Daily Drafts

New book--"Anti-Capitalist Poetics in Action"

2011-01-26T10:47:00.005-05:00

Still working on health, which is why I haven't posted here in so long.

But I'm launching a new book. It includes many "Daily Draft" poems available on my poetry blog--

And it is political poetry that I started writing after I read The Communist Manifesto for the first time--very late in life!

I fell in love with the beautiful poetic language in The Manifesto--and the clarity and truth of its message.

I said to myself, "If Marx and Engels can bring poetry to their economics, what would happen if I tried to write their economics into my poetry?"

Inside the Money Machine is the result--poetry for the "immense majority'—for those who work for a living, out of the house or at home, from the laundromat to the classroom, from the blue-collar construction sites to the white-collar desk jobs. These fresh, gritty and passionate poems are about the people who survive and resist inside "the money machine" of the 21st -century capitalism.

http://www.mbpratt.org/insidemoneymachine.html

“Pandemic, Profits”

2010-05-13T20:19:00.000-04:00

Poetry--even in the flu! Here's to universal
health care and a system that doesn't make
money from our being sick.

A third week sick with flu, coughing fits, green
sputum, amoxicillin, the specialized vocabulary,
of illness, the ailing body of words still ready
for poetry, and to go to work. The dandelions,
slope-shouldered lean their burnished heads
toward the early sun. Nature never did betray
the heart that loved her. A few feet further on
the flowers are white-haired, gone to seed, one
breath will finish them. Last year our human
breath spread pandemic around the world, when
pigs gave us their virus, some called them swine,
we gloved and masked, thin armor against Nature
as she tested us in her favorite game, Evolve or
die, a 3-D global living color beta run-through,
while the last tree I passed before my office door
ramified toward the sky, lifting up green obelisks
out of what, a month before, were nubs of buds
I didn’t even notice as I walked by, while frisky
pharmaceutical prices rose, motel hotel airline
profits fell, right-wing pundits blamed people
from other countries, and CNN never opined
on links between hog factory-farms in Veracruz
and North Carolina, lagoons of manure, vast
wastes of rotting pig parts, fumes, flies, birds,
the “free flow” of capital across borders, NAFTA,
anti-immigrant anti-union laws, the fecal pigsty
draining into the aquifer, fever, throats and bodies
sore everywhere, the coughing workers, neighbors,
the first death doubtless not the first: "Fighting
this disease for months…the pig waste for years,"
Erasto Bautista of La Gloria. Building up resistance.

For more info on those links, see:
Hillel Cohen, “Swine Flu, Pigs and Profits”
http://www.workers.org/2009/us/swine_flu_0507/index.html

Bautista quote from:
Fintan Dunne, “Cover-Up: Mexican Government Lying About Swine Flu,” 29 April 2009
www.breakfornews.com\

“Nature never did betray…” is from William Wordsworth’s
“Lines Composed….Above Tintern Abbey.”

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

"Burning Water"

2010-05-12T19:18:00.007-04:00

A poem in memory of the eleven oil-rig workers
who died in the British Petroleum Deepwater
Horizon explosion on 4.21.10--and for the countless
beings on land, in water, in air, and in between,
who are suffering because of that
completely preventable catastrophe.

In the YouTube video a man flips a lighter, flare,
holds it to a belching faucet, the water catches fire,
not a miracle, the companies hydro-fracking us
for gas, the movement of capital in ground water—
And there’s that unpoetic word again, so overt,
admittedly abstract, some even say clichéd, a word
I’d never even heard when me and the cousins sat
in the shrimp boat stern, grownups on vacation
playing penny poker all night in the front, as we
watched the dark horizon line between deep sea
and deeper sky fall behind us and never change.
We hung our legs into strange bioluminescent foam
flung up by our wake, if we’d scooped the water
up with a glass jar as we did the air for fireflies,
we’d have caught eighty species, galactic diatoms
invisible to our eye, to us just some murky water
from the Gulf, which is licked over today with oil
from the blown-out rig, all for lack of a cut-off
trigger, costs half a million, comes out of the foul
profit now crawling on sand—or the drill was too fast,
after all time is money, that is, less for the workers,
more for the company, yes, theory again—or pooled
experience, since there is a connection from abstract
to specific, the translucent organisms that work
to filter water are this morning drinking in oil,
when they float to the surface, when the sun stares
down on them long enough, they will begin to burn
from inside out, microscopic dying stars in the Gulf.
But not the result of a natural, inevitable process.
What I mean is once I saw a flock of little sting rays,
each no bigger than my palm, arrowing like tiny geese
where water met sand in the shallows of Tampa Bay,
I stood in the Gulf and they winged between my feet,
going somewhere I didn’t know. Now what will they eat?
The connection between there and now not inevitable,
matter striking my mind, me trying to catch the spark,
consciousness.

Watch hydro-fracked water burn:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEtgvwllNpg

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution--No Commercial Use--No Derivs--
Creative Commons 2010

“The Wednesday after May Day: Η προσπάθεια συνεχίζεται”

2010-05-11T18:27:00.000-04:00

A poem for the massive protests led by
working people in Greece last week.
They continue to resist a government
“bail out” of banks with revenue
obtained by cutting their jobs and benefits.
The AP and the AFP reported marchers
chanted "Thieves! Thieves!" and
“The struggle will never end!"

Today I saw a tanager fly its black-winged red flag.
I stood watching in the rain, waiting for its whistle.
The radio had announced finance ministers to consult,
sounded quite deliberate. But the TV split realities:
On the right, a money trader, hands over eyes, hid
from the crevice of loss his numbers were falling into.
On the left, a sound I’d never heard, a firey whoosh
like a furnace, some kind of engine pounding, unison
rhythm, a crowd in Athens chanting to advance,
retreat, advance against a thin grey fence of police,
their barbed arms. The people outnumber the police,
they raise fists again, again, to break down that fence
The world watches the line bend, the people create
a rift, the numbers shift, the people shout no, no,
they won’t work til they die so the banks can live,
corporations into corpses is their cry, and the state?
On the asphalt blackened by rain, green-winged
maple seeds scatter the same small mathematical
symbol, the angle reads lesser than > or greater than <
Repeated by the millions, the meaning depends on
where they stand and what they mean by equal.

--Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

"Talking to the Sun"

2010-04-29T17:18:00.000-04:00

A poem to celebrate Mae’s third birthday,
written on the bus ride down to visit--

No one taught me to talk to the sun,
though we came face to face every dawn,
unacknowledged friend with only one name,
one-way conversation at the speed of light,
now my reply, late, but long before never:
Hello, you big stare of fire, kiss of whither
this morning through the mussed bus window,
you mist-melting flare at last night’s late frost,
you shape-shifter of pear and apple trees,
igniting white torches and bonfires that burn
year after year whether people are near or not,
your hot breath on the rivers, cooking up
the smoke that cloaks our way right now,
souvenir of primordial soup from where
we all came, oh, yes, familiar face, staring in
at my neighbors reading about pedicures,
filling out computer forms for truckers, re-
wrapping hair from night to white-clouded
skyblue scarf. In ten minutes we get off
and you’ll lick us all over like newborns,
your tongue on our eyes and mouths, that morning
kiss sparkles in the grass like the dew of uncounted
stars, you just one, but ours, known enough to talk to.

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

"Chivvying the Children Across"

2010-04-28T18:01:00.001-04:00

A poem about visiting my grandchildren--
what I never expected when I was "coming out"
as a lesbian mother over thirty years ago! and
a poem about holding onto our children's hands
(and minds) in the face of "Homeland Security"
and the new terrible attacks on immigrant workers
in Arizona:

In line for the up-north bus, just left the children,
the next little ones, asleep from our gallivant
to yesterday’s park, their father running, hands
out-stretched over them across four asphalt lanes
the cars in wait, purring. My in-line neighbors
visit in creole French, Arabic, Spanish, the Latina
ahead, arms crossed, has knee-high, shoulder-high
girls, and another tall as her, arms-crossed, apart,
who comes up silent at the last minute to pull
the heavy luggage as we board. The bus driver asks
them extra questions, the two oldest mouths fenced
against the wrong answers. I eye-skim the waiting
room, who’s there, corner glimpse, crimp of a woman’s
hat or hair, top-knotted, nodding, and that or the spring
rain runs me back to looking across our yard, fugitive
beauty, something more than my life, breaks across
the grass, a quail hen chivvying her tiny covey fast,
her feathered curl, frail wisp of question on her head.
Holding Mae in my arms, her little feet beating to get
down, I can walk! I can carry! What we’re doing is
more than silhouettes pasted on a SUV rear window,
the fictional normal family tally, more than the state’s
danger road sign, man woman child hand-in-hand,
running at the southern border. Holding Alden’s hand
as he tightropes on the fallen tree limb, him slipping
again, again his fingers almost twisting from my grasp.

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

“Sleeping through Danger”

2010-04-22T19:19:00.002-04:00

A poem for all of us striving to come
to consciousness and survive in our now:

In the hallway the sweet homey smell of gas,
like the blue flame gush through the crinkled
face of the space heater, I huddled with my cousin
under the covers, hidden in our feathered hold.
In the hallway, the smell of comfort and danger,
the door broken down, the neighbor so deep in sleep
he can almost not be wakened to faces bending over.
In bed with you later I hold your hand, so often blue-
tipped with cold, I wait for our shared warmth.
The room isn’t dark, the moon uses its mirror
to reflect the pale sunlight of night on us. Am I
done with longing to live back in my own past?
with the poison fantasy of living another life?

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

"The Great Leafing-Out”

2010-04-21T17:14:00.005-04:00

On April 12, Leslie & I joined the Buffalo
International Action Center and others
in a protest against the racist, sexist, anti-gay
“Tea Party” movement.

The man with the rattlesnake coiled on his chest
yells in my face, the battleships loom battlements
above us, and the crowd clanks over a gang plank
to hear the fulminating speaker throw his words.
They say they’re not racist, they say they don’t hate.
We say words won’t make it so, not even our own
marked on placards we hold as shields against
three hundred of them, thirteen of us, that’s why
we are here, chanting Fight, fight, fight, the slant
slice of our hands, our signs, hold a patch of grass
for us to root stubbornly there, a thicket of ideas:
Corporate greed breeds racism. A job is a right.
Now three men shout at the perimeter, Get a job!
as if to battle them about the future isn’t work.

An hour later we’re at a Thruway rest stop, fast
food, faster cars, we eat at seventy miles an hour,
no sign anything has happened, except a thin
digital proliferation of messages, interruptions,
interpolations, a small line in Boston is snaking
through the bigots, the struggle for the present
moment from which the future comes, shouting.

Yesterday the maple tree dropped its own reality
at my feet, a twig waving red-green paws, curled
with little finger muscles of seed. Over my head
and further than I can see the tree tops brighten
in a green sunrise. The beautiful moment between,
when something has begun and is not finished yet.

See a roundup of recent actions against the extreme right-wing:
http://www.workers.org/2010/us/tea_party_0422/
http://www.workers.org/2010/us/boston_0422/

And Leslie's pictures of anti-facist protest:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/transgenderwarrior/4517156357/

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

“Getting a Driver’s License, or Consciousness and the State”

2010-04-20T19:54:00.001-04:00

I was another person. I am another person.
The spring rain falls on the cement sidewalk,
the red brick, the green grass. That was where
I was young—where I——The mist streamed
up from the hot cement walk, then the sun
cut away the gauze and the spring was gone.
The person who stood there and the person
who remembers. This time the rain as I walk
out of the DMV, from questions put by the state,
never trivial: Am I married? Am I male or
female? No way to drive away. The sun breaks
through the car window, on the radio a viola,
civilized violence cuts to my gut, frequency
of old anger there, to take that in my hand,
seesaw, bend and bow to my will, sharper,
eager to cut through to what the words wrap,
the power that inscribes on every form
black-and-white categories and demands
an answer: Male or female? U.S. citizen?

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

“The Screen Door Slammed”

2010-04-15T20:04:00.001-04:00

A poem for how our names are younger
and older than we are, always, and the elders
know both our older and younger selves.

My strange name, two centuries doubled,
my grandmother’s name so much trouble,
can’t squeeze all the way onto medical forms,
jumps over the computer hopscotch spaces,
I’m not wholly me unless I hyphenate, re-
fabricate my name. This morning in the hall
my co-worker touched my hand and spoke
my whole name, home, wait, a few more
minutes, and I and the others ran through
the shaded porch, someone older called
our names, Don’t you all let that door slam
behind you! said, I guess I better get ready
to go, lingering. I caught myself, left hand
pushing the screen door, right hand waving
bye, goodbye, their hands slipping through
my closed fingers. Sometimes I walked
with them a few slow steps to the car door.
Why didn’t I touch them one more time?
Why didn’t I? My hand on her shoulder.

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

"Jamie, In Memoriam"

2010-04-14T21:29:00.001-04:00

Why is that mountain pink? ask the grandchildren.
We are at the fish-fry place, outside, staring at spilled
blush across the valley, and I, taller because older,
have gone nose to nose with maple red spring whiskers,
and so can answer why. That’s my work, ask and answer.

At the maple festival, the buzz saw cuts slabs of silence,
fallen trees. Inside me the engine thumps like an old, own
beat but why? Repeated thud, hiss of blood. Sound of work
in my town I didn’t know I still carried, the sawmill engine
wheel, blade, big steam lungs, whistle scream, breath
not heard until it stops turning and calling in the throat.

Jamie wore a red coat to class, came in, took it off,
sat down and asked questions. Until her car slid off
the early morning Thruway, skewed road where there
was none, no way to know exact what happened next,
no teacher’s answer to her death. Only whatever work
was hers is done, well, her friends say. One stayed
in school, not driven over the edge by racist serrated
words, for Jamie said, It’s not you, not who or what, but why—

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

“The Glasshouse Garden, or Art and Resistance”

2010-04-08T19:57:00.001-04:00

Glass bubbles float, baubles on the pond,
fire on water with the lilies and the lotus,
good for nothing, useless. All I want to do
is drift alongside that unjustifiable beauty.
The glassblower lunges and stabs, throws
the glowing water until it freezes. To make
a poem doesn’t seem like use, but phrases,
even broken into fragments, can be held
for years in some pocket of memory, felt
dim and retrieved as I do a flimsy shimmer,
a glass-blooming flower stalk in cold weather.
improbable, something to spy out as the sky
darkens, some glimmer of sound, a beloved
word that says, Not yet, that says, Never.

--Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

“Graduation”

2010-04-07T18:45:00.004-04:00

A poem for the SU students' organizing NO
to the bank CEO scheduled to speak at commencement.
See and sign their petition at
http://www.petitiononline.com/SUGRADUA/petition.html

Whose voice comes through me now?
For years I just repeated the words.
Well, that’s how you learn as a child,
the palaver problem. After a while
as I moved my mouth I heard what
I was saying. Some of my students
are saying they don’t want to listen
to a CEO at their graduation, they
reject a banking concept of education,
they aren’t blank accounts to deposit
ideas or money into, they want to hear
someone they don’t owe money to,
not JPMorgan Chase rich, richer, richest
on interest they’ll pay for fifteen years,
the $27,455 loans on average, the rage
they are commencing with, and what
jobs? Where will they live? Their cars?
The street? They say predator and thief,
their work stolen before they pass Go,
monopoly capital in control of the board.
This is the future we’ve been told, hoard,
and crush the other. But there is the sudden
sitting at our desks when we see our hands
digitally click like a marionette’s sticks,
raising the questions: And whose work done?
What do we want from our opposable thumbs?
Not games, and not to build thick bank vault
walls, set inside our work’s locked-up worth.
Now these young hands up, demanding halt.

See Paolo Freire on the “banking” approach to teaching
in "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" (1968)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogy_of_the_Oppressed

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

“Natter”

2010-04-06T18:58:00.001-04:00

The elm tree, hip deep in snow last month,
now thrashes, furious as performing a sonata,
through every crook, turn and branching out
to the leaf buds at the last twigs. The tree
has a twin dancing in the glass tower opposite,
they have each other and the blue sky glint.
At their feet I am lonelier than both, asphalt
parking lot, up the inner stairs, at the top
a sketching class fetches the view from deep
inside the camera obscura of their eye: trees,
high-rise cranes, humans too small to matter,
the valley spread over their big white pads.
I carry this poem around in a palm notebook,
writing illegibly as I walk. Thank you, words,
for being another self to talk to, for your natter
that has crept again through cranny and crook.

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

"Excitation"

2010-04-01T21:29:00.000-04:00

“The fundamental frequency is the lowest frequency
component of a signal that excites (imparts energy)
to a system,” says the Wiki.

Here and there a big electronic ear sticks out
from a house, odd as ours are, tilted to scoop
invisible motion from the air, thump it down
on the drum inside our bony skull, tilted
like the red woodpecker head this morning
in the dead oak, listening for insects beetling
through bark, then the spear stick beak,
the rim shot crack, now six beats in this poem,
because perhaps it’s not sound but vibration
we crave, evidence of motion, how I broke
down and cried, hearing your voice first time
on the answer machine, that low frequency,
how many chances missed, how many took,
perhaps not all, not yet, I said to myself What
is happening? standing on a fundamental wave,
like ground rising and falling under my bare feet.

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

“The Wood Thrush Sings”

2010-03-31T19:09:00.003-04:00

A poem for those burdened, and wakeful at night--

At the end of day, at the beginning of night
you lift the bed covers so I can climb in by.
The bed is a cave, the sheets cool as limestone
except where you’ve warmed the warp and weft.
The bed is a nest we fold ourselves into, belly
to back, knee to kneefold, wristbone to bone.
Our ribs make a boat of the bed to carry us
to a land of dreams, to what will happen next.

At 3 am I wake up, maybe the IRS, the taxes,
or room after room unpacking hundreds of boxes.
If I put each thing in its place, there will be
a place for the boat to land where the clock
doesn’t tick, where the body is unlocked
from pain, where the wood thrush sings after rain.

To hear the wood thrush sing, go to:
http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Wood_Thrush/sounds

--Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

“Skating on the Erie Canal”

2010-03-30T20:59:00.002-04:00

A poem for the last of the ice—as the skating rink
closes in Syracuse’s Clinton Square—frozen
on top of the channel of the old Erie Canal.

When she answered, Mama said into the phone:
I heard you laugh a minute ago. Also her TV
interview with Tom Brokaw, her sifting flour over
the threshold, pointing to her own footprint as thief,
and the rat that lived in my room. Her right mind—
do I care? That time her voice laughed back at mine.
Was it like the photo? Great-grandbaby Ruth rests
across her knees, they look into each other, eyes
all the way back to me before I had will and words
to wreak havoc with predestination. Now Ruth
circles round and round the ice rink, singing Free
falling as the p.a. says no tagging, no racing back
against the flow, now she’s skating backwards,
now she flaps her arms and shouts, You won’t see
a penguin do this! Now she stands to say goodbye
between my knees, looking long into my eyes,
and I hold still so she can find whatever echo
she can, if time’s wrinkle rhymes with grit, grief,
grin, her eyes winkling out some link, around
and around the rink the song flies, the loud blade,
time, cuts through the ice, device of pain and found.

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

“A Muster of U.S. Soldiers at the University”

2010-03-25T20:22:00.003-04:00

And another look at spring—

The soldiers assemble on the Quad, with their hut-
hut, their about-about-about face, quite common-
place these days, camouflage not needed, grass
greens up under their boots, trees flush pink,
the soldiers draw near, sit at the next desk, chair,
near and more near, the smiling faces next to us
in the school corridor, and overhead the CNN chat
is how one of them put a bullet to the head, heart,
or throat of someone across an ocean, desert, sea
where cargo ships big as towns carry oil and guns,
plowing up the water emptied of fish by trawlers
big as factories, and on the shore the fishers
in the villages pick up guns and take to motor-
boats to catch what they will, exchange of resource,
cash for tanker captain, risking bullet to the head
and the name pirate, bandit, as U.S. soldiers snipe
from a hidden place, are called heroes at home,
but some of them whimper and cry as they sleep,
I know, I’ve heard them as they dream and weep,
not the future but the past, that small hole gapes
wide and wider, a mouth spewing red, sweeps
them out to sea, drowning in sight of shore, people
who stand and watch the uniform flounder and sink,
camouflaged by sun-mottled and blotched waters,
blues, greens, browns, as from the village, fishers
push out their gull-winged dhow and fly overhead,
they lower their nets past him, the huge wire baskets
gather up what will be good to eat, barracuda, red
snapper, hamour, oranda, taken home in straw baskets.

For more information on the U.S. military, profit and Africa, see:

Abayomi Azikiwe, Editor, Pan-African News Wire
“Pentagon Targets Africa: Why Somalis Seize Ships”
Workers World, 13 Apr 2009
http://www.workers.org/2009/world/horn_of_africa_0423/

Johann Hari, “You Are Being Lied to About Pirates”
London Independent, 4 January 2009
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/you-are-being-lied-to-abo_b_155147.html

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

“In the Land of Oz”

2010-03-24T19:35:00.001-04:00

A poem in homage to the last winter snow
where I live now, in Syracuse, NY, where
L. Frank Baum wrote many of the Oz books
I read as a child in Alabama, anticipating
my love of feminist science fiction and
lesbian adventure.

The side-snow is virgin surface, unmarked
except twigs fallen from a stripped oak,
no human footprint, or animal, to mar
the beginning, like the moon’s dirt before
the spaceship came. But I was never one
to take the first step. Instead I climbed
into the story, the rainbow-striped balloon,
up following her feet, then side-by-side,
drifted toward any emerald-spired town
where everyone could live a little odd. Yet,
so, here I am alone, walking one more time
around Rose Hill Cemetery, looking down
at the ice-petal prints going uphill, the worn
slushed path, because and glad my craving
body said Be brave and go ahead, the hot
mouth opened and stuck out its tongue,
to melt every jot and tiddle of snow that fell,
to eat and mate the strange pollen drifting
leisurely down from the otherworldly sky.

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

"Mourning Cloak"

2010-03-23T18:59:00.000-04:00

Did you know some butterflies
hibernate?! A poem from Goethe Park--

No snow, no bloom, the world is brown,
tattered, nothing to read in the dead leaves,
and still the longing for hope, not rhetoric,
the suddenly semaphoring wings that flap
fast, right under my nose, a quick prism,
crimson, scalloped yellow, blue-eyed snap
the book later tells me is mourning cloak,
folded all winter into bark, named as if
it grieves. But something wrapped in that
flimsy cloth survived a minus-twenty freeze
and is now lit on an oak trunk, ready to lick,
ready to wade head-first through the sap
sweating sweetly through the wrinkled cracks.

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

"The Transmigration of the Body"

2010-03-20T18:18:00.001-04:00

A poem to celebrate spring—and our move north
a year ago, from Jersey City to Syracuse.

Every move recalls every other move,
said the youngest son, as he heaved
my boxes into his car. My body to leave
for an electric pathway yet unknown.
Will I be suddenly packing the kitchen
up, another load in the migration north?
Will I be throwing away the dried roses
by my desk, frosted with dust, dessicated,
and pause to crumble the closed buds
and suddenly smell tobacco, cinnamon?

"Going Over the Falls"

2010-03-18T19:17:00.002-04:00

In this poem, a dream about Niagara Falls,
a hope to be able to return there together,
as Leslie continues to struggle for health—

Why write poetry? The problem with prose
is the beginning, middle, end, sentences.
I never want life with you to end. I say:
We never took those dance lessons. The spin,
the dip. There’ll always be something not
yet done. One more trip to see the Falls fall.
I dreamed you said: Let’s go over together,
and I said: But I would die. Not you, not you,
in the dream, not you. We’ve had the talk
about ashes, named the north and south
rivers to be sprinkled with us like pollen,
specks to meet later in some thundercloud
bloom, zigzag, boom! If we see the Falls
again, you’ll flash your smile beside me
and not be pouring through my hands, dust
to sparkle up out of the mist, disembodied
eternal beautiful matter. But not you.

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

“Niagara Falls”

2010-03-17T18:05:00.002-04:00

This poem took a quick spring break to Buffalo and-

Rain came and folded up the snow, put it away
for the year except some pillows in the corners,
rain fell again with a crinkling sound, someone
wrapping flowers in cellophane, maybe pussy
willows, the blurred fur blooms like the slush,
blush of soap on the car windows, Delta car-
wash neon strobe-light joy ride I drove through
in the dead of winter just to hear water released,
like the cracked parched lips of frozen ground
parted to the thawing rain, yes, today what-was
is gone and what-will-be is pressing against us,
long fingers of rain in the dirt, the silver lines
in the furrowed fields, and we are pushing back
in the mud ruck, my fingers picking out letters
to track across the melting snow of the screen,
while somewhere further the water ladders
down the river shoals, maybe even leaps over
some world-famous falls to come around, to try
again to become a different element, electric
art, charged flow past resistance, lightning fire.

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

“Reading Dante: Alabama, 1950s”

2010-03-12T16:58:00.004-05:00

A thank you poem for all of you who've shared,
commented on, or read these poems!

I read poetry before I knew what to say to myself,
fumbling with ornate red-velvet translations, Dante
between brown pasteboard covers, heading straight
down the spiral ramp to hell, the poet leading me
to what was underneath, nether world, nether parts
no one talked about, but I didn’t expect that icy heart,
that cold despair was the biggest sin, like marble
slabs crushing the water at river’s bend, no way out.
I read on until everyone I knew was frozen, flayed,
or fricasseed, I never got to the part where the poet
sees hope, the girl my age veiled in white, beckoning,
me, I longed for her unknown sharp-edged speech,
for an axe made of words, to lift, to smash, to smash
through. It was my doomed father I followed through
the winter woods, he showed me the rill of water
running along the base of the hill, through the massed
dead leaves, I waded barefoot there in the winter,
in a place where nothing is ever frozen all the way
through.

That axe was originally Franz Kafka's. In a 1904 letter to a friend,
Kafka said: "A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."

I found those words, finally, and Beatrice became the heroine
of my book, "Walking Back Up Depot Street"--

http://www.mbpratt.org/walk.html

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

“At the Bessemer Flea Market”

2010-03-11T16:19:00.003-05:00

Poetry, global capital, and the Deep South—

The “New World” symphony a long time ago
in the hot quonset hut, my music home work,
the oboe query, the bassoon spooning out hope
to the horizon. Yes, I wanted more than smallness,
I got into that music and rode it, rode it turned
into poetry, it turned into a plow and turned over
everything, it furrowed right through me until I
came out here, not someone whose family owns,
not someone who can say this land is mine,
not Seamus deep in a peat bog of language,
not Nazim, the other prisoners shouting words,
just me and the Saturday afternoon multinational
working class looking for one-dollar bargains
in Bessemer, Alabama, where the big steel mills
closed a long time ago, Mexicanos sorting oiled
from rusted tools, a slender woman (Hmong? Viet
Namese?) selling sheets, an African American man
meeting an old friend’s baby: I didn’t know who
I was looking at until I saw the eyes, someone
with T-shirts spelling Black History, looking back,
the march of time up to the walking sticks, Amani
carves eyes into the handle the better to see the way
forward, he goes into the thickets near his city home
to get his sapling wood, pecan, hickory, red oak,
white oak, more than 40 percent Black men un-
employed, he used to be a carpenter, now he
makes jewelry, sculpture, music, he tells me
bring the stick back if it needs something, he
leaves things unfinished to see what happens
next, pointing to the copper wires, takes pliers
and crimps them into spirals, what could be
an ear. If I have ears to hear, if I put my ear
to the ground, if I listen to the footsteps mark,
the people walking all around me in Bessemer.

For more on the “globalization” of Alabama,
see my article “From Alabama to Colombia:
Coal Company Faces War Crimes Charge”

http://www.workers.org/2007/us/drummond-0809/index.html

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

“At the Scrub Board”

2010-03-10T18:12:00.002-05:00

This poem goes to the laundrymat at home
in Alabama—yes, I know it’s laundromat!
But that’s now how we pronounce it there--

The clouds woke up early this morning, talking
to each other, first a patter, then a long cackling
boom, they washed us and swished us, everything
was out of focus, 11 a.m. Sunday morning,
I might as well go to the laundrymat, everyone
would be in church. But when I arrived, every
machine was spinning, all the other odd-not-even
ones had the same idea: there were blue dragons
guarding the door of a grey SUV; a harried single
white woman slamming the dryer doors like gears
between shifts; three Mexicanos who’d ironed
their denim shirts; a family, three-year-old girl,
young Asian woman, older white man, crimped
and trembling; a very young skinny white guy,
a tattoo shadow hiding in the nape of his thin neck.
He stands outside smoking a cigarette, furiously,
he’s talking to one of the Latinos, their hands
squared and angled, pointing, some information
exchanged, with me too, as I watch and guess,
not much like the Sunday school cut-felt stories
I saw pressed onto the flannel easel, the camel,
the rich man, the eye of the needle, the teacher
a banker who bribed us to come and listen,
that thrilling ride after church in his personal plane
over my house, Mama waving under, small, smaller,
up over the grey-green trees, the hump-backed
little hills, the river threading between, the town,
the county spread out and waiting to be folded up
and put in his pocket, he said he’d keep it safe.
I see the eye of the future looking back my way,
the rain pours down, we keep putting quarters
into the thunder-rolling machines that don’t
belong to us, tomorrow’s Monday, and how we
get there, me and my neighbors who do
our own washing, that’s for us to figure out.

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

“At U.S. 82 and Alabama 25 & 219”

2010-03-04T23:00:00.008-05:00

This was the National Day to Defend Education—hundreds of strong actions
across the U.S. I drove from my home town to Tuscaloosa,
where Students in Solidarity with the Crimson Ride Shuttle Drivers
& the local SDS chapter rallied to support workers fighting for
a union, a living wage and respect at my alma mater, the U of Alabama.
More on that later--for now, here's a poem in honor of the day.

This is a place people usually pass through, twix
n’ tween, intersection, no conjunction, just a way
to somewhere else. Not the crows this morning,
stunt diving tricks between the power lines. Not me,
I was raised here, I come back all the, all the time.
But the Walmart rigs roll through, the log trucks
with pine trunks pale as skinned knees, how mine
hurt on the gravel at recess, the mercurochrome
stung, like memories coming, going, then gone,
then suddenly standing by me as I pick up shed tree
limbs in the yard and whirl them into the woods,
by me, in me, her arm arches and hand extends,
the impatient vigor, the vim, the stubbornness.
Once I brought a friend to visit, and disappointed,
she said: It’s so small, I thought it was bigger,
much bigger, the way you talked about it. She’d
grown up in a city, she had this notion big things
only come from big places. Anyone who thinks that
could stop, and just look at a word, or at a hand.

For my article on the Crimson Ride drivers’ struggle, see:
http://www.workers.org/2010/us/alabama_bus_drivers_0318/index.html

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

"Unrest"

2010-03-03T22:36:00.003-05:00

And here's a poem from my trip home
to Alabama a year ago--

The river is spring-flooding the island, the water
makes a scalloped glubbing sound as it swims
past the drowning trees and thickets. A fishing
lure caught in the branches winks in the setting sun.
I’m glad I can still wink back. It’s so quiet except
for the jay, the wren, the gnat catcher, the unknown
warbler bird racket, I can hear my skull creak,
my knees crack getting down the mud bank
to the ford where the ferry once crossed over
carrying the settlers, the buyers and sellers of land,
the soldiers, the people in chains stolen to work.
There was the ferry here until there was a bridge,
and upstream a railroad trestle, the train screaming
as it moved mountains of coal dug up by miners
from Italy, Wales, Poland, Jews, Africans, convicts,
Bound to the crossroads of vertical and horizontal
necessity, did they say as I do every time the plane
lands me home in Alabama, whose country am I in?
In the airport CNN announced a massacre back
where I’d just come from. A white man said: A
foreigner. A white woman said, contradicting: He
just got laid off from IBM. Six hundred thousand
jobs lost in one month. The reporter said: What if all
thirty-seven million of them got together? I think
he meant the working class, as he euphemistically
warned of unrest. Yes, my restless bones climb
back up the gullied bank, through the old road, past
layers of stone, sediment, moss, I see in the loam
there is a little city of may-apple plants, spreading
green umbrellas to shelter their twinned flowers.
Overhead in the blue sky the clouds have multiplied
and gone to seed, drifting north on filament wisps.
I walk past the sign marking history, “Pratt’s Ferry,”
and back across the crumbling concrete bridge,
the setting sun shows me my shadow stretched far
back across the trembling water. In France the workers
have taken their bosses hostage, held some owners
in the factory office, stopped the chaffeured cars and
pressed their faces up against the glass, the silhouettes
look in, voilá, the shadows reverse the image of what-is.

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

"Clearcut"

2010-03-03T00:24:00.005-05:00

A poem for going home to Alabama this week,
memories of love and resistance and the struggle
against the lumber, steel and coal companies
that own most of small Bibb County,
at the tail end of the Appalachian Mountain chain.

Between east and west, between morning
and evening, between the beginning and
the end, if I go far enough south, I come
to red clay, drought, the green rivers lying low
in their limestone beds. I come to the woman
who said, I always felt you belonged to me,
the one who is still dead. I come to the man
who handed the ladle and the water bucket
to the others, and made the man with the gun,
the white man, wait in the heat. Memory pushes
against me, pushes me over, under, the sun
on my left, the sun on my right, until shadows
I can follow finally come back across the road
as the trees grow up from the company’s clearcut.

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

“Snow Day”

2010-02-25T16:31:00.004-05:00

For the third time in seventeen years
the University closes for snow--or so
the admin women tell me for this poem—

This morning three inches of snow balanced
along the telephone wires, death-defying
in the cold quaver of wind, then slip-sliding
into the orchard of snow-apple blossom
trees that lined the streets, spring in February,
like the morning the oldest child opened
the back door and saw on our red quince
the flowers of his first snow, how he laughed.
The storm is coming hard, they’ve sent us home
from work, the snow falls on, no telling how
much weight to bear, the boughs of the fir trees,
the branches of the bare trees bend down,
almost ready to break under the weight of our joy.

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

“Marking Up the Path”

2010-02-24T18:35:00.004-05:00

A poem for the big weather coming our way!

Ice and snow have gotten under the skin of the trees,
scaley bark and trunk cold to my touch, so human,
so animal, standing there alone, while we, passing
by, have marked up the path with our tracks, bird
scratch, the sneaker footprints I followed for a while,
diamond-pattern overtaken by another, oval-sole,
in the confusion I made up a story, and then they
parted, leaving me alone with a fiction, and why I
write poetry, the stubborn, riled-up bark in my hand.

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

“Smelling Skunk”

2010-02-18T17:38:00.004-05:00

Here’s how I know I live up North: it’s snowing,
I go out for my walk, the zest of ice stings my face,
the whole neighborhood smells like skunk. No,
I’m not putting here down, especially not the skunk,
poor fellow wanders the night streets to burrow
into shelter. But at home his black-and-white coat
(striped like that guy’s walking past), at home
that coat would get him all through winter outdoors.
Look: poverty is the same there as here, and not.
The trailer park Daniel writes about, the swampdirt
shit no sump the children run through and laugh,
the landlord takes the money and does nothing,
thin metal walls, like an oven baking in summer
indoors. Here the walls are brick thick plaster,
inside now people lean into the gas oven’s mouth,
heat reddens their faces like the sun’s breath.

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

“The Caws”

2010-02-18T12:23:00.004-05:00

A poem for another cause--trans-species communication!
I wrote this last June--but saw the crows flying past my window
tonight and wanted to thank them for coming by.

What are the crows saying to each other?
Wouldn’t we all like to know? And—
Are they talking about us? Maybe,
sometimes. But—probably not.
We don’t know, though we poets
like to ventriloquize crow-wise,
longing to carry over meaning
from one being to another, word-
flinging, like when my pa said he
had the epizöotics when he felt bad,
the flu that flew around the world
in 1872, killing who knows how many
horses, all the way south to Cuba,
and as it passed humans grabbed
the word for ourselves. I thought
it was only his, he’d made it up,
and so it goes from age to age,
we stand at the crossroads of time
and history and whisper as the words
of those who’ve gone before pour
through our throats, we confabulate,
pontificate, prevaricate, we think
the words are ours. But not today.
Today I know what I’m hearing, the caws.
Today this poem belongs to the crows.

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

“Day Care”

2010-02-16T16:50:00.007-05:00

Last week’s walk was a long drive, a short march,
two blocks, snow sifting down on us like sugar,
the children iced in pink and purple jumpsuits,
so sweet, so cold outside the county exec’s office,
him saying to their parents, teachers, friends, us,
budget, cut, waste, and shut, not saying rabble,
hovel, grovel, or balance the city like a top
spinning on the bent back of a woman telling us
right now she’s a full-time worker, full-time
student, full-time mother. Our signs yellow,
pink, green are like candy hearts with bitter
messages: CUTS = Jobs Lost we are yelling.
Shift the filter to black and white, you can see
how we learned to read, you running in and out
of books burning like houses, to find the ideas,
and me, floating on a raft of stories, the lonely
ocean inside my house. No one to talk to.
A teacher calls: Our children! we are yelling,
someone says we’re going in. The empty lobby
sits behind the plate glass windows like a lit,
warm classroom where we could teach a lesson.
Then—not yet. Just a kind of tilting forward.
Later your photos in black and white show
what the signs didn’t say: A man’s tattered
shirt, a woman’s hand pressed against,
that people were Latina, white and Black,
a child with a sign, not smiling, not frowning, ready,
just before his words marched out from his mouth.

For a news report on this demonstration
in support of day care in Buffalo, see
http://www.workers.org/2010/us/buffalo_0225/index.html

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

"Goi-O-Guen"

2010-01-12T19:39:00.008-05:00

They haven’t plowed the circle in Schiller Park
but I am walking the path sunk in snow
by others, humans, dogs, the grey-hoodie guy
behind me with an aging beagle, walking round
and round together. Schiller said joy is the wheel
that drives everything, but he also said poor
suffering masses, so I say rage is the fire
burning in the furnace of our bodies, we go
round and round looking for justice, our feet
melting through ice, snow, down to asphalt
road bed, no rest, my bare feet dug into the dirt
overgrown logging road by the river, the way
to the shallow ford where my people settled,
a deep trace made by other people warred on,
displaced by force, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek.
Justice means knowing what’s underneath.
At the neighborhood mart, the cashier admires
my necklace as she rings me up, dragonfly,
green fire fanning its spark above the river,
and dangles her charm, wolf clan, she says,
a silvered sliver of the past she’s still living.
The past is not the past. Down New York 90,
farmers post No Sovereign Nation two miles
from Goi-O-Guen, Cayuga Castle, burned
in 1779 by U.S. troops, already town destroyers,
the village now a pasture domed with snow.
The beginning of justice is to know what is
underneath.

For more on the history underneath,
go to:
http://sullivanclinton.com/
and
http://www.native-languages.org/cayuga_culture.html

Also on this day in 1915, the U.S. House of Representatives denied
women the right to vote. But in the Central New York area, women's
power in continuing Native nations had long been documented by
Syracuse historian Matilda Joslyn Gage:
http://www.matildajoslyngage.org/

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

"Next"

2010-01-10T18:06:00.004-05:00

What keeps us here, knowing we’re going to die?
At ninety-five, Lethean said to know what happens
next. Good enough reason to watch reality TV—
will Nina Flowers ever win?—or go for a walk
and write down I saw the wind’s legerdemain
pull a veil of snow out of thin cold air and disappear
its gauze in one breath, and I saw ice twisted
like plastic bags around bush branches, and ice
stalactites bigger than my arm plunged like spears
into the ground and broken, flung like toppled gods.
Soon all of this will melt away, forever gone,
and reveal underneath another story waiting to be
found, Mama on her hands and knees in the spring
woods, digging in the dead leaves to fold back
the ground, and show me a green triangle of leaf,
a strange budvase of blossom, its small pursed
lips, its purple-freckled brown skin. Nothing said
about my body, you understand, but she did show
me that. There, another story told, twice-told
reason enough to walk around and ask what will
happen next?

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

“Red-Shifting”

2010-01-08T16:40:00.005-05:00

Starry spirals float on the TV screen, snowflake
galaxies telescoped back in time, so our memory
is now thirteen billion years old, burning, not
melting, starry campion flowers in the sun. Where
was that? By the cold green creek, petals sparkling
in sand, in limestone bluffs, detritus of diatoms,
crinoid sea-lilies, five-armed feather-stars,
calcified memory blooming deep inside the rock
the boys and I jumped off of into a swimming
hole that time needed five hundred million years
to make so the creek could flow. How I wish
I could step my bare feet into that water again.
Carrying memory like trying to pick water up
out of the creek, losing more than I get to keep.
Lonely for the dead, those I can no longer touch,
those alive but older, their young selves running
through my brain’s labyrinth, like Miz Venola
remembered me at one-day-old, my tiny fingers
scratching at my face, grasping at whose hands?
Mama’s white, Laura’s dark, stark history, centuries
to pull myself up to, into, now we call it the struggle
to know what we are born into. When they died,
their me ceased to exist, leaving me to this task,
trying to hold onto each minute of new memory
until my red neuron stars can filament finger
millions, some new connection with the past,
ignition, yes, it is just us and neurogenesis, red-
shifting forward toward multiple possible eternity.

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

"The New Commuter Wars"

2010-01-06T16:44:00.009-05:00

The snow flies up here! she says. White
moths sputtering up, and black crows
storming down past the porch windows.
We’re not up so high, enough to see over
the twilit valley, how the night lights blink
like computer red LEDS so visitors say Oh!
now they see that Syracuse really is a city.
How high up do you have to be to see
what’s happening? The eye is not enough.
Media moguls hand us plastic 3-D glasses
and move the earth wars to another planet,
turn the people blue, and burn beauty in,
the mesmerizing ashes drift, delicate moths
onto our hands as we sit in the front row,
perhaps next to a soldier living secret
in this city, mornings he commutes to war
to fly the unmanned death-reaper drone,
and the U.S. Army says just doing his job.
That’s a lie, he’s making nothing people use,
his techno game hands jerking the joystick,
his well-fledged eyes darting to kill a target
on the screen between him and the mountain
valley where later ashes fall like snow
on a shattered house, a dozen people dead,
on the blood and guts of the ugly truth.

U.S. war on Afghanistan now means “drone” planes being flown 7500 miles away by remote control, out of the airport of the town where I live, by National Guard soldiers who stay in their hometown and commute to war. The Army is aggressively recruiting a younger generation who don’t need to have experience as real-time pilots because they have grown up playing video games on screen with a “joystick,” the same used to operate “The Reaper.”For more info:

http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2009/12/national_guardsmen_in_syracuse.html
http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2009/12/fearing_new_threats_drone_crew.html

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010