Tessera

H. P. Friendcraft

@starcravingmad.bsky.social

Posting a poem a week to help us through our Interesting Times ~ also weird science, history, politics, tt/rpg games ~ don't follow me, follow @greenmtgirl instead ~ bruorton.dreamwidth.org ~ warlockofagnesi.tumblr.com ~ he/him/late for dinner

422 Posts285 Follower 146 Folgt

H. P. Friendcraft @starcravingmad.bsky.social · 5mo ago

When of course, in that scenario, Iran is clearly the biggest loser.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 5mo ago

JD Vance: "If Donald Trump were elected the supreme leader of Iran, the Democrats would still say the United States has lost this"

H. P. Friendcraft @starcravingmad.bsky.social · 5mo ago

happy Pride specifically to the two male Black-crowned Night Herons in the Kennecott Wetlands Experience habitat

Tracy Aviary@tracyaviary.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Another pair at Tracy Aviary that is a same-sex pairing are our Black-crowned Night Herons! Our male pair this past spring worked hard at building a nest together. You can spot these birds in our Kennecott Wetlands Experience habitat!

H. P. Friendcraft @starcravingmad.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Robert Bly. You survived a lot.

One Source of Bad Information

There's a boy in you about three
years old who hasn't learned a thing for thirty
Thousand years. Sometime it's a girl.

This child had to make up its mind
How to save you from death. He said things like:
"Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk."

You live with this child, but you don't know it.
You're in the office, yes, but live with this boy
At night. He's uninformed, but he does want

To save your life. And he has. Because of this boy
You survived a lot. He's got six big ideas.
Five don't work. Right now he's repeating them to you.

H. P. Friendcraft @starcravingmad.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Who turns a look like hers?

Mel Stone @melstone.xyz · last yr.

😈😈😈

Mrs. Detective Pikajew, Esq.@clapifyoulikeme.favrd.social · last yr.

I can’t believe Zohran is transing the trains already www.mta.info/article/f-m-...

F and M trains will swap routes between Manhattan and Queens starting in
December 2025
We're making this change to improve reliability. Here's what you need to know about how your trip may change.
New York City Transit

H. P. Friendcraft @starcravingmad.bsky.social · last yr.

Come here, little one...

All Hallows
By Louise Glück
Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been
picked clean, the sheaves
bound evenly and piled at the roadside
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness
of harvest or pestilence.
And the wife leaning out the window
with her hand extended, as in payment,
and the seeds
distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.

H. P. Friendcraft @starcravingmad.bsky.social · last yr.

Time for spooky season poems.

The Vampire

Madison Julius Cawein
1865 – 1914

A lily in a twilight place?
A moonflow’r in the lonely night?—
Strange beauty of a woman's face
Of wildflow’r-white!

The rain that hangs a star’s green ray
Slim on a leaf-point’s restlessness,
Is not so glimmering green and gray
As was her dress.

I drew her dark hair from her eyes,
And in their deeps beheld a while
Such shadowy moonlight as the skies
Of Hell may smile.

She held her mouth up redly wan,
And burning cold,—I bent and kissed
Such rosy snow as some wild dawn
Makes of a mist.

God shall not take from me that hour,
When round my neck her white arms clung!
When ‘neath my lips, like some fierce flower,
Her white throat swung!

Or words she murmured while she leaned!
Witch-words, she holds me softly by,—
The spell that binds me to a fiend
Until I die.

H. P. Friendcraft @starcravingmad.bsky.social · last yr.

Let me remember.

September Midnight
By Sara Teasdale

Lyric night of the lingering Indian Summer,
Shadowy fields that are scentless but full of singing,
Never a bird, but the passionless chant of insects,
Ceaseless, insistent.

The grasshopper’s horn, and far-off, high in the maples,
The wheel of a locust leisurely grinding the silence
Under a moon waning and worn, broken,
Tired with summer.

Let me remember you, voices of little insects,
Weeds in the moonlight, fields that are tangled with asters,
Let me remember, soon will the winter be on us,
Snow-hushed and heavy.

Over my soul murmur your mute benediction,
While I gaze, O fields that rest after harvest,
As those who part look long in the eyes they lean to,
Lest they forget them.

H. P. Friendcraft @starcravingmad.bsky.social · last yr.

Mary Oliver. The black honey of summer.

ripe blackberries hanging from a blackberry cane, with ferns in the background

August
by Mary Oliver

When the blackberries hang
swollen in the woods, in the brambles
nobody owns, I spend

all day among the high
branches, reaching
my ripped arms, thinking

of nothing, cramming
the black honey of summer
into my mouth; all day my body

accepts what it is. In the dark
creeks that run by there is
this thick paw of my life darting among

the black bells, the leaves; there is
this happy tongue.

H. P. Friendcraft @starcravingmad.bsky.social · last yr.

You could say anything. Poem by Charles O. Hartman.

Ticket

I love the moment at the ticket window—he says—
when you are to say the name of your destination, and realize
that you could say anything, the man at the counter
will believe you, the woman at the counter
would never say No, that isn't where you're going,
you could buy a ticket for one place and go to another,
less far along the same line. Suddenly you would find yourself
—he says—in a locality you've never seen before,
where no one has ever seen you and you could say your name
was anything you like, nobody would say No,
that isn't you, this is who you are. It thrills me every time.

H. P. Friendcraft @starcravingmad.bsky.social · last yr.

This cleft body.

Peach
By Dorianne Laux

I kneel to the ground fall peach,
its russet belly, its honey streaks,
touch its new tough skin, run my thumb
along its deep, sexy cleft. I pluck another
from a low branch, tug it down into
captivity like an animal caught
in a bramble, scooped into my arms
that open to return it to the wide field
of my cutting board where I lift
the knife, slice around the stony pit,
its purple edges bleeding into the gold flesh
in a starburst, and like a star
becoming into silence, miniscule
pulse of living light from this distance,
has been making itself over and over
from the fire within it, like the sound hole
of a violin that welcomes any dark music.
To think we can eat a sunset,
convicted, as we are, to the mud
of this earth, knees dark with dirt, hands
sticky with essence, to think I too
am here in this cleft body, a being
split into parts and seamed back
together, swollen with desire,
hungry for the sun.

ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · last yr.

the rate of progress in battery tech is *insane.* prices down 40% and space efficiency up by ~half in ONE YEAR www.volts.wtf/p/solarstora...

Solar+storage is so much farther along than you think

On how plummeting battery prices make 24/7 solar power a reality today.

volts.wtf

H. P. Friendcraft @starcravingmad.bsky.social · last yr.

We are so busy.

Tomatoes
by Joy Sullivan

I waited so long for love
and suddenly, here it is
standing in the garden, hands full
of heirlooms hot from the sun.

Soon we’ll make a supper of them.
Salted slabs between slices of bread.
Your beard silvers. My hips ripen.
The mail piles up.

Phone calls go unanswered. Forgive us.
Our mouths are full of tomatoes.
We are so busy
being small and hungry and alive.

H. P. Friendcraft @starcravingmad.bsky.social · last yr.

maggie and milly and molly and may

E. E. Cummings

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

Killian @greenmtgirl.bsky.social · last yr.

Bill McKibben said something similar a lot of years ago (15, maybe?) at Vermont's diocesan convention: build community. Vibrant communities will do better than isolated wealthy suburbs. Local food, mutual aid, water protection, the bonds of local civic life - these are where resilience lie.

Killian @greenmtgirl.bsky.social · last yr.

I think the fact that I'm now full of fighting spirit is a sign that acceptance and grief are enlivening, not deadening. So let's fight for mitigation. Let's fight for the fascists' overthrow. And let's pour energy into local communities and looking out for each other.

Screenshot from the Suzuki interview: "Governments will not be able to respond on the scale or speed that is needed for these emergencies, so Finland is telling their citizens that they’re going to be at the front line of whatever hits and better be sure you’re ready to meet it. Find out who on your block can’t walk because you’re going to have to deal with that. Who has wheelchairs? Who has fire extinguishers? Where is the available water? Do you have batteries or generators? Start assessing the roots of escape. You’re going to have to inventory your community, and that’s really what we have to start doing now."

Killian @greenmtgirl.bsky.social · last yr.

This, combined with the report of the Deep Western Boundary Current reversal, strikes me as correct. Our political, legal, and economic systems have not budged. This is not giving up: "The units of survival are going to be local communities, so I’m urging local communities to get together."

Davis Legree@davislegree.bsky.social · last yr.

New from me: An exclusive interview with David Suzuki, who talked about reaching the conclusion that humanity has failed in the fight against climate change, and why communities should start preparing for more destructive natural disasters #cdnpoli #cdnenviro www.ipolitics.ca/2025/07/02/i...

Uncle Duke @uncleduke1969.bsky.social · last yr.

“Very funny, Jesus. Give it back.”

Driver’s perspective of a dashboard missing the steering wheel.

Terri Windling @terriwindling.bsky.social · last yr.

Here's another beautiful essay by Potawatomi author & botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer in @emergencemagazine.bsky.social, a meditation on life, death, and the cycles of nature. emergencemagazine.org/essay/becomi...

Becoming Earth – Robin Wall Kimmerer

Wandering among the ancient decomposing cedar trees of the Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon, Potawatomi botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer wonders what they might teach us about the nature o...

emergencemagazine.org

H. P. Friendcraft @starcravingmad.bsky.social · last yr.

Poem for the week.

The Year of the Goldfinches

By Ada Limón

There were two that hung and hovered
by the mud puddle and the musk thistle.
Flitting from one splintered fence post
to another, bathing in the rainwater’s glint
like it was a mirror to some other universe
where things were more acceptable, easier
than the place I lived. I’d watch for them:
the bright peacocking male, the low-watt
female, on each morning walk, days spent
digging for some sort of elusive answer
to the question my curving figure made.
Later, I learned that they were a symbol
of resurrection. Of course they were,
my two yellow-winged twins feasting
on thorns and liking it.

Killian @greenmtgirl.bsky.social · last yr.

This, like, the 3rd time I've cried at my desk today. But in a good way, this time!

Phillip Ayoub@payoub.bsky.social · last yr.

Absolutely incredible turnout for Budapest Pride! So proud of all the organizers, including some old friends, who estimate hundreds of thousands— major embarrassment to Orban

Gracie12 📎@gracienlucy.bsky.social · last yr.

Text message conversation:

"Is the fall of Rome comparable to the current situation in the United States?"

"No, Rome had good roads."

H. P. Friendcraft @starcravingmad.bsky.social · last yr.

I... no words. Breathtaking. Is this art, actually?

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · last yr.

Leavitt without a trace of irony: "When you have a totalitarian regime, you have to save face. I think any common sense, open-minded person knows the truth about the precision strikes on Saturday night. They were wildly successful."

St. Simeon the Holy Fool @simeonthefool.bsky.social · last yr.

Hot damn.

McSweeney's@mcsweeneys.net · last yr.

A large pot sits in plain sight. There’s a frog in it. Every day, Leader announces his plans to boil the frog. His campaign slogan was “BOIL THAT FROG.” He has already made at least one run on the stove. A man stirs the pot with a large stick. “It’s a metaphor,” he says.

St. Simeon the Holy Fool @simeonthefool.bsky.social · last yr.

Read the whole thing— good political satire is extremely hard to find and this absolutely sticks the landing.

Probably Bad RPG Ideas @badprobably.bsky.social · last yr.

Gain advantage whenever you feel a fleeting moment of hope in a life beset by horrors on all sides.

H. P. Friendcraft @starcravingmad.bsky.social · last yr.

Crivvens!

Killian@greenmtgirl.bsky.social · last yr.

Has anyone seen a Wee Free Men sign today? Because I'm seriously considering "Nae Kings!"

H. P. Friendcraft @starcravingmad.bsky.social · last yr.

Reporting in from our local No Kings rally today in northern New England, I'd guess ~250 people lining both sides of main street! Excellent turnout, and a lot of support from folks driving through.

People line both sides of a main street, holding flags and homemade signs.

my hand covers several stenciled letters of a No Smoking sign on a concrete barrier so that it reads "NO KING"

People line the side of the street, packed together, holding signs and flags, fading into blurry obscurity. In the foreground, the only legible sign reads "No dictators in the USA."

A man strides the edge of a street lined with people. Three legible signs read "A toupee is not a crown," No Kings, No Dictators, No Oligarchy," and "Trump can oligargle my balls."

Another Angry Woman @stavvers.bsky.social · last yr.

ea nasir is back baby awooo

Business insider screenshot: A major commodity trader received containers full of painted rocks instead of the $36 million shipment of copper it paid for

Leah Greenberg ❌👑@leahgreenberg.bsky.social · last yr.

Wikipedia definition of "idiot plot": In literary criticism, an idiot plot is one which is "kept in motion solely by virtue of the fact that everybody involved is an idiot",[1]: 26 and where the story would quickly end, or possibly not even happen, if this were not the case.