The Horse

Hast thou given the horse strength?
Hast thou clothed his neck with thunder?
Canst thou make him afraid as a grasshopper?
the glory of his nostrils is terrible.

He paweth in the valley,
and rejoiceth in his strength,
he goeth on to meet the armed men.

He mocketh at fear,
and is not affrighted,
neither turneth he back from the sword.

The quiver rattleth against the him,
the glittering spear and the shield.

He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage;
neither believeth he that is the sound of the trumpets, Ha, ha,
and he smelleth the battle afar off,
the thunder of the captains,
and the shouting

Job 39:19-25 King James Version
classification:  The Good Earth

Leviathan

He makes the deep to boil like a pot,
he makes the sea like a pot of ointment,
ointment in a mixing bowl.
He leaves a shining trail behind him,
and in his wake the great river is like white hair.
Upon the earth there is not his like.

Job 41:31-33 Revised English Bible

It appears many Bible scholars consider this to be about some kind of giant crocodile,
but I always visualize a whale or "great fish"

Proposition

Tonight
when the moon comes out
I shall change it
into money.

But I'd be sorry
if people knew about it,
for the moon
is an old family treasure.

Nicholás Guillén, translated by Langston Hughes


I See the Moon

I see the moon
The moon sees me
God bless the moon
And God bless me.


by Jim Brickman
memorized by Jill age 4
classification: the Good Earth

Prayer For Our Daughters

May they never be lonely at parties
Or wait for mail from people they haven't written
Or still in middle age ask God for favors
Or forbid their children things they were never forbidden.

May hatred be like a habit they never developed
And can't see the point of, like gambling or heavy drinking.
If they forget themselves, may it be in music
Or the kind of prayer that makes a garden of thinking.

May they enter the coming century
Like swans under a bridge into enchantment
And take with them enough of this century
To assure their grandchildren it really happened.

May they find a place to love, without nostalgia
For some place else that they can never go back to.
And may they find themselves, as we have found them,
Complete at each stage of their lives, each part they add to.

May they be themselves, long after we've stopped watching.
May they return from every kind of suffering
And be themselves again, both blessed and blessing.

by Mark Jarman, from Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems. © Sarabande Books, 2011

Shall We Forgive Our Fathers?

How do we forgive our fathers?
Maybe in a dream.
Do we forgive our fathers for leaving us too often,
or forever
when we were little?

Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage,
or making us nervous
because there never seemed to be any rage there at all?

Do we forgive our fathers
for marrying
or not marrying our mothers?
For divorcing,
or not divorcing our mothers?

And shall we forgive them for their excesses of warmth?
or coldness?
Shall we forgive them for pushing?
or leaning?
or shutting doors?
For speaking through walls?
or never speaking?
Or never being silent?

Do we forgive our fathers in our age
or in theirs?
or in their deaths,
saying it to them
or not saying it?

From "Smoke Signals" the film adaptation of the short story "This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona" from the book "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven" by Sherman Alexie, 1993.

classification:  Home and Family

It is a fact that unresolved feelings and problems will resurface again and again during a lifetime until they are finally resolved.  I met people in the assisted living who had trust issues as children, and were dealing with it again in old  age.  A class-mate taught me this saying from his home country  "once a man, twice a child"  
I thing our feelings about our childhood remain with us all our lives to finally be resolved....
in our age?  or in theirs?

Looking Out

It must be odd

To be a minority

He was saying.

I looked around

And didn't see any.

So I said

Yeah,

It must be.

Mitsuye Yamada

This poem written by a Japanese-American

comments on how some ethnic groups

see themselves as part of main-stream culture,

Yet main-stream culture may still see them as belonging to their former culture

classification:  Social commentary

Here in Virginia, we are unfased by middle-eastern women in head scarves, or foreign accents.

They tell me there are more than 100 countries represented in the high school. I consider myself more acculturated than some but I catch myself doing this:

In class I call the name for attendance, I see their face and expect to hear a reply with accented English. As soon as they speak, I realize this family has been here many generations!

The Laundress

She worked as a housemaid, then as a laundress
in small-town Winnipeg, full of emigrés speaking
every language except for her own: She was Icelandic
and as she worked she sang the old Icelandic hymns
and songs: the songs had all her joy, they brought
all her peace. She kept reaching for the language
that got lost in her life. She could never speak it
again, although it always measured her breath.


Late one summer, as she lay dying, she sang again
the Icelandic hymns, sang in her mother tongue
another tongue for us; and as we lay her
in a foreign grave, we, who know no Icelandic,
who know then almost nothig of what she loved
and lived by, say our prayers over her in English.

Einar P'all J'onnson
translated by Thorvaldur Johnson and M.P. O'Conor

classification: social commentary

My grandma Stephania never put in articles, and sometimes left out conjunctions too. She said "you put a little bit sugar"
Mark, when studying the Russian-related languages (did you know Mark speaks a little Russian?) explained to me that's how Russian is, and that grandma must have transferred this to English.

We know these people, who left their homes and came to Canada
whose language got lost, and their children, unable to speak their language were
bemused by their accent and peculiar language structure, never understanding that language is a filter through which we see and interpret our world.

When I studied US immigration patterns, and saw the echoes of the same patterns in Canada,
I learned that the US became the melting pot, but Canada in leaving cultures and languages intact, was more of a fruit salad. But in immigration, every culture suffers a similar loss of identity.