Click on photos to enlarge.
This blog by Annie makes such a valid (and conciliatory) point–and offers hope for a solution to divisiveness in the U.S.
I am writing this piece with images of the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol still very fresh in my mind. It is a huge stretch to think of those brutal, sadistic, remorseless thugs and imagine summoning an iota of compassion for them. But others of their ilk–and many psychologists and researchers–say that’s precisely what’s needed.
They call themselves the “formers”: former Klansman, neo-Nazis, or generic white supremacists or other racial extremists who are now devoted to guiding those who’d followed similar paths to come to a better life.
Christian Picciolini is one of them. As a 14-year-old, he’d joined a violent group of white power adherents who became the “Hammerskin Nation.” As he described his feelings to Dave Davies in an NPR interview, the group threw him a “lifeline of acceptance…I felt a sort of energy flow through me that I had never felt before—as…
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Wise Men and Fools
Pompous men and religious zealots rush into the fray
professing as the solid truth speculations they
determine to be necessary for things to be righted
and other fools support them because they are short-sighted.
But wisdom is as wisdom does and not as wisdom thinks.
It floats up to the surface when foolishness just sinks.
It tends toward calm and practical when flightier heads turn manic
and is irreconcilable with discord and with panic.
Fools may build vain edifices reaching to the skies
that are palatial prisons—follies in disguise.
In time of war, a bunker furnishes more protection,
offering a wiser choice to screen us from detection.
Fools raise their hands and wave at us, inviting their own end,
standing straight and rigid when a wiser man might bend.
Fools rush in where sages might not speculate,
instead letting the evidence sit and percolate.
Sages, fools and charlatans mixed up in the fray.
For those who cannot tell the difference, now we’ll all have to pay.
Prompt words for today are wisdom, irreconcilable, practical and palatial.
Heart’s Eye
Who can pass a bookstore door
and fail to note the vellichor
or fail to feel within their heart
the message of a piece of art?
A poignant poem or pithy quote,
well-loved and thereby learned by rote,
is a means by which we might denote
that part of us that we devote
to what we can’t repudiate—
that part of us that is a gate
to a special way of seeing—
the heart’s eye of a human being.
Word prompts for today are art, repudiate, vellichor and denote.
I am becoming infirm one finger at a time
Is this how it happens, digit by digit
Not all at once, being felled in the street
Hit by a car or clutching my chest
My finger must be coaxed to unbend
In the morning, I watch it unfurl in slow motion
No one told me to look out for this
This tiny incapacitation, it comes as a surprise
A fascination, I am entranced by my sick finger
With its slight bend, softer than my father’s little finger
That he broke as a kid and it stayed frozen as a V forever
My finger is an apprentice to my father’s, a fledgling
The hand salve is greasy and smells of mint and other deep things
In a tin like axle grease sold at a general store last century
With my well hand I pull my bent finger, massaging and straightening
As…
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Cheap Thrills
Stand by the door of the room with your coat still on.
Try to stay focused
while he unbuttons his shirt.
Relax everything.
Different parts of you
like clothes in a pile on the floor.
You’ll get wrinkled falling down so often
from the tempest
that has dropped him
back again,
flat on you, as you melt into the bed
above his favorite spot.
He will go
where everyone goes
without you.
You may have crossed the equator,
returning home
with treasures
from around the world and back,
but not the kind of prizes
you can hang
on dressing table mirrors.
Your exquisite things of the world
live with you,
but you have never been
where they all go
though you have tried
and tried
and sometimes you have
nearly made it
yet,
cheap thrills, in the end,
have always evaded you.
In your deepest voice,
you want to
“Hey baby,”
and you want him to
sink you down.
You want to almost drown
call help so he comes after you
and you rise up
together
for the splitting of an
atom gone
‘til you
come
back
to fall
back down together.
It would be a miracle.
Imagine.
VJ’s Weekly Challenge prompt is URGE.
A Night in Shining Armor
The royal chambers were impressive, their ceilings high and vaulted,
and the king that lived within them was respected and exalted,
but he’d grown a bit too portly around his hips and bust.
To put it more politely? He was overly robust.
Only once a year was there a problem with his girth.
On the anniversary of his country’s birth
when he had to put on armor, it had become a must,
if he was to fit inside it, to be securely trussed.
Thus girded and then girdled, he was stuffed within
armor made for him before, back when he was thin!
Luckily, there was sufficient room around his face,
so, although the rest of it lacked sufficient space,
he was able to make speeches about affairs of state,
to eulogize and glorify and pontificate!
Then, after the ceremonies, feeling young and sprightly,
he visited his concubines, clad regally and tightly.
But when he tried to exit his protective crust,
he found that he’d been glued within by a seal of rust!
They tried to use a crowbar, a hammer and a chisel,
but, alas, it was a rainy day and all that drizzle
had sealed him tight within the metal of his kingly raiment,
making it a prison, not just a brief containment.
At length, they called a blacksmith who with cutting, prying, hammering,
in spite of the king’s protests, his commanding and his yammering,
removed the monarch from his shell, released him to his ardor,
none-the-worse for all those nightly visits to his larder.
The ladies took him to their beds and comforted and soothed him,
giving him that royal special care that much behooved him.
And when next year the king was placed upon his royal charger,
the armor that he wore was seen to be some sizes larger.
The invoice that the blacksmith sent for the king’s re-guising,
tactfully just charged him for adjustment and resizing,
but in fact, the artisan had made a big improvement
bound to make it easier for future royal movement
if he kept up his nightly search for items that were edible.
Cleverly, he made it out of chainmail that was spreadable!
Prompt words today are robust, invoice, sprightly and exalted. I took this photo in 1969 on an eight week driving tour of Great Britain. It was taken in the castle of Sir Walter Scott. Just this year, I bought a slide converter and converted the slides of that trip to jpegs. I hadn’t seen these photos in almost fifty years! Came in handy today.
The Year They Outlawed Chocolate
The Year they outlawed chocolate in our village was calamity.
It might have trimmed our waistlines, but it did not promote amity.
Former cheery citizens, lacking its sweet delight,
commenced to back-biting when they had nothing sweet to bite.
The town jail quickly filled right up with chocolate-smugglers and
little grannies in aprons who forgot chocolate was banned.
Young kids wound up in juvie just for shooting M&Ms.
Chocolate-loving parsons sat in jail cells humming hymns.
Cocoa went undercover and fudge went on the skids.
Moms had to resort to feeding apples to their kids!
We were all in mourning, yet the mayor was resolute.
With the whole town in withdrawal, he didn’t give a hoot!
In the end, townspeople voted to freeze the salaries
of councilmen and mayor who had voted to freeze calories.
So politicians changed their minds, reversing chocolate bans
by commissioning the blacksmith to forge three giant pans
and then they used his ovens to create colossal brownies—
enough to furnish chocolate for all the pissed-off townies.
“No Chocolate Allowed” signs were defaced and taken down,
making the perfect kindling for bonfires all over town.
The very air was sweet the night that chocolate was unbanished!
Hostess Cupcakes had to do when brownies quickly vanished.
Strings of lights and fireworks lit the evening air
as townfolk used hot cocoa to wash down their last eclair.
When they ran out of Hershey bars, at first they were aghast,
until Snickers bars ran rampant and Kit Kat bars were passed.
It was a bonbon orgy, a candy jubilee
The day the politicians set chocoholics free!
Prompt words today are chocolate, village, cheery and amity.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 