Michael Ancher, “The Sick Girl”, 1882, Statens Museum for Kunst / Public domain photograph courtesy of Michael Peter Ancher

Of special note:

• Please don’t miss Iron Wind, Zimbabwean poet in exile Mbizo Chirasha’s response to the current prompt. An explanation for its solitary publication is included in the post.
• Wisconsin poet, DeWitt Clinton, wrote, “I’ve visited many hospital rooms over the years, and occasionally, I was a patient. I’m always drawn to Sylvia Plath’s poem about her stay in a hospital following a surgical procedure.”  I didn’t have enough time to get Harper Collins’ permission to publish Tulips today. You can read it in its entirety HERE.
• Irene Emmanuel…

we are urged to change our lives
and maybe just maybe it is about
time
for we have had it easy a while

i am refering to myself only
for speaking broadly find
i may upset some

am late here after writing
a tome of explaination
apology for verse
not aimed at anyone
just a pattern of words
and sounds

my life is simplified
with the new living
suggestions

spoken for our health &
safety overall

people have come kind
& supportive all round
mainly

while few remain
in anger

i just feel

resigned to what
comes as i have before though

scared for my family & those
around me

i say this to you who
have been to war
who rides your bike
down dangerous hills

who cares for kittens

Weighs heavy like a borrowed coat
Each well-meaning Your English is Very Good
I have seen and felt and dreamt in it always
I have healed the holes in my soul with it always
It is skin, not clothing
It is mine to own, not another’s to loan
That morning I was wandering, wondering in English
But she saw my hair, skin, and eyes, and said nihao
That afternoon I was silent, alone for a Wilde
But he saw my hair, skin, and eyes, and bowed
Your English is very good
Yes, and so is yours

Allison Thung is a writer from Singapore. She started telling stories at 6, and just never stopped. Some of her work can be found at https://www.allisonthung.com.

In the Editorial to the current issue (71) of Tears in the Fence I have quoted from Michael Heller’s autobiographical account of his early years, Living Root, A Memoir (S.U.N.Y. 2000) and as I look at the elegiac exactness of Peter Huchel’s poems as translated by Martyn Crucefix I am struck again by what I had read from the American poet’s concern for the “ritual forms and objects” associated with his Jewishness:

“As a child in the early nineteen forties, six or seven years old in Miami Beach, even as I sat, sunk deep in the velvet plush seats of Temple Emmanuel on Washington Avenue, feeling the rapture of the ritual occasions, I sensed I was climbing a cliff face, the very physiognomy of otherness, the pathways of memory by which I skirted the fragile edging of the present.”

Remembering his grandfather, a rabbi and teacher, he recalled how “all…

“. . . I don’t understand why our propaganda machines are always trying to teach us, to persuade us, to hate and fear other people in the same little world that we live in.” Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

My Aunt Julie once said that it is easier to love than hate. She was a good woman, a diamond in the rough and I believe her. I believe it takes less energy to love (respect) others than it does to hate them and that honest appreciation of differences is actually our own best protection: today the hate is directed at “those people” and tomorrow it is directed at me and you. This is the way the world turns in the hands of the spin-meisters. They love nothing so much as pitting us against one another for their own gain and it is ALWAYS for their gain, not ours, make no mistake.

pleased to hear of the funds

for that bike

go get it soon

i was drawing yesterday

and if things continue

as they are

i shall be here drawing some time

while

that is a comfort

much else is cancelled

work today

then a week

of social distancing

as it is now known.

newport sands

just to say that i am making changes due to the current situation.

will be working from home, and avoiding social interactions to

help prevent spread

why behave as normal when things are not normal

hope to see you  all when we are out the other side