(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Morning Open Thread: When What You Would Change You Cannot Change [1] ['Greg Dworkin'] Date: 2026-10-12 “Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.” — Bertolt Brecht, German playwright, lyricist, and poet “Poetry has never been the language of barriers, it’s always been the language of bridges.” – Amanda Gorman, American poet, activist, first National Youth Poet Laureate (2017-2018) “The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.” – Seamus Heaney, Irish poet and playwright; 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature recipient _________________ Welcome to Morning Open Thread, with daily posts from a MOTley crew of hosts who choose their own topics from a wide-open range: often music or poetry, sometimes history — anything and everything from Apples to Zoology! We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in our open forum. That’s a feature, not a bug. Other than that, site rulz rule. We’re always looking for new contributors, so contact officebss or RandomNeuron if you’d like to give it a try. Meanwhile, grab your cuppa, and join in! ☕ _________________ 13 poets born in October, some emigrants and some born-here Americans, while others hail from South America, Europe, and Southeast Asia, but all writing about life on our Big Blue Marble _________________ October 11 _________________ 1854 – Adela Zamudio born in Cochabamba, Bolivia; Bolivian poet, feminist, essayist, and educator, cited as the most famous Bolivian poet, and the founder of the Bolivian feminist movement. Her first poem to be published was “Two Roses” when she was 15 years old, under her pen name, Soledad. Her first book, Poetic Essays, wasn’t published until 1887. Zamudio taught at Escuela San Alberto, and later became a director of a girls’ high school, which was renamed Liceo Adela Zamudio in her honor. She was an advocate of higher education for women, an outspoken critic of the Catholic Church’s paternalism, and campaigned for women’s rights, separation of church and state, civil marriage, legalization of divorce, and the labor movement. A Bolivian Catholic women’s group publicly condemned her. She was one of the founders of Feminiflor, a Bolivian feminist magazine, compiled a spelling book in Quechua for use in schools, and composed many poems in the Quechua language. In 1926, she was awarded a medal by Bolivia’s president for her writing. She died from a pulmonary condition at age 73 in June 1928. Her birthday is now honored in Bolivia as Día de la Mujer Boliviana. The Husband by Adela Zamudio Thirsting in the desert of ambition, in search of recognition he holds dear, a man stands at the threshold of glory; to his wife he says, “Stand back and stay here.” And when he resumes his arduous quest, his courage failing, his fortunes adverse, “Stay by my side,” he beseeches his wife, “for so you did swear, for better or worse.” – translated by Laura Nagel, translation © 2021 _________________ 1897 – Joseph Auslander born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; American poet, anthologist, translator, and novelist. He graduated from Harvard in 1917, and attended the Sorbonne in Paris (1921-1922). He married poet Audrey Wurdemann in 1932. Auslander was the first to be appointed as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1937-1941) – the title was changed to Poet Laureate Consultant in 1985, and is now commonly referred to as U.S. Poet Laureate. He is best-known for The Unconquerables, a collection of poems published in 1943, addressed to the German-occupied countries of Europe. His other collections include Sunrise Trumpets; Letters to Women; More than Bread; Riders at the Gate; and The Islanders. Auslander died of a heart attack at age 67 in June 1965. Abandoned by Joseph Auslander Vacant and ghostly and content with death, Once a man’s hearthtree; now the haunt of bats; Once a cradle creaked upstairs and someone sang The terribly beautiful songs young mothers know. It is hard, even though you hold your breath, To step without disturbing the loosened slats And livid plaster…. Go! for a whisper rang Through the bleak rafters: Take up your things and go! “Abandoned” is in the public domain. _________________ 1948 – Becky Birtha born in Hampton, Virginia; African American poet and children’s author whose heritage also includes Cherokee and Catawba; known for poems and short stories depicting African American and lesbian relationships. Her family moved to Philadelphia when she was four, and she attended the Philadelphia School for Girls, a college prep public magnet school. She earned a BS in Child Studies at the State University of New York in Buffalo, and a MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Birtha has worked as a teacher, a librarian in a law library, and as an adoption agency representative. In 1983, her work appeared in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, and her first book was published, a short story collection called For Nights Like This One: Stories of Loving Women. Her first poetry collection, The Forbidden Poems, was published in 1991. Her children’s book Grandmama’s Pride won the 2005 Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators Golden Kite Honor Book for Picture Book Text. The Healing Poem by Becky Birtha There is a healing power in the sky. For times when you cannot weep— travel on foot a morning’s measure; find a vast unbounded field of sky then, spend the whole of a day beneath it. In your house keep one window free panes shining full with blue or gray— you must never stray far from the sky. There is a healing power in the land. When what you would change you cannot change, take tool to hand and work the earth: spade deep and turn it over, let it crumble, sift out every stone. Near your home, set off a stretch of ground; feed it, keep it growing. If you must leave the land, do not leave for long. “The Healing Poem” from The Forbidden Poems, © 1993 by Becky Birtha – Seal Press _________________ October 12 _________________ 1896 – Eugenio Montale born in Genoa, Italy; Italian poet, translator, literary critic, journalist, and editor. He worked as an editor for the Florentine publisher R. Bemporad in the 1920s and 1930s. In the late 1940s, he moved to Milan, and became a contributor and the music editor for the newspaper Corriere della Sera. In the 1950s and 1960s, he also worked as a reporter. In 1975, he was honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died of heart failure at age 84 in September 1981. Again and Again I Have Seen Life’s Evil by Eugenio Montale Again and again I have seen life’s evil: it was the strangled brook, still gurgling, it was the curling of the shriveled leaf, it was the fallen horse. I have known no good except the miracle that reveals the divine Indifference: it was the statue in the drowsy trance of noon, the cloud, the cruising falcon. “Again and Again I Have Seen Life’s Evil” translated by David Young in Eugenio Montale Selected Poems, © 2004, published by Obeline College Press _________________ October 13 _________________ 1896 – Arna Wendell Bontemps born in Alexandria, Louisiana, to a Creole family; American poet, novelist, and librarian, notable figure in the Harlem Renaissance. The Bontemps family moved to Los Angeles when Arna was three years old, and settled in the Watts district. After graduating from college in 1923, he worked for the post office, until he moved to New York in 1924. He published several novels, including God Sends Sunday, Sad-Faced Boy, and Drums at Dusk. Bontemps was also the editor of Great Slave Narratives and The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, and co-editor of The Poetry of the Negro with Langston Hughes. He died of a heart attack at age 70 in June 1973. The Daybreakers by Arna Wendell Bontemps We are not come to wage a strife With swords upon this hill. It is not wise to waste the life Against a stubborn will. Yet would we die as some have done: Beating a way for the rising sun. “The Daybreakers” © 1927 by Arna Wendell Bontemps, published in the anthology Caroling Dusk, edited by Countee Cullen – Harpers & Brothers _________________ 1938 – Askia M. Touré born as Rolland Snellings in Raliegh, North Carolina; African American poet, essayist, political editor, educator, playwright, and a leading voice of the Black Arts Movement. He was under the care of his paternal grandmother in La Grange, Georgia, until age six, and later joined his family in Dayton, Ohio, but his early years and frequent later visits to Georgia and North Carolina greatly influenced his early poetic imagery. During high school in Dayton, he sang “Doo Wop” and considered a career in music, but after graduation he joined the US Air Force instead (1953-1959). He then moved to New York and studied visual arts at the Art Students League (1960-1962), then worked as an illustrator for Umbra Magazine, where he met many poets, writers, and activists. He was on the editorial board of Black America (1963-1965), then became editor-in-chief of the Journal of Black Poetry. He also co-founded with Larry Neal the newspaper Afro World. He began teaching African History at San Francisco State in 1967. His poetry collections include: Juju: Magic Songs for the Black Nation; From the Pyramids to the Projects: Poems of Genocide and Resistance, winner of the 1989 American Book Award for Literature; Dawnsong!: The Epic Memory of Askia Toure. His poems also appeared in several anthologies. He was a member of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and of RAM (Revolutionary Action Movement). He also participated in the rise of the Black Panther Party. In 1996, Touré was honored with the Gwendolyn Brooks Lifetime Achievement Award. A Poem For Certain Cats (for the negro soldiers) by Askia M. Touré Hey you — Black boy! You with the submachine gun! What you think you doing in them wet rice paddies, man? This don’t look like Birmingham to me. Hey you — Black boy! You with the M-1 on your shoulder! That whitey at your side looks just like the one who shot your uncle Clyde in Mississippi: ask him and see. (looks just like him to me). See those folks there? Those young yellow cats in black peasant pajamas? Well, they’re fighting whitey’s sons to keep their land (Ma-a-an, they’re about your age too). See those young whiteys at your side? They’re fighting those yellow cats in black to keep the land for daddy’s corporation….. ….What you fighting for, Black boy? The land don’t belong to you, and “daddy’s corporation” is strictly OFF-LIMITS. Hey you — Black boy! Explain it to me; I’m puzzled. Why police dogs and bombed-out churches only make you mad enough to slaughter YELLOW folks you’ve never seen. Hey you — Black boy! Everybody’s waiting for your answer. “A Poem For Certain Cats (for the negro soldiers)” from Juju: Magic Songs for the Black Nation, © 1970 by Askia M. Touré – Third World Press _________________ October 14 _________________ 1867 – Masaoka Shiki born as Masaoka Noboru on Japan’s Shikoku Island; Japanese poet, author, and literary critic during the Meiji period. One of the four great haiku masters, along with Matsuo Bashō, Yosa Buson, and Kobayashi Issa. He died of tuberculosis at age 34 in 1902. 3 Haiku by Masaoka Shiki . . for love and for hate I swat a fly and offer it to an ant. . . autumn is leaving tugging each others’ branches two pine trees . . a light newly lit — first winter drizzle Masaoka Shiki: Selected Poems, translation © 1998 by Burton Watson – Columbia University Press _________________ 1949 – Katha Pollitt born in Brooklyn, New York, American essayist poet, critic, and feminist. She writes a bimonthly column, “Subject to Debate,” for The Nation magazine, and is the author of four essay collections and two books of poetry. She was The Frost Place poet-in-residence in 1977, and her poetry collection Antarctic Traveller won the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award. Her 2014 nonfiction book, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights is her unapologetic and wholehearted defense of abortion as a moral right and a force for social good. Two Cats by Katha Pollitt It’s better to be a cat than to be a human. Not because of their much-noted grace and beauty— their beauty wins them no added pleasure, grace is only a cat’s way of getting without fuss from one place to another— but because they see things as they are. Cats never mistake a saucer of milk for a declaration of passion or the crook of your knees for a permanent address. Observing two cats on a sunporch, you might think of them as a pair of Florentine bravoes awaiting through slitted eyes the least lapse of attention— then slash! the stiletto or alternately as a long-married couple, who hardly notice each other but find it somehow a comfort sharing the couch, the evening news, the cocoa. Both these ideas are wrong. Two cats together are like two strangers cast up by different storms on the same desert island who manage to guard, despite the utter absence of privacy, chocolate, useful domestic articles, reading material, their separate solitudes. They would not dream of telling each other their dreams, or the plots of old movies, or inventing a bookful of coconut recipes. Where we would long ago have frantically shredded our underwear into signal flags and be dancing obscenely about on the shore in a desperate frenzy, they merely shift on their haunches, calm as two stoics weighing the probable odds of the soul’s immortality, as if to say, if a ship should happen along we’ll be rescued. If not, not. “Two Cats” from The Mind-Body Problem, © 2009 by Katha Pollitt – Random House _________________ 1988 – Ocean Vuong born as Vuong Quốc Vinh in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; Vietnamese American poet, essayist, and novelist. His grandfather was a white American serving during the Vietnam War, who met and married a Vietnamese girl. They had three children, including Vuong’s mother. In 1975, his grandfather, on a visit to the U.S., was cut off from the family when Saigon fell to communist forces. His grandmother separated her daughters into orphanages, concerned for their survival. When Ocean was two, the family fled Vietnam after a police officer became suspicious that his mother was part white, and subject to the regime’s discriminatory policies. They eventually reached a refugee camp in the Philippines, then gained asylum and migrated to the U.S., settling in Hartford, Connecticut. His mother renamed him Ocean after they came to America. His father abandoned the family, but Vuong later found his American grandfather. At age 11, he was the first child in his family to learn to read. By 15, he was working on a tobacco farm illegally, which he wrote about in his 2019 debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. After struggling in school, he tried community college, then enrolled as a marketing major, but quickly decided it wasn’t for him. He earned a BA in English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, then an MFA in poetry at New York University. His second novel, The Emperor of Gladness, was a best-seller in 2025. Among his many awards, he has won the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets, the T.S. Eliot Prize, and was short-listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize for On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. His other poetry collections include Burnings and Time is a Mother. To My Father / To My Unborn Son by Ocean Vuong The stars are not hereditary. —Emily Dickinson There was a door & then a door surrounded by a forest. Look, my eyes are not your eyes. You move through me like rain heard from another country. Yes, you have a country. Someday, they will find it while searching for lost ships . . . Once, I fell in love during a slow-motion car crash. We looked so peaceful, the cigarette floating from his lips as our heads whip-lashed back into the dream & all was forgiven. Because what you heard, or will hear, is true: I wrote a better world onto the page & watched the fire take it back. Something was always burning. Do you understand? I closed my mouth but could still taste the ash because my eyes were open. From men, I learned to praise the thickness of walls. From women, I learned to praise. If you are given my body, put it down. If you are given anything be sure to leave no tracks in the snow. Know that I never chose which way the seasons turned. That it was always October in my throat. & you: every leaf refusing to rust. Quick. Can you see the red dark shifting? This means I am touching you. This means you are not alone—even as you are not. If you get there before me, if you think of nothing & my face appears rippling like a torn flag—turn back. Turn back & find the book I left us, filled with all the colors of the sky forgotten by gravediggers. Use it. Use it to prove how the stars were always what we believed they were: the exit-wounds of every misfired word. “To My Father / To My Unborn Son” from Night Sky with Exit Wounds, ©2016 by Ocean Vuong – Copper Canyon Press _________________ October 15 _________________ 1940 – Fanny Howe born Fanny Quincy Howe in Buffalo, New York; prolific American poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, and civil rights activist.Her sister Susan Howe, her husband Carl Senna, and their daughter Danzy Senna are also writers. She has published over 20 poetry collections. Her book Selected Poems was honored in 2001 with the Lenore Marshal Poetry Prize for most outstanding poetry book of 2000, and she received the 2009 Ruth Lily Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Foundation. She died of complications from a surgery at age 84 in July 2025. Her other poetry collections include The Amerindian Coastline Poem; One Crossed Out; On the Ground; Second Childhood; and Love and I. Unday by Fanny Howe From no nowhere not near the sea on blue field flax the cemetery’s absolutely solitary you and you and a third of a pound of bread for supper in the refectory where I would die of hunger if you–if soon–if on this unday–one undoing would be undone “Unday” from Gone © 2003 by Fanny Howe –University of California Press _________________ October 16 _________________ 1863 – Katharine Lee Bates born in Falmouth, Massachusetts; American author who wrote for both adults and children, poet, editor, and professor of English and American literature at Wellesley College. Her father, a Congregational minister, died a few weeks after she was born, and she was raised by her mother and an aunt, both graduates of Mount Holyoke. Bates graduated with Wellesley College’s second class in 1876. Though now only known for the lyrics of America the Beautiful, she was influential in the development of American literature as an academic specialty, and wrote one of its earliest college textbooks. Bates was also one of the organizers of Denison House, a college women’s settlement house. She spoke and wrote extensively on social issues, including the struggles of women, workers, people of color, and immigrants. She was appalled by the carnage of WWI, was against American isolationism, and very active in attempts to establish the League of Nations. She even crossed party lines to vote for Democrat John W. Davis because of Republican opposition to American participation in the league. She died of pneumonia at age 69 in March 1929. Glory by Katharine Lee Bates At the crowded gangway they kissed good-bye. He had half a mind to scold her. An officer’s mother and not keep dry The epaulet on his shoulder. He had forgotten mother and fame, His mind in a blood-mist floated, But when reeling back from carnage they came, One told him: “You are promoted!” His friend smiled up from the wet red sand, The look was afar, eternal, But he tried to salute with his shattered hand: “Room now for another colonel!” Again he raged in that lurid hell Where the country he loved had thrown him. “You are promoted!” shrieked a shell. His mother would not have known him. “Glory” from The Retinue and Other Poems, by Katharine Lee Bates – published in January 1918 _________________ October 17 _________________ 1942 – Duane Ackerson born in New York City; prolific American author of speculative fiction and poetry. He was Director of Creative Writing at Idaho State University. His published works include Recycle this Poem: Poems on ecology; The Eggplant & Other Absurdities; UA Flight to Chicago; and the textbook Writing Poetry. He died in Salem, Oregon at age 77 in April 2020. Weathering by Duane Ackerson You told us about chairs made for out of doors, rough-hewn and left outside so the joints could fill and grow together in the rain. These chairs could last fifty years on the front porch, you said, and fall apart with a year of the parlor. Watching you at dinner, tan face, knotted arms, your wife pale as fresh cut timber, I could see you knew what sort of carpentry you were. “Weathering” from Weathering, © 1973 by Duane Ackerson – West Coast Poetry Review _________________ 1965 – Anna Leahy born in Illinois, daughter of attorney Mary Lee Leahy; Anna Leahy is an American poet, nonfiction writer, editor, and academic. Her first full-length poetry collection, Constituents of Matter, won Kent States’ Wick Poetry Prize in 2006. She has also won top prizes for her essays. She and her husband Douglas R. Dechow co-founded the blog Lofty Ambitions (2010-2017), about aviation and space. Leahy directs the Tabula Poetica Center for Poetry and MFA in Creative Writing program at Chapman University in Orange, California. In 2013, she was named editor of TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics. She has also edited and co-authored books about teaching creative writing. Her poetry collections include: Turns About a Point; Sharp Miracle; Aperature; and What Happened Was. On the Brink by Anna Leahy This year, the universe says you are old. Panic is a wrinkle that goes only so far: through, the day, around the corner, the bend. Promises don’t keep the story in orbit. Order creates us, and then there’s chaos: atypical hyperplasias in the heavens, hemorrhages in the hollows of the galaxy, little extinctions everywhere. In the body of the world, in the world of the body, living become window weather. Lips press the pane, this clear incision in the world, in the worry. We are glaziers. We shallow glass, life’s shards in the throat, in the heart How does one get used to this urgent in-between-what’s-been-and-what’s-to-be? “On the Brink” from If in Some Cataclysm, © 2024 by Anna Leahy – Glass Lyre Press ______________ 📚☕ [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/10/12/800110745/community/morning-open-thread-when-what-you-would-change-you-cannot-change/ 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/