Overpackaged

My non-poetic thought of the day (er, month?) as I attempt to open a bag of Terra(r) brand exotic vegetable chips is this:

If the bag containing nitrogen-plus-14-chips is made of material so thick that they've scored one corner to allow me to open it bare-handed, we may be facing an overpackaged-chip situation. Is it freshness we're seeking? Do we simply enjoy the shiny faux-metal sheen? I don't buy it.

The lesson here is the same one I'm always learning, O Bramble. Don't buy it.

The Bell Witch

I bought a short book of poetry by Ruthellen Quillen yesterday at my favorite used bookstore. The book is titled, apparently, for a Tennessee legend about the Bell Witch. She (the legend, not the poet) has got quite a following. This I learn from Wikipedia.

I flip to page 54, where the Bell Witch becomes a poem.

There must be no more of breathing in this house.

Flip. I turn pages back, and read from the front of the book. This poet has more than legends to tell.

To be a woman, at last,
is to wash the endless underwear in the bathroom sink,
things which will not go white again.
It is to stringe up tights and panties and bras
on the string between your curtain rods.
God, it is to put those items folded neatly,
folded smally away
each into their separate drawers.

In my head, I conflate the Bell Witch poem with this other poem, "This Particular Truth," which is so like the stories my women friends and I tell every day to one another. We are all the Bell Witch, looking for a way to stop the world from becoming oblivious to the dark, quiet things we hold, and separate, the pills we swallow and the boys we hope will grow up knowing how to fold the laundry, and what goes where.

Waking up the dormant poet

I filled four drawers of a small filing cabinet this weekend, and felt satisfied putting things in categories. I shredded several small stacks of paper that I'd kept for no real reason. It felt good to chop them up and send them back to the earth, assuming our recycling program actually works.

I put a man in a white shoe box and placed him, somewhat gently, in the back of the 2nd drawer from the top. I fed him with paper and dried rose petals and he grew quiet. I cleaned the floors. My heart emptied. I closed the drawer.

The quiet is a welcome sound.

...

This has been a sleepy month... I have about four almost-begun posts for this quiet little blog, which languish in draft space and then become out of date. And what I really need is poetry.

For example, Louise Erdrich, the poem with which I paper all of my gray cubes. The paper and letters are black and white, but she reminds me where the color lives.

Pursue the authentic-decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don't even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.

Oh, and this one too.

In the news of the world ... today is World Malaria Day. In October we'll go for a walk to support the fight against HIV/AIDS ... AIDS Walk Washington. Next week is cookie packaging for the Avon Breast Cancer walkers.

We bake, we pack, we walk, we run, we work, we wear ribbons, we Facebook our lil green patches into next week, we click for the rainforest, we watch Inconvenient Truths and think about driving less. And then we get in our cars and go to Target. Admit it: we do.

I speak for all of us, because it's easier, faster, quicker, and I live in a murky A-Murka. It's in my bones.

Click, click.

Click.

Says the poet to the Bramble ...

(With apologies to Anne Sexton)

My lovely poet friend reminds me to think harder about what we insist on doing to ourselves.

"I know I’m throwing this at you, when you aren’t one who needs to hear this ..."

There is this NY Times article. Mayhap you saw it, and wondered, or nodded, or sighed.

But ... did you stop to wonder whether we know, in these reports of illness/outbreaks/what-have-you, "anything about what harm was done?" Were you told anything truly scary?

Think.

"... the idea of being harmed is left in the white spaces ..."

In the US, from measles, did children die? Were parents more than inconvenienced?

Measles is generally not a scary illness in healthy children, in the United States. I'm not talking Zambia here, or Haiti. I'm talking the United States. We're scared because the "news" tells us to be scared. The CDC tells us to be scared. The FDA tells us to be scared. Our CIC, above all, expects us to go on being scared.

Think about it: have you ever seen the Measles? Your image, unless you're somewhat older than this sorry blogger, comes from malnourished children in Africa. Am I wrong? Malnourished, underfunded, forgotten children who have no access to basic health care and basic human rights. Am I wrong? Replace Africa with Asia. Am I wrong, dear Bramble?

(If I'm wrong, there IS a comment feature -- have at it.)

Statistically, what are we looking at in the United States, really? The New England Journal of Medicine reports a 2005 outbreak in Indiana imported from Romania. Note, however, that NEJM recommends "a two-dose vaccination strategy with very high coverage" as the only way to sustain immunity. In almost the same breath, the article notes that "the level of vaccination coverage in Indiana was 98 percent."

Sorry: did I miss something? A critical transition statement, perhaps? Too much skimming between paragraphs? I used to know a NEJM editor; she was good.

And: "The longer a community goes without circulating measles virus, the more vigilant public health officials must be to maintain immunity levels..." I refuse to explain why I included that quote. Think, oh city-dweller. Think.

#1: What are we actually doing to help where it really counts? #2: Do the authors of these articles really understand how the immune system works, when they claim that “children who are not vaccinated are unnecessarily susceptible to serious illnesses, they say, but also present a danger to children who have had their shots”?

Give me a break, people. Human beings are not born with these viruses/etc. lurking in their bodies. What risk? Is Measles floating in the air around us, like the smog? Are we drinking it in, like the fluoride we've been forced to ingest because it makes it easier for our government to ensure the "public health" of all?

Okay, Bramble, you're cringing and trying to slink away into the corner of your concrete cage. I'm, yowza, one of those extreme leftist/pinko/anarchist whatevers that drags crystals across my body and swigs green tea while chanting OM and hoping the Universe will save me, when there are perfectly good drugs that will do the trick without any action on my part?

I mean, who among us have ever keeled over from a vaccine? Right?

You, in fact, are entitled to your opinion ... I'm banking on the fact that my poet friend has really done her research. She's an accountant; she likes facts. I trust her. I trust myself to read, and understand. I want to know ... and if I have little ones, I will want to know with a fiery vengeance much like hers.

"For instance, in a 2006 mumps outbreak in Iowa that infected 219 people, the majority of those sickened had been vaccinated. In a 2005 measles outbreak in Indiana, there were 34 cases, including six people who had been vaccinated.” My friend wants to know why the unvaccinated population are being blamed for this (see above, under "is Measles floating in the air around us..."). What danger does an unvaccinated person who hasn't been exposed pose to a vaccinated person?

Doesn't the vaccine, er, vaccinate you?

Or is this "evidence of the failure of the vaccine to protect? Instead of admitting that something doesn’t work, let’s blame those who chose not to participate."

.
.
.

Think. Please think.

.
.
.

Tomorrow ... I promise ... more poetry. Less propaganda. (Unless I'm busy, sending my refrigerator, which has recently begun clicking as though using echo-location, out to sea.)

For today, my poet friend and I pose the question: Folks, do you know what else is in your vaccines? Ask, please. Please. And then make a real decision.

And maybe, don't go to the "news" for trustworthy information about your health ... your child's health... The news is the wind swinging the trees around. It moves fast, and it changes fast. Beware.

Be aware.

"Rock splitting is for prisoners"

So says my mad poet friend, from his vista in Costa Rica.

Aren't we all prisoners hammering our way out of the four walls in which we're sitting? This is partly our own fault of course... the middle-grounders are populating the city and drinking its mochas free of charge. At least until the bill arrives.

Enter rock-splitting. Enter music, enter ear-splitting resonance. Enter the poets. Enter their friends, who keep them fed, and listened-to. Enter, stage left.

This week we issue a cease and desist order on our nation's conscious betrayal of itself. Read, write. Resist.

We wish to remind you: we miss nothing, we poets, and we tell all. We are frantic with the telling of it.

Don't you hear this hammer ring?

One Week to Split This Rock Poetry Festival!

A brief history of what I missed (and what I've found)

As we approach Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation and Witness, I find myself unimaginably busy and also, somehow, finding time to read more. Surprise, surprise: I also find myself attempting to write more. Through this work, I am finding only now the poets whose work speaks to me as if it were my own. As if I might write an answer to their call, and be heard.

Consider the last few years ...

In 2002 Robert Bly was writing "Call and Answer"
How come we’ve listened to the great criers—Neruda, / Akhmatova, Thoreau, Frederick Douglass—and now / We’re silent as sparrows in the little bushes?

We learned today that Robert Bly will not be able to join us for the festival, alas. But we still have more than 20 poets whose voices will break the silence for four days of raging joy and hope, and awakening.

Sarah Browning and I both moved to DC after years in Boston. I was backstopping U.S. government contracts. Sarah was writing “Another March, January 2003.”

We will find the perfect
Hand-made sign:
THE ONLY BUSH
I TRUST
IS MY OWN

Alix Olson graduated from college the year before I did. I left for the Peace Corps. She became a folk poet and progressive queer artist-activist. I learned to sleep wearing every item of clothing I owned.

There is more, of course, dear Bramble in the City, but the hour grows late and my friends will have to pay for the electricity my laptop is using.