8.6.2020 – I work then time off

I work then time off
after few days I relax
into just myself

I was inspired by a couple days away and this:

That’s what holidays are about, really: time. The hours we work means that we can spend months living alongside other people and feel that we have not really seen them at all. Put us on a cheap flight to Crete and after a few days we relax into ourselves. The stress dissipates. We look across a taverna table at their pink faces as they nurse a cold Mythos and shove courgette fritters into their gobs and we feel, well, love.

In the past few months, I have come to realise just how much I relied on holidays to keep me sane. Yes, we are in the middle of a pandemic, and yes there’s the climate emergency to consider, but the draw is strong.

From We all want a holiday from coronavirus – even if that’s a fantasy by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

8.5.2020 – wooden planks, wet wood

wooden planks, wet wood
wet sand, plastic mat, hot sand
walking to the beach

I walked out to the beach the other day.

My bare feet started on wooden planks with the thumb thumb thumb sound of feet on wood.

Further along, I came to the faucets for spraying sand off your feet when you are going the other way.

My bare feet felt the unsure slipperiness of wet wood.

Further along, the wet sand on the wooden deck stuck to me feet and there was the kind of a ‘give’ to my steps and the wet sand crunched under my feet.

Further along, I stepped on to the blue plastic beach mat that led out to the beach.

The plastic poked at my feet and the sand was loose on the plastic screen.

On to the sand.

White and soft.

Hot and hotter.

Footprints on footprints.

I could not pick out my trail if I looked back at the path behind me.

The loose hot sand changed to hot hard packed sand of the tidal beach.

It was hot on my feet.

Hot on my feet all the way.

Hot on my feet all the way down to the ocean.

As much as the experience of different tastes during a meal, the experience of different surfaces under my feet.

Taking that path.

To the beach.

7.30.2020 – I dream a world where

I dream a world where
joy attends the needs of all
A world I dream where

From the poem, I Dream a World by Langston Hughes.

The poem was included in UNCOLLECTED POEMS in the 1941-1950 Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Vol2, University of Missouri Press, 2001.

Quoted today by teacher James Lawson at the Funeral of John Robert Lewis.

As President Barack Obama said in his remarks at the funeral, the work goes on.

The testing of his faith, proved his perservernece.

President Obama said that John Lewis, “Believed in us even when we no longer believe in us.”

I Dream A World

Langston Hughes

I dream a world where man
No other man will scorn,
Where love will bless the earth
And peace its paths adorn
I dream a world where all
Will know sweet freedom’s way,
Where greed no longer saps the soul
Nor avarice blights our day.
A world I dream where black or white,
Whatever race you be,
Will share the bounties of the earth
And every man is free,
Where wretchedness will hang its head
And joy, like a pearl,
Attends the needs of all mankind-
Of such I dream, my world!

7.29.2020 – night of summer stars

night of summer stars
low, near, lazy in the sky
sky of summer stars

Walking at night in the warm dark of summer in Georgia is something you to cannot explain to people up north.

I remember our first 4th of July fireworks down here and realizing it was near midnight and I was still in a T shirt and shorts.

No sweatshirt.

No hoodie.

No long pants.

Up north in Michigan, I was lucky to go out at night and not end up wanting a coat.

Jim Harrison in the Brown Dog novellas writes about a summer in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan without tourists.

It was so cold that people went to the 4th of July fireworks in snowmobile suits and watched the rockets red glare through snow flurries.

Walking in the warm dark of the Georgia night.

Stars so fat and close.

No big names but the North Star and the Big Dipper, maybe Booters, but so many stars without names.

Warm and lazy stars of summer time.

Maybe global warming will bring this Michigan.

Maybe that might bring me back.

Summer Stars
by
Carl Sandburg in Smoke and Steel (Harcourt, 1920).

Bend low again, night of summer stars.
So near you are, sky of summer stars,
So near, a long arm man can pick off stars,
Pick off what he wants in the sky bowl,
So near you are, summer stars,
So near, strumming, strumming,
So lazy and hum-strumming.

7.26.2020 – disasters, trials of

disasters, trials of
common fate, can create bonds
of community

Today’s haiku comes from this snippet of text.

New bonds of community are often created by disaster, as Rebecca Solnit charts in A Paradise Built in Hell.

The shanty town built by survivors of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and the self-organised evacuations New Yorkers arranged with strangers after 9/11, show how people facing a common fate can see themselves as belonging to a single group.

Like the Covid-19 mutual aid groups we see today, these altruistic communities provide glimpses of an alternative world.

From the article, “People power: the best books about the allure of crowds and community“