Letting Go of What Cannot Hold You Back
by Bill Holm

Let go of the dead now.
The rope in the water,
the cleat on the cliff,
do them no good anymore.
Let them fall, sink, go away,
become invisible as they tried
so hard to do in their own dying.
We needed to bother them
with what we called help.
We were the needy ones.
The dying do their own work with
tidiness, just the right speed,
sometimes even a little
satisfaction. So quiet down.
Let them go. Practice
your own song. Now.

"Letting Go of What Cannot Hold You Back" from Playing the Black Piano by Bill Holm (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2004). Copyright © 2004 by Bill Holm. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions. milkweed.org (buy now)

It's the birthday of novelist and playwright Frank Chin, (books by this author) born in Berkeley, California (1940). He's the author of The Chickencoop Chinaman (1972), Donald Duk (1991), Gunga Din Highway (1994), and Born in the USA: A Story of Japanese America, 1889-1947 (2002).

In The Chickencoop Chinaman, Chin writes, "I am the natural born ragmouth speaking the motherless bloody tongue. No real language of my own to make sense with, so out comes everybody else's trash that don't conceive. ... I am a Chinaman! A miracle synthetic! Drip dry and machine washable."

It's the birthday of the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, born in Limoges, France (1841). When he was 13, he was apprenticed to a porcelain painter, and he saved money to take night classes in drawing and anatomy. One of his classmates was Claude Monet. Renoir and Monet and their friends wanted to reject tradition — to paint light and to paint from life instead of sketching everything out first in a studio. These ideas became known as Impressionism. Renoir used the techniques of Impressionism, but while most of his friends painted landscapes, he painted people.

It's the birthday of Karl Friedrich May, (books by this author) born in Ernstthal, Germany (1842). He's one of the best-selling German writers of all time, but his stories are mostly about the American Wild West, a place he'd never set foot in when he started writing the stories.

He first encountered the “cowboys-and-Indians” tales when he was in prison, and he began writing there, too. His most famous novels involve a German immigrant named Charley and his wise Apache chief friend named Winnetou. Since May had never traveled to America, he turned to guide books and maps and travel diaries to give him an idea of the landscape, and the rest he left to imagination.

His books were wildly popular in Germany and the rest of continental Europe, and it was on the basis of his books that many 19th-century Europeans formed impressions of the American West. The books are still popular and widely read in Europe. They've been translated into 30 languages and sold more than 200 million copies.

May himself finally made it to the U.S. to take a look around in 1908, several decades after he'd begun writing his stories. Though, he only made it as far west as Buffalo, New York.

It's the birthday of novelist and prolific composer Anthony Burgess, (books by this author) born in Manchester, England (1917), best known for his novel A Clockwork Orange (1962), set in futuristic London. He once said, "The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and a failed musician, short-sighted, color-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read."

On this day in 1570, Pope Pius V excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I of England. In a papal bull written in Latin, he declared that "Elizabeth, the pretended Queen of England and the servant of crime," was a heretic, and he announced that all of the queen's subjects were released from being allegiant to her. A decade before, the English parliament had passed a law that affirmed the Anglican Church's independence from the Roman Catholic Church. A lot of European monarchs had wanted to overthrow Elizabeth of England, but the pope wasn't particularly eager to, since she was fairly tolerant of Catholics' worshipping in private.

But after Catholic rebellions in northern England and in Ireland, the English government persecuted Catholics. Then the pope excommunicated Elizabeth, and then the English government started rounding up Jesuit priests and killing them, on the grounds that they were conspiring against England with Spain.

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

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