The biggest throw-your-hat-up-in-the-air news on May 8, 1945 was VICTORY IN EUROPE - GERMANY SURRENDERS!
Click here to go to a site where you can hear a live report from Edward R. Murrow of CBS news standing in Piccadilly Circus in London”amidst a crowd of jubilant Britains celebrating the end of the war”.
A refugee is a person whose heart has been broken.
“My daughter, who was 11 at the time, also loves Bessie’s books and was deeply influenced by living for two years in Botswana. One of my favorite expressions from there is Ke moto fela - “I’m just a person.”–Barbara Bamberg Scott (Read her impressive bio below.)
Botswana is a land-locked country in Southern Africa, the size of Texas. I lived and worked in Botswana for three years in the 1970s, first with Peace Corps (teaching Engligh as a Second Language and Literature in Maun Secondary School) and later with village development, literacy, and Popular Culture Projects (with my salary funded by British Quakers).
I met Barbara Bamberger Scott through JudyTart (who has appeared on Riehlife several times). Judy, knowing of our mutual connection with Botswana, suggested to each of us that we might enjoy reading Robyn Scott’s “Twenty Chickens for a Saddle: A Memoir of an African Childhood” set in Zimbabwe, one of Botswana’s neighbors.
Each of us wrote back independently of our love and admiration for Bessie Head (1937-1986) …as an African author of depth and craft whose work surely deserved to be better known in the United States. When I taught in Botswana “When Rainclouds Gather” was one of the set books for the examination that we studied in our curriculum. I became a fan. Thus it was that Barbara wrote this charming story of meeting Bessie in 1980 when she, her husband and daughter were volunteers for Quaker Peace and Service (a British organization).—JGR
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MEETING BESSIE HEAD
by Barbara Bamberger Scott
copyright 2008
We were quite naive about Southern Africa. We had hoped to go to India, but wound up in Botswana. Our director introduced us to Vernon Gibberd who was Bessie’s model for the idealized volunteer in Serowe - Village of the Rain Wind, a book I had read before going to Botswana, in preparation. I had also read Head’s Maru.
Vernon was a Tarzan-like figure, very English, and his wife was equally attractive and Dutch. They had two older children and a new baby. I believe when they had only the first child, Bessie described them (perhaps with some jealousy as she seemed to have had a crush on Vernon) as “A man, a woman, and an ugly baby.” But there was nothing ugly about any of the family.
Vernon was exactly as advertised—he was a true Quaker, intelligent, aristocratic, could have been doing anything but chose to be in Africa digging wells and going slightly native. The day we drove up to Serowe from Mogoditshane, Vernon stomped around showing us various projects we had read about in Bessie’s book. We later got very sick with tick-bite fever from following him through the high grass.
That evening there was a meal and social gathering that included Bessie. She would have been about 50 then I think, and I found her fascinating. I had not gotten used to the odd accent of Southern Africa, and I knew little about what it meant to be “colored.” But she was easy to talk to, perhaps because I was complimenting her writing.
Like most writers (I have since learned, having become one) she did love to talk about what she’d written, and what strikes me as most memorable is what she said about Maru.
I told her sincerely that I believed the last sentence of the book was perfect.
People like the Batswana, who did not know that the wind of freedom had also reached people of the Masarwa tribe, were in for an unpleasant surpise becuase it would be no longer possible to treat Masarwa people in an inhuman way without getting killed yourself. (NYC: The McCall Publishing company, 1971)
She was delighted, and serious, as she told me that the whole book had been, from her viewpoint, written backward from that sentence.
I later read her short story collection and A Question of Power which seemed to me one of the best books ever written about a man’s domination over a woman, and a mental breakdown all rolled into one.
Considering how difficult it was to get around, we lived far from Serowe, and I never saw Bessie again. I think her books are magnificent, the lucid narratives of a person who lived her life in pain and sorrow in a strange land.
In our work I had a lot of contact with refugees. One, who had lived in four countries since he was forced to leave his home naked and fleeing from two armies, told us, “A refugee is a person whose heart has been broken.” I think that applied to Bessie.
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Speaking of Botswana
Botswana is the country.
Batswana are the collective citizens of the country.
Motswana is an individual citizen.
Setswana is the language of the Botswana.
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About Barbara Bamberger Scott
Barbara is a freelance writer, a Spanish interpreter, and a well-traveled person. She grew up with a small library of the Heritage books, and Les Miserables was one of the first “real” books I ever read, at about age 10. Barbara was a child actress. She writes songs!
Barbara has written the nonfiction book, Golden Thread, about the impact of an Indian spiritual master on a group of hippies in the late 60’s in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Her second creative non-fiction tale is With It: A Year on the Carnival Trail. Her private company is called Barscoink, dedicated to using words to their best effect.
With Phyllis Silverman Ott-Toltz she co-authored Love Bade Me Welcome: The Life of Phyllis Ott.
You can read Barbara’s reviews at Curled Up with a Good Book and many other sites. Google her name to find her many online interviews. She is the principle editor for A Woman’s Write.
Hello poets!
May Garsson (maygarsson@yahoo.com) is collecting submissions for Clive Matson’s publication Crazy Child Scribbler using a new form called “tuanortsa” (astronaut spelled backward). This is a simple form, a poetic palindrome that reads more or less the same from top to bottom as from bottom to top.
Here’s an example May gives (taken from an excerpt of a longer poem called “The Yuppie Dog Phenomenon”):
A chihuahua is in the library
dancing on his hind legs
yap yap yapping, yap yapping
behind me.
His owner gloats, stands beside me
with pride he yak, yak, yaks
on his cell phone.
On his cell phone
with pride he yak, yak, yaks.
His owner gloats, stands beside me,
behind me,
yap yap yapping, yap yapping.
Dancing on his hind legs,
a chihuahua is in the library.
May says: “It’s fun to vary the wording and line breaks to make it hold together better as a whole poem. Look for John Rowe’s site featuring his award-winning poem “Forever—An Old Man Considers His Hand,” which inspired me to get on this roll in the first place.”
If you want to try some out, send them to May at maygarsson@yahoo.com. It’s a great way to see a mirror image of your poems and see how they work in the opposite direction. It will be fun to see what people do. Publication is June 1st, so send them by May 15-20.
To the spirit of fun and creativity!
Erwin and Ruth Thompson snuggle up on a past wedding anniversary
Second Love
by Erwin A. Thompson
For the second anniversary of Ruth’s death, May 1, 2006
My first love was like a pansy,
brought too soon from the greenhouse’ sheltering glass.
A late frost took its vicious toll.
That love was never meant to last.
My second love was like a native fern,
nestled gently in a forest glen.
God planted it a hundred years ago,
nobody knows just when.
It weathers out the ice and snow,
the chilling winds that sweep the country side.
It will be the symbol of our love
long after our mortal bodies die.
Flora, Goddess of Flowers
May first. May Day is a many-splendored thing with more official holiday designations than perhaps any other day of the year. I recall as a child weaving May Day wreaths from spirea branches cut from our bushes and hanging them on our neighbors door. I especially liked hanging my wreath on Aunt Grace’s door in the brown cottage.
As a woman living in Northern California, I celebrated May Day by dancing around a Maypole with other women in a secluded spot on Point Reyes.
Since May 1, 2006, though, this day has taken on another, deeper meaning. May first for me now mainly means the time my mother chose to pass from this earth. What a perfect time she chose to be the Queen of May…to culminate her lifetime graduate studies as a biology major.
Mother’s high school graduation photo
For many people this May 11th will be Mothers Day. For my father and me, it’s today. Today is not only Mothers Day, it is my mother’s day. We won’t be weaving funeral wreaths as grieving Romans did to appease Pluto, master of the Underworld. No, we’ll be stepping out. Most likely we’ll take an outing to Calhoun County to enjoy a day together in a place where my father and mother loved exploring and birding together…and perhaps have a country feast at Widman’s Hotel. Wherever we go, and whatever we do…Mother remains our Queen of the May.
Asa way of connecting more fully with us, you can read some of my poems for Mother on the sidebar under “Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary.” Just look for the section titled “Sweet Little Dove.” You’ll also find her life story there and a moving tribute my father spoke at her graveside service.
By taking this day stepping out together we honor mother’s memory and her place in our lives as she lives on in them, during the first two years following her change of destination. It is both our memorial to memory and our pilgrims’ cairn on the path to the continuing future my father and I now share.
The Poet gropes in the darkness for the switch knowing that the light that is sought lies within. –William T. Dawson
I met William Dawson when I told a story at last year’s Sunflower Festival in Mountainaire, New Mexico. We shared supper on his simple terrace as we gazed across the desert leading up to the blue mountains. When I read his question about the poet’s role in village life, I think of PLATO’S REPUBLIC —JGR
SNOW BLINDNESS
by William T. Dawson
Dedicated to Viviane
The Poet gropes in the darkness for the switch knowing that the light that is sought lies within.
What use is The Poet? For all he/she knows how to do is paint pictures with words, words slapped on parchment like a carpenter nailing wooden pegs in a coffin.
The words become fewer and fewer in length until they finally disappear, and The Poet finds himself writing blank pages so deep in spirit that even spirit has a hard time deciphering their meaning.
The Poet is so dependent on his fellow man that he could easily put to work an entire city working in unison to the beat of his heart.
So what use is The Poet to a town, a village, a community of man? For he knows not how to do anything except decipher the meaning of life in words that fall on deafened ears. Yet, what good is a town, a village, a community of man without The Poet? For who else has the power to hold the vision of life and disperse it throughout.
The Poet gropes in the darkness for the mop to swab the milk spilled by mankind in their economic destruct fullness needed to feed their ego only to discover that he is only a pebble in an ocean of milk.
An ocean of milk soured by mankind that flows like an endless spring until Mother Earth steps in to reclaim the universe that is hers. Her domain ruled by laws far above mankind’s yet distinctively understood by The Poet.
For The Poet gropes for the words that will penetrate the hollowness of society’s entertainment only to discover that joy lies within, and he yearns to be returned to the warmth of the womb that first nurtured his soul and breathed life into his journey.
Life is a circle and the journey of The Poet is much like one walking in circles in a blizzard that is labeled Life….groping for this, groping for that, groping, groping until the snow like flag of surrender is finally draped over his coffin of sacredness.
Spain’s King Juan Carlos gave Gelman a medal symbolizing the Cervantes Prize at a ceremony in Alcala De Henares, the birthplace of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, the author of “Don Quixote.”
To read Gelman’s work in translation find out more “Unthinkable Tenderness: Selected Poems”—edited and translated into English by Joan Lindgren, with a foreword by Eduardo Galeano–click here.
Riehlife National Poetry Month Editor Stephanie Farrow writes:
Dear Friends,
It has been such a treat to share poetry during this past month. Thank you all for participating! Because today is the last day, I’d thought initially that the final poem should be deep and meaningful, inscrutable perhaps and profound—something along the lines of what the New Yorker would print. Then I thought, “Naw. Poetry is for all of us, not only the denizens of ivory towers.” So, in the interest of keeping it ‘umble, here are my final two offerings.
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THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY
–for the students, who put me in my place
by David Citino (1947-Oct. 17, 2005)
from Paperwork
(also appears in Poets on Place…see below)
I’m all mouth, mustache, cane, grandiose Italian nose,
I squeak, speak in tongues, Cleveland, Little Italy.
But for you, these fevered weeks, I’m cuckoo,
vireo and finch, redbird, nighthawk, jay—
a squawk, a call at the windows of this stanza
called The Writing Room. Poetry, I try to say,
I crow, I swear. Poetry poetry poetry poetry.
Click here and scroll down to read complete entry in W. T. Pfefferle’s September 2003 road trip visit with Columbus, Ohio-based poet David Citino.
David Citino has one of those offices every professor wants, full of books, spacious, well lit from inside and out. It’s big enough to play racquetball in. He’s a terrific host, and we sit next to each other in front of his desk and we chat about the book a while before I begin asking him about the role place plays in his work. Citino’s lived in Ohio his whole life, born in Cleveland, now 30 years in Columbus. For him, Ohio is a place that he takes with him on any journey in his own writing. (Tales from W.T. Pfefferle’s year-long journey around the country assembling material for his book Poets on Place (Utah State University Press, Spring 2005) © W.T. Pfefferle 2005)
Click here to read my review of Poets on Place.
And finally, from Polish-born poet Adam Zagajewski
DEFENDING POETRY, ETC.
by Adam Zagajewski
from Eternal Enemies(translated by Clare Cavanagh)
Yes, defending poetry, high style, etc.,
But also summer evenings in a small town,
Where gardens waft and cats sit quietly
On doorsteps, like Chinese philosophers.
Barry D. Yelton, author of Scarecrow in Gray, (September 2006, Universe) based roughly on the Civil War experiences of his great-grandfather is currently at work on the sequel.
Barry says:
As to my work, I am a bit of a poet, a bit of a novelist, and a whole lot of Southern. I come from the hill country of North Carolina, which is a unique place unto itself. Our accents tend to have a bit more twang and a little less honey than those you hear in the movies. We were also ambivalent about secession, unlike our rabid cousins in South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi and Louisiana.
You can keep up-to-date on Barry and his writing by clicking here.
ALABANZA: IN PRAISE OF LOCAL 100
Martín Espada
Alabanza[excellent video!]
(for the 43 members of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees
Local 100 working at the Window on the World restaurant,
who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center)
Alabanza.Praise the cook with a shaven head
and a tattoo on his shoulder that said Oye,
a blue-eyed Puerto Rican with people from Fajardo,
the harbor of pirates centuries ago.
Praise the lighthouse in Fajardo, candle
glimmering white to worship the dark saint of the sea.
Alabanza. Praise the cook’s yellow Pirates cap
worn in the name of Roberto Clemente, his plane
that flamed into the ocean loaded with cans for Nicaragua,
for all the mouths chewing the ash of earthquakes.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen radio, dial clicked
even before the dial on the oven so that music and Spanish
rose before bread. Praise the bread. Alabanza.
Praise Manhattan from a hundred and seven flights up,
like Atlantis glimpsed through the window of an ancient aquarium.
Praise the great windows where immigrants from the kitchen
could squint and almost see their world, hear the chant of nations:
Ecuador, México, República Dominicana,
Haiti, Yemen, Ghana, Bangladesh.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen in the morning,
where the gas burned blue on every stove
and exhaust fans fired their diminutive propellers,
hands cracked eggs with quick thumbs
or sliced open cartons to build an altar of cans.
Alabanza. Praise the busboy’s music, the chime-chime
of his dishes and silverware in the tub.
Alabanza. Praise the dish-dog, the dishwasher
who worked that morning because another dishwater
could not stop coughing, or because he needed overtime
to pile the sacks of rice and beans for a family
floating away on some Caribbean island plagued by frogs.
Alabanza. Praise the waitress who heard the radio in the kitchen
and sang to herself about a man gone. Alabanza.
After the thunder wilder than thunder,
after the shudder deep in the glass of the great windows,
after the radio stopped singing like a tree full of terrified frogs,
after night burst the dam of day and flooded the kitchen,
for a time the stoves glowed in darkness like the lighthouse in Fajardo,
like a cook’s soul. Soul I say, even if the dead cannot tell us
about the bristles of God’s beard because God has no face,
soul I say, to name the smoke-beings flung in constellations
across the night sky of this city and cities to come.
Alabanza I say, even if God has no face.
Alabanza. When the war began, from Manhattan and Kabul
two constellations of smoke rose and drifted to each other,
mingling in icy air, and one said with an Afghan tongue:
Teach me to dance. We have no music here.
And the other said with a Spanish tongue:
I will teach you. Music is all we have.
