Beauty – Iteration 18

First beauty – architectural blueprint for Prince’s Paisley Park complex.

Second beauty – Annie Lennox on the radio, singing “Would I Lie to You?”

Third beauty – blessed coolness: overcast, breeze, birdsong like crazy.

Next beauty – two well-dressed women; dark eyes, mouths speaking sweetness. A wonderful perfume.

Next beauty – my mood, buoyant, peaceful. The body at ease.

Penultimate beauty – I will not give up, no matter what the cost,

WIN_20160319_18_16_14_Pro (2) — Mimosa – Cover Image by David Bradford Kane, Self image by Michele Montserrat

A Tale of Herring Do

She was still reeling from errant seagull attacks. That would certainly teach her to keep anchovies in her pocket. She tried rinsing her jacket in the bay water but couldn’t get the stink off, so she resigned herself to smelling like a bag of overripe fish for the duration of her walk to town. She’d try to find a cheap jacket at the Redeemer Family Light thrift store, “where all your purchase dollars go to our Heal the Poor ministry and job training center.” Hell, with the stench wafting up strong and feral from the front of the coat pockets, she might as well ask what kinds of benefits they might have available for her. If the threadbare hoodie and torn gloves weren’t enough to have a charity take pity on her, the herring breeze which dogged her steps like hound dog in heat might do the trick.

WP_20160730_18_56_21_Pro — All photos created by Michele Montserrat

“They Could Hear Their Children Screaming for Them From the Next Room”

What are we doing as a nation? This is like a nightmare from which you can’t awaken, that goes deeper and deeper into darkness.

Justin DaMetz

If you can measure the moral fiber of a nation by how it treats children and the vulnerable, then its easy to see that the United States under Donald Trump has shed any moral leadership it once carried.

35065632_1691544297632463_5572430109022879744_o Jesus Christ, ripped from Mary’s arms and thrown in a cage.

News and images coming out of Border Patrol detention facilities over the last few weeks show heartbreaking images of parents, searching for a better life than the violence of drug gangs who feed American addictions, being forcibly separated from children as young as just a few months old. We see pictures of small children locked in cages inside warehouses, sleeping on hard floors and not being allowed sunlight and space to move.

This, put simply, is highly immoral. What we as a nation are doing to these people and these children is evil and goes against human nature, not to mention…

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Federico Garciá Lorca

“…never let me lose what I have gained,
and adorn the branches of your river
with leaves of my estranged Autumn.”

Today is the birthdate of playwright and poet Federico Garciá Lorca, born in1898 in Fuente Vaqueros, near Granada in Spain. Check out the link below to read more about him on Poets dot Org.

There’s also a relatively new translation of Lorca’s work – Poet in Spain – that was published last fall by Knopf.”

“Riveting . . . Lorca’s poems from Spain are a poetry of dreams and journeys and glimpses from balconies, of sunbaked meadows and realms of erotic yearning . . . Arvio is a supple translator, and she has delivered a personal book . . . [Her] rich and gripping retranslation of ‘Blood Wedding’ [is] of a piece with Lorca’s blood-warm verse.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

Federico on Poets.org

In 1936, García Lorca was staying at Callejones de García, his country home, at the outbreak of the Civil War. He was arrested by Franquist soldiers, and on August 19, after a few days in jail, soldiers took García Lorca to “visit” his brother-in-law, Manuel Fernandez Montesinos, the Socialist ex-mayor of Granada whom the soldiers had murdered and dragged through the streets. When they arrived at the cemetery, the soldiers forced García Lorca from the car. They struck him with the butts of their rifles and riddled his body with bullets. His books were burned in Granada’s Plaza del Carmen and were soon banned from Franco’s Spain.

“Verde que te quiero verde”

Featured image illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo. Photos by Thinkstock, Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images.