2. My autobiographical text: “Fragments of an Autobiography or Remembering in the House of Time, From London to Wisconsin, 1933-2010:
http://asjournal.zusas.uni-halle.de/190.html

3. link to my poem that gives the whole issue its title of “Women’s Voices from The House of Time”:
http://asjournal.zusas.uni-halle.de/194.html

Please click here to visit the Questioning Contemporary Art blog.

I couldn’t make it to the Poor Farm
But It I know what it’s like,
I’ve seen it in my dreams, always on a hill
A lawn of weeds in front, a few bent figures
Scattered here and there, postures unforgiving,
Anonymous staffage.
I know what it is like from reading
About the dispossessed in England, the misérables in France,
The Depression in the U.S. of A. I know what it’s like from
Jacob Riis’s clever photos
That dull the glance, reveal the glare
Of poor folk’s pots, the
Messiness of their bedding, I know
from Daumier, Courbet and the London Illustrated News.
I know what the Poor Farm is like and what it’s not
It’s not nice.

Starting in England in 1834 or thereabouts, with the new
Poor Laws and “scientific” social planning,
They—those in the know, with the power, with the reasons—purposely
Made the Poor Houses as off-putting as possible
So the conniving poor wouldn’t choose to go
Unless absolutely desperate, out of work; the old, the children, those
With nothing to eat and nowhere to go: they made it to the Poor House.

If you were decrepit, had no work, no family and couldn’t afford
The price of a loaf or even a slice of bread, you went.
The Poor Farm was cold;
The Poor Farm was mean;
The Poor Farm licked your old bones clean.
And you worked, you bent, you stitched, you dug, relentlessly
Pleasure? Leisure? Respect?
Not for a moment.
The idea was to make it so bad that you’d rather
Lie on the pavement and hold out a cup, but you weren’t allowed
Because you would then be a Public Nuisance, a shame to the
Good name
Of the Community.
So you went off to the Poor Farm, the last resort, too sick, too sore,
Too tired, to poor for anything, anywhere else
But the Poor Farm on the Hill.

What a spirit of generosity; what a sense of charity what public spirit!
Those Poor Farm taxes made every fat farmer, every portly banker,
Every solid, tax-paying citizen into a complacent donor, though over my dead body
Said some.
But when all was said and all was done,
Some old woman, some old man
Couldn’t fall back on anything; to tell the truth,
Nothing was left, so down
Into the pit of dispossession, wretchedly clinging to
Some last shred of self-respect, some fading memory of self
Crept the derelict into not-quite-prison
The derision of their betters ringing in their ears
(Though they were mostly deaf, poor dears,
And couldn’t hear so it’s just a figure of speech.
Nevertheless, they felt it.)

I never made it to the Poor Farm on the hill—
But I might still.
Count no man happy til the day he dies, said
The Greek writer.
Maybe it’s better to die than to go to the Poor Farm,
But still it’s probably better to be alive, to be kept alive
If not to thrive.
What is it all about, this way of treating poor folks?
It’s about Capitalism, about Free Enterprise, about old
Malthus with his logical lies.
Too many people, not enough stuff?
Prune them down, make life tough
For those who can’t produce, those surplus beings
Who reduce the chance of plenty for the rest of us.
Its law—capitalism’s—ruled the world and rules it now.
Keep working til you drop: work, work and never stop,
And if you stop you’re doomed, even if you’re laid off.
Work even if you’re old and sick, even if you can’t stand up.
Minimize the rations;
Keep the hovel cold;
Clothe their bones in rags,
Drape them in contempt
Nobody’s exempt
from the laws of supply and demand.
Utilitarianism drives the heart of charity
So whip the slackers into shape,
The poor, the old, the helpless are Other, like the blacks,
The dim provincials overseas on obscure continents
Grouped in tin-rooved shacks or ragged tents;
All richly deserve to shiver in the cold.

Yet surely all these terms are shifters: “poor”,” old”
“Other”. Even we could easily be here,
Be knocking at the Poor Farm door.
These are not permanent conditions
Inscribed in DNA at birth, au contraire
They lurk in potens for us all. Any one of
Us could crawl or could have crawled up to
The hateful Poor Farm door.

I never made it to the Poor Farm
But I might. In the middle of the night, in the
Twinkling of an eye lose my money
And my reason and my friends and my position
And my pride, take a ride, slip and slide
Fall
Like them all
Who had nothing left
Who were bereft.
There is no God
There are no angels
Only judges, beasts and strangers
To drag you to the Poor Farm door
And then there is no more.

The Poor Farm Press website (under construction):
http://poorfarmexperiment.org/index.html

Staring out into the ocean
And dazzled by the sun,
She could hardly believe her eyes

Was that the ship of Isis?
Isis,
The mother of Horus,
The wife of Osaris,
The protector of the dead.
What was she seeking now?

Ship of Isis, October 21, 2010

The youngest
Of all the Mirror Holders
Imagines herself
In the midst of seven luminous stars

With the shadowy figure
Of
Isis at her side.

Isis tells the Young Mirror Holder
Of the treachery of Seth,
Of the death of Osaris
And of his lost coffin,
That she finally found
Embedded
In the trunk of a cedar tree.
Of her search again
For the scattered fragments of Osaris’s body,
And of his final resurrection
So that he may live forever in Hades.
The Young Mirror Holder
Listens to Isis,
Trying to imagine all this,
But it is impossible.

Seven Sisters Green Pleiades, October 9, 2010
Isis’ Redeeming Shadow over the Thirsty Earth, October 6, 2010

Two Mirror Holders,
Friends from childhood,
Imagine themselves

Standing
With Daedalus and Icarus

Listening to the tale
Of their escape from Crete,
Born aloft on the wax wings
that Daedalus had fashioned
For himself and his son.
Standing together
On the Portal of Despair
The two Mirror Holders
Turn to Daedalus
Eager to hear the end of his tale.
But Daedalus can only weep
As he remembers,
As if it were today,
Seeing his son fly too close to the sun,

Watching the wax wings melt,
And seeing Icarus
Fall headlong into the ocean.

Another Mirror Holder
Imagined
That she was Persephone
Mapping Hades, the Underworld,
So that she might
—for a few months each year—
Escape from it.
She followed the path of the river Acheron
Back to earth
And then
Looked up at Sirius
—the brightest star
in the night sky—
For further guidance.
Sirius Rising,

In the Glass Library of Time
There were Mirror Holders
Who searched for the past
Rather than the future.
One imagined
That he was Poseidon
Sending nightly messages from lighthouse to lighthouse

To help those who wanted to navigate his oceans.

]]> http://moiraroth.com/2010/10/searching-for-the-past-1/feed/ 0 http://moiraroth.com/2010/06/turning-the-pages-part-1/ http://moiraroth.com/2010/06/turning-the-pages-part-1/#comments Sat, 05 Jun 2010 06:14:54 +0000 Admin http://moiraroth.com/?p=320 May 23, 2010
drawing by Slobodan Dan Paich and text by Moira Roth

It was all that she had preserved from her childhood
This book
Made by her Irish uncle
About a family
Of small insects
Who lived in a miniature castle
Balanced on the branch of a tree.

drawing by Slobodan Dan Paich and text by Moira Roth

She turned the book’s next page,
already knowing what it would show
–a castle

That housed the laboratory
Of the Alchemist.