Here in New Bedford, the kind folks at Gallery X have donated space in their Frederick Douglass gallery for a 100 Thousand Poets for Change reading. The event will take place on the afternoon of Saturday, 9/24 from 2-5 PM.
So far, our lineup of readers (in alphabetical order) includes:
Bob Barboza
Jim Bobrick
Maggie Cleveland
Jaime Duquette
Bill Gauthier
Patricia Gomes
Everett Hoagland
Colleen Keenan
Nancy Morgan-Boucher
Mwalim *7)
Jake St. John
Tracy Tarvers
Rhonda Ward
This list is growing by the hour. Right now, I’m looking to hear from folks interested in reading (send an email to whalingcityreview@gmail.com for details), along with volunteers to help spread the word (creating and distributing posters or flyers, sharing this event listing through facebook ); also, helping with setup/takedown of chairs, and bringing snacks or drinks to the reading. Any help would be appreciated!
If you have connections with local schools, colleges, or youth groups, we could especially use your help. This is a great opportunity for young people to use their voices to talk about the kinds of change they want to see.
If you’re not from the area, it’s a great time to visit New Bedford as the Working Waterfront Festival featuring musicians, authors, demonstrations, and the world’s best fresh local seafood is taking place right down the street.
Hope to see you there!
change
I must confess that I came to this poem
the long way around,
as I sought to express
the multitude of things
for which new thinking –
change –
must be found;
the task was daunting,
with socio-economic and
political ills taunting
from every corner of life,
each filled with their own traps
and trappings,
too many for me
to do much useful mapping;
I stopped by the yard sale
that the three sisters,
Atrocity, Duplicity, and Mendacity
were having,
looked around,
bought nothing,
and thought,
this is fertile ground
for some change;
I wandered down Main Street
where all the Isms have their shops,
decorated with grand rhetorical flourishes,
although most of them have
turned out to be flops:
in one dark cavern
sat Sexism, old and grey,
but with lively eyes and hands
that never seemed to stop moving –
he was disarming, charming –
but underneath it all, I could sense
a smarminess that I found
quite alarming;
another fetid stall
seemed to have it all:
Ageism, Fascism, and Genderism
were all lined up against a wall;
seeing them so posed
made them seem rather small,
and ripe for change;
further down the way
a large crowd seemed to
swing and sway
in front of the joint exhibition
of Capitalism and Socialism
(Communism was out of the way),
although try as they did, neither one
seemed to win the day,
poised and posed
for the hand of change;
there were dozens more Isms
in all the other tiny spaces,
more hogwash than dogma
splattered across their faces,
and so I moved on, noting that
change is needed in all of their
rigid, stiff-jointed places;
and I came to Hunger and Homelessness,
huddled together due to a
change in the weather,
and the sight of those two,
who knew not what to do
made me
weep
and vow
to keep
promises for change yet again;
I saw Civility and Dignity,
lying naked, near death, in the street:
they were both too wounded to stand,
they were both too bloated to eat;
they seemed lost in a foreign world,
out-of-place curiosities at whom
jeers and derisions were hurled,
and I was so sad that I had
to look away;
and then I came upon the saddest sight of all,
four thousand stories high, with
nothing else as large, or as tall:
it was Loneliness looming like a dreadful pall;
and I thought, this is what most
needs change:
cure Loneliness, and we may cure all.
September 22, 2011. Written specially for reading at 100 Thousand Poets for Change, September 24, 2011, Gallery X, 169 William Street, New Bedford, Massachusetts.
Copyright © 2011, Ricky A. Pursley. All rights reserved.