In court, he forgave the white policewoman who shot his brother, a 26-year-old man who was eating ice cream and minding his own business when she burst into his apartment and killed him.
I am very impressed that Brandt asked the judge to be allowed to hug her, inviting her to find Christ. I know of no other religion which would endorse such a choice and that truly amazing depth of forgiveness and compassion.
Fall morning rush-hour. Starting up, green-lit, into
a demolished Edmo intersection, wasteland as far as the eye can see.
A crow nonchalant in the lane ahead
only dodges the van wheels as I pass, looking back at me as if to say,
“What the f—! Are you trying to kill me? I live here, goddammit. This is my home, asshole!”
You just never know, do you?
1. In waking life, anything is possible–so I’ve learned over and over again throughout life. For instance, the many of us who ever gave up hope that Trump would be impeached. But we all forgot how careless human beings are and how we often do it to ourselves, incriminating ourselves in the public eye.
2. In Dreamland nightly, anything is possible. John Lennon was alive and well, reading his poetry from A Spaniard in the Works, the book of quirky poems he penned back in the sixties, right here in Edmonton in a big tent. (Yes, Yoko was there also.) What impressed the audience was his reading of his popular “Our Dad” poem in an unexpected cockney accent. Again, anything is possible.
3. Where this poem came from was last evening and my hosting and reading at the Upper Crust Café. It was a beautiful transcendent evening with every poet having his or her ephemeral shining moment with language and many life experiences. Again, anything was possible.
4. Thoughts arising: Poetry is the art of the impossible. I have always been impressed by the effects/affects of artistically formed words on an audience. The power of the spoken word, too, when voice and delivery do justice to the words on the page. The mental and spiritual interplay between poet and reader/audience, too.
I have witnessed something akin to the movie Awakenings, in which people long dormant and devitalized, have returned to consciousness in response to art. I have repeatedly seen large and small groups moved , reawakened, and hugely pleasured by poets’ conscious choice of words writ down in the past and then recited in the present. A magical osmosis often involving emotional transport and transcendence, elevating an audience to the olde truly magical, transcendent possibilities of words, language, and poetry.
For more on this topic, I refer you to the only surviving audio transcript of Virginia Woolf (who was truly a poet and loved poetry and literature more than anything else) reading her essay on “Words” for the BBC which you can readily Google to listen to. Be prepared to be overwhelmed and moved to a higher understanding and appreciation of how words work, what they mean, and how they can change our lives and life experience. The audio speech per se is similarly transcendent to what I’ve talked of above and quite likely the greatest essay ever written about the most basic and essential building block of our lives, human experience, literature, and poetry. Enjoy!
(ps/ This speech is also found on The Bloomsbury Group CD set put out by the British Library and the BBC.)
Sometimes a whole legal case can hang on one word like “though” as in the Trump phone call to Ukraine’s PM.
Consider also the dangerous threat in Trump’s “Civil War-like fracture” threat in his weekend tweet. Words that sow even more false, unnecessary, manufactured division amongst the American people to gin up support for his treasonous behavior and actions.
the pain and suffering of animals and young children. If someone has no feeling about these two, then he or she is clearly unempathetic, unsympathetic, and likely lacking in Heart.
Downright dangerous on sidewalks. Bad enough these riders are not wearing helmets and sustaining head injuries: ‘doing it to themselves’.
But worse that city council is opening the door for riders to mow down other people by illegally riding on busy sidewalks like Whyte Avenue, for instance. There will be court cases and lawsuits eventually to say nothing of unnecessary soaring health care expenses paid by taxpayers.
And, already, deserted scooters are being left hither and yon to spoil the physical appearance of our declining city. If the mayor and city council were smart, they’d outlaw the e-scooters before someone gets killed by selfish, careless riders.
*If anyone dies, it’ll be mainly on Don and council’s heads for willy-nilly licensing over common sense and public safety.
(Victoria: Inn at Laurel Point)
“Never be in a hurry; do everything quietly and in a calm spirit. Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset.”
(Constellation)
Ever notice how beautiful flowers become, more brilliant and ‘full-out’ when the first frosts hit. Although they’re dying, they are then at their most beautiful and eloquent.
reading my poems at the Upper Crust Café. Today I am honoured to be the host for my doctors’/my wife’s and daughter’s employers’ Farewell Party. They are deservedly retiring and will be hard to replace. Great guys; I have been very lucky to have them looking out for me for the past 4 decades.
(Spiritus:Daddio/Dean McKenzie–right; Laddio/me–centre; and Spook/Glen Kirkland–left, reading and stopping traffic at the old Woodward Books in Southgate Mall on a historic Saturday in 1990)
Tomorrow the grandsons will land for a visit which is always an exhausting, but rewarding/renewing workout. And Monday I am back at the Upper Crust to host the program and to read poems by my old departed Spiritus reading partners: Glen Kirkland and Dean McKenzie. Should be a slice. Still hard to believe they’re gone several years now.
from now on during his long downhill impeachment descent. His mental illness was pretty obvious in his Last Hurrah speech last week as he, in the style of Shakespeare’s Richard II, proceeded to take himself apart in front of the camera much to the horror of Mike Pompeo standing near him. There have been many columns online about his mental discombobulation the past 2-3 years. When you read any of these pieces by psychiatrists and psychologists, you begin to realize that T is a very sick man who could come apart if things aren’t going his way at all and he is being publicly humiliated and embarrassed.
Yesterday he was calling an apostrophe a hyphen and freaked out over CNN’s misspelling of liddle’ (no such word; when they left off the apostrophe, he went ballistic) We are now witnessing Captain Queeg from The Caine Mutiny obsessing about imagined missing strawberries. I would not be surprised if he is eventually carted off screaming: “No obstruction” and “No collusion”.
