My Sweetness, My Sorrow

My Sweetness: Ruby and I during our weekly mentoring session--and I have to say the mentoring goes both ways--Ms Ruby, 16 now, and I sharing thoughts about the imagist poetry of H.D. and the Circe tale as Homer tells it. I have been struggling to find my way back to this site, to force my words again into this mix of private public touch. Not because there is nothing to mourn for or rage about or to remain obdurate in our demand to take note and find actions of resistance, but because there is so much. I am thinking now of the three young Russian women of Pussy Riot who have been imprisoned on the outer limits of their Russian geography, how much the Putinites would like us to forget them, Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina Samutserich, and how we will not forget them, even as they are disappeared into the incarceration black hole of the Russian prison system. The lightness of their touch, their thin disruptive bodies now exiled from our ken but oh how foolish, how brutal Putin looks as he struts his masculinity over their youthful bodies. Somewhere over the steppes a strum is carried on the winds, young women's voices, fresh and brave, mocking the hollow iron man.  

Ms Ruby, in her new dress, celebrating her 16th year in our Melbourne home