News from the Muse

 The Muse of Lament and Dissent  III

Weeping Madonna
(with credit to Sara Spaulding Phillips)

Introduction 

An Agony of Witness and Empathy

I release you, my beautiful and terrible
fear. I release you. I release you. You were my beloved
and hated twin. But now, I don’t know you
as myself.

—Joy Harjo “I Give You Back”

Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light

If you are an American who pays attention to the news, July 2025 has brought a chaos of terror and grief, and an agony of witness and empathy. July 4th brought the signing of the Big Bad Bill, which cut Medicaid for poor people in order to lower taxes for the rich. To witness the slashing and burning of institutions that have supported our American way of life for decades, is to grieve for the world as we’ve known it. To witness hardworking immigrants, who pick our fruit and vegetables, build our houses, tend our gardens, serve us in restaurants and hotels, take care of us in old age, live in terror of being snatched out of their lives and families by masked secret police, without IDs or due process, brings tears of empathy and bursts of rage. How did America, the land of the free, morph into such a hell realm?

To witness civil servants, who have worked for the government for many years, on whom we have depended for help with Social Security, Health, Education, Homeland Security, Emergency Assistance, be fired, or live in terror of being fired, arouses our empathy and horror. Who stole our government and its agencies from us—our access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

To witness the humiliation of great universities, attacked for allowing their students to gather and speak freely, takes many of us back to our own student days, when we demonstrated for Free Speech. Many schools have had their scientific research funds withdrawn as punishment-- for whom? That is a blow to the health and wellbeing of every American, who, should they fall ill, will not be able to benefit from the latest medical advances. 

Who will be held responsible for the monstrosity our country has become in just six months of the Berserker’s reign of terror?

Enter the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein. Is this some sort of Deus Ex Machina? An act of God intent on haunting the Berserker and his minions? The Man of Teflon seems unable to shake the dirty secret of his long association with a pedophile—a trafficker of young girls and women--sexual prey for rich and powerful men. The ghosts of some of those women, who died before their time, are wailing in the Underworld, seeking to rouse those of us who will listen. Their souls require our witness and our empathy.

Commentary on the Poem: Unease Listening to my Guide in Tallinn

The edgy title of Virginia Chen’s wide ranging and penetrating poem sets the reader up for the discomfort of facing difficult truths. Those truths come in two voices, speaking from very different histories and lands. We begin in Tallinn, the capitol of Estonia, where a tour guide lectures the visitors about a history unknown to most Americans--his country’s struggle with Russian Tsars, and how that tiny country prevailed: One million Estonians sang against the Soviets day and night.

The guide scolds the tourists from the West for being afraid to “stand up for freedom” and warns: Do nothing and you will lose everything.

The second voice is that of the poem’s speaker, a “traveler for forty years,” as, back in an America changed drastically by a new administration, she struggles with what has become of her country. Married to the birthright son of parents born in China, she comes home to the shock of seeing immigrants being “arrested by agents wearing masks.” She wonders about her husband’s safety, about her own standing—her grandparents came from Europe. In a powerful leap that takes us beyond “unease,” the speaker’s blood pressure rises, sending her to the emergency room. She sums up her medical crisis deftly: American rage gave me the political bends.

She makes an astute psychological assessment of the land of her birth: We have no ancient enemy outside ourself.

Which means, one gathers, that we are doomed to project our shadow on an enemy within. But, being a traveler, who has learned courage from her Estonian tour guide’s lecture, the speaker ends her poem:

I sing in praise of singing for our rights and freedoms
unsafe though it is.

May the wisdom she has brought back from Eastern Europe inspire our American struggle against our own would-be Tsar.

Unease Listening to My Guide in Tallinn

by Virginia Chen

Tallinn

The sun is decorative. It doesn’t warm and the wind is blowing.

Our borders are closed to Russians.
Tsar Putin wants all of Europe.
Just wait. He will take.

Russia on the Globe    vs   Estonia on the Globe

Kyiv was once the Russian capital. Ukraine kicked out the old Tsar.
He moved to a swamp—St. Petersburg.
We’re getting ready for a fight. Northern Europe is building up

its military —NATO will help us.
Not the U.S.
They can’t decide which side they’re on.

The West is afraid to stand up for freedom.
They’re scared of nukes. Retribution.
Do nothing and you will lose everything.

Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia

Naïve leaders think they can make a deal with a Tsar.
For 500 years, Russian Tsars and Soviets tried to annex the Baltics.
Russians took us over. Then the Nazis. Then the Soviets. We fought back.

We’ve held off the Russians since 1990s when we got
independence by singing. That’s right.
One million Estonians sang against the Soviets day and night.

Estonian Women Singing Against the Soviets

We were lucky.
Not a drop of blood.

Russians don’t travel. Don’t know how others live. We Americans don’t travel that much either. When I’m asked about traveling, I’m careful

not to say much. People here are easily bored. Some are listening for what tribe I belong
to. I did not buy a “Greenland is not for sale T-shirt” in Nuuk, I bought a deep blue one

that was a map of the Fjords. Think climate. Thawing permafrost.
I’ve been traveling for over forty years. This time I came home to riots in LA.

Masked Ice Agents Arresting Immigrants

Immigrants are being arrested by agents wearing masks. Some detainees are sent to prisons in Central America, Cuba and Africa. Americans voted for this.

My husband’s parents were born in China. They had Boxer Rebellion scholarships to medical school in the U.S. They became naturalized citizens.

Becoming Naturalized Citizens

They hated the communists. Couldn’t go back home. Will Americans whose parents were born in China be targeted next? Like the American Japanese during WW II?

My husband was born in Indiana. I spent my whole life in California. My grandparents were born in Europe. I love the Dutch and Swiss but my home is in the U.S. 

I was home a week when my blood pressure rose. I went to the emergency room feeling like the salmon who couldn’t readjust in the brackish waters of home after living at sea. 

Sockeye Salmon

Tests showed a possible blood clot from the long flight. They let me go after they factored in my
age. American rage gave me the political bends. I don’t feel at home swimming 

in hostile waters. My home has the mightiest military in the world.
But—we have no ancient enemy outside ourselves. We’re only 250 years old.

I sing in praise of travel.
I sing in praise of singing for our rights and freedoms
unsafe though it is.

No Kings Demonstrations

Besides travel, Virginia Chen spent most of her life singing in choruses. She loves the idea of people singing together in religious congregations, community choruses, and other gatherings big and small. She cherishes the experience of singing with people from different backgrounds and cultures to make beautiful music—not war. When things are bad or good, we sing.

News from the Muse

News from the Muse of Lament and Dissent

Sara Spaulding-Phillips

Introduction

You are a story fed by generations
You carry songs of grief, triumph
Loss and joy
Feel their power as they ascend
Within you
            Joy Harjo “Prepare”
            Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light p. 86

Our world has changed drastically since last month, when the Muse of Lament and Dissent published the first of a series of political poems written by members of the Deep River Poetry Circle. On June 14th “No Kings” demonstrations all over our land brought some 6 million Americans out into the streets and public squares to give voice to their lament and dissent about the state of our country. In peaceful gatherings with handmade signs they protested the authoritarian regime which sends masked ICE agents to rip terrified immigrants out of their jobs and lives without due process, sends marauding DOGE members and their chainsaw wielding leader to fire thousands of civil servants and the staff of USAID without cause, and threatens Veterans Benefits, Social Security and Medicaid in order to give tax cuts to billionaires; I could go on. 

But, also during this month many of us learned of the “3.5% Rule” developed by political scientist Erica Chenowith, which says that authoritarian regimes have a difficult time withstanding the power of their people once 3.5% of the population mobilizes against them. This gives me hope and courage. Less hopeful is the President’s decision to go to war with Iran on June 21st, using enormous bunker busting bombs. Many believe this escalation will encourage Iran to continue to develop a nuclear weapon. How did we land in this dangerous hell realm? How did the way of life we took for granted just a few months ago get ripped to shreds? 

Note: If you are grateful to the activist group indivisible, which organized the “No Kings” as well as the earlier “Hands Off” demonstrations, please consider joining and/or donating to them: (indivisible.org). 

The Moon Is a River of Darkness

Jacqueline Thurston’s prose poem, “The Moon is a River of Darkness” braves an excruciating issue of our times, about a people whose lives have literally been ripped to shreds. On the wings of poetic imagination, we are transported to Gaza where the poem’s speaker is engaged in a heroic mission to sooth a terrified Palestinian child, and to find the Israeli activist Vivian Silver who disappeared on October 7th. Silver “linked arms with Palestinians and marched in protests” against the Israeli government’s denial of Palestinian rights. The poem’s speaker reveals that she wears her “rage like a buoy lighting the way.” But rage, and lighted buoys, tend to burn themselves out.

In the second section of the poem the speaker’s heroic determination unravels as she confesses: “I will do none of these things.” Like many of us who have suffered the horrors of the news from Gaza since the war began, the poem’s speaker is caught in an agonizing paralysis. She is back in painful reality—polarized America. She sees the dreadful truth--the slaughter, the devastation, the starvation and the echoes of the war in our own land. And then she reveals the horrible truth of Silver’s fate. In America today, protesting the war in Gaza can get you arrested for antisemitism even if you are a Jew. How can anything be solved in such times?

Thurston uses her own artwork as a kind of balm for her searing vision. Three strong images and her commentary on them illuminate her text and provide a counterpoint to the terrible truths of her poem. She reaches back in time for a Bob Dylan song from another difficult era and a poem about singing by Bertold Brecht. She ends her moving poem with a poignant peace “Offering” of seashell, feather and the uplifting image of the Holy Land as a flyway for migrating birds. 

Note: When I wrote this prose poem in November of 2023, I was enraged at the violence inflicted by two Semitic peoples upon one another. At that time, I could not have envisioned the heart-breaking images of starving children and a land reduced to rubble. I am heartened by the blunt assessment of Ehud Olmert, the twelfth Prime Minister of Israel, which appeared in an edition of Haaretz in late May of 2025.“What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians.” I continue to believe in the mission of inter-faith groups like Combatants for Peace and Women Wage Peace, but my days are filled with foreboding about the perilous times in which we are living.

The Moon Is a River of Darkness

Prose poem and images by Jacqueline Thurston
November 8, 2023

I will plunge through the gate at the Rafa border crossing and make my way to the heart of a city encircled by tanks. Wash the concrete and blood from the frightened face of a Palestinian child with enormous brown eyes and banish the nightmare that her life has become. Whisper “Malesh,” (“It doesn’t matter.”) knowing, of course, that it does matter, and croon “Fi Amanillah” (“In the protection of God.”)—over and over and over—until she stops sobbing. Make my way into the catacombs of Hamas’s underground city. When I find Vivian Silver, and I will find her, I will deliver her to her sons, their faces rivers of grief, who wait for her on the other side of a broken fence. How can these men who hold her prisoner not know she has dedicated her life to peace, driven ill children to Jerusalem for medical treatments, linked arms with Palestinians and marched in protests, believed she and they were comrades bound by a shared cause. I will walk through concrete walls, burning rubble, smoke-filled air—wearing my righteous anger like a buoy lighting the way through a difficult channel to the safety of a small calm port at night. I will turn Antony Blinken into a pillar of salt and release him from his prison of diplomatic rationality only when he brings this madness to an end.

“Between Two Worlds”

Mixed media image symbolizing the separate realms inhabited by hope and despair

and the secret inner world of the soul in contrast to the known elements of the outer world.

I will do none of these things. I will stare at the white ceiling of my study streaked with shadows cast by the streetlight outside my home and wait to be taken into the arms of night and finally sleep. In the morning, I will awaken to grim photographs of Palestinians being pulled from the rubble; a boy, barely ten, will turn away from the camera in anguish screaming. A child himself, he has just pulled the bodies of two children from a collapsed building. Two U.S. senators will visit kibbutzim, pause in front of uninhabitable homes, smell the stench of burnt rubber and human flesh, offer predictable platitudes, and leave.

I will listen to a Stanford student, a Syrian refugee studying computer science, describe being mowed down by a “white man with dirty blond hair” spewing curses and shouting “Fuck you and your people!” The young university student, a refugee from a war-torn country, will acknowledge that his attacker’s “hateful screams . . . still echo in my ears.” A woman who believed she was crashing her car into a Jewish school will be arrested by police in Indiana. The school, the Israelite School of Universal Practical Knowledge, is in fact an extremist organization that is anti-Israel. A sixty-nine-year-old Jew will decide to attend a pro-Israel rally in Southern California. He will be struck by a pro-Palestinian man with a megaphone and fall to the ground. His accused assailant will call 911, but the victim will die of massive head injuries in an antiseptic hospital.

“Genesis”

Mixed media image, an emblem of 

the interplay of dynamic, creative, and destructive forces.

Five weeks after the Hamas attack, Vivian Silver’s remains will be found in the charred detritus of the safe room in which she sought shelter. Hundreds of members of Women Wage Peace, an Israeli organization she co-chaired, will raise their voices in song at a celebration of her life. “How many deaths will it take ’til he knows that too many people have died?” The answer, my friend, cannot be “blowin’ in the wind,” for as Dylan’s edgy voice reminds us, “You don’t count the dead when God’s on your side.”

I will reach back in time; retrieve the words of a playwright and poet who fled his homeland and settled in an adopted beach community filled with palm trees, sunlight, and other German refugee intellectuals, only to be uprooted once again and cross an ocean to the land of his ancestors—his return driven by the McCarthy-era investigations.

In the dark times

Will there also be singing?

Yes, there will also be singing

About the dark times.

—Bertolt Brecht

“Offering”

Photograph celebrating fragile gifts from the sky and sea. (Bordered by a great sea to the West,

the Holy Land is a flyway for hundreds of different species of migrating birds.)

About Deep River: My creative life has been enriched by being a member of Deep River, a community of rare soul and substance. I have been nourished by the poems forged by members of this community and am grateful to Naomi Lowinsky, who has introduced us to many wonderful contemporary poets and shared her poems with us.

News from the Muse

The Muse of Lament and Dissent

Introduction

We heard it.
The racket in every corner of the world. As
the hunger for war rose up in those who would steal to be
    president
to be king or emperor, to own the trees, stones, and everything
else that moved around the earth, inside the earth
and above it. —Joy Harjo

                                            “When the World As We Knew It Ended”
                                                    Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light pp. 49-50

Sara Spaulding-Phillips

Since the “Orange Man” began his tricky and treacherous reign, the Muse of Lament and Dissent has been causing a ruckus in the poetry circle I lead--Deep River—a public program for the San Francisco Jung Institute. We read great poets and write under their influence. Thankfully, we spent our last three months of this year’s cycle with Joy Harjo, who has shown us, brilliantly, how to engage in dissent and lament, in political poems that speak out of Indigenous consciousness—out of love and concern for our Mother the Earth and all her creatures.

As poets, our mode of expression is verse. So I’ve invited the poets of Deep River to give voice to their Lament and Dissent through writing political poems. The Sister from Below has graciously agreed to publish a series of these poems.

Our first poet, Maureen Wolf, gives us “Breaking News.” This powerful poem loops and spins from the NYTimes to the colorful changes spring creates in the foothills, to the myth of Demeter and Persephone, to the horrors of a Hades in El Salvador, where hapless immigrant men are held with “Trumped up” charges and without due process. In lithe poetic leaps Wolf carries us off to Ukraine, to children’s paintings of rising waters, to her Irish grandmother as she prays for her sons at war in the war to end all wars, back to the “riot” of Nature in spring, to the song in the mouth of a Stag at Easter and the Raven’s raspy voice, which even the Orange Man can’t stop.

Breaking News

        by Maureen Wolf

“Guernica” Picasso - ARAS Online

News from the NY Times: not much has changed;

the world is still riding the roller coaster of the

Orange man’s policies

dipping, looping, spinning beyond the rule of law.

“Pink Peach Trees” Van Gogh -
ARAS Online

But then maybe everything has changed.

It is spring: pops of orange, blue and white

speckle the green grass of the foothills populated

with scrub oaks, grazing cattle and the confidence of Nature.

“Demeter and Kore” - ARAS Online

Spring won’t last long here: the gentle warmth of spring sun will change

quickly. The lupine, the paint brush, the shooting stars will shrivel

and the grass will brown and the air will become heavy and oppressive

under the summer sun. Remembering the scorched earth,

I wonder if Demeter has lost her bargain with Hades.

“Wailing Female Mourner”
Yeats - ARAS Online

Haven’t we all?
Aren’t we all waiting for the long winter days of the centuries to end,
Wondering when Persephone will push through

the hard pan clay of the human heart.

“Death in the Afternoon” Yeats - ARAS Online

This spring I can hear the echo of Abel’s scream as the cell door clangs behind

Neri Jose Alvarado, Andry Hernandez-Romero, Kilmar Agrego Garcia and

more in the Terroism Confinement Center in El Salvador. Trumped up stories,

no evidence, no trials. The Orange Man and Nayib Bukele casting lots.

Not long after, I learn of a Ukrainian woman nearing her hundredth birthday,

living alone in an apartment which is miraculously standing in Zaporizhzhia—

with no electricity, no heat, thimbles of food brought by her niece

when bombs aren’t falling--who stays three more days in hospital,

not for medical reasons, but to visit friends.

Hour Glass Drawing by child

I imagine a broken table in the hospital ward where the crones have tea

and grieve for the soldiers they once suckled at their breasts and talk

of the images their great grandchildren paint, images of a child standing

on the roof of home surrounded by rising water, of earth in an hourglass.

Scrawled in a child’s hand: No more planet.

“Weeping Madonna”
Sara Spaulding Phillips

I hear them singing Bozhe Velykyi and Mariye Maty Bozha prayers for protection,

prayers of supplication. I hear my Irish grandmother praying for thirty days

until her sons come home from the war after the war to end all wars.

Prayers to Mary. Prayers to Demeter. Prayers to Gaia.

“Stag and Moon” pixabay

The songs are carried in the mouth of a Stag to me on Easter morning. When I watch

the pinks and blues of the eastern sky gently pull back the curtain of night, I hear

the raven’s raspy voice greet the sun and see the crown headed sparrow search

for seeds and know the confidence of Nature.

“In Shoreham Garden” Palmer
ARAS Online

The Orange Man cannot pen an order stopping the riot of Spring from hearts on fire.

But as the Stag, and the raven, the sparrow and the crones have sung to me

to be consumed by fire means leaving so much of me behind. The path to the Other

winds through the path hidden in plain sight.

"My Nurse and I" - ARAS Online

Artist’s Statement

For several years I had eyed Naomi’s Deep River workshop in the CG Jung Institute of San Francisco program brochure. In 2019, I attended a conference on the Other at the Institute where Naomi was presenting. I spoke with her briefly about my interest in Deep River but also of my hesitation. I found understanding the works of most poets a mystery. Naomi said something to the effect of “Jump in.”

 

Nearly five years later, I jumped into Deep River. During this past year we wrote “under the influence” of three poets dislocated from the land of their birth. In these turbulent times in the States, I too have felt dislocated. Deep River became the place where I could explore and give voice to my exile. I am grateful to Naomi for providing a place and for her enthusiastic greeting of my fledging poems. I am grateful for the Deep River poets for their warm embrace of me and, especially, of my work. Over the years, I have collected several degrees. I am a psychotherapist and live with Ruby, a dislocated husky, in Fresno, California in the Central Valley, the doorway to the Sierra Nevada. 

—Maureen Wolf

June 14th No Kings Day of Defiance

If you are feeling a need to express your own lament and dissent about the state of our country, we urge you to join Indivisible’s demonstrations on June 14th—A Day of Defiance.

News from the Muse

News from the Muse

of Revolution 

“Hope” is the thing with feathers—that perches in the soul—

—Emily Dickinson

Sister from Below: Cover
Painting by Bianca Dalder

What’s Happened to the Sister from Below?

If you follow the Sister from Below’s News from the Muse you may wonder what’s become of her. I’ll tell you what: the November 2024 Election, and since the January Inauguration, the onslaught of bedlam and chaos in the crazed fists of a Berserker President. The Sister from Below has been silenced. Struck dumb. The breath of inspiration knocked out of her. She, my connection to Soul, to deep Self, has withdrawn to a dark cave, to keen, to howl, to moan. She’s brought me no wisdom, no glowing intuitions from the depths, only nightmares about stormy weather. 

Kamala & Tim

Gone, gone the joyous dance of Kamala Devi Harris & Tim Walz, in whose vision of America women are free to choose, workers are paid livable wages, Mother Earth is honored and protected. Gone gone the feathered thing called Hope. Now we’re in a story of total devastation. The Robber Baron crew has showed up with their chain saws, to fell every tree our ancestors planted—the habitat for feathered creatures and their songs. 

But then, one night, I had a dream which changed everything. The Sister from Below showed up in the form of Diane di Prima, my late, long ago poetry teacher, demanding I write a revolutionary rant. That dream evoked memories of a difficult mentorship. It woke The Sister from Below to the inspiration of the Muse of Revolution and to the necessity of political rants. She gave me this poem to pass on to you. And she asks, if you are so inclined, that you pass it on to others in need of inspiration.

Diane di Prima

A Revolutionary Letter

to the Spirit of Diane di Prima

Revolution: a turning, as the earth
turns, among planets, as the sun
turns. . .  

                               we turn. . . 
faces of pain and fear, the dawn
awash among them
—Diane di Prima

You came to my dream last night    Diane
like a Zen slap    your fierce spirit hell bent    on waking
me up    rousing me to write    a roaring rant
for these terrible times    you find me in    You
who were my poetry teacher    decades ago    You
whose lineage    is my lineage    Blake    H.D.
The Black Mountain Poets    Your own wild Loba    You 

usher me up a steep staircase    to your garret    a word 

whose root means watchtower    You who believed
there is gold    deep in the roots of words    You
        whose creed was    a poet must always be    on the watch

White Wolf Fantasy

Remember the first time I came to you?    wearing a flouncy
gypsy skirt    so femme    beside your tattered Beat poet jeans
I was scared    for I had given you the power    to dub me poet
or dud    Back in the day    at a demonstration against The War
I’d heard you read    Revolutionary Letters    I was smitten    you
who mingled the lyrical    & the political    (forbidden to an English
major)    called to me    like a Muse    Turns out my lucky stars
had unexpected plans for me    an esoteric path you walked
me down    to the roots of Poetry’s Tree of Life    in the Spirit
of the Depths    in the Lunar Realms    of Magick    Tarot
                                       Kabbala Alchemy Mythology Dreams

Wm. Turner Angel Standing in the sun

I watched you being brilliant    fierce    tongue-lashing nasty

You scared me    just as my Father had    & yet I stayed
in your circle    in the spell of your Magick    long enough
to become the poet I am    whose Muse insists    on mingling
the esoteric    the lyrical    & the political    Your lineage
is my lineage    At the cusp of the pandemic    I learned 

you’d left your body    & now here you are   in my dream

insisting I remember   who I am   the first-born birth right baby   

of refugee Jews from the Shoah   reliving the very catastrophe   

into which I was born     I used to believe   never again

would such an atrocity   assault us     

The holy wind’s been knocked out   of my Muse  

My Goddess has retreated    to the underworld    

Your spirit demands    that I tell it   as I see it   

                  the whole cruel scourge   of our passion play

He has come    who sees himself as savior    creator

of a Golden Age    whose given name means    

Ruler of the World    Sea Monster from the Depths 

I prefer to call him    Berserker    You say that hardly
does him justice    The truth is that he stinks
He is corrupt    his guts rotting    in Big Mac Sauce
His Doppelganger    who does his dirty work
his little boy    as a shield against assassination    He wields
a jubilant chain saw    to cut & slash    the Civil Service
to rend asunder    the bonds that bind our land    Diane
is that you chanting    the Declaration of Independence?

Lady Liberty Weeping

Whenever any form of government becomes destructive
of our rights    to Life    Liberty    and the Pursuit
of Happiness    It is the Right of the People    to abolish it

He has ridden roughshod    over the Constitution
He has tossed landmines at clinics that serve    wounded veterans
He has swindled the working classes    to cut taxes for the rich
He has eviscerated truth    violated due process
disobeyed judges    ripped peaceful legal immigrants
out of their lives    O monstrous chaos agents
wreckers of law    & community    You who believe
that empathy is a sin    a feminine weakness
like helping a stranger    like feeding a starving child
like calling out    cruelty & bigotry    Be careful

Our Goddess has arisen    from her underworld meat hook
She who is a love Goddess    a warrior Goddess    a flood
& fire Goddess    for whom earth & sky sing
                is in a holy fury    about this desecration &    She’s Woke!

The Goddess Durga: Photo by Subhrajyoti