Go to our Local Ventura Poet's Group on Youtube to watch and listen to me read this poem, "Fresh Tree" from my book of poems, Dead Tree Elegies (available in my website bookstore). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItMX6hQeyrw Fresh Tree We won the lottery—cone, nut, sprout, root drilling down to damper depths, without contaminations, deprivations. I might be sipping near a wedged stone, or alongside a thin crevice with weepy faces. No bird has stuck me with rank seed of mistletoe. Tree sprouts nearby aid me. My scaffolds are out, framework set. I’d be best pruned, limbed up, fire skirted, still, I’ve made a start. Summer grinds on, our only season. Heat settles in and won’t let go. But I’m fr
With much of our food and supplies coming to us in this our plague time through pickup and delivery, I’ve been reflecting on such activity in my early youth, in the 1940’s to be exact. With today’s mediated deliveries we order online and either pick up or have the items delivered, carefully wiped down either way. With all its exploitive problems, the Amazon experience is over the top, but the convenient and necessary process for getting food from local supermarkets often results in lots of missing items or replaced ones that aren’t something one would buy. We soon might tire of not getting our favorite choices. This was never a problem years ago with home services and deliveries. In general
Viruses are neither living nor dead, but somewhere in between. As microscopic parasites, they need actual living material in a host cell for their genome or genetic program to replicate.1 Viruses may be older than living cells, may have spawned all sorts of evolutionary changes 2 and are downright weird. How weird are they? First of all, we do a virus disservice when we give it motive. We say the virus wants to enter the lungs in order to replicate. That’s a standard trope of ours, to give something agency, to see it in human terms, wanting and needing things, which is anthropomorphizing it. A virus has no plan, no goal, no direction. In fact, it just floats around in aerosol droplets driven
Freedom is the Recognition of Necessity—Philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) Life Burdens How are you doing today? I ask this in all sincerity since I ask myself that every morning. What I am aware of is my increasing stress from various problems, namely fear of the approach of coronavirus, coping with my two surgical recoveries, worry about my two healthcare worker adult children and their children more likely exposed to the virus as they come home from work every day, and general fears about our economy’s collapse with the added crisis of the environment going through radical human-caused degradation. My personal health situation is pretty compromised when it comes to susceptibility
REFLECTIONS ON COPING WITH CURRENT DISASTER: MARCH 22, 2020 By Bob Chianese Freedom is the Recognition of Necessity—Philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) Ci Arrangiamo—Neapolitan Credo: “We Adapt to Survive” Life Burdens How are you doing today? I ask this in all sincerity since I ask myself that every morning. What I am aware of is my increasing stress from various problems, namely fear of the approach of coronavirus, coping with my two surgical recoveries, worry about my two healthcare worker adult children and their children more likely exposed to the virus as they come home from work every day, and general fears about our economy’s collapse with the added crisis of the environment go
