Poem: Litany

This is a poem I started in 1982. I finished it once (badly), but never published it anywhere, except in a music program. The composer Dell Wade, set it to music once and performed it with (I think) a soprano and a chamber orchestra (I have a cassette somewhere). My friend Frances Hayden translated it into spanish (Litania).

When I started this, I was fascinated (as I still am) by Christopher Smart's fantastic call and response litany Jubilate Agno. Now that I am finishing a book of poems, I have resurrected a few of those old nuggets. After decades maturing, most of them went straight to the trashcan, but about fifteen or so were successfully (and success in this instance, is of, course, debatable, and you, the poor, hapless reader must decide on your own) resurrected, seriously rewritten, and offered up, as Rod Serling would say, for your inspection.


Litany

Let us cut the poets loose
For the earth is trenched with their wanderings
For they trample the blood-waged borders
For their steps bisect old steps

Let them find their way
For they wage tense inner century wars
For they need permission
For they could scribe heartlines

Let them do what they will
For they remember to remember
For they share the common air
For their peopled hearts waltz

Let them praise the little lamb
For the wolf has already been sung
For God said I Am That I Am
For we have arrived at the year two grand

Let them dream of a song to leave
For they brood about the blank beside their birthyear in books
For the trees don't last forever
For the oysters refuse to sing.
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1982-2006

Democratic frontrunner Senator Clinton mugs for the camera at State of the Union?

Yahoo! News Photo

The most popular photo from last night's State of the Union? As it turns out, Senator Clinton makes Yahoo's "Most Emailed Photos" list with this one.
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Cindy Sheehan arrested at President's speech

Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom, formerly known as Operation Shock and Awe, but better known as The War In Iraq, was arrested and removed from the House gallery shortly before President Bush's State of the Union address Tuesday, according to The Capitol Police.

Sheehan, invited to the speech by Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D- Calif., was charged with demonstrating in the Capitol building, said Capitol Police Sgt. Kimberly Schneider. Schneider said Sheehan had worn a T-shirt with an anti-war slogan to the speech and covered it up until she took her seat.

Sheehan was hauled away in cuffs from the Capitol to police headquarters a few blocks away. Sheehan would be released on her own recognizance, according to the heat.

The photo of Cindy Sheehan on this page is not from her protest last night, but is an All This Is That file photo from 2005.
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Poem: The Developers

Dusk has always been
My favorite time of day

When the earth relaxes
And says OK

You f***ers can quit beating
On me for a while

But sequestered away
In boardrooms offices and labs

They work overtime on classified plots
To pave the ocean and blow up heaven.
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Index to Jack Brummet poems appearing in all this is that:
http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com/2005/12/index-to-jack-brummet-poems-on-all.html

Poem: A raindrop's life

A raindrop is born
In a cloud
And returns like a salmon

How it got there is another story
A droplet latches onto a nuclei
Of smoke salt or dust

And bumps into other droplets
Over and over and over
Coalescing a million times

Gravity pulls the raindrop down
To strike water or earth
And one day it evaporates

A raindrop is born
In a cloud
And returns like a salmon.
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Word Verification Sucks

I keep running hot and cold with word verification. I turned it on in the fall, when blogs were just beginning to be hammered by the splogs, or spamming blogs. As soon as I posted an article, the spammers arrived. Then things start to quiet down. I turn verification off. And the spammers sneak in, and not just to new posts, but reaching back into comments a year old, they add their new ones.

Shoes. Increased semen production. Cars cheap! Boner enhancers. "you have a great blog. You're really making things happen. Check out my blog at...." People selling acreage on the moon. Jewelry. Books. Oxycontin and Vicoden over the internet! (hmmm!). Teddy bears. Steaks Fed-exed! Sex pictures of M.I.L.F.s in action! Real estate! Nekkid girls! Nekkid boys! Horse sex!

I turn it off and get complacent again. Until the post I just created about something (reasonably) serious is spammed with another Exciting Offer! And I turn it on again. It's a war of attrition. I want people to comment, and they, like me, find word verification irritating. . .especially if you're a marginal typist and it takes at least two (or more!) tries to pass the word verification challenge. . .
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State of the Union Satire worth a look

Check out this excellent impression of President Bush and his upcoming State of the Union speech performed by James Adomian. It goes over the top, but there are a lot of gems in there.
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President Bush: "Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton"

[click images to enlarge]


According to Reuters, President George W. Bush says Bill Clinton has become so close to his father he's almost one of the family. Between their disaster relief work, fund raising, attending funerals, and the like, the two former POTUSes are thick as thieves. In fact President George W. Bush joked that Bill Clinton was "my new brother."

"Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton," President George W. Bush joked, referring to how Bill Clinton had followed his father, and Hillary Clinton could follow him.

"That's a good relationship. It's a fun relationship to watch," Bush said in an interview with CBS News broadcast yesterday. "It was fun to see the interplay between dad and Clinton. One of these days, I'll be a member of the ex-president's club. ... I'll be looking for something to do."



The President said he checked in with Clinton occasionally. "And you know, he says things that makes it obvious -- that makes it obvious to me that we're kind of, you know, on the same wavelength about the job of the presidency. "
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The Onion on The West Wing's cancellation

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/44832



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Alien Lore 62 - two encounters between President Ronald Reagan and UFOs

[click all images to enlarge for viewing and readability]

1. Steve Allen took one of Ronald Reagan's UFO sightings public on his WNEW-AM radio show in New York. Allen related a story that "a well-known personality in the entertainment industry" had confided to him years ago.

For years, the story had made the rounds in the press-politico rumor mill and everyone knew Allen was talking about Governor Ronald and Nancy Reagan. The Reagans were expected at a dinner party with Hollywood friends. The guests had arrived except for the Reagans. Ron and Nancy showed up thirty minutes late and were very upset because, they said, they had seen a UFO coming down the coast.

2. Another sighting happened in 1974 while Reagan was still Governor. The future President related the story to Norman C. Millar, who was Washington Bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal: "I was in a plane last week when I looked out the window and saw this white light. It was zigzagging around."

"I went up to the pilot and said, Have you seen anything like that before? He was shocked and said, Nope. And I said to him: Let's follow it! We followed it for several minutes. It was a bright white light."

"We followed it to Bakersfield, and all of a sudden to our utter amazement, it went straight up into the heavens."

"When we got off the plane, I told Nancy all about it." Reagan, in his discussion with Millar added that he had told Nancy about the UFO he had seen, and that they had done personal research on UFOs. This research had uncovered the facts that there were references to UFOs in Egyptian hieroglyphics.

The reporter suddenly realized that Reagan actually believed in UFOs. "Are you telling me that you saw a UFO?"

Suddenly, according to Millar, Reagan realized that he was talking to the press. "This look crossed his face," recalled Millar, "and he said let's just say that I'm an agnostic."

The speech draft reprinted above shows that UFOs were never far from the President's mind. He mentioned UFOs and aliens publicly numerous times during his Presidency, most famously in a speech at the United Nations.

No wonder that, toward the end of his administration, the British tabloid, The Sun, published a huge headline

"Reagan will end his presidency by adding several planets as states."

Links to selected earlier posts on President Ronald Reagan in All This Is That:

http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com/2005/11/president-ronald-reagan-glances-out.html
http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com/2005/11/alien-lore-no-39-presidents-and-near.html
http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com/2005/07/president-ronald-reagan-on-war-and.html
http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com/2005/03/potus-40-pres-ronald-dutch-reagan-b.html
http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com/2004/12/three-by-ronald-reagan.html
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It was twenty years ago today that the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded

Twenty years ago (1-28-1986), the space shuttle Challenger lifted off from from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The launch was watched by almost every schoolkid in the country, because one of the crew was a teacher--37 year old Christa McAuliffe, the first civilian to travel into space. She didn't make it.

Seventy-three seconds after the launch, the shuttle exploded in a forking plume of smoke and fire as family and friends watched, along with millions watching live television. No one on board survived.

President Ronald Reagan appointed a commission to find out what went wrong. The investigation found the explosion was caused by the failure of an "O-ring" seal in one of the two solid-fuel rockets. This rapidly triggered a chain of events that resulted in a massive explosion.

It's not nearly so well remembered as the Challenger, but just three years ago, on February 1, 2003, another space-shuttle tragedy occurred when the Columbia shuttle disintegrated entering Earth's atmosphere.

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Ann Coulter: Justice John Paul Stevens Should Be Poisoned

Ann Coulter "joked" during a Thursday speech that liberal Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens should be poisoned. "We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens' creme brulee," Coulter said at Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Ark. "That's just a joke, for you in the media."



















She made other tasteless jokes about liberal Supreme Court justices that made the audience "squeal," according to an article today in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Coulter was booed, however, after she stopped two black men during questions, telling them, "I'm not gonna be lectured to," according to the newspaper account. She also was booed when she said that the crack cocaine epidemic "has pretty much gone away."

Blacks "are the most loyal group for Democrats and you ought to be getting a little more out of them by giving them competition through the Republicans," Coulter said.

Afterward, black students stood around "lashing" back at Coulter's "rhetoric," the newspaper said. One sophomore girl said: "We need someone on the Democratic side who is just as outspoken as she is."

The college president, Walter Kimbrough, told the audience that inviting Coulter to speak at the black school made sense because like hip hoppers she is "raw, outspoken, uncensored." He also called her the "conservative answer to rapper Lil' Kim -- [both] attractive and sexy, long-haired blondes. ..." Coulter said it was "the best introduction" she'd ever had. It's hard to believe Walter Kimbrough was able to compare Ann to Lil Kim with a straight face, but he somehow did.
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