Photo by Camille Brodard via Unsplash
Hello WNBA-SF members,
Today we are writing to you about our poetry initiative.
In April 2021, we held the WNBA-SF Poetry Mixer with six poet members from our chapter. After this event, a conversation began about expanding and creating seasonal poetry programs to include poets and poetry lovers from all twelve of our Women’s National Book Association Chapters.
This initiative continued in November 2021 as we celebrated Native American Heritage Month with the event Five Poets Read in Honor of Native American Heritage Month.
Our most recent event, which took place this past April, was Looking Back, Looking Forward: A Reading with Jan Beatty and Dana Levin, an event hosted and organized by Iris Jamahl-Dunkle that featured the poets Jan Beatty and Dana Levin as they discussed and celebrated their inspirations.
This coming September, on the 14th, we are excited to be hosting a virtual social justice poetry reading and discussion. Join Joan Gelfand, Judy Juanita, and Andrena Zawinski on Zoom as they read and discuss poetry that seeks change in these troubling times.
After that, in November, we are once again hosting an event to celebrate Native American Heritage Month, featuring a selection of Native American poets who will read their poetry. As of now, the date for this event is to be announced.
That’s all for now! We wanted to keep in touch over the summer and leave you with some of our winning poems from the 2020 Effie Lee Morris Writing Contest.
Our 2020 selection is below:
1st Place
“The Blues”
Joan Gelfand
“I think there’s something in the pain of the blues, something deep, that touches something ancient in Jewish DNA.” -Marshall Chess, founder of Chess Records and producer of Chicago blues.
It was news to me that Jews took up the chore of indigo
Dyeing. It was messy, a job in which no noble
Deigned to engage. Fingers, forearms, clothes,
Stained from steaming vats.
“The stench,” they complained.
And, holding their noses they
Created a tone so rarified women fought for the right to buy.
A logical progression, this blue
Manufactured by Jews who, as you knew,
Never felt at home – and still don’t.
This blue, encoded in the bones, was royal, leaped centuries to David’s harp
His poems of yearning for God and Jonathan’s forbidden love.
These blues wept and bled, crept along diaspora routes
All the way to Dylan. Today, we mourn Pittsburgh Jews.
The same hands that mixed indigo, lent a hand to suffering wanderers, immigrants,
The displaced, murdered. They recalled their own treacherous crossings.
The blues. The Shoah. Dachau, Pittsburgh.
Indigo, David, bloodlines. Lines of blood
And still, an outstretched arm, an open hand.
2nd Place
“Seoraksan”
Lucille Lang Day
On a clear day from the top of Mt. Seorak,
which juts more than a mile into the sky,
you can see all the way to North Korea,
but Google won’t tell you exactly,
or even roughly, how far that is.
Sorry, your search appears to be
outside our current coverage area.
A polite way of saying, You can’t get
there from here. Our guide says
it’s 40 kilometers, about 25 miles.
Korea is seventy percent mountains
with forests of oak and red pine.
Intricately carved and painted,
Sinheungsa at the base of Mt. Seorak
is the oldest Zen temple in the world.
Nearby sits the Great Unification Buddha,
48-feet high, representing the people’s
wish for reunification of Korea,
but the guide will lose his job if he speaks
of this. No politics, his employer
has warned. It might upset the tourists.
So he turns to religion. Half of Koreans
are atheists, one-quarter Christians.
Inside the hollow statue are three pieces
of Buddha’s sari. Monks chant and pray.
3rd Place
Pivot
Joan Gelfand
Navigating traffic, corner of Vaci and Vorosmarty Square.
Soviet brutalist office faces off with a gothic cathedral.
Sweet smell of potato pancakes, brisket and a riot of pastries
Tempt passersby with big eyes and thin wallets.
We tangle of tourists, busking musicians and locals,
Traverse busy Pest. Across the river we rumble
To meet the funicular to bucolic Buda.
I step from the yellow tram,
My hand, clutching the guardrail.
Concern passes Simone’s face.
A cloud over sun.
My studied descent on the steep step
Signals a change in the atmosphere.
I watch my daughter silently calculate extra minutes
To reach our concert seats at Zeneakadamia.
Like a whisper, she pivots
Acquiescing to relinquish her role:
Child. Recipient of great and generous love,
The one protected.
An imperceptible half-turn,
A new vocabulary of care.
Her arm laced through mine,
She extends her hand, her
Strength, to steady me.
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