Blessed Samhein

In the season leaves should love,
since it gives them leave to move
through the wind, towards the ground
they were watching while they hung,
legend says there is a seam
stitching darkness like a name.

Now when dying grasses veil
earth from the sky in one last pale
wave, as autumn dies to bring
winter back, and then the spring,
we who die ourselves can peel
back another kind of veil
that hangs among us like thick smoke.

Tonight at last I feel it shake.
I feel the nights stretching away
thousands long behind the days
till they reach the darkness where
all of me is ancestor.

I move my hand and feel a touch
move with me, and when I brush
my own mind across another,
I am with my mother's mother.
Sure as footsteps in my waiting
self, I find her, and she brings
arms that carry answers for me,
intimate, a waiting bounty.

"Carry me." She leaves this trail
through a shudder of the veil,
and leaves, like amber where she stays,
a gift for her perpetual gaze. ~~ Annie Finch

Photo found here

Vote Like a Girl

Vote Like a Girl H/T to Hecate

Frank Rich - what happened to change we can believe in?

No matter how much Obama talks about his “tough” new financial regulatory reforms or offers rote condemnations of Wall Street greed, few believe there’s been real change. That’s not just because so many have lost their jobs, their savings and their homes. It’s also because so many know that the loftiest perpetrators of this national devastation got get-out-of-jail-free cards, that too-big-to-fail banks have grown bigger and that the rich are still the only Americans getting richer.

Read it
here

Roundtable - The Politial Battlefield

Little Isis is hosting a blogger roundtable regarding the political battlefield of politics in America at Liberal Rapture. Go visit and add your 2 cents to the comments. And, I hear she is serving popcorn and apple cider!

From the Dep't of: Stand by Your Man

Wife of Clarence Thomas asks Anita Hill to apologise

Ms Hill said she had no intention of apologising for her testimony in 1991 The wife of US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has asked Anita Hill to apologise for accusing her husband of sexual harassment 19 years ago, ABC News reports.

Virginia Thomas has confirmed that she left a voicemail message for Ms Hill at the weekend.

Ms Hill accused Justice Thomas of sexual harassment during his confirmation hearings in 1991.

Justice Thomas denied the allegations and was confirmed.

Ms Thomas said in a statement on Tuesday that she had left a message on Ms Hill's office answering machine with the intention of "extending an olive branch".

ABC News said it listened to the recording and reported that Ms Thomas asked Ms Hill to apologise.

"I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband," Ms Thomas reportedly said.

"So give it some thought and certainly pray about this and come to understand why you did what you did," ABC News quoted Ms Thomas' answerphone message as saying.

Ms Hill, a professor at Brandeis University near Boston, reported the recording to the campus public safety office.

"I have no intention of apologising, and I stand by my testimony in 1991," she told ABC News.

Ms Thomas, a conservative activist, said in a statement that she would be very happy to meet Ms Hill "and talk with her if she would be willing to do the same".

During Justice Thomas' confirmation hearing Anita Hill claimed that Justice Thomas had harassed her with graphic sexual remarks and pornographic films while they worked together at the US Equal Employment Opportunities Commission.

Story here

Third Party Rising

Go read Corrente
Here

photo found here

Needing one, I invented her - - -
the great-great-aunt dark as hickory
called Shining-Leaf, or Drifting-Cloud
or The-Beauty-of-the-Night.

Dear aunt, I'd call into the leaves,
and she'd rise up, like an old log in a pool,
and whisper in a language only the two of us knew
the word that meant follow,

and we'd travel
cheerful as birds
out of the dusty town and into the trees
where she would change us both into something quicker - - -
two foxes with black feet,
two snakes green as ribbons,
two shimmering fish - - - and all day we'd travel.

At day's end she'd leave me back at my own door
with the rest of my family,
who were kind, but solid as wood
and rarely wandered. While she,
old twist of feathers and birch bark,
would walk in circles wide as rain and then
float back

scattering the rags of twilight
on fluttering moth wings;

or she'd slouch from the barn like a gray opossum;

or she'd hang in the milky moonlight
burning like a medallion,

this bone dream, this friend I had to have,
this old woman made out of leaves.

- Mary Oliver