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| Artist: P.K. Harmon Title: What We Did During the Threat of War Release #: MIF347 Format: Poem Release Date: 08/13/2017 What We Did During the Threat of War Chopped carrots and cucumbers-- lunches for the week. Took the trash out and burned cardboard boxes at sunset, the sky naturally lovely. Made pasta and ate it and washed and folded our clothes. It's Sunday. School has started and the new uniforms are bright red. I read The World on the Turtle's Back, an Iroquois creation myth, and thought a bit and looked at the sky a bit. There are beautiful souls everywhere, a consistency of history. I love the beauty of our small place and our lives in it. I hope everyone reads and spends time looking at the sky. But I know not everyone does. The threat of war is appealing to some; even everyday hatred from otherwise agreeable people can be insufferable. People can be insufferable. True. But today, Sunday, this little family chopped vegetables and ate pasta and watched a burning that was pretty. I think it looked pretty. And we are sleeping now and dreaming just the dreams of any quiet home. |
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Artist: P.K. Harmon Title: What Island Release #: MIF210 Format: Book Release Date: December What is it like to go abroad but not for vacation? What business do we have? What right-minded, haunted search for community, for family, for social justice takes us beyond our borders, domestic rooms, and familiar walls? What responsibility is there—those of us who've been to the two-thirds world, met the 99%, the uninsured, the impoverished—when we arrive and hear the planet's last message: pay attention, live on me. What W. S. Merwin has done to elevate ecology to the poetic, P. K. Harmon now takes—without bravado, without exaggeration—to the source, the sun, the tropics we've wanted, adorned with fantasies of leisure, then ruined. But also, despite any American devastation, what we've loved and longed for: "how blue / and how we turned from one / another into blue—all so blue / those old beaks cutting ahead /the flapping somehow grace too // in the flight—those two into / a deeper and deeper blue and I / drifted closer and closer // to the rough and sharp until / finally the heavy air that is / coming into a lovely silence." What island? The ultimate answer is earth. www.servinghousebooks.com |