Did Someone Say Chocolate?

. . . AND SHOES!!!

Gayle's Chocolates

POETRY: Read More, Blog More #1

This post is the first in a series of monthly poetry posts written in response to the READ MORE, BLOG MORE challenge sponsored by Regular Rumination. 

I would appreciate your response to the posts as they go up. Be honest. I'm a big girl. Just remember, house rules: Do unto others & such.

I'll ease into the challenge with a bit of reflection:

I will admit, my desire to publicly discuss poetry has taken a few hits through the years. Back in school (late Paleozoic period) my teachers had definitive and unassailable ideas about the meanings and messages in each poem we read. Invariably, my thoughts and ideas were different, and therefore wrong. Slapped down in class repeatedly, I shared less and less. I never lost my love for poetry, but I stopped sharing it.

The final blow, however, came while in a grad school. A hole in the university's scheduling left me a rare chance to take a poetry writing class. I was an English education major in a seminar with writing majors. It was also my first writing seminar, and my peers were veterans of many years. I shouldn't have been surprised by subsequent events. But I was.

We were prompted. We wrote. We sat in circles and offered critique on each others' writing. I loved the writing and steeled myself for the critique of my peers. Initially, I was more worried about evaluating the others than hearing their comments. But that changed. Quickly.

My peers delighted in literary allusion. Well trained writing, packed to the rafters with them, forced me to spend more time researching than reading. Even then I was left with the feeling I had missed something.

I, on the other hand, an avid reader, a Literacy and English Language Arts teacher, loved to play with words. Manipulating the sounds and meanings to create something that is just a little bit more than it was, gave (and gives) me tremendous pleasure. And making it seem effortless is an art to which I still aspire.

The comment I heard most often was, "I didn't know that word, so I didn't 'get' the poem." Did they look it up? no.

They were polite. They were supportive. They tried hard to hide their exasperation as they patiently explained how to rewrite each poem; changing allusions, changing symbolism, changing word choice - especially word choice - until it said what they thought it should. Until it was a completely different poem. Not my poem.

I smiled. I explained my choices. I thanked them for their kindness. And I retreated into silence.

I still love poetry. I read all that I can get into my greedy little hands. I write it. I share the poetry I love on this Blog. But do I talk about it? Until today, no.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for the next installment, scheduled for February 28. Who knows what wonders may take root and grow in this modest little place.

My Favorite Color

Photo source.

The Flower Of Carnage by fatmanwalking, © All rights reserved.

QUOTE OF THE . . . CENTURY

There are two ways of viewing the Government’s duty in matters affecting economic and social life. The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small business man. That theory belongs to the party of Toryism, and I had hoped that most of the Tories left this country in 1776.

But it is not and never will be the theory of the Democratic Party. This is no time for fear, for reaction or for timidity. Here and now I invite those nominal Republicans who find that their conscience cannot be squared with the groping and the failure of their party leaders to join hands with us; here and now, in equal measure, I warn those nominal Democrats who squint at the future with their faces turned toward the past, and who feel no responsibility to the demands of the new time, that they are out of step with their Party.

Yes, the people of this country want a genuine choice this year, not a choice between two names for the same reactionary doctrine. Ours must be a party of liberal thought, of planned action, of enlightened international outlook, and of the greatest good to the greatest number of our citizens.

Now it is inevitable – -and the choice is that of the times — it is inevitable that the main issue of this campaign should revolve about the clear fact of our economic condition, a depression so deep that it is without precedent in modern history. …

… My program, of which I can only touch on these points, is based upon this simple moral principle: the welfare and the soundness of a Nation depend first upon what the great mass of the people wish and need; and second, whether or not they are getting it.

What do the people of America want more than anything else? To my mind, they want two things: work, with all the moral and spiritual values that go with it; and with work, a reasonable measure of security–security for themselves and for their wives and children. Work and security–these are more than words. They are more than facts. They are the spiritual values, the true goal toward which our efforts of reconstruction should lead. These are the values that this program is intended to gain; these are the values we have failed to achieve by the leadership we now have.

The New Deal: 

A Speech delivered by 

President Franklin D. Roosevelt

Take a Moment

QUOTE OF THE DAY

The folly at the root of this foolish economy began with the idea that a corporation should be regarded, legally, as “a person.” But the limitless destructiveness of this economy comes about precisely because a corporation is not a person.

A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.

Unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetime of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular. It can experience no personal hope or remorse, no change of heart. It cannot humble itself.

It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money.

The stockholders essentially are usurers, people who “let their money work for them,” expecting high pay in return for causing others to work for low pay.

- Wendell Berry on Corporate Personhood.

You Make Me Happy!

QUOTE OF THE DAY

From The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

At the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, on 3/31/1968.

~  ~  ~

Jesus told a parable one day, and he reminded us that a man went to hell because he didn’t see the poor.

His name was Dives. He was a rich man. And there was a man by the name of Lazarus who was a poor man, but not only was he poor, he was sick. Sores were all over his body, and he was so weak that he could hardly move. But he managed to get to the gate of Dives every day, wanting just to have the crumbs that would fall from his table. And Dives did nothing about it. And the parable ends saying, “Dives went to hell, and there were a fixed gulf now between Lazarus and Dives.”

There is nothing in that parable that said Dives went to hell because he was rich. Jesus never made a universal indictment against all wealth.

It is true that one day a rich young ruler came to him, and he advised him to sell all, but in that instance Jesus was prescribing individual surgery and not setting forth a universal diagnosis. And if you will look at that parable with all of its symbolism, you will remember that a conversation took place between heaven and hell, and on the other end of that long-distance call between heaven and hell was Abraham in heaven talking to Dives in hell.

Now Abraham was a very rich man. If you go back to the Old Testament, you see that he was the richest man of his day, so it was not a rich man in hell talking with a poor man in heaven; it was a little millionaire in hell talking with a multimillionaire in heaven. Dives didn’t go to hell because he was rich; Dives didn’t realize that his wealth was his opportunity. It was his opportunity to bridge the gulf that separated him from his brother Lazarus.

Dives went to hell because he was passed by Lazarus every day and he never really saw him. He went to hell because he allowed his brother to become invisible. Dives went to hell because he maximized the minimum and minimized the maximum. Indeed, Dives went to hell because he sought to be a conscientious objector in the war against poverty.

And this can happen to America, the richest nation in the world — and nothing’s wrong with that — this is America’s opportunity to help bridge the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. The question is whether America will do it. There is nothing new about poverty.

What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will.