National Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month, for which I am grateful this year. The Poets Academy sends a poem a day to anyone who wants it, and this has inspired me to read more poetry than usual. For me, reading and writing poetry only happens in a certain kind of head space, more meditative and calm than everyday madness. Although I can discipline myself to write prose just by sitting at my desk, poems either come to me or they don’t. I’m hoping a poem or two will come to me soon–it’s been quite a while.

In honor of Poetry Month I’m posting a few old ones. Enjoy.

All I Ever Wanted

All I ever wanted from you was a baby.
All I ever needed you for was your seed.
The rest was a cover.
The rest of the needs
I presented with tearful platitutdes
were merely a disguise.

I used your maleness ruthlessly.
I never was what I pretended to be.
I needed your seed
and I took it with style
and after the first
I milked you for more.
I milked you, do you hear?
The silly things you used me for
never really touched me.

Once I had my children
I played on all the mean
sadistic nastiness in you
which wasn’t hard to find:
I had chosen you for your nastiness
knowing it was my ticket out.

Wicked woman that I was,
glorious witch,
triumphant she-devil!

All I ever wanted from you was a baby.
All I ever needed you for was your seed.
The rest was a cover.

Sick

You were sick that weekend
lying in your purple-sheeted bed
absorbed in deterioration.

I was on the campaign trail then:
the well-worn trail
women have traveled for centuries,
out to make you love me.

And there you were
in a purple-sheeted bed
hopelessly vulnerable.

So I rode the Amtrak
to your hobbit hole
and did your cooking
washed your dishes
served you tea.

The campaign trail is rough
though the markers well-defined.
On the second day I stumbled.
I cried out to you
but you couldn’t respond:
you were sick
I was healthy.

You were sicker that weekend
than I had imagined.

Midnight Instincts

Don’t follow midnight instincts:
that knife-edged clarity
is but a dagger against darkness.

Lovers you decide to take
will do more than warm your bed.
Letters to your mother
will be misunderstood.
Those dream-inspired lines
were probably written by Proust.

Seal envelopes at dawn.
Dial telephones at noon.
Make love in the blazing sun.

When shimmering visions disturb your slumber
remember that midnight’s Eurekas
are morning’s mea culpas.

Whose Side Are You On?

We were running running
and suddenly I faced him.
All our lives had led us to this moment.
His rifle aimed at my heart
and he pulled the trigger
a split second before calling my name…

and the air is thick and sweet
and I am fairly swooning…

We were in a car,
he on top of me:
I wriggled beneath him
and called it love.

He went off to the wars.
I stayed home and had babies,
forever dreaming of his sweet love,
waking, reaching through the thick sweet air
I called love.

He came home from the wars.
I grew up with my babies.
We reached for each other
but the air had turned bitter.

And I am running from the guns.
All thoughts of love are gone.

Jackie Robinson Day

Major League Baseball is designating Sunday April 15th as Jackie Robinson Day. It’s 60 years since Robinson played his first game for the Brooklyn Dodgers, representing the beginning of integration in Major League Baseball…whoa, not so fast, buddy! The League wasn’t fully integrated until 1959; in the intervening 12 years Robinson endured epithets, threats, and wads of spit from fans and other players. Betcha can’t guess which team was the last one to integrate…come on, quick, give it a try! I’ll let you know the answer later.

These days Robinson is treated like a real hero, with good reason. Through all the abuse he suffered, he never once retaliated, knowing that to do so would blow the whole thing. The man carried a heavy load on his shoulders: he knew what he was doing, not only for baseball but for all of America.

That’s how important baseball was back then. Since then the game’s lost some of its stature due to the popularity of football and basketball, but back in Robinson’s day it was the quintessential American experience. And what Robinson did had a trickle-down effect that went beyond the world of baseball.

Even if it had only affected baseball fans, Robinson’s contribution was enormous. When I first got into baseball, only seven years ago, I was amazed to learn about the ongoing conversation among fans. Every time I venture out wearing my Yankee visor, I end up talking with someone about whatever’s going on in the field. My son and I went on a baseball tour through Middle America, and for a week talked about nothing else. I can’t tell you a thing about the other 50 people on the tour with us, yet I felt close to them because of the baseball conversation. It transcends race, religion and politics. At the risk of sounding sentimental, baseball talk engenders good feelings and kindness among people (well, except when Yankee fans and BoSox fans meet). When Jackie Robinson stepped onto Ebbets Field 60 years ago he opened up the conversation as well as the diamond.

How ironic then that fewer African-Americans are playing today than ever before. In the year 1975, 27.5 percent of all major league players were black; today that number’s a mere 8.4 percent. What happened?

Bruce Jenkins of the SF Chronicle thinks kids in urban areas today have been influenced by the kind of glamour and celebrity to be found in football and basketball, so they don’t get into the sport or develop baseball skills. Baseball, he notes, is an intellectual sport—in other words, uncool. That might be part of the reason—but I think it has more to do with practical reality: colleges hand out hefty scholarships to football and basketball players, but not for baseball.

Another probable factor is that everyone has a shorter attention span from living in a culture that functions like it’s continually on speed. During football and basketball games someone’s almost always in motion. But in baseball nine innings can go by without a single run scored by either side–and they go right on playing until someone gives the damn ball a good whack. This can go on for three hours or more (the longest game on record went 26 innings). Baseball fanatics will tell you these are the best kinds of games, perfect pitching matchups–but hell, they make me want to tear out my eyebrows, so I can’t imagine a teenage boy sitting still for that in 2007.

With so few African Americans batting and pitching, the league is heavily populated by players from Central and South America. That’s where the scouts go to find the next Mariano Rivera or Pedro Martinez. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Did the presence of the scouts encourage South American kids to put on baseball mitts, or did the kids attract the scouts because they were already playing well? I don’t know the answer to that—but I do know that scouts can’t be in two places at once, and if they’re down in Venezuela they can’t be in Oakland or the Bronx.
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Okay, in honor of Jackie Robinson Day, I’ve decided to issue a special dispensation for Alex Rodriguez, he who I formerly hated, he who wimped out under pressure from New Yorkers, he whose batting average this season is 371, he who is now hitting grand slams and breaking ties for the team. I’ve been shamed into repenting for my previous participation in the New York cruelty fest. Besides, I just found out that A-Rod’s no longer the highest paid player in major league baseball; Jason Giambi is—and he’s not even playing in the field this season, he’s a Designated Hitter! Henceforth I plan to treat A-Rod the same way I treat the rest of the Yankees—with respect and empathy. When it’s earned, anyway.
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And now here’s the answer you’ve been waiting for:
Q: Which Major League team was the last one to inegrate?
A: The Boston Red Sox. No comment.

Kurt Vonnegut Retires

Some people are so much a part of the earthly landscape that I seem to take it for granted they’ll always be around. Johnny Cash was one of those people. Kurt Vonnegut is another. Without him on it, the planet feels a little bit lonelier.

Fortunately, great artists bestow great gifts: Vonnegut leaves us an invented universe populated with memorably named characters like Kilgore Trout and Billy Pilgrim, who speak made-up words and phrases that found their way into everyday conversation—and, in some cases, into American dictionaries. Carass. Ice Nine. Wampeters. Granfalloons. So it goes, a phrase that originated in Slaughterhouse Five and was later repeated endlessly in Breakfast of Champions, became a slogan for anti-Vietnam War protestors in the 1960s.

Slaughterhouse-Five is Vonnegut’s best known book; it was made into a fairly well done film. My favorite Vonnegut books are Cat’s Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater—but I read them so long ago that only bits and pieces are still floating in my mental database. On the other hand, I read Welcome To The Monkey House, the title story of his first collection, so many times it’s still vivid and intact. Monkey House is particularly relevant today, when kids are being taught sex will kill them. I’ll be reading it again this weekend.

Like baseball’s Roger Clemens, who issues annual announcements of impending retirement, Vonnegut threatened, in later books, to make each one his last. Driven like many writers by interior forces, he always came back. In one such announcement he compared writing to his service in the Army, pleading, “I’ve written books. Lots of them. Please, I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do. Can I go home now?”

Kurt Vonnegut went home yesterday, April 12th, 2007.

For a complete list of Vonnegut’s works and more biographical information, see his entry in Wikipedia.

It’s The Captions, Allah!

Even as Pakistani women organize for greater freedom, radical clerics issued a fatwa, or religious decree, against Tourism Minister Nilofer Bakhtiar for “violation of acceptable moral norms.” Her crime? Bakhtiar not only parachuted from a plane to raise funds for earthquake victims, but at the end of her jump she accepted a hug from a French man (he would be French, wouldn’t he, the rogue?). The mullahs are using the incident to increase calls to institute Shariah, or Muslim law, in Pakistan, under which women become virtual prisoners, barely allowed to leave the home.

As for Bakhtiar, she blames “the photo captions,” which she says “were horrible.” As much as I’ve googled and yahoo’d, I’m still unable to find the offending captions. But I can imagine them: I don’t know how many times, as a journalist, I’ve had to apologize and grovel to some interview subject about the captions and headings placed by a layout person with a weird sense of humor. A story about sex therapists was accompanied by pictures of babes with outsized boobs; an article on the Men’s Movement was headlined What Do Men Want, and Why Should We Care? Most people have no concept of the workings of newspapers, so they blame the writers for everything.

Thus, all morning I’ve been speculating about the captions that might have accompanied Bakhtiar’s photos:

—– Tourism Minister Leaps Into Paramour’s Arms—–
—– Unknown Frenchman with Leaping Lover—–
—– Bakhtiar, Carried Off by Lover, Waves to Crowds—–
—– Bakhtiar Flies, Flaunts French Flirt, Foments Fatwa—–

Okay, I admit it: I’m not as good at this as those late-night layout people–which is why they’re hired for it.

Moving along: The fatwa demanded that Bakhtiar be fired, given another unspecified punishment and that her family “force her to ask for forgiveness so that she does not repeat this un-Islamic act.” Bakhtiar, a member of the Pakistan Muslim League, which supports her actions, says she’s not intimidated. But some Pakistanis fear this may mark the beginning of a renewed precedent reminiscent of the fatwa against writer Salman Rushdie, who’s made himself scarce ever since it was issued two decades ago.

This isn’t the first or only action by Pakistan’s hardline clerics, who recently started a Taliban-style anti-vice campaign in defiance of state authority. Last week they announced the establishment of an Islamic court and gave the government a one-month ultimatum to close brothels and video shops. They warned video and music shop owners to close their businesses, and they abducted a woman and her relatives for allegedly running a brothel.

Pakistani women defend their rights

The bright light in all this medieval darkness is pakistaniwomen.com. Anyone who believes that Pakistani women really like living under burkas and Shariah should check out the myriad ways they’re defending their rights and working for greater freedom.

PC in Canada

Our friends to the North seem to be getting even crazier than we are about what’s permissible in public discourse. The agency that oversees television ads—yes, such a thing exists—has disallowed a Toronto Blue Jays ad in which burly Frank Thomas, formerly of the Oakland A’s, wins a pillow fight with a kid. Jim Patterson, president of the Television Bureau of Canada, says it’s an “issue of power…that’s not acceptable behavior with a child and a person that large.” Tony Ciccia of Publicis Canada, the agency that created the ad, says it’s obvious Thomas isn’t committing an act of violence, and he finds the ban “peculiar,” given Canadians’ penchant for violent hockey. All I know is, if I were a Canadian daddy I wouldn’t be getting into any pillow fights with my kids, lest social services whisk them off to some pillowless foster home.

Back here in the States, the latest on the Don Imus flap: Imus is being punished with a two-week suspension from the airwaves. In my book that’s a vacation—it’s obviously just a symbolic gesture. If the station really wants to make amends, it should consider filling Imus’s time slot with programming about women’s sports—and the first guests should be members of the Rutgers basketball team. I don’t care what Al Sharpton or NOW or even Imus himself has to say about it anymore: I want to know how the subjects themselves felt being called “nappy headed ‘ho’s.” Not just the appellation, either, but the context in which it was said; I still maintain that some of them might not have taken it as an insult.

Everyone asks, what if he’d called your daughter a ‘ho? I’d rather let my daughter speak for herself, and I’ll speak for myself. Given the context in which Imus said it, I’m fairly certain that, as a teenage girl, I would have laughed and felt secretly proud to be regarded as fearsome. Of course, I was a degenerate hoodlum…and I’m told that serious female athletes these days eschew that sort of thing. Whether they do or not, I want to hear from those gals, and as soon as I finish blogging I’m heading over to the two radio stations—MSNBC and WFAN I believe—to tell them so. Anyone care to join me?

Note: In case I’m completely off base on this, I urge my readers to click here and read Gwen Ifill’s op-ed in the NYTimes.


Don Imus on Al Sharpton’s radio show yesterday.