Girl's Best Friend

I lost my dog yesterday. She was 18 and lived a long life, and she was my best friend. I wrote this poem a couple of weeks ago about her.

Girl's Best Friend

I miss the heavy electricity
of your body against my knees,
the way your heart goes "tha-thrum"
and mine sings "ba-bum!"

Mom says it's hard to watch you go "downhill,"
but what she means is that it's hard to watch you die.

First you couldn't come downstairs to sleep with me,
so I came up and slept by you.
Then you couldn't sit with me on the couch,
so I come down to the floor to sit with you.
Now your feeble legs are unsteady,
and I think you've lost weight on purpose
because they wouldn't support you anymore.
You weave from side to side.
You don't answer when you're called
and I feel so selfish for making you
live in this terrifying darkness.

But all I have done this year is grieve
and the world seems so harsh
when I think about it without you in it.
No one wagging at me, or meeting me at the door.
No fur to cry into, no doggie kisses anymore.
But this is the world I must get used to
because I don't want you to hurt anymore.

Cookie Monster: Origins

Long ago, in a galaxy far far away, there was a cookie-loving zombie alien. One day, he ate all the cookies in his solar system. (Teenagers, what can I say?) So he asked his mom where he could get more. "There are a whole bunch on Earth," she said. "But you have to have their money to get them, and you can get their money by getting a job."
"Okay, cool. See you this afternoonllenium." So he borrowed the spaceship (bet he didn't return it with a full gas tank, the punk) and came to Earth. He landed in New York City. The people had delicious-looking brains, but they were puny. The cookies, on the other hand, were ginormous compared to the ones he was used to. He really really wanted some.
He saw a sign outside a cookie store that said, "Help wanted: Monster needed for children's TV show."
So he went inside and asked what he had to do. When he found out all he had to do was eat cookies as fast and messily as possible, and sometimes sing, he signed on the dotted line immediately. When he was done for the day, he called his mom (and used up all the roaming-galaxy minutes). "Mom!" he said excitedly. "I got a job - and all I have to do is eat cookies!"
"That's great, Alistair," she said. "Who are you with, what are you doing after work, and when are you bringing my ship back?! I have a meeting next millennium and I can't be late!"
"All right, all right. Let me just work a couple more years and I'll be home."
"Fine, but you have to finish your schoolwork when you get back," his mom said.
So Alistair Cookie Monster continued to live on Earth and eat cookies instead of brains, because they're really more delicious anyways.

Spring and Fall

 by Gerard Manley Hopkins

 to a young child

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow's spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Click on this to view the site where I copied the poem

Having experienced a different kind of loss recently, I find myself just as sad over something just as trivial as falling leaves. There is a physical sensation of dry mouth and choking, as though I had inhaled a cloud of dust. But the emotions are what define grief: denial, anger, bargaining, sadness, acceptance. I recently lost my full-time job, through no fault except corporate greed, and since I knew there was no talking my way out of this one, I seem to have skipped the bargaining stage. The most difficult part has not necessarily been dealing with reality, since my reality appears to be improving as a result. The most difficult part has been answering the same concerned questions over and over and over, ad nauseum. I don't mind answering those people whom I know actually care, but even their queries still exhaust me. What are you going to do? Where are you working now? Or the worst, from complete strangers: Are you losing your job? Though there were clear signs all over the store stating that we were closing and this was a liquidation sale. Keeping patience and gracefully answering were at times mutually exclusive. I finally just started telling the strange public, "I'm sorry, I don't feel comfortable discussing my personal life with people I don't know." The etiquette of privacy seems to have been lost somewhere in the technological evolution of a cell phone in every hand and a Facebook profile of every person. Only a quiet rage against the injustice of it all has allowed me to bare my heart here. Before I sink back into my relative, comfortable anonymity, let me just say this to those of you who really care: a hug speaks a thousand appropriate words, and I will never turn one down.

A video about 29 for the 29th of February! This song cracks me up. And Marc Cohn is a fabulous singer. Enjoy!

I Sing the Poet American: Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902.  He acquired his interest in literature mainly from his grandmother, who introduced him to people like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and took him to hear Booker T. Washington.  As a boy, Langston's favorite book was The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B. Du Bois.

Hughes attended high school at Central High in Cleveland, where he studied and read many works from various black authors, including Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Carl Sandburg.  After high school, on his way to south to visit his father, Hughes wrote "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," which was printed in The Crisis in 1921.

Langston Hughes first entered Harlem attending Columbia University.  After only a few weeks in Harlem, the sights, sounds, dance, music, and intellectual life of the people around him inspired Langston in everything he wanted to do with his life.  In fact, he eventually quit school to write more.  Hughes's poetry absorbed the rhythms of blues and jazz and the dialect of African American speech he heard around him.  His works continued to become a big success, especially in The Crisis.

After only one year at Colombia, Hughes decided to leave.  He did not want to become a mining engineer, as his father had wished, and felt that he was cheating his father out of money.  So he got a job on a ship, and once he realized it wasn=t going anywhere, he left and got another job on a ship sailing for Africa.  He didn=t stay there long, having been rejected by the Africans. This incident hurt him deeply, and he said, A[Africa] was the only place in the world where I=ve been called a white man.  They looked at my copper-brown skin and straight black hair,...except a little curlyCand they said: >YouCwhite man.=@ He left soon after and went to home to New York.  For a few days Hughes enjoyed rare time spent with his family, and then the sea began to call again.  He was hired on a freighter making regular runs between New York and Holland.  He quit the ship at Rotterdam and fulfilled a wish to see Paris.  Desperate for money, he got a job at a nightclub as a busboy, but didn=t like it much because he was expected to break up fights, of which there were many, as it turned out that it mostly served ladies of the night and their patrons, and there was a lot of professional jealousy.  Hughes found another job as a waiter, and continued writing poetry.  The next spring he met a young lady named Anne(alias Mary) Coussey, and quickly fell in love.  But her father, believing that she was considering marriage, cut off her allowance and demanded her return to London.  Later that summer, he went on to Italy, where he wrote and published through Alain Locke the renowned AI, Too.@ 

In November he went home to New York on a ship that allowed him passage as a workaway without pay. When the ship docked, he had twenty-five cents.  He took the subway to Harlem.

The Harlem that Hughes loved was an exciting place.  During the Renaissance, intellectual dialogue, literary and artistic creation, blues and jazz, dance and musical theater came together and flowered as never before.  There were all black musicals, dance clubs, jazz clubs, and night clubs catered to the whites.

The end of the Harlem Renaissance came as a very unpleasant surprise to some, but not to Hughes.  "I was there," he would later write of Harlem during the Renaissance.  After the end of the Renaissance, Hughes went on to publish dozens of poems, several novels, two volumes of autobiography, and several volumes of nonfiction for young people.  Through his simple stories, Hughes revealed his own great sense of humor and proved by example that one reason that black people have survived so long is their ability to

laugh.  Langston Hughes had a large impact on the Harlem Renaissance, and many black writers today honor his name with deep respect. He forever established free verse as a major part of poetry.  Langston Hughes died in Harlem in 1967.

                                                                         I, Too

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes,

But I laugh,

And eat well,

And grow strong.

Tomorrow,

I=ll be at the table

When company comes.

Nobody=ll dare

Say to me,

AEat in the kitchen,@

Then.

Besides,

They=ll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamedB

I, too, am America.

                                                   The Poetry of Langston Hughes

Much of Hughes= poetry is concerned with black poeple and being black.  As a black man, he was well aware of the exclusion of his race from the American dream. This poem illustrates his hope of the elimination of Jim Crow laws.  Throughout his life, Hughes expressed distaste for these laws, and wouldn=t attend places that had them.  For example, never once did he set foot in the renowned Cotton Club.  He refused to be put on display for whites, blacks, or any other color.  He said, AWe younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.  If white people are pleased we are glad.  If they are not, it doesn=t matter...If colored people are pleased we are glad.  If they are not, their displeasure doesn=t matter either.@

This poem is of the obvious influence of Walt Whitman, who, unlike Hughes, celebrated the individual rather than a group or race. Hughes greatly admired Whitman, and once wrote his friend Walter White, AI=ve been invited to read my poems a Walt Whitman=s House in Camden on March 1^st.  Invitation came from Walt Whitman Foundation, and because I admire his work so much it seems a great honor for me to read my humble poems in the house where he lived and worked....@

                                                                   Bibliography

1.                  Caroling Dusk. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1927. Countee Cullen.

2.                  Faith Berry. Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem. New Jersey: Wing Books, 1992.

3.                  Raymond Smith, Arnold Rampersad. Langston Hughes: Modern Critical Views.  New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1989. Harold Bloom.