Parallel heavens
by Claudia Serea

Doors closed,
lawns freshly mowed,
the heavens line up,
a row of suburban houses
on a quiet street.

I imagine mine painted white,
silent and sleepy,
a provincial art museum
where all the angels have been assigned
to perpetual paperwork.

One can't even think
to jump from one heaven
into another
without wings,
or breaking a bone.

And each heaven
has its own way to get to it
on parallel stairways,
steps, and ladders.

The old man sets the ladders against the walls,
side by side.

From here,
we can only go up.

“Parallel heavens” by Claudia Serea from TwoXism. 8th House Publishing © 2018. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

It was on this day in 1965 that President Lyndon B. Johnson gave a speech demanding legislation to guarantee equal voting rights for all Americans. The televised speech was delivered before a joint session of Congress. It was titled “The American Promise,” but it is usually called the “We Shall Overcome” speech.

He said: “The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong — deadly wrong — to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of States rights or National rights. There is only the struggle for human rights.”

Eight days earlier, on March 7th, 600 people had started marching east out of Selma, Alabama, headed for the state capitol of Montgomery. They were marching in a demonstration for voting rights, and in protest against the murder of civil rights activist and Baptist deacon Jimmie Lee Jackson. Activists John Lewis and Hosea Williams led the group of marchers, who made it only six blocks. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River, they were violently attacked by local and state law enforcement with clubs and tear gas. The event became known as Bloody Sunday. The violence was televised across the country; on ABC, it interrupted a film about Nazi war crimes. Activists flocked to Selma, including Martin Luther King Jr. On March 9th, King led a group of marchers back to the bridge, where they knelt and prayed but then turned back. That night, a white minister from Boston who had come south to march was assaulted, and he died two days later.

The following Sunday, 3,000 marchers set off once again from Selma. They reached Montgomery five days later. After arriving in Montgomery, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the crowd and said: “The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave Negroes some part of their rightful dignity, but without the vote it was dignity without strength.” Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in August of 1965.

It’s the birthday of the playwright and folklorist Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory (books by this author), born in Galway, Ireland (1852). Lady Gregory is best remembered as an instrumental figure in the Irish Literary Revival. At age 28, Isabella Augusta married the 63-year-old widower Sir William Henry Gregory, and the couple’s estate at Coole Park became a haven for Irish Revival writers, including W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, and Sean O’Casey. Yeats actually wrote several poems set at the estate, including “The Wild Swans at Coole.”

Lady Gregory co-founded the Irish Literary Theatre with Yeats in 1899, which became the Abbey Theatre Company. Encouraged by Yeats, Lady Gregory collected regional folklore and published numerous translations and retellings of local mythology, including Poets and Dreamers (1903) and God and Fighting Men (1904). Lady Gregory’s first play was Twenty Five (1904); in the next eight years she wrote 19 original plays and seven works of translation, all for the Abbey, including The Doctor in Spite of Himself (1906), The Image (1909), and McDonough’s Wife (1912).

It’s the birthday of literary critic and biographer Richard Ellmann, born in Highland Park, Michigan (1918). His parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe. He went to Yale and decided to do his dissertation on W.B. Yeats, who had just died and who, as Ellmann put it, “seemed at that time a subject suspiciously and brazenly modern.” But he chose Yeats anyway, and was partway through his dissertation when World War II began, so he left to join the Army. While he was stationed in London, he took a vacation and went to visit George Yeats, the poet’s wife, who greeted him warmly and happily shared stories of her husband and granted Ellmann numerous interviews. He published Yeats: The Man and the Masks in 1948 and went on to write biographies of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde. Oscar Wilde (1989) won the Pulitzer Prize, and Anthony Burgess called James Joyce (1959) “the greatest literary biography of the century.”

It's the birthday of botanist and horticulturist Liberty Hyde Bailey (books by this author), born in South Haven, Michigan, (1858). By the age of 14, he was helping the neighborhood farmers graft good apple stock onto their inferior trees. Cornell University offered him a position teaching horticulture in 1888. It was the first time they had ever had a professor of horticulture. His encyclopedia of cultivated plants, Hortus, is still considered a standard reference in the field.

It's the birthday of blues guitarist Lightnin' Hopkins, born in Centerville, Texas (1912). Hopkins wrote and sang and recorded a monumental catalog of blues songs. He played on street corners, in small clubs, and at Carnegie Hall.

It's the birthday of novelist and poet Ben Okri (books by this author), born in Minna, Nigeria (1959).  Okri moved to London in 1977, living for a time in subway stations and with friends. He published more novels and short stories, but he didn't really get much attention until his novel The Famished Road came out in 1991. It's about a Nigerian child who hovers between the real world and the world of spirits, and it describes the poverty and oppression in modern Nigeria. The Famished Road won the Booker Prize for Britain's best novel in 1991.

Okri said: "Literature doesn't have a country. Shakespeare is an African writer. ... The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. Dickens' characters are Nigerians. ... Literature may come from a specific place, but it always lives in its own unique kingdom."

The first Internet domain name was registered on this date in 1985 by a company called Symbolics.com. In 1985, only six companies held dot-com domains. By 1992, there were fewer than 15,000. In 2010, there were 84 million separate domains, and in late 2019 there were 144 million registered “.com” domains.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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