here's luck

The Lie

The lie that a protester shot dead by ICE
in Minneapolis was a terrorist, the lie
that killers set loose on their own cities
are victims, the lie that a poem is a gun.

A poem is not a gun, though a poem
from the pen of Akhmatova or Neruda
or Mandelstam, not one of whom ever
to my knowledge fired a shot, might

in certain conjugations of the stars
lodge in the heart and spread out
across mountains and borders
across languages and the sea and you

can't shoot it down, or lock it up
or alter its pixels. It is played
on the hollowed reeds of dead bones.
A poem like that is a bomb.


— Mary O'Malley
from The Irish Times, 31 January 2026

sheafrotherdon reminded me of this poem yesterday.

The Shortest Day

So the shortest day came, and the year died,
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive,
And when the new year's sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, reveling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us—listen!
All the long echoes sing the same delight,
This shortest day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, fest, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome, Yule!


— Susan Cooper
from The Shortest Day

(NPR did a lovely little story a couple of years ago about the process of turning the poem into an illustrated children's book.)

Thinking of absent friends as the moon turns full and the year turns to winter.

Death and the Moon

                        (for Catherine Marcangeli)

The moon is nearer than where death took you
at the end of the old year. Cold as cash
in the sky's dark pocket, its hard old face
is gold as a mask tonight. I break the ice
over the fish in my frozen pond, look up
as the ghosts of my wordless breath reach
for the stars. If I stood on the tip of my toes
and stretched, I could touch the edge of the moon.

I stooped at the lip of your open grave
to gather a fistful of earth, hard rain,
tough confetti, and tossed it down. It stuttered
like morse on the wood over your eyes, your tongue,
your soundless ears. Then as I slept my living sleep
the ground gulped you, swallowed you whole,
and though I was there when you died,
in the red cave of your widow's unbearable cry,

and measured the space between last words
and silence, I cannot say where you are. Unreachable
by prayer, even if poems are prayers. Unseeable
in the air, even if souls are stars. I turn
to the house, its windows tender with light, the moon,
surely, only as far again as the roof. The goldfish
are tongues in the water's mouth. The black night
is huge, mute, and you are further forever than that.


— Carol Ann Duffy
from Feminine Gospels

Animals

The president called undocumented immigrants
animals, and in the nature documentary
I watched this morning with my kids,
after our Saturday pancakes, the white
fairy term doesn't build a nest but lays
her single speckled egg in the crook of a branch
or a tree knot. It looks precarious there
because it is. And while she's away,
because even mothers must eat, another bird
swoops in and pecks it, sips some of what now
won't become. The tern returns and knows
something isn't right—the egg crumpled,
the red slick and saplike running down the tree—
but her instinct is so strong, she sits. Just sits
on the broken egg. I have been this bird.
We have been animals all our lives,
with our spines and warm blood, our milky tits
and fine layers of fur. Our live births, too,
if we're lucky. But what animal wrenches
a screaming baby from his mother?
Do we know anymore what it is to be human?
I've stopped knowing what it is to be human.


— Maggie Smith
from Goldenrod

I'm at the stage of vidding where I just want to watch my most recent export on loop because THEIR FACES.

Whipping

Cord or twine used to bind 
or cover a rope, keep the ends
from fraying. To begin, 

place a hand 
on your daughter’s shoulders.
Tell her fifth grade is 
a bloodletting.

Show her your own path
of hard turns taken
before you were hauled taut
and loosed into motherhood.

Say, this knot 
is a folded note. 
This knot is a map

back to me. Lay out a rope.
Tell her to gather each end.
Say stitch them tight
or burn them down.


— K. D. Harryman
originally posted in Poem-a-Day


"I’m interested in the emotional fortitude and the trauma parents pass down to children, and I think often about ancestors and their reserve of knowledge and experience that we can draw from. This poem originated with a line from The Ashley Book of Knots, a beautiful encyclopedia of knots written in the 1940s. I had been working for some time with the metaphor of tying and untying knots and being female, the ways in which women are manipulated, how we contort ourselves, make ourselves small, and how it takes concentration and effort to both live within that smallness and to undo it."
— K. D. Harryman

killabeez prompted: Top 5 things that make you have to vid a thing!

You know, I’m not sure there are as many as five; it’s more like there are two dealbreaker things that have to both be true.

I feel like I have to vid a thing when 1) I love the thing not only a lot but also in the particular kind of way where I want to spend a lot of time thinking about it and looking at it, and 2) a viable song attaches itself to something in the thing -- character, relationship, ensemble, theme -- that I particularly care about.

This is maybe easiest to illustrate with counterfactuals.

So, first, loving the thing. As there’s been more and more TV available that fits my general tastes, I find that I do a lot more non-fannish TV-watching. For example: I enjoyed watching Russian Doll; I thought it was smart and weird and intriguing and well-made, and I recommended it to a lot of people. But when I finished it I didn’t immediately have the urge to rewatch it (in whole or in part); I didn’t (and don’t) have any particular desire to spend more time with it. Without that... there’s no sense of having to vid it.

And second, the song. Without a vidsong, I may have a sort of itchy feeling of wanting to vid the thing, but I don’t feel like I have to. Every now and then my interest in vidding something will send me out in search of a song, but that’s pretty rare for me.

These two things are separate, but they interact. If I don’t have Russian Doll on my mind, songs are unlikely to ping me as vidsongs for it. And if a song ever did strike me as a Russian Doll vidsong, I probably wouldn’t feel compelled to make the vid. This happened, actually, with Dollhouse: a song pinged me with a vid idea that I thought was pretty interesting, but the vid never got anywhere near the top of the queue because I simply wasn’t that interested in spending time with Dollhouse (and at the same time I had other vid ideas for other shows that felt much more compelling). Or, to take another example, Battlestar Galactica: I actually was pretty interested in vidding that show at one point, but the most interesting vidsong/idea I had related to an aspect of the show that I liked but didn’t love. It was a good song and a good idea, but it was sort of... at a thirty-degree angle to what most intrigued me personally.

Beyond that... maybe 3) I can’t find the vids I want to see, and/or 4) I can’t find vids set to music I want to listen to? But that’s a stretch.

I’ve certainly made vids that I didn’t feel like I had to make -- that I just wanted to make because I could, or that I made for someone else, or that I thought I could get done before a particular deadline, or that I thought would go over well in a particular vidshow. But for the vids that I’ve felt compelled to make... Yeah, it’s love + song every time. :D

nestra prompted: Top 5 fandoms you've loved but never felt the need to vid.

This is such an interesting question! When I think of my unvidded fandoms, I tend to think of all the shows I wanted to vid but never got around to (or had half a dozen ideas for yet vidded only once). So it's nice to be reminded that there are some fandoms that I can think of without any vid-related guilt or regret.

In alphabetical order:

1. The 100


2. Fringe


3. Leverage


4. The Sarah Connor Chronicles


5. The X-Files

To be clear, I would have been perfectly happy to vid any of these shows if the right song had showed up! (...well, except maybe X-Files; that acrimonious divorce was well over by the time I first encountered vidding.)

But songs didn’t show up, and I didn’t feel an urge to go looking for them. I am lucky in that most of my vidsongs take over my brain without my having to do anything except, you know, exist in a permanent state of readiness to hear all the music I listen to as potential vidsongs; I only go hunting for songs when the compulsion to vid is really strong and no songs have presented themselves yet.

Various posting memes are going around, and I would like to post more but apparently need a boost, so:

Ask me a question or give me a topic! Can be about a fannish opinion or headcanon, a top 5, books, music, vidding, cooking, gardening, or my thoughts on anything that strikes your fancy.