TUESDAY POEM | Why Then Do We Not Despair? by Anna Akhmatova

                            Why then do we not despair?

                            Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold
                            Death's great black wing scrapes the air,
                            misery gnaws to the bone.
                            Why then do we not despair?

                            By day, from the surrounding woods,
                            cherries blow summer into town;
                            at night the deep transparent skies
                            glitter with new galaxies.

                            And the miraculous comes so close
                            to the ruined, dirty houses--
                            something not known to anyone at all,
                            but wild in our breasts for centuries.

                            Anna Akhmatova
                                                   (Translated by Stanley Kunitz.)


Thank you, Rebecca, for posting this poem over on your blog a day or two ago; as poems do, it turned up at just the right time.

This week's editor on the TP hub is Tim Jones

with Oh, Dirty River

by Helen Lehndorf

And in other writerly news, Tuesday Poem curator Mary McCallum's story Dead Space was one of the prize winners in the 2013 National Flash Fiction competition. . . and Rachel van Blankenship's story Dear Phoenix was placed 4th in the International Flash Mob section of the same comp. Congrats to you both, and to all who entered. Michelle Elvy (one of our TP-ers) is to be lauded for her zeal in organising these events; no matter that she's on the other side of the world from NZ at the moment! 

When fire = poetry

Seattle-based Japanese artist Etsuko Ichikawa writes, "My work is a continuing investigation of what lies between the ephemeral and the eternal.

Moment and memory, absorption and evaporation, light and shadow are some of the triggers that inspire me and relate to my work. My “glass pyrographs” are made by drawing hot molten glass, which is one way to capture and eternalize the immediacy of a moment, while my hanging and floating installations are about ever-changing states of mind. . . " 

"The yin to Etsuko Ichikawa's soft-spoken, intro-spective yang is fiery, molten glass. Handling while aglow at 2100 degrees F, she loops, stretches and presses the smoking mass of lava atop paper to create abstract drawings known as pyrographs. Filmmaker Alistair Banks Griffin captures the dramatic choreography of Ichikawa's art in this short film for The Anthropologist*. . ." 

For more vids of the artist at work, visit this page on Etsuko Ichikawa's website - http://www.etsukoichikawa.com/video.htm

Thanks +++ to RachvB for introducing us to the meditative, alchemical work of this remarkable artist. 

* rich pickings await you at The Anthropologist

The Clearest Way Into The Universe - for RachvB, who understands rivers

". . . Wild rivers are earth's renegades, defying gravity, dancing to their own tunes, resisting the authority of humans, always chipping away, and - eventually - always winning. And wild rivers bring out the renegade in us, enticing us to leave behind all that we've been taught and to let ourselves surrender to their special symphony. When I was in high school, I would climb out of my bedroom window for midnight canoe runs, or say I was at a slumber party when I was off rafting for the weekend. The river was a kindred spirit. I shared a secret with the river, a knowledge that the clearest way into the universe was downstream. . . " Richard Bangs

Riroriro, Korimako, fly me a line. . . CB - pastel on paper

RachvB