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27 Jul Special Commentary: Thank You, Joe! And Let’s Go, Kamala!

A few weeks ago, in the season finale podcast for "Women's Media Center Live with Robin Morgan," I said that although we were going on hiatus until September, in case of unusual news I would return with Special Commentary. Well! This past week or so certainly has given us unusual, even historic, news. So here is that commentary....

04 Dec Not Giving Up

Moving fighting words this week from a conversation on police brutality to Black women to the Middle East isn't a disruption really, since the same principles apply: structural supremacies, power colluding with power over the heads of the disenfranchised/dispossessed who are being silenced; power accruing to power and powerlessness to powerlessness, in an endless repetitive circle; all of it disguised by the usual banalities that manage to be boring as well as lethal at the same time....

13 Nov The Shoah and The Nakba

Netanyahu got exactly what he wanted – war as the ultimate diversion of attention from his corruption scandal — and Hamas gave it to him....

06 Nov Terms of Art

From Harvesting Darkness: New Poems 2019-20233 Terms of Art (for Cherrie Moraga) Some people, they claim, manage to die peacefully in their sleep. How can anyone tell that? How does anyone say how anyone lives or could die—above all in their sleep? For in that sleep who knows what wakenings may come? The mystery slams shut and locks behind you once you enter it. Only the one question—what now?—endures. No matter how you answer that, you're dead. Nyctophobia is fear of darkness, octophobia fear of light. Terms of art. The best you can long for and dread is to live out your life as an artist, I'm betting. Preoccupied? Yes. Arrogant? Certainly. Fools snarl, “Elitist”--as if this didn’t demand obsession driving its relentless harrow across your lifework’s form, plus pitiless indifference to the cries of those who dared believe you loved them—and so you did, for rare moments wedged between or at the edge of magic, when dailiness...

23 Oct Disability Rights (and Wrongs)

The Turkish earthquakes set me off, and sent me off also, into rage. Because rural women in Turkey live their entire lives under virtual house arrest. Hijab, "properly observed religious ways," requires among other things that women stay at home, unless accompanied by a male relative — so think about it: following the first small shock, the men rushed out of their homes for safety in the open air, but the women couldn't. When the real quakes hit, it was the women and children that they buried.The men had got away. News reports said that over 2000 people had died. Or was it 2000 women and children? And what in hell did they do if they were disabled? Oh my god what in the hell did they do,? Buried alive, they died. This drove me to borrow an excellent piece written by my colleague here at the Women's Media Center,...

16 Oct All Too Human

Generations of women living in fear . . ....

10 Oct Surfacing . . . (Sort Of)

Oh my god have I had Covid. I don't do anything, it seems, by halves. And I have really truly honestly wow had Covid. In fact, I am still sick, groping my way through the fog of post Covid lassitude, total lack of energy, and for lack of a better name to call it, brain-fog-woo-woo. Finally, I did test negative, but I feel as though I'm walking underwater, and certainly thinking underwater, which means not thinking clearly, or much at all. Granted, there's the Parkinson's, plus I was a moronic smoker for years so have a (fortunately mild) case of COPD. Still, I have never experienced anything quite like this, except perhaps coming out of anesthesia after surgery-—but then that didn't last as long as this is lasting--which is horridly daaaaaaaaays on end, niiiiiiights on end...

18 Sep The Frequency

Welcome back, and welcome to the book party! I'm celebrating the just-now publication of my eighth collection of poetry, Harvesting Darkness, by Spinifex Press. It's available from Amazon and other online sources as well as from bookstores. I'm truly proud of it; I think it's the best work I've done yet, and I hope you are moved by it. A few words about the book itself: many of the poems are shaped formally (sonnets, for example). I found such structure helpful in engaging the dark subjects and themes we are all living through, including aging, political anger, environmental angst, and the fragility of life. Yet the very insistence of that life simply refuses to be denied, showing itself most consistently and affirmatively in the guise of art. That's the real underlying current of the book, and I offer a sample here. The Frequency Federal prosecutors in Brazil opened an investigation into a...

26 Jun Harvesting Darkness