(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Morning Open Thread: Morning Open Thread: Before You Know What Kindness Really Is [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2026-03-09 ________________________________________________________ “We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.” — President John F. Kennedy ________________________________________________________ “… this bullet had no innocence, did not wish anyone well, you can’t tell us otherwise by naming it mildly, this bullet was never the friend of life, should not be granted immunity by soft saying — friendly fire, straying death-eye, why have we given the wrong weight to what we do?” – Naomi Shihab Nye, “For Mohammed Zeid of Gaza, Age 15” ________________________________________________________ Welcome to Morning Open Thread, a daily post with a MOTley crew of hosts who choose the topic for the day's posting. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum. That’s a feature, not a bug. Other than that, site rulz rule. Morning Open Thread is looking for contributors — either occasional, or weekly. If interested, please contact officebss or Ozarkblue for more information ________________________________________________________ So grab your cuppa, and join in. __________________________________________________________ March is Women’s History Month, so this week’s poets are women from 7 different countries, and the 2 centuries in which women have made the most advances toward an equality with men ________________________________________ March 8th ________________________________ 1859 – Helen Gray Cone born in New York City; American poet, short story writer, critic, anthologist, and professor of English literature. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the Normal College of New York in 1876. Her first poetry collection, Oberon and Puck: Verses Grave and Gay, was published in 1885, followed by The Ride to the Lady in 1891. She co-edited Pen-Portraits of Literary Women with Jeanette L. Gilder in 1887, provided notes for Houghton Mifflin’s Riverside editions of several Shakespeare plays, and her history of American literature appeared in 1890. In 1899, she was elected as the first woman professor at Normal College, which became Hunter College in 1914. Her other poetry collections are: Soldiers of the Light (1910); A Chant of Love for England (1910); and The Coat Without a Seam (1919). She retired from teaching in 1926, and died at age 74 in January 1934. Hunter College has awarded the Helen Gray Cone Fellowship annually since 1927. A Memory by Helen Gray Cone . Though pent in stony streets, 'tis joy to know, 'Tis joy, although we breathe a fainter air, The spirit of those places far and fair That we have loved, abides; and fern-scents flow Out of the wood's heart still, and shadows grow Long on remembered roads as warm days wear; And still the dark wild water, in its lair, The narrow chasm, stirs blindly to and fro. . Delight is in the sea-gull's dancing wings, And sunshine wakes to rose the ruddy hue Of rocks; and from her tall wind-slanted stem A soft bright plume the goldenrod outflings Along the breeze, above a sea whose blue Is like the light that kindles through a gem. . “A Memory” from The Ride to the Lady, by Helen Gray Cone – published in 1891 ________________________________ 1892 – Juana de Ibarbourou born in the Cerro Largo department of northeastern Uruguay; an early South American feminist and pantheist, her poetry is full of nature imagery and eroticism. At age 17, she published Derechos femeninos (Women’s Rights), a prose work. In 1979, she died at age 87 in Montevideo, Uruguay. Juana Fernández Morales de Ibarbourou was a Uruguayan poet known also as “Juana de América”. She was the 1959 winner of the Premio Nacional de Literatura in Uruguay, and was nominated four times for the Nobel Prize in Literature during her lifetime. She authored many collections, including Lenguas de diamante (Cooperativa Editorial Limitada, 1919) and Oro y tormenta (Zig-Zag, 1956). She died on July 15, 1979. The waves (Las olas) by Juana de Ibarbourou . If they wanted to, all the gulls on this beach could join their wings to make an airplane–or a ship– to carry me to some other shore . . . . Through the dense mystery of night we’d venture, skittering over the water. With a scream of triumph, my gull-ship would alight on land and greet the dawn. . Walking on virgin soil I’d hold out my hands to the rising sun like two newborn wings. Two wings, to lift me to a new life! . English translation © by Liz Henry “Las olas” from Antología poética by Juana de Ibarbourou – Cultura Hispánica, 1970 ________________________________ 19?? – Jayne Jaudon Ferrer born on March 8 in Wauchula, Florida “sometime after dinosaurs and before the Internet.” Longtime resident of Greenville, South Carolina. Her books of poetry include Dancing With My Daughter, A Mother of Sons, and a New Mother’s Prayer. She is the editor and host of Your Daily Poem.com. Sunday Afternoon at Lake Poway by Jayne Jaudon Ferrer . Wall Street, Washington, and wars don’t exist on this day that’s pure perfection. Those of us who passed up a nap, a ballgame, a tryst, who decided the term paper/laundry/brake job could wait, have received a princely reward. September sun glints off rowboats drifting past, warms the rocks on tawny hills that rise around us, streaks the emerald grass with olive shadows. Charmed, we stroll benignly on the sand, cast lazy fishing lines in cobalt ripples, trade treats for tricks with bombastic, greedy ducks, sit sated with the beauty and the bliss. Here, Monday seems miles away; world peace seems possible. . © 2018 by Jane Jaudon Ferrer ________________________________________ March 9th ________________________________ 1892 – Vita Sackville-West born at Knole House, Kent, England, the ancestral home of her father, Lionel Sackville-West, Baron Sackville. An only child, Vita Sackville West was prevented from inheriting her father’s title or family lands and estate because she was a girl – they went to her father’s younger brother instead. She became an English novelist, poet, journalist, diarist, and garden designer, and not only had affairs with both men and women, but she shocked society by writing about them. Portrait of a Marriage, a memoir of her love life, including her marriage to Harold Nicolson and her relationship with Violet Keppel, was so controversial it wasn’t published until 1973, over a decade after her death. She published more than a dozen collections of poetry and 13 novels during her life, and wrote a column for The Observer newspaper (1946-1961). Her novel All Passions Spent was a best-seller in 1931, and is probably her best-known work today. Sackville-West died at age 70 from abdominal cancer in June 1962. The Greater Cats by Vita Sackville-West . The greater cats with golden eyes Stare out between the bars. Deserts are there, and the different skies, And night with different stars. They prowl the aromatic hill, And mate as fiercely as they kill, To roam, to live, to drink their fill; But this beyond their wit know I: Man loves a little, and for long shall die. . Their kind across the desert range Where tulips spring from stones, Not knowing they will suffer change Or vultures pick their bones. Their strength's eternal in their sight, They overtake the deer in flight, And in their arrogance they smite; But I am sage, if they are strong: Man's love is transient as his death is long. . Yet oh what powers to deceive! My wit is turned to faith, And at this moment I believe In love, and scout at death. I came from nowhere, and shall be Strong, steadfast, swift, eternally: I am a lion, a stone, a tree, And as the Polar star in me Is fixed my constant heart on thee. Ah, may I stay forever blind With lions, tigers, leopards, and their kind. . “The Greater Cats” from Collected Works of Vita Sackville-West – Delphi Classics, © 2022 ________________________________ 1926 – Anna Adams born as Anna Theresa Butt in Richmond, Surrey, but grew up in Northwood, a town NW of London; English poet, ceramicist, and sculptor. At age 13, Adams won a scholarship to Harrow School of Art, where she earned the National Diploma in Design (NDiD) in painting in 1945. She then studied sculpture at Hornsey College of Art, exhibiting in the Young Contemporaries show in London, and completed her second NDiD. After she married, she continue to use her maiden name professionally, working part-time in jobs as a designer or art teacher. In 1961, she started writing prose and poetry, and her work began appearing in magazines, newspapers, and pamphlets. Her first poetry collection, A Reply to Intercepted Mail, was published in 1979. In all, she would publish 20 books, chapbooks, and pamphlets. She won several prizes, including the 1976 Arnold Vincent Bowen Prize, the 1984 Lincoln Open First Prize, and the 1986 Rhyme International First Prize. Adams was poetry editor of The Green Book (1989-1992), and a member of the Poetry Society. She died at age 85 in October 2011. Water Remembers by Anna Adams . When frost draws fishbone and fern on windowpanes, water is running through memories, tracing forms like starry mosses, muscles and intricate brains. Water has been there. Thus, as liverwort tongues, it overlapped; thus it feathered the coalmeasure forest fronds, and thus it was combed by mermaidens' cold webbed hands. Water remembers bloody adventures as Man, and many deaths from which it emerged unscathed, as from the fire water ascends as a ghost and descends as a shower. Water reminds us nothing that truly exists can ever be lost. It recapitulates its countless loves, having been present at every winesodden wedding and virgin's deflowering. Water confetti falls on the winter forest, loading all trees alike with spurious blossom, heavy as fruit, that bends then breaks the branches. Crutches of water prop every plant in the forest. Making, unmaking, water is omnipresent and taken for granted; being, perhaps, mere ambassador, deputy, servant of something forgotten. . “Water Remembers” from Green Resistance: New and Selected Poems © 1996 by Anna Adams – Enitharmon Press ________________________________ 1947 – Keri Hulme born in Christchurch, New Zealand; New Zealand novelist, poet, and short story writer who also used the pen name Kai Tainui. The eldest of six children, her family heritage included “Māori, Orkney Islanders, Lancashire folk, Faroese and Norwegian migrants.” Hulme was the first New Zealander to win the Booker Prize, in 1985 for The Bone People. She was also the first author to win the Booker for a debut novel. Her father died when she was 11 years old, and she began writing poetry and short stories after that. The family spent their holidays with her mother’s parents at Moeraki, a fishing village on New Zealand’s South Island, which she called her turangawaewae-ngakau (standing-place of my heart). After high school, she worked as a tobacco picker, spent four terms at the University of Canterbury in Chirstchurch, but left because she felt out of place, and went back to the tobacco fields. She kept writing, taking nine months off to write full-time in 1972. Returning to earning a living, her jobs included fish-and-chips cook, a winder at a woollen mill, mail deliverer, pharmacist’s assistant, proofreader, newspaper journalist, and assistant director on documentary and children’s TV shows. Some of her writing was published in journals and magazines, sometimes as Kai Tainui. She became a writer-in-residence at the University of Otago in 1978, and a visiting poet at Hawaii’s East-West Center in 1979. She submitted her manuscript of The Bone People to publishers for 12 years before it was accepted by the Spiral Collective, a New Zealand feminist literary and arts collective. It won the 1984 New Zealand Book Award for Fiction before being honored with the Booker Prize. Her poetry collections include The silences between (Moeraki Conversations); Lost Possessions; Strands; and Stonefish, a mix of poetry and short stories. She suffered from dementia toward the end, and died at a care home at age 74 in December 2021. Trust by Keri Hulme . Here, where we live by the rubbling sea we know our tides and why we should be constantly crunched crouched and sluiced and rearranged and hoping – o hoping for a new moon to be free . “Trust” was used as a poster by the Phantom Billsticker series for National Poetry Day, © 2012 by Keri Hulme ________________________________________ March 10th ________________________________ 1861 – E. Pauline Johnson, who also performed and sometimes published under her paternal grandfather’s Mohawk name Tekahionwake (“double wampum”), was born on the Six Nations Reserve, Canada West. Prolific Canadian poet, short story writer, and created the autobiographical two-part act she performed across Canada, and on tours in the U.S. and Europe. Her father, a Mohawk who was both a hereditary and elected chief of the Six Nations. was fluent in six Indigenous languages, and often worked as a translator. Her mother was an English-born Canadian from Bristol. Johnson's poetry was published in Canada, the United States, and Great Britain. Pauline Johnson’s works helped define Canadian literature, and she made an indelible mark on Indigenous women's literature. Many of her poems and short stories appeared in Canadian newspapers and magazines. Her published works include: Gems of Poetry; The Week; Saturday Night; and Canadian Born. She died at age 51 of breast cancer, three days before her birthday in March 1913. Good-Bye by E. Pauline Johnson . Sounds of the seas grow fainter, Sounds of the sands have sped; The sweep of gales, The far white sails, Are silent, spent and dead. . Sounds of the days of summer Murmur and die away, And distance hides The long, low tides, As night shuts out the day. . “Good-Bye” from E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake: Collected Poems and Selected Prose, by E. Pauline Johnson – published by University of Toronto Press in 2002 ________________________________ 1979 – Ama Codjoe born “with roots in Memphis and Accra,” raised in Youngstown, Ohio; African American poet, social justice activist, and dancer. She received the Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellowship from New York University, and earned an MFA in Dance Performance from Ohio State University. Codjoe was a Cave Canem fellow, a Black Bottom Tuesday Poet, and Associate Director of Professional Development for the DreamYard Art Center. Her poetry collection, Blood of the Air, won the 2019 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, and Bluest Nude: Poems won the 2023 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Diamondback by Ama Codjoe . Like an organ coiled deep inside or a lasso of lightning and high noon, the rattlesnake traveled the length of my spine, sunning itself inside me. Then death—some call it god—drew a diamond on the snake’s back, and marked my chest with feeling. How godly the two of us were, shaking what was hollow. Dirt stained the front of my blouse. I felt venom rise in my ears. I heard the snake molting, turning my skin bronze and flawless. This is how I became a woman, sun rattling across my back, dust glittering my tongue, the snake’s tail whirring. . “Diamondback” from Bluest Nude: Poems, © 2022 by Ama Codjoe – Milkweed Editions ________________________________________ March 11th ________________________________ 1917 – Nancy Fotheringham Cato born in Glen Osmond, South Australia; Australian writer, poet, historical novelist, biographer, playwright, and environmental and conservation activist. As Nancy Cato, she published more than 20 historical novels, and several biographies and poetry collections. A fifth-generation Australian, she studied English literature and Italian at the University of Adelaide, graduating in 1939, then completed a two-year course at the South Australian School of Arts. She was a cadet journalist on The News (1935- 1941), and an art critic (1957- 1958). After her marriage, she and her husband travelled extensively overseas until they settled down to raise their daughter and two sons. She was a founding member of the Lyre-Bird Writers, a collective of Australian writers who published verse by Australian writers. She was active in the Fellowship of Australian Writers and the Australian Society of Authors during the 1950s and 1960s. Her most famous work is a trilogy of historical novels, All the Rivers Run, published in three volumes – All the Rivers Run; Time, Flow Softly; and But Still the Stream. Her book on unplanned development (environmental vandalism) in the town of Noosa, Queensland, where she lived for most of her adult life, was first published in 1979. In 1984, she was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for services to literature and the environment, and she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by the University of Queensland in 1991. Nancy Cato died of a stroke at age 83 in July 2000. The Road by Nancy Cato . I made the rising moon go back behind the shouldering hill, I raced along the eastern track till time itself stood still. . The stars swarmed on behind the trees, but I sped fast at they, I could have made the sun arise, and night turn back to day. . And like a long black carpet behind the wheels, the night unrolled across the countryside, but all ahead was bright. . The fence-posts whizzed along wires like days that fly too fast, and telephone poles loomed up like years and slipped into the past. . And light and movement, sky and road and life and time were one, while through the night I rushed and sped, I drove towards the sun. . “The Road” © by Nancy Cato from the Cambridge A-Level Poetry anthology – 2025 edition ________________________________________ March 12th ________________________________ 1951 – Susan Musgrave born in Santa Cruz, California to Canadian parents; prolific Canadian poet, children’s author, novelist, memoirist, essayist, and anthologist. She left school at 14, running away to Berkeley, California. Her first poems were published when she was 16. Her collection, Songs of the Sea-Witch, appeared in 1970. Her first husband was a lawyer, her second husband was an accused drug smuggler, and she married her third husband in the prison where he was serving a sentence for bank robbing, after reading the manuscript of his novel. Though granted full parole in 1987, he was convicted again for bank robbery in 1999. Her first novel, The Charcoal Burners, reflected her interest in West Coast mythologies and feminism. Musgrave now lives in Haida Gwaii, an archipelago in British Columbia. She was nominated four times for the Governor-General’s Literary Award. Her 20 poetry collections include: Entrance of the Celebrant; The Impstone; Kiskatinaw Songs; A Man to Marry, A Man to Bury; Right through the Heart; What the Small Day Cannot Hold; Origami Dove; and Exculpatory Lilies. Hunger by Susan Musgrave . When I go to the river with my trouble, and sit under the big trees, I see my girl again. . Her dress is the colour of soft butter. Her hunger tastes of whiskey and rain. . Behind us is darkness, and darkness lies ahead. The worst kind of pain is to miss someone you’ve never known, and worse, never will. The emptiest days are loveliest, only people with desires can be fooled, and I have none. . “Hunger” from Hunger; The Poetry of Susan Musgrave, © 2025 by Susan Musgrave – Wilfrid Laurier University Press ________________________________ 1952 – Naomi Shihab Nye born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a Palestinian father and an American mother; poet, songwriter, children’s author, novelist, and editor. In 1966, when she was 14, her family moved to the West Bank because her paternal grandmother was sick. In 1967, just before the Six-Day War broke out, they returned to the U.S., settling in San Antonio, Texas. She earned a BA in English and world religions from Trinity University in 1974. Nye teaches creative writing at Texas State University, and also runs writing workshops for children and teens. Nye was honored for her body of work with the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature, and in 2019, the Poetry Foundation chose her as the Young People’s Poet Laureate for the 2019-2021 term. In addition to editing anthologies of verse by contemporary poets, she has published over two dozen collections of her own poetry. Her debut young adult novel Habibi was named an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, and honored with a Jane Addams Children’s Book Award, given for children’s books which advance peace and social equality. Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye . Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever. . Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. . Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend. . “Kindness” from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, © 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye ________________________________________ March 13th ________________________________ 1920 – Ann Darr born as Lois Ann Russell in Bagley, Iowa; American poet, teacher, pilot, and WWII WASP (Women’s Airforce Service Pilot). “I was one of the lucky women who were part of the experiment that proved women could fly as well as men.” She published eight poetry collections, including Riding with the Fireworks; St. Ann’s Gut; Do You Take This Woman; The Myth of a Woman’s Fist; and Confessions of a Skewed Romantic. She recorded some of her poems for the Library of Congress Contemporary Poets Series, and many were published in over 70 journals and 30 anthologies. She was featured in the Museum of Television and Radio in New York City, where she wrote and performed radio scripts for NBC and ABC before moving to the Washington, D.C. area. She taught at The American University in Washington, D.C. and at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Late in life, Ann Darr was stricken with Alzheimers, and died at age 87 in December 2007. An Old Film on TV at the Reunion of the Fifinellas by Ann Darr . I watch the girl, Hair flying, Leap onto the wing Of an AT6. I know who she is, I have made that leap. I watch those planes in formation, precede their moment of peeling off with a delicious NOW and pull away, my body arcing, that small smile coming up from my toes and settling on my mouth. O clear arc in the air, when did I begin forgetting I can fly? . Fifinella was the official mascot of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) during World War II, designed by Walt Disney Studios and based on a character from Roald Dahl's book The Gremlins. She was a female gremlin with horns, goggles, and red-and-yellow flying gear, symbolizing the women pilots who flew military aircraft to support the war effort. “An Old Film on TV at the Reunion of the Fifinellas” from St Ann’s Gut: Poems by Ann Darr, © 1971 by Ann Darr – William Morrow & Co ________________________________________ March 14th ________________________________ 1949 – Lynn Emanuel born in Mount Kisco, New York; American poet and academic. She earned an MA from City College of New York, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop. She lived, worked, and traveled in North Africa, Europe, and the Near East. Emanuel is Director of the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series, and a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. Her husband, anthropologist Jeffrey H. Schwartz, named the early primate Microadapis lynnae after her. Her poetry collections include: Oblique Light; Hotel Fiesta; The Dig; Noose and Hook; and The Nerve of It, which won the 2016 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. What Grieving Was by Lynn Emanuel . That was not the summer of aspic and cold veal. It was so hot . the car seat stung my thighs and the rearview mirror swam . with mirage. In the back seat the leather grip was noosed by twine. . We were not poor but we had the troubles of the poor. . She who had been that soft snore beside the Nytol, open-mouthed, . was gone, somewhere, somewhere there was a bay, there was a boat, . there was a scold in mother’s mouth. What I remember best . is the way everything came and went in the window of my brief attention. . At the wake I was beguiled by the chromium yellow lemon pies. . The grandfather clock’s pendant of unaffordable gold told the quarter hour. . The hearse rolled forward over the O’s of its own surprise. . “What Grieving Was” from The Dig, © 1984, 1992, 1995 by Lynn Emanuel – University of Illinois Press _____________________________________________________________ G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies After a bombing in Gaza — war’s aftermath looks much the same no matter where it happens [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/3/9/2372255/-Morning-Open-Thread-Morning-Open-Thread-Before-You-Know-What-Kindness-Really-Is?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/