Poem with an Embedded Line by Susan Cohen
by Barbara Crooker

When the evening newscast leads to despair,
when my Facebook feed raises my blood pressure,
when I can't listen to NPR anymore,
I turn to the sky, blooming like chicory,
its dearth of clouds, its vast blue endlessness.
The trees are turning copper, gold, bronze,
fired by the October sun, and the bees
are going for broke, drunk on fermenting
apples. I turn to my skillet, cast iron
you can count on, glug some olive oil,
sizzle some onions, adding garlic at the end
to prevent bitterness. My husband,
that sweet man, enters the room, asks
what's for dinner, says it smells good.
He could live on garlic and onions
slowly turning to gold. The water
is boiling, so I throw in some peppers,
halved, cored, and seeded, let them bob
in the salty water until they're soft.
To the soffrito, I add ground beef, chili
powder, cumin, dried oregano, tomato sauce,
mashed cannellinis; simmer for a while.
Then I stir in more white beans, stuff the hearts
of the peppers, drape them with cheese and tuck
the pan in the oven's mouth. Let the terrible
politicians practice / their terrible politics.
At my kitchen table, all will be fed. I turn
the radio to a classical station, maybe Vivaldi.
All we have are these moments: the golden trees,
the industrious bees, the falling light. Darkness
will not overtake us.
 

“Poem with an Embedded Line by Susan Cohen” by Barbara Crooker from Some Glad Morning  © 2019. Aired by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press. (buy now)

It's the birthday of Austrian-born English novelist Eva Ibbotson (books by this author), born in Vienna, Austria (1925). She has followed two separate paths: as a writer of romance fiction and as a writer of witty and imaginative ghost stories for young adults. Her romance novels include A Countess Below Stairs (1981) and Magic Flutes (1982), which was chosen as the best romance novel in Britain for the year 1983 by the Romance Novelists Association.

Her romance novels include memorable minor characters, including Mrs. Proom in A Countess Below Stairs, who tosses geraniums out of windows and keeps her appendix in a jar as a keepsake. Her young adult novels include Which Witch (1982) and The Secret of Platform 13 (1994).

She said: "After years of writing magazine stories and books for children, I am trying hard to break down the barrier between 'romantic novels' and 'serious novels' which are respectfully reviewed. My aim is to produce books that are light, humorous, even a little erudite but secure in their happy endings. One could call it an attempt to write, in words, a good Viennese waltz!” Eva Ibbotson died on October 20, 2010.

Marie Smith Jones, chief of Alaska’s Eyak people, died on this date in 2008. Jones was the last fluent native speaker of the Eyak tongue; it died with her and thus became the first Native Alaskan language to be declared “extinct.” Jones had devoted her life to the preservation of her language: recording it, helping to create a dictionary, and trying to formalize its grammar so it could be taught to others. Two years later, a French college student named Guillaume Leduey came forward and said that he had been teaching himself Eyak for several years, using DVDs made available by the Alaska Native Language Center. Leduey came to Alaska for the first time at the age of 21, and returned the following year to help set up Eyak language workshops in Anchorage and Cordova. He is now considered fluent, but since there are no native speakers of the language, and since no one else has achieved more than symbolic proficiency, the language is still considered “dormant.”

On this day in 1525, a group of Swiss Protestants, originally known as the Swiss Brethren, formed their first congregation. The Brethren, who faced persecution for their resistance to civil authority, later came under the leadership of a Dutch minister named Menno Simons, from whom they received their common name, the Mennonites. In the United States, the Old Order Amish are among the spiritual descendants of the original Mennonite congregation. The first Mennonites in the New World arrived and settled in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1683. The United States now has the largest Mennonite population in the world.

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

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