Poem series: Rain
Tag: Canberra
Poem Series: Bushfires
This is new
12 April 2020
Time
Is that the engine of change?
Is it time?
How do we change
as a person
as a society
My changes
slowing down
not just physically
due to age
i.e. time
but psychologically
with thought
with letting go
letting go
of judgment
of guilt
of anxiety
of worry
Is that what anxiety is?
Worry
Forecasting doom and gloom
Forecasting
Unnamed unknowable
Fear
Yet there is an ongoing crisis
Pandemic of COVID 19
And
Global warming
Consuming the globe
with various levels of understanding
and reaction
How to be more aware
Awake
Alive
To watch a bee circling a shrub
Listen for birds
Squawking
Distant hum of traffic
Sitting on a balcony
On a no street
A slow street
A street where
Three cars pass in a day
More birds pass than cars
Accepting that life is beyond control
Yet not beyond action
Pleased
with a new found ability
to sit and look
and listen
without doing
anything
This is new, different
Loss and grieving
I am in Canberra Australia
Far far from the USA
I grew up in Kansas City
Moved to the San Francisco Bay
Listening to the music
of Soul, Motown
Thinking of that music
today
The hope
The love
The promise
Otis Redding
Aretha Franklin
Nina Simone
The Temptations
Stevie Wonder
Diana Ross
Ray Charles
Smokey Robinson
The Temptations
Sam Cooke
The Supremes
Lou Rawls
Percy Sledge
Margin Gaye
Tina Turner
Gladys Knight and the Pips
(Partial list)
Listening today
on YouTube
after reading about overwhelming
numbers of deaths of African Americans
in the USA
during the COVID 19 pandemic
Mourning the loss
Listening to the music on YouTube
Remembering the joy
in an African American café
in Oakland California
November of 2008
The election of Barack Obama
44th President of the USA
People crying
shouting
dancing
singing
saying “I wish my mother was alive today”
People believing
“A Change is Gonna Come”
(Sam Cooke song)
and yet
and yet
Who is dying today
in the USA
in the pandemic?
Escape
Let me sit
for awhile
and see if I feel better
Alienated by anti-poetic words
Symposium presentations
deadening of affect
My mind engorged by a headache
My limbs growing numb
I hurry out of the room
grab a sugary treat
to sit outside
in the sun
Building walls covered by harsh
techno renderings
of the beauty
of Sidney Nolan paintings
Walls coloured
a blue not of the sky
a blue with more green
than the piercing sky blue above
The walls asymmetric pattern
Yellow tiles in a ragged diagonal
small black square tiles
interspersed randomly
with colourized tiles
The sun on my back
Renewing
I cannot return
to the symposium
Dead words
causing bodily pain
Back inside the gallery
to briefly re-absorb
Sidney Nolan’s paintings
Then going out to catch
the Rapid 6 bus
taking me home
Let Down
Somewhat
After putting aside for several months my novel-in-process based on events in my father’s life, Tracking the Human: nobody’s a long time, I came back to it. I went through it page by page. Made some minor changes. Leanne my editor did a copy edit. Ready for layout.
So what am I waiting for? Is it perhaps that I’ve lost some of the energy and enthusiasm? Or is it that I can’t face actually publishing and sharing the book and what that entails? So just put it aside and pretend I’ve done it.
With the help of my spouse, Jim, we did the layout in InDesign and submitted it to Lulu in mid January. I ordered a proof copy. Now at the end of January it never arrived. So I ordered another copy for the final proof reading.
Here’s the front cover:
The photo is of my father W. Lon Hutchison on the left, his sister Margery and brother Jack. Lon was the first born. I believe this picture was taken in Tulsa, Oklahoma about 1917.
More soon on planned launches later this year in Canberra, Australia, Oakland, California, Kansas City, Missouri, and Vinita, Oklahoma. Watch this space!
Please keep in touch if you would like to attend any of the book launches. Thanks!
Two Novels by a Poet
I urge myself to write after days in a daze due to a head cold the aftermath to sitting in a tent for hours at the Majors Creek Festival (a tiny historic gold mining town, 301 km south of Sydney and 16 km south of Braidwood in New South Wales, Australia), listening to Emily Rose and the Wild Things (high energy) followed by Great Aunt, a folk duo on guitar and bass (quiet competency).
I have lost the plot. What did I want to say about Kei Miller’s two novels? See my blog https://bettehutchisonsilver.wordpress.com/2019/11/01/you-never-know/ about meeting Kei Miller, the poet. Inspired, after meeting Kei Miller at the Poetry on the Move festival in Canberra, I found two of his novels at the local public library: The Last Warner Woman and Augustown The title of The Last Warner Woman confused me. When I see the word “Warner”, I immediately think of two brand names: Warners bras and Warner Brothers, a film production company.These are brands I grew up with in the USA. I have never consciously thought of either one - perhaps in my entire life (although I have seen the WB logo of Warner Brothers in movie credits). I have never bought a Warners bra. So I wondered why a writer from Jamaica would write about Warners bras or Warner Brothers? The cover of the book did not relate to the Warner brands. Think about it. Shocking that a word “warner” became embedded in my mind with two brands. The power of advertising that changes the lens through which we understand words. Warner… means a person who warns… that is, a seer or prophetess. A warner is someone who can “see” what is going to happen and then warn people.This book is as beautiful as the cover. The writing is so evocative that I had to read it carefully - word by word - the way I usually read poetry. I often speed read novels. Satisfied with understanding the main story line, following the principal characters and immersing myself in the story without carefully reading each word. Not possible to speed read The Last Warner Woman. And then Augustown
Augustown started slower for me. Something ominous surrounded the people in the novel. Something was going to happen. I read the novel with anxiety. At one point I put it aside. I didn’t want to know what was going to happen next. Both books are based on Jamaican history and folk lore. After reading Augustown, I looked up “Bedward“ and found the following: “Between 1891 and 1921, Alexander Bedward, an African-Jamaican healer, led the Jamaica Baptist Free Church in August Town, Jamaica, on the Hope River. . . In the 1930s, Bedwardites and Garveyites transformed Bedward's millenarianism into the more antiestablishment and durable Rastafarian movement…” https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/historians-and-chronicles/historians-miscellaneous-biographies/alexander-bedward Enjoy!
