• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content

daveread news & views

root for honesty, she's undefeated

  • Phran Read
  • 97 years ago…
  • Contact
  • Poems
  • Prose
  • Photos
    • Cape Cod 2021, Life on the Edge
    • Peeskawso Peak, Monument Mountain, July, 2021
    • Read good books club at Fair Haven, June 2021
    • Marconi Station, Cape Cod, Aug. 2020
    • Birds at sea, Sandwich, Cape Cod
    • Cape Cod August 2020
    • Fort Hill, Cape Cod National Seashore

Adam Zappa

Bud Dillyn butts in

Ed. note: My essay, Is Mom Dead, Too?, turned up in this week’s Best American Poetry blog, as a discrete article, with a note that it is reprinted “from the archives – 2011.” After a search of my various docs and blogs, I see that I had posted it as a “comment” to a poem there, which received a generous comment of its own from the author of the poem. Up until moments ago, this page has been n draft status on this blog – now it’s published! Bud Dillyn is a rather blunt nom de plume, one of many I’ve hid behind.

“The Two-Party System” [by Walter Carey]

The hand

The Republicans are like
a drowning man
who pulls down
his rescuer thinking
he’s pulling him to safety

and the Dems are like
the girl on the shore
who pulls down
her boy-cut hipsters
when no one’s watching

— Walter Carey

Posted by Jenny Factor on September 21, 2021 at 11:16 AM in Feature, From the Archive, Walter Carey | Permalink

Comments

Is Mom Dead, too?

In the 1960s, the United States of America was home to a hundred million monarchies, lorded over by moms and dads who wielded absolute power over their children, ruling as if by divine right. Anti-war and anti-draft movements were full of mothers who were willing to do anything to keep their baby boys from being fed into the war machine like so much coal into a locomotive.

Americans concluded the second world war in 1945. We never came home from war, however; without the Euro-phobic FDR in the White House, we failed to return. Without a single vote cast by a single American citizen, the arsenal of democracy was transformed into an imitation empire. We re-modeled ourselves on the regime whose greedy lust for power produced Common Sense, the pamphlet and user’s manual the United States of America is rooted in.

We established a democratic republic to take the place of nepotism and inherited power, which are as sensible as tweedledum and tweedledee and all other English nursery rhymes.

It is as if the country that had been called upon to drop what it was doing at home – plenty good, some very bad, so that it could rescue the world from itself, simply claimed ownership of the thing it had rescued. (Red Cross lifeguard training warns that drowning persons try to drown their rescuers)

Midway through America’s make-or-break decade, April 1966, Time magazine published an issue with a cover designed to shock:

Is
God
Dead?

As a leading organ of the business roundtable, Time thereby copped out loud to the obvious truth. Back-to-back global holocausts are all the evidence any reasonable person needs to illustrate the bankruptcy of the global god business.

After all, Franco’s Spain, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany (and France), were heavily Roman Catholic. And, of course, so was England, before it quit sharing with Rome and re-branded itself as church and state.

The crowning glory of human evolution is the social construct we know as the family. No truth is more self-evident than this: absolute authority over every baby born vests in the mother and the father, because their love for each other produces the everyday miracle of birth.

As dreamy as that sentence sounds to you, please consider what a fairy tale you will need to dream up to convince yourself that authority over people is vested anywhere else.

The Constitution of the United States guarantees us the right to believe anything we want. People choose to believe that you can take what the pope tells you to the bank, so long he says it on Peter’s chair; other people believe that their tribe is the teflon one and all other tribes have bad stuff stuck on them; others pitch the idea that if you die while killing a certain class of strangers, you will have metaphoric copulation over and over and over and over.

The point is that the job of answering the questions that make children afraid of the dark, the job of telling the fairy tales that prepare children for the metaphoric death of sleep, is the parents’ job. The state, since it would contain an unlimited number of mutually exclusive propositions and divine edicts, from Zoroastrianism to Q-anon, must have no truck with any of them.

Henry VIII not only got away with wife-killing and murder but he scored good seats in heaven, too, because he was church and state. We, in the new world, have gotten as close to him as we want, and it was right in the damned White House. It was a successor of Henry VIII’s who burned it to the ground. There’s your original 9/11 – and that bin Laden roams free today.

All animals have the same number of senses, except human beings. We were singled out for the gift of common sense, the thing that allows us to create common wealth, which alone enables the peace and security that guarantees a good night’s sleep.

Common sense is the original viral pandemic, thank god!

Posted by: Bud Dillyn | September 25, 2021 at 10:07 AM

Thank you for this fascinating comment, Bud Dilyn. Probably it should be the post while my little poem should be the footnote.

Posted by: Walter Carey | September 25, 2021 at 11:57 AM

Phran Read

Beadwrok by Phran Read

Phran and Dave Read

Phran Swazee

With the passage of Phran, now
I feel the pull of Death, jealous king
who keeps his subjects each alone.

With sister Martha, we made a wild Injun
tribe against the wicked world outside –

We drank, we danced, we smoked
and laughed, we cried. God rest your
merry soul, Phran dear.

What’s in a name?

The proper French pronunciation of her improperly spelled name was among the many jokes I shared with Phran, hence the title of the memorial poem.

Phran, Martha and I together hoisted the anti-war, pro-pot banner during the dark, dismal 1960s, when that sort of behavior could get you arrested. Could??? It did land Martha in jail, she was perp-walked to the hoosegow along with seven other peaceniks at the end of a massive anti-war demonstration in Oswego’s East Park, August, 1970.

Pueblo Thanksgiving

Beadwrok by Phran Read


Phran’s beadwork jewelery was so expert, and so beautiful that it was available for purchase inside the ancient Taos Pueblo. It was a great thrill for me to enjoy a Thanksgiving feast in 1980 in the pueblo home of Frank and Sassie, an old, old couple who were Phran’s great friends. (Thanksgiving is celebrated Sept. 30, feast day of St. Jerome, patron saint of Taos pueblo.)

Let there be music

Music comprises much of the glue that held us together, not only Bob Dylan, but also Dave Van Ronk; on an LP of his, a gift from Phran, is a song called “Random Canyon.”

I promise you that Phran wants you to crank it up and sing along (it won’t take long to learn the lyrics) as you gaze at this random sample of photos that feature our beloved blond bombshell, Phranny Read:

And now an earlier poem, which may, by now, seem like an after thought!
Afterparty

We don’t bid our dead Godspeed to the afterlife
the way we did, in churches, where weeping echoes
off walls or gets absorbed by pipe organ blasts,
while incense spirals from an acolyte’s censer,
and the minister intones his woeful sound.

After we lowered our dearly departed into the ground,
back at the church hall there would be baked ham,
casseroles, and pies, supplied by neighbors and aunts.

Today, in function rooms, where event planners
have laid out aromatherapy diffusers and flowers,
we get right on with the afterparty and mingle,
nibbling fruit, veggies, and tiramisu, while a playlist,
synced to a slideshow, loops in the background.

Dave Read

Cape Cod 2021, Life on the Edge

Show of hands, please – who wants the window on car rides, goes for an aisle seat in the theatre? Me too! That identifies us as the brave people, the ones who enjoy life on the edge. (Click to enlarge/slideshow)

Cape Cod August 2021; Dave Read photo.
Cape Cod August 2021; Dave Read photo.

Instead of peering down the rabbit hole of psycho-genetics, I’m content to declare that my inner-edgieness is a birth-effect, the natural result of being born on the edge – the southeast edge of Lake Ontario, in a place that once also graced the northwest edge of these United States.

The shore of that lake would be the locale of most summertime adventure, all the way until 1960, when I was eleven and my family vacationed on Cape Cod, which is as edgy a place as you could imagine!

Cape Cod Canal boatspotting, August 2021; Dave Read photo.

This is the northern terminus of the Cape Cod Canal, in Sandwich, home also to the Shawme-Crowell state park. Where I’ve parked my chair is the last patch of shade before the Canary Islands!

Peeskawso Peak, Monument Mountain, July, 2021

Peeskawso Peak,

Matthew and I visited the ancient and the brand new at the same time, Saturday July 24, 2021 when we summited* Monument Mountain on the northern outskirts of Great Barrington, MA. With a contour as identifiable as Mount Greylock’s, Monument Mountain is about as ancient a thing as you’ll find in the broader neighborhood of the Berkshires. (*At my age, to ascend higher than a few flights of stairs, without a nap break, constitutes a summiting.)

Matt on Monument Mountain, the Berkshires, July 2021; Dave Read photo.

And now it’s own most distinguishing characteristic, which was called Squaw Peak for at least a century and a half, has been re-branded as Peeskawso Peak, in a token nod of apology to the Mohican people, who are due much more from the descendants of the Williams family that dispossed them of so much of their land and forced their emigration to Wisconsin. (Yes, same Williams as set up the town and college).

Poet Dave Read takes the waters at the literary Lourdes of the Berkshires. Matt Lavalette photo.
Poet Dave Read takes the waters at the literary Lourdes of the Berkshires. Matt Lavalette photo.

When I got wind of the re-branding, I wrote this poem, to replace this one.

Peeskawso Peak

Come along William Culllen Bryant,
let us beckon Melville, Hawthorne to convene,
along with Umpachanee and Konkapot – all the best

Shall meet at Monument Mountain, and follow
Mohican Monument Trail, through the seasons
of the soul, to Peeskawso* Peak, and there to rest.

Dave Read

*Mohican for “virtuous woman.”

Read “Monument Mountain,”, by William Culllen Bryant.

Read good books club at Fair Haven, June 2021

Kate and Mike Halpin, and Caitlin and me convened the first gathering of the book club and never said a word about Harper Lee books, the conversation was so good! It was a beautiful day, rain free in an otherwise rainy week.

This shows that, while un-civil war tears at the fabric of the nation, relatives can travel to Fair Haven from Virginia, Massachusetts, and nearby Fulton – primarily for the joy of family, secondarily for chin-wagging on an Olympian level, and thirdly to partake of picnic cuisine! (Also, plenty fun photos at the book club page!)

This gathering took place a few days before Caitlin’s 50th birthday, which was my father’s 106th – July 2. That is the day the Declaration of Independence was approved by 12 of the 13 colonies – New York hadn’t made up her mind, yet!

These pictures (click ’em) show that there is plenty of room for you and your crew next time!

Read good books club

And here, Caitlin captures a sublime sunset from the Bluff the night beofre:

Fair Haven sunset on the bluff on Lake Ontario
  • Phran Read
  • 97 years ago…
  • Contact
  • Poems
  • Prose
  • Photos

© 2022 Dave Read WordPress by ReadWebco