Peak Summer perspectives

In our northern hemisphere, this coming Saturday, August 1, Lughnasadh is celebrated among the Celts and Irish Gaelic. Locally, row crop harvest will start in a couple of months and fruit and vegetable harvest has been underway for a couple of months. Somewhere close to or on August 7 we'll reach the midpoint between between Summer Solstice and Autumn Equinox. This sure seems like peak Summer and the weather concurs. Right now the temperature is in the mid 90's (℉) and the humidity makes it feel like 113℉. At least the wildfire smoke has eased away for now.

field corn not yet  ready for harvest

Photo by J. Harrington

The limited cool down forecast for the next ten days may be enough for those Minnesotans who vote in person on August 11 to get over being hot under the collar. Early voters, not so much. Those who pay close attention to the state of the world, the country, the state, and/or the 99% are unlikely to cool down regardless of the weather. I'm reminded of the key theme from Dr. Seuss' The Lorax: "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, Nothing is going to get better. It's not." I'm here to say it's well past time we all stop voting for Once-lers while we still have a habitable planet to protect! I wonder if we could send all of the 1% to colonize the "Red Planet." (Am I the only one who sees real irony in that?)

At some point we seem to have allowed those who are supposed to represent US to act as though the words accommodate, tolerate, cooperate, and compromise are each spelled with only four letters and aren't to be used in polite political company. winner take all is the antithesis of a democracy, just as is the short-sightedness of not thinking beyond this quarter's profits. How can we be sure to vote only for those who realize we, and our descendants, are all in this for the long term? Your thoughts?

Ghazal: America the Beautiful

Alicia Ostriker

1937 –

Do you remember our earnestness our sincerity
in first grade when we learned to sing America

The Beautiful along with the Star-Spangled Banner
and say the Pledge of Allegiance to America

We put our hands over our first grade hearts
we felt proud to be citizens of America

I said One Nation Invisible until corrected
maybe I was right about America

School days school days dear old Golden Rule Days
when we learned how to behave in America

What to wear, how to smoke, how to despise our parents
who didn’t understand us or America

Only later learning the Banner and the Beautiful
live on opposite sides of the street in America

Only later discovering the Nation is divisible
by money by power by color by gender by sex America

We comprehend it now this land is two lands
one triumphant bully one still hopeful America

Imagining amber waves of grain blowing in the wind
purple mountains and no homeless in America

Sometimes I still put my hand tenderly on my heart
somehow or other still carried away by America

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Reaping what we sow time?

Much of the local field corn has tasseled. Late yesterday we noticed a whitetail buck in velvet. This year's fawns seem to be everywhere. Wild turkey poults? Not so much. Heat, humidity, and fine particulates from northern wild fires in Minnesota and Canada have dominated the weather recently and look like they'll come and go for the rest of the season. Does anyone know of a place where it's October-like year round?

whitetail doe with two fawns

Photo by J. Harrington

At least July is more than half gone and "normal" maximum temperatures would begin to decline late this coming week, on Friday the 24th. I'm not sure what that may portend in reality, since so little is normal these days. I am sure that we'll find a way to celebrate Lughnasadh in about two weeks, on August 1. If nothing else, it will start a countdown to the Autumn Equinox which will then bring US closer to National Election Day on November 3. Some of US are hoping there's meaningful symbolism with the Day of the Dead immediately preceding Election Day. No doubt the other side is wishing for the same thing, but in their favor. Can't we find a way to make politics win-win instead of zero sum?

The Guardian recently published an article about the increase in political violence worldwide. It attributes much of the cause to political rhetoric increasingly demonizing the opposition spouted by the same politicians who deplore actual violence against politicians. Does anyone else see a classic case of "Do as I say, not as I do"? Political types claiming to be Christian might want to recall the dictum "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." Perhaps, since we're approaching the harvest season, recalling Galatians 6:7-9 would be better: ".... for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."

A Quest for Universal Suffrage

Kimberly Blaeser

I.

Suffrage:

In late middle English

intercessory prayers,

a series of petitions.

Not the right—but the hope.

 

Universal:

applicable to all cases—

except those marginalized

and unnamed.

A belief, but not a fact.

 

II.

In the trombone slide of history

I hear the suffer in suffragette

the uni uni uni in universal—

each excluded ikwe: women

from five hundred tribal nations

mindimooyenh or matriarchs

of ancient flourishing cultures

still disenfranchised by race,

still holding our world together

in the dusky and lawless violence

manifest in colonial america.

 

Twenty-six million american women

at last granted the right to vote.

Oh, marginal notes in the sweet anthem

of equality, Indigenous non-citizens

turn to the older congress of the sun

seek in the assembled stories of sky

a steady enlightenment—natural laws

(the mathematics of bending trees,

sistering of nutrients—maizebeanssquash,

or wintering wisdom of animal relatives)

each seasonal chorus colored with resilience—

earth voices rising in sacred dream songs.

 

Even now listen, put on the moon-scored

shell of turtle, wear this ancient armour

of belonging. In the spiral of survivance

again harvest the amber sap of trees

follow the scattered path of manoomin

the wild and good seed that grows on water.

Oh water, oh rice, oh women of birch dreams

and baskets, gather. Here reap and reseed

raise brown hands trembling holy with endurance.

Now bead land knowledge into muklaks

sign with the treaty X of exclusion.

Kiss with fingers and lips the inherited

woodland flutes and breathy cedar songs.

Say yea, eya, and yes. Here and here cast

your tended nets—oh suffered and sweetly mended

nets of abundance. This year and each to follow

choose, not by paper but by pathway, a legacy:

woman’s work—our ageless ballad of continuance.

 

Copyright © 2020 Kimberly Blaeser. This poem was co-commissioned by the Academy of American Poets and the New York Philharmonic as part of the Project 19 initiative.

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Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.