A Longhouse Birdhouse: 01/01/2025

Friday, January 31, 2025

HANNAH ARENDT (POEMS) ~

The end of days

the threshold of evenings

still it is not night

still the birds take flight

still the trees stretch out.

Soon it blows cooler,

the night and the dream.

And no record

of those days

tangled into one another

devoured by flames

that burned us:

The wounds of happiness

Become stigmas, not scars.

There would be no record,

if your account

had not been imparted —

poetic language

is a place, not a refuge.

I love the earth,

as if traveling

to a foreign place

and not otherwise.

So life spins me

quietly on its thread

into unknown designs.

Until suddenly,

like a journey's farewell —

the great silence cuts the thread.

_______________________

What Remains

The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt

TRANSLATED BY SAMANTHA ROSE HILL

Liveright, 2025

Thursday, January 30, 2025

Wednesday, January 29, 2025

YU XIUHUA ~

collecting firewood in the field

as the afternoon sun hits my throat it takes on the quality of a melody:

solitude is sufficient as long as you live well. i remove my dirty shoes

and find myself falling thoroughly in love with how small my feet are

they've walked tens of thousands of miles and they're still the same

diminutive size, they've withstood day after day of inclement weather

i should have hardened and hidden my heart in the mud decades ago

thrown out the banality of carnality to leave a clean corpse with fine bones

i could not care one whit less about suffusing my spirit with nobility

the wheat in the paddy field is sprouting marvelously well

a bright red crane flits from tree to ground, ground to tree

i love you

would i really go so far as to call this a life?

every day i draw water from the well, put meals on the table, remember to take my medication.

when the sun is high up in the sky i steep myself in its light like fruit peel or tea leaves in hot

water: jasmine, rose, lemon, chrysanthemum. the sun and tea pull ne back towards springtime,

so each day i am able to hold back the frost in my heart as i sit

in a clean yard, reading your poems. feelings between people are as formless as darting

shadows cast by the flight of a started sparrow. there's no way i'd get my intestines in a twist

and chop up my innards just to lay them bare before you, look, if i mailed you a book, it wouldn't

be poetry.

i'd give you a book about plants.

on farming. teaching you how to differentiate between rice and weeds.

telling you about the lobe weed that couldn't stop quaking like a leaf one fine

spring morning

Yu Xiuhua, born in Hengdian, Hubei Province, China, is a poet from an

impoverished rural background who was born with cerebral palsy. Yu

began writing poetry in 1998. Her first poetry collection Moonlight

Falls On My Left Palm was published at Guangxi Normal University Press.

Tuesday, January 28, 2025

STEVE ALMOND WORKS CONSTRUCTION ~

R E A D M E

Zando, 2024

Monday, January 27, 2025

ANDREW SCHELLING, LINGUISTICS ~

Linguistics

Into the language we come

into the world

to depart by the same path we

arrived

the most hidden gulches hold petroglyphs

caves unvisited thirty thousand years contain ideograms

the tundra's littered with

calendar bones

a rustle, a swift breath of dialect

larynx, nostril & lip

certain archaic forms change hardly at all

though tools and food get reshaped

The word Ma

the number three

and for some hidden reason obscure to

linguistics

the term for

ashes

__________________

Andrew Schelling

Forests, Temples, Glacial Rivers

Empty Bowl 2024

Sunday, January 26, 2025

President Gustavo Petro's Full Statement

Trump, I don't really like travelling to the US. It's a bit boring, but I confess that there are some commendable things. I like going to the Black neighborhoods of Washington, where I saw a fight in the US capital between Blacks and Latinos with barricades, which seemed like nonsense to me, because they should join together.

I confess that I like Walt Whitman and Paul Simon and Noam Chomsky and Miller.

I confess that Sacco and Vanzetti, who have my blood, are memorable in the history of the USA and I follow them. They were murdered by labor leaders in the electric chair, by the fascists who are within the USA as well as within my country.

I don't like your oil, Trump. It's going to wipe out the human species because of greed. Maybe one day, with a glass of whiskey that I accept, despite my gastritis, we can talk frankly about this, but it's difficult because you consider me part of an inferior race and I'm not, nor is any Colombian.

So, if you know someone who is stubborn, that's me, period. You can try to carry out a coup with your economic strength and your arrogance, like they did with Allende. But I will die true to my principles, I resisted torture and I resist you. I don't want slavers next in Colombia, we already had many and we freed ourselves. What I want next in Colombia are lovers of freedom. If you can't join me, I'll go elsewhere. Colombia is the heart of the world, and you didn't understand that, this is the land of the yellow butterflies, of the beauty of Remedios, but also of the colonels like Aureliano Buendía, of which I am one, perhaps the last.

You will kill me, but I will survive in my people, which lives, before yours, in the Americas. We are peoples of the winds, the mountains, the Caribbean Sea and of freedom.

You don't like our freedom, okay. I don't shake hands with White slavers. I shake hands with the White libertarian heirs of Lincoln and the Black and White farm boys of the USA, at whose graves I cried and prayed on a battlefield, which I reached after walking the mountains of Italian Tuscany and after being saved from Covid.

They are the United States, and before them I kneel, before no one else.

Overthrow me, Mr. President, and the Americas and humanity will respond.

Colombia now stops looking north, it looks at the world. Our blood comes from the blood of the Caliphate of Cordoba, the civilization of that time, of the Roman Latins of the Mediterranean, the civilization of that time, who founded the republic, democracy in Athens; our blood comes from the Black resistance fighters turned into slaves by you. Colombia is the first free territory of America, before Washington, [before] of all America, and I take refuge in its African songs.

My land is made up of goldsmiths who worked in the time of the Egyptian pharaohs and of the first artists in the world in Chiribiquete.

You will never rule us. You're opposed to the warrior who rode our lands, shouting freedom, whose name is (Simon) Bolívar.

Our people are somewhat fearful, somewhat timid, they are naive and kind, loving, but they will know how to win the Panama Canal, which you took from us with violence. Two hundred heroes from all of Latin America lie in Bocas del Toro, today's Panama, formerly Colombia, which you murdered.

I raise a flag and as (Jorge Eliecer) Gaitán said, even if it remains alone, it will continue to be raised with the Latin American dignity that is the dignity of America, which your great-grandfather did not know, and mine did, Mr. President, an immigrant in the USA.

Your blockade does not scare me, because Colombia, besides being the country of beauty, is the heart of the world. I know that you love beauty as I do, do not disrespect it and it will give its sweetness to you.

FROM TODAY ON, COLOMBIA IS OPEN TO THE ENTIRE WORLD, WITH OPEN ARMS, WE ARE BUILDERS OF FREEDOM, LIFE AND HUMANITY.

I am informed that you impose a 50% tariff on the fruits of our human labor to enter the United States, and I do the same.

Let our people plant corn that was discovered in Colombia and feed the world.

PAM REHM ~

Confirmation

Wild birds form
distances
for a restless eye

They retain
then edify
the soul's longings

I have lived as of late
unpracticed

My faith essentially
eroded

I am possessed now
with duration

As there is no measurement
to the turning
of a leaf into soil

Being also descends
with a slowness

Innocently enough
to witness

This river
awakened by the morning sun

A vale of close light
A light incarnate

Spiritual Life

I was not sure how
my children would dream

They saw further
than sheltering

They heard clearer
than my prayer

I could not feel my rescue
Intently enough

They held me tighter
than my grip

They led me across
my indigence

and were my abundance
when I got there

Sprung up like
wild herbs

I had always hoped
To find

______________
Pam Rehm

Inner Verses

Wave Books, 2024

Saturday, January 25, 2025

GERALD HAUSMAN, HAIL CHANTER ~

Author of Evil Chasing Way, Hand Trembler and Sungazer

Hail Chanter, Book Four, in the Star Song series, features one man winding and wending his way through Southwestern real-time and dream-time. This novel serves as the final healing rapture of the previous three books: Evil Chasing Way, Hand Trembler, and Sungazer.

In the earlier novels, the author/storyteller used the ancient art of singing to a star, hand trembling, and praying. The result, from the traditions of the Navajo Old Ways, turns a burning light into a healing one. This process took place on an operating table and in a radiation chamber. Hausman states:

“I followed the sacred speech that a star makes. It lived within me and healed both the inside and outside of me.”

The emergence ceremony in Hail Chanter intertwines a mixture of ancient religion with modern medicine. The novel portrays Winter Thunder blowing apart a human form, making it all come together. The healer said:

“It all comes together like a bunch of broken parts waiting to be annealed all over again.”

This captivating story maintains Jack Andrews as the hero from the first three novels, while also exploring the character of Jay DeGroat, a Navajo friend of Gerald’s for fifty years.

“…Hausman honors Native American philosophy and spirituality even as he reveals it.” —Booklist

“Carlos Castaneda would've loved this book.” —Dr Michael Gleeson, Anthropologist

Speaking Volumes

2024