Poetry, music, spaceships, home

[radiantfracture]

Good art things by people I know today!

Attended a lovely afternoon poetry reading and concert by yarrowkat on the indie platform https://onlineconcertthing.com.

And a new podcast episode is out from Wizards & Spaceships! Excited to listen and make my aimless wandering more aimful.

A propos of nothing in particular except a mysterious entry on my reading list, do you have favorite readings (poems, articles, essays) on the idea of home, return, going or not being able to go home again?

§rf§

Comments

[sabotabby]

Oh, I have to have some. But my brain is fried.

[radiantfracture]

SAME

I think I was going to reuse my epics and I will plus maybe "Descent into Saanich" by Philip Kevin Paul.

[lokifan]

Two poems I've used in class:

For Eimear, Overseas by Sam Starbuck/copperbadge



My ancestors were restless wanderers.
No family plot for them; their simple graves
Are scattered over continents and isles.
Some ashes in the wind. Some lie interr'd
On that Atlantic outpost where you grew,
And now you too have left. To yearn for home
Is natural, though you may love the place
Where you now find yourself. The language new,
Strange manners, stranger food. But not disliked,
despite it may feel traitorous to say.
Or sometimes hated, for its strangeness burns.
This long adventure spans a world too wide,
and home and family seems so far away.
But take it from the son of travellers,
The travel's worth the cost. When you feel far
From lands whose streets you've lost, where my kin's graves
Sleep warmly in a deep unwaking grace,
When winter slices keen down from the north
Remember, where you come from still awaits;
It keeps and saves when strangeness is your place.
It has released you now to come away,
To learn, to triumph, to become the one
Who, in homecoming, makes the land more rich
Than otherwise could be. Be well, be safe,
Love the adventure, love the place you are,
Be well, be safe, be wise. There's nothing more.









Gate C22 by Ellen Bass

At Gate C22 in the Portland airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from Orange County.
They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after
the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
like he'd just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
like she'd been released at last from ICU, snapped
out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down
from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.

Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.
She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine
her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish
kisses like the ocean in the early morning,
the way it gathers and swells, sucking
each rock under, swallowing it
again and again. We were all watching --
passengers waiting for the delayed flight
to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots,
the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling
sunglasses. We couldn't look away. We could
taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.

But the best part was his face. When he drew back
and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost
as though he were a mother still open from giving birth,
as your mother must have looked at you, no matter
what happened after -- if she beat you or left you or
you're lonely now -- you once lay there, the vernix
not yet wiped off and someone gazed at you
as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.
The whole wing of the airport hushed,
all of us trying to slip into that woman's middle-aged body,
her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses,
little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up.


And a poem I haven't (it's upsetting enough that it wasn't right for my teaching context, but it might work for yours?):

Home by Warsan Shire

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won't let you stay.

no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it's not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn't be going back.

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough

the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off

or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i've become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here

[radiantfracture]

Thank you! These are just the kind of thing I think I had in mind when I wrote myself that note. The moods and griefs of home and flight. Lovely.