Malala Yousafzai tribute at 'Word-Dreamer':& a call for a Canadian Malala Anthology

Dear poet-friends,

as you know I was asked to be a co-editor for a special FutureCycle Press Anthology for Malala Yousafzai and have sent out many invitations to friends and colleagues to send submissions. However, I've been rather unceremoniously removed from that position when it became clear to the publisher(s) that I was being too pro-Canadian in my selection of poems and generally too tough as editor, especially in regards to submissions from Americans. It was only until I first posted my own little tribute to Malala here and Joseph Hutchison his afterwards that FutureCycle, inspired by our posts, developed the idea of a special Anthology edition.

I'm calling out to Canadian publishers to perhaps pick up the impetus I started at 'Word-Dreamer' and begin our own Anthology. I'd be more than happy to share editing duties. In the meantime I'll continue to celebrate Malala here and ask that you please send to me at 'Word-Dreamer' any poetry that the recent shooting by the Taliban of Malala Yousafzai, a fourteen-year old blogger and women's education rights activist in Pakistan, may have recently inspired you to write. I will post all submissions as they are given to me at cdidiodato@yahoo.ca or cdidiodato@gmail.com. Any format & style (provided they be respectful) will be accepted.

Let's celebrate here the exemplary courage and dignity of this remarkable young person.

Thank you!
__________________________


1) Malala--
  walking hand in hand,
   a steep staircase

Conrad DiDiodato

 

2) The Harrows of Halloween
 

This night of black-leaf key

opens the old door between worlds,

the dead I knew flit through, cast no shadows

on the moist opened earth,

the dead I did not know this orbit

come costumed through

grimace at my puzzled witness,

for in this ancient valley

dead-sight is granted

to the fay-touched few.

They affirm connection

the helix thread of everything

since the singularity of creation.

The earth is old

her children seek forbidden revelation

unhallowed Halloween a harrowing.
 

Katherine L. Gordon

October 31st. 2012.

3) Malala

Malala, your name sounds like a song
but it means grief-stricken in Urdu,
language of poets. You are named
after a poet, a warrior woman and
you have so lived up to your name.

The courage it takes to cross borders
defined by others, courage to uphold
freedom to read, learn, speak­ to be
the fully human that is all our birthright.

“Every girl in Swat is Malala. We will
educate ourselves. We will win. They
can't defeat us,” states her classmate.

Now it’s our turn to take up the call,
education for every child for which
women and girls today rally across
India, Pakistan and Afghanistan lands.

Malala, Malala. I hear the ululation
of lament and of celebration for her.
Can you hear what she’s crying? You
can join her common cause. But
how fares the girl in her hospital bed?

That beautiful face blasted. Her voice
silenced, her eyes shut. Hang on, girl,
hang on. There’s work to be done and we
desperately need such spirit among us.
 

Her father cries when Malala falls that all
Pakistan stands up. And now she too can
stand, what will Pakistan do? March on...

Grief is no time for emotion. Let sky open
and open to more sky. Light, we call for
light to dispel the darkest oppression. Her
name on a million lips in many tongues.

Malala, Malala, Malala. Hear the ululation

and respond.

Penn Kemp


4) Ed Baker's haiga tribute to Malala entitled "Sudden Sharp Pain" (click on image to enlarge):

5) Speaking Out
 

Raising the voice to speak against injustice 

puts the speaker on a path of collision

from those who vehemently oppose their ideas.

One young blogger, Malala, dared to do so

Speaking out about life in the Swat Valley

the need for girls to be educated

Pakistan and the world has taken note

of the attempted murder of this girl 

yet where was the outcry when many Malalas

Ayeshas, Ahmads and Bilals were killed by drones?

Who spoke up for them on the world stage?

People like you and me, living out their lives

their existence snuffed  out by unpiloted drones

hope of their families, cut down where they stood.

Injustice is a blight upon humankind

those who perpetrate it will be judged harshly

in the history books of future generations.

People who want harmony and peace

mothers, fathers, sons and daughters

young and old, let us work together

to eradicate injustices.
 

©Wilma Seville2012

6) Malala's Beads

Midway up the mountain,

on the day the bullets struck,

a flock of patterned Chukars,

the Partridge of Pakistan,

stood in feathered silence

as though they knew

your voice was stifled,

and the Sage

who sensed their stillness

strung your words

on mala beads,

said she learned

what lasts forever

when a thousand pairs of wings

filled the sky with sudden flight,

blessing schoolgirls with their shadows

beneath a streaming, soaring sun.

Andreas Gripp

"Another valley marvel" by Katherine L. Gordon

Poet, friend and mentor Katherine L. Gordon (who's in the opinion of many Canada's real first Lady of Letters) has just shared with me and Andreas Gripp a beautiful description of last night's lunar eclipse told in her typical Celtic playfulness, which she's entitled "Another valley marvel". Below is Katherine's piece followed by a poem of mine inspired by it. Dedicated to Katherine, as always.

Dear bards, last night (early morning really) I watched the lunar eclipse from my bed! The moon positioned herself directly above me in the sky light and I saw her swallowed, turned pulsating orange and extinguished by our shadow. By 3 A.M. the phenomena was over. What queen could have a better observatory! Could this rare event have anything to do with the torrential tides and weather in the Maritimes? This morning the returning sun gilded in a rosy halo, the trees and stones of the cliff.

Happy return of the light and a magic solstice to each...the Newgrange dead are awakened again.
Katherine.

    Only someone

as regal and long-hemmed,

—& shadowy, starry and blue,
    as You—
    (from her bed)
    could've seen it

instructed, at last, on how to live
    and go down the one
    passage way
    to yr King—

the deeper and deeper,
not sadder and sadder
    one

Erland Lee poetry reading: or return to a Canadian poetics

"Readings are the central social activity of poetry. They rival publishing as the most significant method of distribution for poetic works. They are as important as books and magazines in bringing poets into contact with one another, in forming generational and cross-generational, cultural and cross-cultural, links, affinities, alliances, communities, scenes, networks, exchanges and the like." (Charles Bernstein)

If any poetry venue can claim to inspire participants and, at the same time, give visible proof of the 'urban' and 'rural' mix that is the essence of Canadian poetry, it'd have to be the Erland Lee house in Stoney Creek. I was happy recently to organize a second poetry reading there, in the red adz-barn (as poet Katherine L. Gordon calls it) lying just adjacent to house. A sturdy plank two--tiered structure(technically a 'drive house'), it displays some of the original farm implements of late nineteenth-century Stoney Creek , while outside, on almost every side , stretching to the very horizon, lie the mostly uncultivated fields of an Ontario landscape that has virtually remained unchanged for hundreds of years. Everywhere is the rural poetic landscape of Isabella Valancy Crawford and Sir Charles G.D. Roberts: the same grid work of roads and orchards, same lush verdure of weed, grasses, & the same forest wildlife that had called a distinctively Canadian pioneer poetics into being.

But when you look directly ahead, & see cityscape sweeping below the escarpment to the shores of Lake Ontario and beyond to Toronto ( CN Tower always looking as if it's about to poke through the clouds!) naturally names like Al Purdy, Earle Birney and Milton Acorn come to mind, and all their literary descendants. A year ago a statue of Al Purdy was unveiled at Queen's Park, Toronto as testimony to one Canada's most popular city poets. And what may also come to mind is the terrible 'two solitudes' syndrome to which Canadians have grown accustomed because it now translates into split allegiance to the 'rural' and 'urban' literary consciousness. Behind us an early Canadian pioneering poetics but everywhere else, encroaching on the countryside, a city's own sensibility and distinctively jarring rhythms.

Who (and what) are we as poets: purveyors of a pioneer poetics, nostalgic for the old British 'models', or a contemporary poet attuned to a very different type of human buzz, always ready for novelty, experiment and academic discussion? Are we colonialist or postmodern in temperament? I posed that question at our Erland Lee reading and let each of my poet-friends give their own unique responses in verse.