I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape — the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.
Andrew Wyeth
Autobiography
Shipwreck
I loved this song growing up (I adored Gordon Lightfoot) & here is the story behind it …
“The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
To the big lake they call Gitche Gumee
Superior, they said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy.” — Gordon Lightfoot
Some say the Great Lakes are haunted. They have caused the demise of many a sailor, and within their waters lives the blood and despair of lives cut short. This is one such story.
They came from Duluth. From Toledo. From Sturgeon Bay. Iron River, St. Joseph, Ashtabula and Milbury. They worked as oilers, engineers, first mates, captains, cooks, watchmen and deckhands. Their names were John, James, William, George, Russell, Bruce, Oliver and a few Thomases. They were husbands, fathers, sons and brothers, beloved of many. Some were as young as twenty, on their first trip out.
Karl Peckol, b. 1955, Watchman
Some were in their fifties, making a last voyage before retirement.
Frederick…
View original post 1,360 more words
A One Syllable Per Line Sonnet
Here’s today’s writing prompt! I think it might be harder than it looks.
Review: Six the Musical
THIS SOUNDS FABULOUS !!!!
The Six Wives of Henry VIII
On Sunday 23rd September, I was fortunate enough to be able to see this amazing musical about the six wives of Henry VIII.! This musical was first brought to my attention at some point last year, and straightaway my mind was like:
“How on earth can you turn the history of Henry VIII’s six wives into a musical? That wouldn’t work!”
How wrong was I?! I will take my words and eat them, because it worked perfectly and it was one of the best musicals I have seen! I know it’s one of the best, for the simple fact that I went again the previous Friday with the whole of my family this time!
This musical was hilarious and very sharp and witty! It was written by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss. The basis of the musical is that the Six Tudor Queens of…
View original post 3,421 more words
wicked witch
Once upon a time there was a wicked witch and her name was
Lilith
Eve
Hagar
Jezebel
Delilah
Pandora
Jahi
Tamar
and there was a wicked witch and she was also called goddess and her name was
Kali
Fatima
Artemis
Hera
Isis
Mary
Ishtar
and there was a wicked witch and she was also called queen and her name was
Bathsheba
Vashti
Cleopatra
Helen
Salome
Elizabeth
Clytemnestra
Medea
and there was a wicked witch and she was also called witch and her name was
Joan
Circe
Morgan le Fay
Tiamat
Maria Leonza
Medusa
and they had this in common: that they were feared, hated, desired, and worshiped.
Andrea Dworkin
Woman Hating
a dignified serenity
This is one of my favorite novels of ALL TIME.
November — with uncanny witchery in its changed trees. With murky red sunsets flaming in smoky crimson behind the westering hills. With dear days when the austere woods were beautiful and gracious in a dignified serenity of folded hands and closed eyes — days full of fine, pale sunshine that sifted through the late, leafless gold of the juniper-trees and glimmered among the grey beeches, lighting up evergreen banks of moss and washing the colonnades of the pines. Days with a high-sprung sky of flawless turquoise. Days when an exquisite melancholy seemed to hang over the landscape and dream about the lake. But days, too, of the wild blackness of great autumn storms, followed by dank, wet, streaming nights when there was witch-laughter in the pines and fitful moans among the mainland trees.
L.M. Montgomery
The Blue Castle
“I Never Knew it Would Come to That” the Eternal Excuse of Participants and Bystanders
Another great read.
Jewish Men being Rounded Up in Baden with Citizens looking on
Friends of Padre Steve’s World,
Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer wrote: “Thou shalt not be a victim, thou shalt not be a perpetrator, but, above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.” These words from his book Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933-1945 serve as a warning to members of a society where various minority groups are being labeled as enemies of the state and often less than human.
Over the past week we have watched as a rabid Trump supported sent pipe bombs to a dozen men and women who the President has personally attacked in speeches, interviews, or on his Twitter account. We have watched as a White man gun down two Black senior citizens in a Louisville, Kentucky Kroger store after failing to gain access into a Black Baptist Church. We…
View original post 538 more words
Kristallnacht In Broad Daylight
MUST READ
Writing for First Draft is one of my passions. It’s often my therapy. This has been one of those times. The MAGA Bomber’s failed attempt at mass assassination shook me to the core. Then, the massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh left many of us questioning what it means to be an American in the Trump era.
I am proud to be an American, but I am ashamed of our current leadership’s inability to respond with an ounce of human decency or a scintilla of empathy. As far as the president* is concerned, it’s an inconvenient interruption of rally mania. As far as I’m concerned, Trump and his allies have blood on their hands, if not literally, then symbolically.
I’m not the only one questioning what it means to be an American in 2018. Veteran political journalist Howard Fineman grew up in Pittsburgh as a member of the…
View original post 829 more words
The “unsayable” thing at the center
I think there is a general misconception that you write poems because you “have something to say.” I think, actually, that you write poems because you have something echoing around in the bone-dome of your skull that you cannot say. Poetry allows us to hold many related tangential notions in very close orbit around each other at the same time. The “unsayable” thing at the center of the poem becomes visible to the poet and reader in the same way that dark matter becomes visible to the astrophysicist. You can’t see it, but by measure of its effect on the visible, it can become so precise a silhouette you can almost know it.
Rebecca Lindenberg
Why Write Poetry?
Untitled
I like misty autumn mornings,
And cold snowy winter nights.
Rainstorms bring me inner peace,
Thunder sets my soul alight.
I care not for summer days –
Too long, the heavy heat.
Give me candlelit evenings,
Early darkness, a silent street.
Natalia Crow
silverapplequeen 