people

A Poem & A Picture (On Meeting Robert Hayden in a Dream)

/ Janna Hill / Leave a comment

On Meeting Robert Hayden in a Dream

by Abdul Ali

Winter Daybreak

here among them   the dead   the others   the aliens

I see you without    coke bottle glasses   a wavy comb over

your nose buried inside a notebook  over-

 

flowing with strange sightings   men and women

without a homeland   a library to shelve histories

dreams   the names of rare flowers  fruits  baby names

 

exiled from their villages   learning to say hello

with accents thick   with nostalgia   for their purple planets

here UFO sightings aren’t so spectacular

 

border crossing is quintessentially american  universal

crowds gather in squalid ghettoes where every country is a city

every city is a verse  & every verse echoes “Those Winter Sundays”

 

where a New World opens up where all the martians are welcome

at the writing table with their fountain pens & swollen digits & you

 

whispering

 

what took so long?

Weekly Photo Challenge (Foreign)

/ Janna Hill / 10 Comments

This week’s photo challenge foreign fits right in to my current thought process, as in foreign language. As I mentioned in a recent post I speak Hick and a little French. My grasp of foreign languages is limited; thank goodness my imagination is not.

I sometimes watch Spanish television. No, I do not speak Spanish – that may be why I find it so entertaining. I like to guess at what they’re saying. My husband enjoys certain Latin channels because they show cleavage and midgets. I don’t know what it is about that combination but it humors him and he laughs at the plump jolly man dancing to La Cucaracha.

I try to discern what they are saying, I don’t want to fluently comprehend – that would take the fun out of my guessing game. Husband doesn’t even try to guess, his thoughts are, “They’ve got boobs, little people, a happy fat man dancing and a song about a cockroach – who cares what they are saying.”

Foreign Snapshot

This snapshot came from a program I was watching this morning. I gather the conversation had something to do with men cheating on women or leaving them and monogamy being a realistic expectation.

I’m guessing that to some monogamy is a foreign concept.