Poetry with Senior Citizens

How's that for soothing? The steam from my coffee cup literally swirling up and out and can't you smell those peaches and the pears are buttery and the sun, always the sun. The calm certainly belies the simmering rage I feel, especially tonight after seeing the POSPOTUS give one of his inimitable rally speeches, this time in the great state of Mississippi, where he mocked Dr. Ford. The backdrop was a bunch of hooting and hollering white men and women who, I suppose, are his base and never was there a better word to describe them.

We need to turn this thing around.

Here's something else to soothe our souls. I'm teaching a couple of creative writing classes to senior citizens. They are lovely men and mostly women in a couple of assisted living homes here in Los Angeles, and I got the job by applying through one of those newfangled job search engines. I won't be putting either of my two boys through college or putting in an adapted bathroom for Sophie with my pay, but I already really like doing it. The group that I've seen twice is particularly fragile -- both physically and cognitively -- but they can be inspired to tell the most vivid stories. I am always the first, one woman began, her words unfurling to describe her early childhood days in the cotton fields of Texas, plowing and picking. Another woman opens one eye and glares at me. I've got NOTHING to tell you, she says and closes her eye. She's so hostile that I sort of love her. She also told me at the end of the class (she contributed nothing) that's a pretty dress, and I said thank you. I recited Joy Harjo and played a Native American water song. A man in a Dodgers cap whose chin lay on his chest while he gently snored through the entire first class was lively in the second one. When prompted to write about someone in your life who is important he chose his son and said He always does the right thing and organized this whole thing when there was all this darkness and trouble. 

The stories. Everyone has a story.

Except for that POS that is running ruining our country. I know I'm not supposed to wish harm on any living being but damn. And the people who support him? The word scratch. The word eye. The word out.


#smashthepatriarchy



Here's a poem.

All the Difficult Hours and Minutes

All the difficult hours and minutes 

are like salted plums in a jar. 

Wrinkled, turn steeply into themselves, 

they mutter something the color of  sharkfins to the glass. 

Just so, calamity turns toward calmness. 

First the jar holds the umeboshi, then the rice does.

Jane Hirshfield