THE SIGNAL from David Katznelson
"Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole."-Derek Walcott
Yesterday, I was able to breath again. And it felt great.
“I have no color on the brain. All I have on the brain is paint.”-Robert S. Duncanson
Like everyone else I was blown away by Amanda Gorman’s poetic speech at the inauguration yesterday and did a deep dive reading about her young career. She is on the National 826 Board, an amazing organization (my wife helped start the very first one). That alone is reason to support it!
This Land is Your Land: America’s other national anthem
Sung at the Inauguration, described as a socialist hymn by a New York Times reporter in real-time during the performance (not a bad thing!), Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land is one of the greatest songs about America. It should be our national anthem. Hell, at least it doesn’t have a racist verse that has to be continually overlooked, instead showcasing verses that define and own the struggles of America. Thanks to the work of Alan Lomax, the song “spread virally” by being placed in textbooks for children to learn. And what’s more, the instrumental break Guthrie provides in his recording wonderfully salutes the folk movement of the 20th century.
The Season of Phantasmal Peace
By DEREK WALCOTT
Then all the nations of birds lifted together
the huge net of the shadows of this earth
in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues,
stitching and crossing it. They lifted up
the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes,
the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets,
the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill—
the net rising soundless as night, the birds' cries soundless, until
there was no longer dusk, or season, decline, or weather,
only this passage of phantasmal light
that not the narrowest shadow dared to sever.
And men could not see, looking up, what the wild geese drew,
what the ospreys trailed behind them in silvery ropes
that flashed in the icy sunlight; they could not hear
battalions of starlings waging peaceful cries,
bearing the net higher, covering this world
like the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing
the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes
of a child fluttering to sleep;
it was the light
that you will see at evening on the side of a hill
in yellow October, and no one hearing knew
what change had brought into the raven's cawing,
the killdeer's screech, the ember-circling chough
such an immense, soundless, and high concern
for the fields and cities where the birds belong,
except it was their seasonal passing, Love,
made seasonless, or, from the high privilege of their birth,
something brighter than pity for the wingless ones
below them who shared dark holes in windows and in houses,
and higher they lifted the net with soundless voices
above all change, betrayals of falling suns,
and this season lasted one moment, like the pause
between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace,
but, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long.
