Goodbye to 2017

It feels like -20 F today.

The neighbor next door has hung her wash out on the line and I believe it has frozen.
 Frozen socks take awhile to thaw out, which is why inside on a rack is better,
past a certain temperature mark anyway.

 Last January I thought 2017 would be THE year -
 the one certain projects got finished (or started).

Time to start again to start again.

Ever onward.

Best wishes to all for a HAPPY NEW YEAR, 2018.

Four more years

TRUMP: We’re going to win another four years for a lot of reasons, most importantly because our country is starting to do well again and we’re being respected again. But another reason that I’m going to win another four years is because newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if I’m not there because without me, their ratings are going down the tubes. Without me, The New York Times will indeed be not the failing New York Times, but the failed New York Times. So they basically have to let me win. And eventually, probably six months before the election, they’ll be loving me because they’re saying, “Please, please, don’t lose Donald Trump.” O.K.

Quoted from an impromptu interview by President Donald Trump to a New York Times reporter yesterday.

Poetry for a Cold Winter Day

It's -13 F today and our house and street are surrounded by snow.
So quiet it's as if the world has stopped.
Rearranging a  lower bookshelf, a thin volume slid out, which
got opened to a random page.
These are the words that leapt out:

 

December sun seeps into the woods
orange yolk over bare limbs
drips into a grove
where woodpeckers
tap tiny solos
                           a net cast
                           in the wake of the day

Chinese monarch King Wen
tells us the wanderer can progress in little things
when the source of light is farthest from the earth
and bends the prism
like a bow
                           and he finds himself
                           surrounded by woodpeckers
                           tapping out their eternal question

how to hold
interwoven rhythms
in a net of changing light

                          ~ ~ Paul Pines

Excerpt from Book Two: The Absent One
in Divine Madness (Marsh Hawk Press, 2012).

If Only

Merry Christmas everyone!

Normalization of the Intolerable

With only a precious few notable exceptions, this past year has been seamless in its belligerent horror.

We are well beyond "It can't happen here."  

This is what fascism looks, smells and sounds like before it breaks out of its egg  and spreads its wings. This, right down to the clownish strongman screaming from the podium. They laughed at Mussolini, too, until it became a crime to do so.  After that, the joke was on the world. [Source]

There is a point, I think, when continually being outraged becomes both exhausting and irrelevant.  A populace that's socially conditioned to respond will react predictably, and be ignored (or punished) for doing so,  (A typical reaction to the New Now is the expression on the face of the guy in the photo above. ) 

Maybe it's time to stop  knee-jerk emoting and take a stand, try to find a solution.    Replace fear with resolve.   Say no to the Nonsense.  As in:  No, we don't buy into the reality they're trying to impose.

____________________________________

Photo and artwork by awyn.

Reminder

of how far there is to go yet;

of the power of declarations (individual, or universal)

     to motivate;

of the powerless with little hope

the world is listening.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted on 10 December 1948. The date has since served to mark Human Rights Day worldwide.

Human Rights Day promotes and spreads awareness about the following articles under UDHR: 

• All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.

• Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. 

• Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person. 

• No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

• No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. 

• Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.

• All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law.

• Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law. 

• No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile. 

• Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him. 

• Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country. 

• Everyone has the right to a nationality.  No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.

Consecratalstones That Lack Foundation

EVICTION PROCESS

Wreckball all the highrises:
then use the cornerstones of those
leveled towers to create my castle:
composed solely of foundationstones,
each one of which was blessed
with a ceremony, a literal
groundbreaking and therefore whole;
each block unique,
inscribed with ritual aggrandisements;
each planted solemnly:
each underpin-laid as the bedrock
its lesser brothers would rest on:
use only these rootstones to raise
the walls of my eyrie house hideaway
whose forbidding frame will have
no real infrastructure, whose form
will be a spiritual suspension
(cradle crux kernel hub core)
wherein each establishing stone
must cohere solid with the weight
of its having once been named
in salutation as such--but surely
when these maidenstones these
consecratalstones are placed
together to make home my dream
my ideal occupancy, then surely
due to the baseless act
of imagining this acme of architecture
I will never be allowed to live here.

~ ~  Bill Knott

From: Beta: Poems About Things that Begin with the Letter B,
self-published by Bill Knott in 2013.

The poem above is one of three poems in this 82-page book that fall under his category of "buildings" (between "barbershops" and "bullets").

Francis

awynfoto

Apocalyptic Haiku Dream

Overweight, her cupboards bare
Mother Earth implodes.
News at eleven.

Homemade Quotiekards

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interlude

apropos

Great Cruelty and Heartlessness

We’re living in a time of great cruelty and heartlessness

where instead of a sun they’re throwing up
anvils

Instead of sunlight there’s the sound of
hammers beating

Instead of walking there’s kicking

Instead of thinking there’s talking

It’s almost as if there’ve never been times like
these before

Even shadows thrown by cartwheels on dirt roads
resemble the grimaces of armies as they
slide across rocks

In the palaces of power clocks go off but no one
wakes

Decisions are made by pouring acid down drains
or waiting for nightfall in a room lit by
neon tubes

If anyone speaks all eyes are upon them

I saw a sparrow fly over a fence

An ant stop and not go on

But laughter has turned to pebbles
falling on zinc

And children have been torn from their futures

-- Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore


From In the Realm of Neither, (The Ecstatic Exchange, 2008)

Whether Report

FORECAST FOR:

Region:   Earth

Timeframe:  Ongoing

Population Affected:  All

Deadline for Full Recovery:  Past

awynart2017

Not a question of Whether anymore

but

When

Liu Xiaobo Has Died

Reuters

 Liu Xiaobo, (1955-2017)

 He once said he hoped he'd "be the last victim

in China's long record of treating words as crimes". 

Liu Xiaobo was imprisoned for the crime of speaking.

Free expression is the base of

 human rights, the root of human nature

 and the mother of truth.  To kill free speech 

is to insult human rights, to stifle human nature, 

and to suppress truth.

~~  Liu Xiaobo

Worry Birds

Fun with digital brushes

Forgot I had this paint program installed.

Played with some lines & shapes & colors to see what would emerge.
Voilà, c'est fait!

Garden haiku

awynfoto2017

                                                                 accidental scarecrow -

                                                                 the birds are not impressed

Every morning, same time

awynfoto2017

A Virtual Visit to Paris

It's been many years since I've been there and it's not likely I'll get back, so the next best thing is armchair reminiscing, with some black and white photos, shared here with the kind permission of Luis L. Tijerina. 

 

Photos by Luis L. Tijerina, November 2016

Gee, Thanks, Stella

We got a visit this past week from a blizzard they named "Stella".  All hope is now gone that our accumulated snow will be melted anytime soon.

Am adding some new, updated photos to the ones I  posted a month ago. That peaked snowdrift in the back yard--were I in its middle--would be up past my shoulders.

A friend in Los Angeles reports hundreds of Canadian geese hunkered down in a nearby soccer field, and that they are on their way north.  Yay. Meanwhile, indoor seed planting starts tomorrow.

Diggin' on Out

So, we've been getting a bit more snow the past several days