minneapolis update: peaceful protests last night, more protests today, Noem/Trump are attempting to escalate it, Walz calls for peaceful protests and “good trouble”, FBI takes investigation away from Minnesota, public school is cancelled for rest of the week after ICE enters campus and threatens staff/students at Roosevelt High School (the threatening was yesterday, the cancellation begins today).
And, just discovered this: Renee Nicole Good was a poet who won an award for this poem: On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs
bike: 30 minutes
basement
run: 2 miles
Icy outside, so inside on the bike and the treadmill. Important to get in some exercise for stress relief. Watched clips from the US figure skating championships while I biked, listened to Mood: Energy” while I ran. Songs: Panama/ Van Halen; We Got the Beat/ Go Gos; I did Something Bad/ Taylor Swift; My Sharona/ The Knack — an at least one other song I can’t remember now. It felt good to move, especially for the second mile of my run. A few times, I felt like I was floating. The thing I remember most: my bobbing shadow off to the side, in the shadows, near the old coal shoot — yes, my house is old enough to have a coal shoot in the basement.
Wow, this poem:
[from the time we were talking]/ Henri Meschonnic
Translated from the French by Gabriella Bedetti & Don Boes
from the time we were talking
to stones
we took on their
meaning their time and now
their memory is in us it
walks in our footsteps it moves
in our warmth we no
longer distinguish
between what they say and us
the time of the stones is us and
we are full of cries that we
leave in our wake like
stones
holding on to each other
to find among them our
path
This morning, barely one day after a woman was shot and killed by ICE here in Minneapolis, this poem speaks to me in a different way than it would have the day before. Before I would have thought about the time of stones as living in geologic time or talking to/with/as stones as echoes or Kafka’s parable of Prometheus in which Prometheus becomes part of the rock (“According to the second, Prometheus, goaded by the pain of the tearing beaks, pressed himself deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it.”) but now I’m thinking of the stones — like Emily Dickinson’s granite lip — as tombs and the dead talking (or trying to) talk to us:
If I couldn’t thank you,
Being fast asleep,
You will know I’m trying
With my Granite lip!