Three Minutes

From ABC News:

House Honors Birmingham Church Bombing Victims

@GoldmanRussell

By Russell Goldman

Apr 25, 2013 4:49pm

The House of Representatives on Wednesday voted unanimously to honor four young Alabama girls, killed in a 1963 church bombing. Martin Luther King Jr. had called them  ”martyrs” of the civil rights movement.

The girls, all black members of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, will be posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, one of the country’s highest civilian honors, created by an act of Congress.

Addie Mae Collins, 14; Denise McNair, 11; Carole Robertson, 14; and Cynthia Wesley; 14, were killed on Sept 15, 1963,  in the attack that struck the packed church on a Sunday morning. Twenty-two others were injured.

The bomb, composed of dynamite and a timer, was planted beneath the front steps of the church,  outside a basement room in which 26 children attended a Sunday school sermon.

FIND MORE OF THIS STORY HERE: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2013/04/congress-honors-birmingham-bomb-victims/

Three Minutes

Four young ones

died yesterday

and yesterday

and yesterday

Seems like yesterday

when four girls died

and four more

and four more

Today, too, death

more died today

while praising and

singing and walking

Bombing children anywhere 

is bombing children 

here in this 

safe heart.

Copyright © 2013 S.L.Chast

Peaceable Kingdom

I was thrilled to see this, an 11-minute segment of a documentary-in-production on the Religious Society of Friends.  It's exciting because it avoids the pitfall of mythologizing.  For example, whereas it reveals Quaker involvement with abolition it does not obscure the fact that some Quakers owned slaves and were the first "targets" of Quakers who came to know that ownership of people was against the right order of God.  





I am not collecting money for this documentary which will play on PBS, but I am supporting it in every way I can.  

I am a Quaker in Philadelphia, PA, a city founded by William Penn within territory he received from the King of England.  His statue is on top of City Hall, and yet many here do not know of Penn or the Quaker faith.  

In contemporary USA there are any different flavors of Quaker stemming from the historical tradition provided in this clip.  For silent-meeting universalists like myself, the more conservative and talkative branches seem strangely fundamental next to my own experience of that of God in all people and the equality between continuous revelation and the Biblical Word.   I look forward to seeing how this documentary explains the differences as well as our common work toward a peaceable kingdom and the end of all war. 

Unfinished Poem

                                     (for Amy M-K)

I wake into giving thoughts,

day already blooming for me

(if I am ready to receive

it without hesitation)

I rise into givens, catching

as much as possible with mitts

(protecting my hands, hands shielding

my heart, eyes closed, peeking)

I will, I promise daily, learn

to receive Light bare handed

(and uncover my heart, and   

worship with eyes open)

Copyright © 2013 S.L.Chast

Posted at dVerse Poets Pub OpenLinkNight Week 112.

Labor Day 2013

(My poem "Labor Day 2013" is HERE.)

The skies opened and rain, rain, RAINED.  Stopped for a minute, and now pour again.  My daily Facebook is filled with reminders of union actions that made the USA a better place to work and warnings about upcoming legislation that turns some of that around.  To me, reading the history of labor unions while watching governments dissolve them is poignant and energizing. Democracy is powerful when its people engage in it and apply their voting and veto and marching-to-be heard powers.


From Wikipedia where you can read much more:

     In the US, Labor Day, the first Monday in September, is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of their country.
     In many countries, the working classes sought to make May Day an official holiday, and their efforts largely succeeded. In the United States and Canada, however, the official holiday for workers is Labor Day in September. This day was promoted by the Central Labor Union and the Knights of Labor, who organized the first parade in New York City. After the Haymarket Massacre, US President Grover Cleveland feared that commemorating Labor Day on May 1 could become an opportunity to commemorate the affair. Thus, in 1887, it was established as an official holiday in September to support the Labor Day that the Knights favored.

Today's New York Times Opinion Section, re-ran Cindy Hahamovitch's " "The Lessons of Belle Glade" originally published July 18, 2013.  A historian, Ms. Hahamovitch provides context for understanding the latest migrant worker options pending in Congress.  Read the article; it's powerful.

I wish an equally clear context was available for current legislation that feels to me like attacks on teachers and our unions.  While union reform is necessary, the union breaking and economics involved with funding education seems to be political and not related to any policy present and past.  Correct me if I am wrong.

Please help me find clear readings providing an historical context for today's impoverishment of education that ultimately affects children, families, and the future of this nation.

(My poem "Labor Day 2013" is HERE.)

(I am aware that I left weapons out of this poem,  over-
simplifying the tactics of terrorists and tyrants.  
I pray for safety in the Labor Day streets 
of the USA and elsewhere.)

Thrills and Chills

Susan Chast

37 minutes ago near Philadelphia · 

• I am so excited! My first poem to be published in the pages of a real book is “Word Wrapping” in The dVerse Anthology: Voices of Contemporary World Poetry, edited by Frank Watson. Plum White Press, 2013; P. 151. Hurrah. My poem faces one by Laurie Harris Kolp and is practically in the center of poems by poets who have been reading my work as it develops. Visit us at dVerse Poets Pub .

  
  

            The above is my status on Facebook today.  One little poem in one 269-page paper-back publication is making my heart beat fast.  Frank Watson did a great job with layout, order and style, right down to the feel of the paper--not the most expensive--but smooth to the touch.  And these matters of design are important to me as I consider self-publishing a full collection and a chapbook by early next year.  Can I do it?  

            I believe I can, but I'd like to finish the first draft of my novel first.  The poetry books can be the rewards.  Not that the steps of making any book are easy, but it is a work reward for doing good work.  Having just soaked up the wisdom of writers Marge Piercy (my hero) and Ira Wood all weekend up at Omega Institute, I am revved up to treat the act of writing more seriously while maintaining the light tone of the book.  I think.  I think it needs the light tone as it addresses serious matters, but the experience of the Piercy/Wood Memoir Workshop Lab  may alter that. 

            The last piece I wrote about my friend Doug's death is mainly serious and would not easily be translated into my fiction. Nor should it be. Something new is emerging, popping out from behind my privacy screens energetically and eagerly.  Why?  Will it wait for another book?  Or will it shove the one I have started into the back of the file drawer where I keep 50+ years of false starts?

            In my autobiographical novel, so far, I emphasize my theatre and feminist experience in the character of an aging performance artist and storyteller who is being pressured to break her safe routine and isolation by three unforeseen events:  (1) She has been invited to the 30th reunion of her old Women's Center and Theatre Company, both of which ended existence in the 1980s.  (2) She has been asked to update and publish her ancient 1990 dissertation now that her artistic director subject, Ellen Stewart, has died.  (3) Her favorite audience member, Greg, has just lost his mother to the struggle in Afghanistan.   These three events cause enough conflict to expose her experience with racism, feminism, lesbianism, community, theatre, and love's concurrent losses and needs. That is already a lot without drugs and suicides and sex and secretly transgendered lives. I don't lack for material and research to open up the culture of radical change and the stagnation of feminist community in the late 1970s and early 80s.

           In the next phase of writing I will re-outline, I think, in an attempt to separate the story lines so I can satisfy them all and let them re-entwine.  Then if I have to include love and sex to make the work sing I will.  But I really hope it isn't necessary.

  
  

            That's all for now--writing to think, thinking to write. The UPS wagon came down the street today and left a book with one of my poems in it at my feet.  Yip-pee!  I forgot to eat, but I'll go and do that now.
  
  

  

  I just sent this to dVerse Poets Pub where a gallery is growing.

  
  Copyright © 2013 S.L.Chast