Tag: Current Events

Poetry Friday: Murder

An award-winning poet was murdered this week.

Renee Good was, of course, a multitude of other beings as well. We all are.

But in 2020, she won one of Old Dominion’s most prestigious accolades, the American Academy of American Poets Prize. 

Rajiv Mohabir was serving as a judge for the contest in 202o and selected her poem as the winner. He said “…he never had the chance to meet or interact with Ms. Good, as he was teaching in Boston then and the contest was held remotely that year. But he said he was struck by the poem’s idea that “we have to kill something in order to know it,” and since Ms. Good’s killing, has been ruminating on its ending words:

“that the bible and qur’an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom used to & exhaling from their mouths ‘make room for wonder’ —

all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as:

life is merely

to ovum and sperm

and where those two meet

and how often and how well

and what dies there.”

Read the whole poem, On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs at poets.org.

Ruth has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at There is no such thing as a God-forsaken town.

Poetry Friday: So Much Shouting

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That’s my TED talk for today. I’m over all the shaming that implies that if you’re not doing all the things someone else thinks you should be doing then you’re not doing enough to stop the fascist regime that’s taking over our country. We’re all in the same boat and all the responses are valid, especially the ones that BUILD community instead of creating even more layers of stratification and binary us vs them hoo-hah.

Heidi has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at my juicy little universe.

Post written on Thursday, but edited now on Friday morning to add:
I support (100%) what Gavin Newsom and other Democratic governors are cooking up right now, which is a bit two-faced of me, since they are DEFINITELY using the “us vs them binary” in quite a powerful, in-your-face way. I guess the difference in my mind is that they are shaming the ones who actually deserve it, while us little folk without the power they wield, need to keep doing what we can with who we are and what we have. And in a way, they are doing what I advocate: building a community of leaders with the hutzpah to fight back.