Resistence (Thursday Doors)
Fear is a door–
a threshold leading to passages
full of dead ends
Fear has a map–
close your eyes and you can follow,
surrounded and alone
Fear employs
subterfuges and deceptions,
false pretenses
Courage is a bridge–
a hand to hold voices
singing together
Look for the window–
open it
I was walking on East 91st Street last week when I noticed a small demonstration. After seeing the reason for the assembly, a celebration of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, I took a few photos and walked on to my destination. When I downloaded the photos this week I thought to investigate further.
It turns out that the gathering was in support of a petition to rename this block, where the Russian Consulate is located, “Alexei Navalny Way”, as a reminder one year after his death of his courage in support of the Russian people against the despotism of Putin. This follows a bill introduced in the Senate by Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., to name a portion of the street near the Russian ambassador’s residence in Washington “Alexei Navalny Way”.
My message in case I am killed do not give up. Don’t, you can’t give up.
Both Mish at dVerse and Anupama at W3 provided prompts asking us to depict emotions using personification. I went two lines over the W3 request for no more than 12 lines, but I felt the coda was needed.
Read more about Navalny here and here.
And be sure to visit Thursday Doors, hosted by Dan Antion, for more doors from all over the world.
The collages are from the Kick-About prompt inspired by artist Kiki Smith.
Queens Doors near PS 1 (Thursday Doors)
wander
ing the streets look
ing for doors—not lost ex
actly but unfamil
iar with this strange
terrain
a dog
walker stops to
let me take my photo–
smiles, nods, moves on—no one
questions me, my
motives
tourist?
this is not my
neighborhood, so kind of–
but even at home, I
can’t stop looking
at doors
After getting off the #7 train on my way to PS1 recently, I decided to take a side street around to the museum. Almost all the buildings in the immediate neighborhood are big modern glass buildings, but this street always got my attention because it reflected what the neighborhood used to be. I photographed a few doors along the way.
This interesting building was situated in the middle of the block, between groups of houses. I like the Deco-ish design.
Wonderful bay windows on these houses plus an interesting geometric door design.
I went to see the Ralph Lemon exhibit which was closing soon. The paintings he calls “mandalas” were my favorites.
Also on display were a number of Lemon’s huge paintings full of tiny vignettes taken from life, history, and the news. Here’s one with a door.
Selma’s prompt for Tanka Tuesday this week was to write a series of Badger’s Hexastitch poems about what we like to do in Spring. I like to look for doors any time of year, but the weather is better for it in Spring than in Winter.
Any time of year is a good one to visit Thursday Doors, hosted by Dan Antion, for more doors from all over the world.
The Mirror Shield Project at the Met (Thursday Doors)
“As artists, we live on the periphery. But we are the mirrors. We are the reflective points that break through a barrier.” -Cannupa Hanska Luger
ourselves reflected
in what we see–are mirrors
windows? thresholds? doors?
serpentine lightlines
ask who we are–revealing
our actions—speaking out loud
These mirror-shield photos were taken from a video I watched several times in an exhibit of Native American art at the Met. You can find a the whole video and more information about the project here. A summary from the exhibit is below.
I’ve written a mondo, which is the Tanka Tuesday form proposed by Melissa for this week, but I’ve used the theme of window proposed by Dora at dVerse–at least in a slanted way.
The windows and doors outside the Met reflect its own landscape, seen in its own always changing light.
As a footnote, the Times published a list of forbidden words for American government paperwork now. “Native American” is a among them, along with Black, Latinx, LGBT, and head-scratchingly, woman and female. If I don’t exist, they can’t collect taxes from me, right?
And be sure to visit Thursday Doors, hosted by Dan Antion, for more doors from all over the world.
Inspired by Kiki Smith
My contribution consists of collages and a poem. Birds and the cosmos…perfect themes for me.
Jacamar (Draw a Bird Day)
aerial hunter
following gossamer wings
through tropical wilds
conjures echoed reflections
inside a luminous dance
The Jacamar is a bird family consisting of 18 species residing on the edges of lush tropical rainforests in Central and South America. Resembling hummingbirds, they are closely related to Old World Bee-eaters.
Characterized by metallic jewel-like feathers and long bills and tails, nearly all species have zygodactyl feet–two toes in front, two in back–which help them to better grasp branches.
Jacamars are insectivores, spending most of their time perched on branches waiting for flying insects–butterflies (their preferred prey), moths, bees, wasps, dragonflies, and beetles–to pass by. They bang their captures on branches to kill them and dislodge their wings before eating them, and seem to have learned which insects secrete chemicals that make them unpalatable.
Jacamars nest in tunneled burrows excavated in sandy riverbanks, around the rotting roots of fallen trees, and sometimes in termite mounds.
Habitat loss is a continuing threat but only one species–the three-toes jacamar–is endangered.
My poem is a tanka for Colleen’s Tanka Tuesday, where this week’s prompt is to use synonyms for create and bright.
Spiritual (Thursday Doors)
How many doors must I enter to find
myself? What universe exists between
open and closed? Is it a sacred space?
Is any space sacred? Is nothing? If I
cross the threshold can I return? Where
is sanctuary in this disintegrating world?
I am looking for a circle, an ensō left open
to the free exchange of every kind of light.
The shadows make shapes that try to pull
me in. I can neither hold onto earth nor
rise into the heavens. I am caught, neither
conduit nor messenger. I contain too much
emptiness, both living and dying I do not
wish to reside in the hallowed spaces of
deities in which I do not believe. Yet I am
surrounded by currents of invisible forces.
I am looking for a circle, an ensō left open
to the free exchange of every kind of light.
And so I stand once again before another
doorway, a vestibule which contains
another passage to another closed door,
uncertain of my context, unwilling to embark
upon another journey that leads to an en
closure where the only exit available is exile.
I am looking for a circle, an ensō left open
to the free exchange of every kind of light.
My poem was inspired by some writing I did, after reading a post by Rajani Radhakrishnan that started with Monet and his painting of the same landscapes over and over and spilled into writing four different poems in response to the same thing. My response was to take the same image and write about it seven days in a row. I chose the Ansel Adams photo below, Church, Taos Pueblo, New Mexico.
My approach was different each day, yet somehow I kept coming back to spirit. And so the Murisopsis prompt for W3 this week, to write about spirituality in a form that included a refrain, was perfect for combining my different observations about these doors into one poem. I looked at a lot of forms that included a refrain, but settled on the Bop, because of its affinity for questions.
And of course I am always photographing sacred spaces and their mysterious doorways.
My answer to the prompt is that I keep asking questions. Still, I know what I’m looking for.
I am looking for a circle, an ensō left open
to the free exchange of every kind of light.
Read about the ensō here.
And be sure to visit Thursday Doors, hosted by Dan Antion, for more doors from all over the world.
March 2025
The path the earth follows chooses itself. The
imprint it leaves becomes something else. Perfect
metaphors decompose and then transition
into new patterns
remembering where they have traveled, marking
the way they have gone while gathering inside
the circle of return. The dark silences
hold the essences
of growth–seed, flower, fruit–messages written
in the spaces between, where being threads
itself through woven correspondences on
invisible wings,
on land-bound bodies, rocks altered into cairns,
fragile bridges. We dig to reclaim our blood
lines, opening veins that sail the earth, vessels
currented with light.
What we thought was lost echoes us back, rooted
into the center of the earth’s ancient womb–
Do you remember? Can you see now? it asks,
all at once alive
A sapphic stanza chain for the new month, inspired by Kim’s prompt at dVerse to write about one of the four elements. No matter what humans are doing, the earth will follow its seasons.
I also wanted to note that my poem “Undocumented”, inspired by the work of Jacob Lawrence, was published this week in Collaborature. Thanks Melissa! You can read it here.
Catching up
We recently (11/29/24) lost Perry, my daughter’s dog. About a month later we went to the Montclair Township Animal Shelter and took home Sally, an American Bulldog mix with a wonderful temperament. She just turned eight years old and by gosh, it’s a wonderful thing. A lady, not a peep out of her (I’ve only heard her bark a couple of times), happily eats dog food (we cooked for Perry), and so on…I love her. Things are calming down a bit here.
Here are a couple of finished clam shells.
Picture taken right out of my window where I work! It’s a pricey bush where the birds like to congregate. I saw a robin in there the other day.
With love to my WordPress community.
Nina
It takes a Village/Thursday Doors
I went down to Greenwich Village last weekend to see an art exhibit at the Grey Gallery at NYU. The Village was my second neighborhood in NYC, after my year in the dorm at FIT, and the one I moved back to after a short time in Brooklyn. I lived in the West Village, and though I often visited the Washington Square area, I did not usually roam east of Broadway.
So I walked right by the Grey Gallery and ended up going around the block to find it again. On the way I passed this graffiti covered doorway, and of course I needed to photograph it.
I also did not notice the Village Voice building the first time I passed it. As I’ve written before, The Village Voice was my source of news throughout my 20s–I didn’t start reading the NY Times until much later. I thought it was totally defunct, but it turns out they have an active website, and evidently sometimes still publish a print version, though I’ve never seen one in my recent journeys around the city. I was happy to find that they still cover local news, as well as national and international news, like the recent protests that the mainstream media are busy ignoring. They also still seem to cover the arts and culture. Their current staff list of writers is impressive too.
The Voice has gone through a number of owners and iterations, and stopped publishing altogether in 2017, which is why I did not realize it had returned in 2021. It occupied this building from 1991-2012. You can rent office space there now, if you so desire. I’m glad they kept the name, and the doors, which appear to have Athena, in her non-warrior persona as the goddess of wisdom and justice, as a guardian.
Here’s a colorful food truck that was parked across from the Village Voice building. It, too, has a door.
There were lots of people out on this beautiful if somewhat chilly day, and I saw two gatherings–a peaceful and joyful one for trans rights in Sheridan Square–and a peaceful marching one that turned onto Broadway ahead of me as I was walking crosstown, which had a lot of signs and chanting but was too far away for me to hear or see clearly what it was about. We still have voices; it’s nice to see people exercising their right to use them.
My poem is a taiga, a combination of photo and tanka, for Colleen’s new Tanka Tuesday challenge, with a request that we use a black and white photo.
And look for more doors at Thursday Doors, hosted by Dan Antion.
When we say a voice
is lost, what is it we mean?
Does it not linger
in the uncontainable
echoes holding on to Truth?
method two madness 
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