The 25th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall

Piece of Berlin Wall by Katley Demetria Brown, 2014

Last week I was at the Smithsonian Museum of American History.  A piece of the Berlin Wall was on display.

I remember that cold November day in 1989 very well.  My daughters were born just a week before.  They were seven weeks premature and were still in the hospital.  I was worried about them since they were both in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

November is not exactly a happy month for me because of the lack of sun (I have a mild form of Seasonal Affective Disorder).  Having two babies in the hospital was also very stressful, especially after a C-section. I tired very easily and had to depend on my husband to drive me to the hospital every day to see the girls; and I also had to take care of my three year old son while my husband was at work.

One night I was feeling down and my husband told me to have a look at what was on TV.  It was a broadcast from Berlin, Germany.  People were partying at the Berlin Wall.  It was the beginning of the end of Communism in Eastern Europe.

I couldn't believe what I saw.  And it made me smile.

The Wall was a symbol of tyranny for so many years.  It was part of an Iron Curtain of barbed wire and watch towers that stretched from East Germany to Bulgaria. According to the Communist Party, it was to keep the Westerners and their capitalist ideas out of Eastern Europe, but we all knew better.  The Iron Curtain was built to keep people from escaping.  And escape they did, often by dangerous means: tunneling, hiding under cars, or floating down rivers One of my closest friends left Hungary as a three year old child with her parents during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

Here is a poem I wrote five years ago about the fall of the Wall:

 A New Beginning

Communism
A way of life for so many years
In so many countries
In Eastern Europe
Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia,
Albania, Romania, and Bulgaria
And the nation once known as the
Deutsche Demokratische Republik
Held hostage for over 40 years
Its people imprisoned by barbed wire
Watchtowers and concrete
And West Berlin, an island
In a sea of red its people isolated
Until the wall fell
And everyone rejoiced

Die Mauer ist gefallen
Berlin ist wieder Frei!

And twenty years ago
The people of Eastern Europe
For the most part peacefully
Toppled their communist governments
Like so many dominoes
And tore down the barbed wire
And watchtowers
And we shall never forget

Die Mauer ist Gefallen
Europa ist wieder frei!

If you like Balkan music, please visit my other blog The Alien Diaries.  It features music from the Balkans. Until 1989, some of these countries were behind the Iron Curtain.

Copyright © 2014 Katley Demetria Brown. Photography is © Katley Demetria Brown 2014 and may not be reproduced without permission.

Also, please check out the following websites:

Poetic Expressions from the Heart

Cahaba River Literary Journal

Why Autumn in New England is Overrated

October 12, 2014 Street Scene, Springfield, MA

I think autumn in New England is overrated.  However, it hasn't stopped a certain species of tourist, the Leaf Peeper.  The Leaf Peeper's goal is to take pictures of as many multicolored trees as possible before all those beautiful red and gold leaves litter the ground (a problem for those of us who have yards full of leaves every October and have to dispose of them). Some years the leaves fall as late as November, making the job even more tedious.

 

Pynchon Point Park, October 25, 2014

Leaf Peepers are responsible for traffic jams on the roads.  They can be recognized by the upward tilt of their heads and the clicking of their cameras or camera phones as they capture fall foliage for posterity. Accommodations around here are booked for a solid month. Why people will travel such long distances to look at leaves is foreign to me.

I suppose I'm jaded because I live here and all I have to do is look out the window at the huge tree behind my house decked out in orange autumn finery before the winds and the rain (or maybe snow!) knock the leaves into my backyard.  They are not so beautiful when its time to rake them.

Fall Foliage, October 25, 2014

The downside of autumn leaves can best be described in one word: Snowtober.

Back in 2011 there was a period of beautiful fall weather at end of October.  A cold front moved up the East Coast and brought snow and cold. The trees had not yet lost all their leaves. When the snow fell, it was heavy and wet.  The combination of heavy wet snow and autumn leaves was a recipe for disaster.  Trees crashed onto roads, cars, homes and power lines.

Many communities were without power for a week or more.  I had no electricity for a week.  Since there was no heat, many people, especially the elderly and families with children, stayed in hotels or shelters.

I chose to stay home (at night anyway) because my house faces south and there was enough sun to warm up the house during the day. I couldn't prepare hot food since my stove runs on electricity.  I lived off ready to eat food (fruit and yogurt) from the cooler, Chinese take out from the restaurant that had electricity, and horrible cafeteria food from the high school which was designated an emergency shelter.  I also used their shower facilities. The public library, fortunately had power and I spent much time there; they had light, heat, books and best of all, computers!

The laundromat was also open.  It was packed with people doing laundry, and it was warm from all the dryers going at the same time. During that week there were electricity haves and have nots, it depended where you lived on the power grid.

That week was an ordeal I wouldn't like to repeat. Towns banned Halloween trick or treaters from making the rounds, it was too dark and dangerous with fallen trees and no lights.

By the way, these beautiful autumn trees can turn into monsters.  During the storm many fell on the roads and crashed onto the roofs of houses, costing homeowners thousands of dollars in roof repairs.

This month's poem is After the Storm.

After the Storm

Monster trees

weighted down

with snow and ice.

Monster trees

are the reason

the power is out.

Monster trees

whose lost branches

smash through roofs.

Monster trees

lie in the road

to crash your car.

Monster trees

in the dark

are out to kill you.

I think that I shall never see

a poem as deadly as a tree.

A tree whose broken arms crash down

and bring the power lines to ground.

© Katley Demetria Brown 2012

If you like Balkan music, please visit my other blog The Alien Diaries.   There's enough to keep you occupied all winter :)

Copyright © 2014 Katley Demetria Brown. Photography is © Katley Demetria Brown 2014 and may not be reproduced without permission.  You can also view these photos on Flickr.com under the name Katley99.
Site Designed by Katley Demetria Brown. All Rights Reserved.

Thoughts on the Autumn Equinox, An Abandoned Bridge, and Poetry Time!

The autumn equinox was a few days ago. I'm really dreading the Dark Days, the sunless time between November and mid January.

The Dark Days start to become really noticeable in November, when the sun sets before dinnertime, and the nights are 15 hours long.  You get up in the dark and leave work in the dark; and it seems to be cloudy and foggy most of the time. How depressing is that?

It's no surprise that that people suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder. I wonder how people, let's say up in Alaska cope with it.   There are cities and towns in Alaska, Canada, Siberia, and Scandinavia located north of the Arctic Circle  that get no daylight between late November and sometime in January.  It must be really weird to live in 24 hour darkness.  I wonder how they cope: sun lamps? solariums? megadoses of Vitamin D? Antidepressants?  It's probably all of these combined.

Right now it feels more like late summer, so it isn't too bad. It doesn't hurt to go outside yet, and there's still plenty of light.

Speaking of summer, I haven't written here in a while.  Most of the time I've been out enjoying the sun before it disappears for another winter.

My husband and I went kayaking on the Connecticut River near Northfield, Massachusetts earlier this month and I didn't bring the camera since I like to travel light. The quality of pictures that can be taken with Smartphones never ceases to amaze me, especially when I enlarge them to fit in an 8 1/2 x 11 picture frame, but for this blog, the small version will have to do.

This photo is a bridge in the autumn of its life span (pardon the pun)  since it has been closed to traffic since 1985.  The Powers That Be have not yet figured out whether whether it will be rehabilitated or demolished. It would be a shame to destroy this bridge because it's such a beautiful backdrop.  No one builds structures like this anymore.

Abandoned Bridge, September, 2014 Copyright © 2014 Katley Demetria Brown

Since inquiring minds want to know, I looked it up on Wikipedia , where you can find just about everything. Not only did this bridge have a name (the Schell Bridge), but quite a bit of history as well. The article also mentioned something there about adding it to the National Register of Historic Places. I really hope it doesn't get demolished.  There is something both poignant and scary about going under an abandoned bridge  in a small boat.  My thought was.....what if this thing falls down?

Here is a photo of another bridge that I took on the same trip: the Amtrak Railroad Bridge.  A train crossed the bridge right before I took this picture; it was on its way to Vermont.

Amtrak Railroad Bridge, September 2014 Copyright © 2014 Katley Demetria Brown

If you wonder why I find bridges fascinating, I grew up in New York City, a place surrounded by water and hundreds of bridges. The suspension bridges are especially beautiful at night when the lights are on.

This month's poem is Water Remembers. One day the Schell bridge may become just a memory which is why I wrote about it.  There never seems to be enough money to fix roads and bridges, but there is plenty of money to wage The War on Terror.  One day there will be a tragedy related to a bridge collapse or faulty roads and then I'll be telling the Powers That Be "I told you so."

Water remembers

most people would doubt this

after all it's a substance

that follows the path

of least resistance

it moves and it's alive

the river remembers all

it has heard the melodies

of many civilizations

seen many celebrations

bridges and boats

mountains and cities

and visions of love

along its banks

it has been reincarnated

many times

just like you and me

we carry the memories with us

forever

and see them in our dreams

the river is eternal

and water remembers

If you enjoyed this, there is a post on my other blog, The Alien Diaries, Crossing the River, Part Four about the bridge between Calafat and Vidin, with videos and music.  It is worth a look, especially if you like music from the Balkans. There are many other posts there on a variety of topics, all related in one way or another to Balkan music and dance.

One of my Pinterest boards has pictures of bridges  in Europe and the United States.

Copyright © 2014 Katley Demetria Brown. Site Designed by Katley Demetria Brown. All Rights Reserved.
Water Remembers ©2010 Katley Demetria Brown

Summer is the Season of Escape, Sneaking Past the Lifeguards and Messing Around in Boats

 

“Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”
― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

After a long, hard winter, I really looked forward to summer, now that summer's here I know winter will come before I know it.

If you've been reading and following this blog you know why I hate winter.  Now it's time for you to find out why I like summer. Many years ago Nat King Cole summed it up quite nicely in this song: (Check out the big guy in that beach chair and the skinny dippers!)


During the summer of 2012,  my husband and I visited friends and family in Seaside Heights, New Jersey for several days.

The ocean was so turbulent that the lifeguards wouldn't let anyone in the water past their knees, and all I heard the entire day was the blast of their whistles. The rip current risk was high that day, and they weren't taking any chances.

My husband, a friend, and I decided to hang out on the beach after hours, and jumped into the surf barely five minutes after the lifeguards went off duty. We found out first hand how powerful the ocean was.. Fortunately, we returned to shore safely, after a few scary moments with strong currents threatening to take us out to sea.

The next day I overheard a lifeguard say "I had to perform a rescue at 8:30 this morning."

Hurricane Sandy destroyed the Jersey Shore three months later, and the ocean claimed the roller coaster. The resort has been rebuilt, but the ocean can reclaim it again.

Usually the ocean off the coast of New England is much too cold for swimming until August, when this picture was taken last year.  Unfortunately, the beaches close in early September because the lifeguards go back to school. It's too bad they don't get a few local people to work the beaches until mid September because that is when the water is warmest.  After what happened at Seaside Heights, I'm not tempting fate again, now that I know how the ocean can lay waste to boardwalks and roller coasters.

  T

What I like best about summer are the long, hot days, the balmy breezes, and going outside without being encumbered by heavy clothing. As much as I like the beach, we don't get their often because it's a bit of a drive and gas is expensive. So we go kayaking on the Connecticut River instead.



My husband and I try to get on the river a few times a year.  Last year we didn't go at all because there were tropical rain storms nearly every day in July, and dangerous high water. He likes to watch the birds and the wildlife, I like the exercise, the scenery, and that  I can cool off if it gets too hot.

We both hate it when people leave trash like red (why red?) Solo cups, empty beer bottles and trash for others to clean up.  We like it when we find unopened beer bottles underwater that people have forgotten.  If they haven't been opened they are drinkable. Free beer is always good :)

Taking a small boat on a large river is a mystical experience.  Foggy mornings are the best.  Although there is a bit of a chill from the fog and the water before the sun burns it off, everything is shrouded in a cloud of mystery.   A couple of years ago we paddled on a foggy morning and watched an artist on his boat, deeply engrossed in painting.  I am, however, hesitant about taking electronics (like a tablet for writing) on a kayak, although the cell phones are protected in the dry bag.  There is enough buoyancy in the dry bag that it will float, and we can retrieve our stuff provided the current isn't too fast.

There is also the challenge of wind and current.  The worst is when you're paddling upstream when the wind is against you, but then it's good for muscles on those arms.  Besides, you get a free ride later in the day when you're tired.

The best thing of all is the warm sun and the cool water. Being out on the river is a sensual experience that can excite all five senses.  (even taste).

Summer is the season of escape.  It is the "get out of jail free" card.  It is, most of all, an excuse to get outside.

This month's poem is about playing tag with the Atlantic Ocean. By the way, the ocean always wins.

A Game of Tag

I stand at

the edge of the

Atlantic Ocean

cold, wet sand

between my toes

while crashing waves

of freezing water

rush to shore

approaching me

as the tide comes in.

Do I really want to play

a game of tag

with the Atlantic?

She's a formidable opponent

whose weapons are the

icy water and the undertow.

I am no match against

something so powerful

so beautiful and

so vast that it meets land

somewhere in Spain,

but yet I am tempted

to join her in her

watery playground.

I could get hypothermia,

you know, or a rip current

could drag me away,

never to return.

In the meantime, a rogue wave

hits me with a numbing blast

of salt water,

knocks me down, pulls me in

and it's time to play...

Tag, you're it!

You can also check out my companion blog The Alien Diaries, if you like dance music from the Balkans. It's good summer reading, with lots of music.

Copyright © 2014 Katley Demetria Brown. Site Designed by Katley Demetria Brown. All Rights Reserved. Photos and A Game of Tag © Katley Demetria Brown (with the exception of the video Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer, song by Nat King Cole, 1963)

The Tornado of June 2011

photo by Katley Demetria Brown: Devastation on Hancock Street

Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore. (Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz)

One of the scariest events in nature is the tornado. They seem to pop up out of nowhere, usually during a round of thunderstorms. When a cold front meets a warm front, violent weather ensues and sometimes results in tornadoes. They are prevalent in the Midwest and Southern United States.

They have always been the bane of spring in the Midwest and some parts of the Southeastern United States. My mom had the misfortune to experience the 1998 F4 tornado in Central Florida. She said it was an experience she would never forget.  Fortunately she escaped it unscathed, with minor damage to her house.

Unlike blizzards and hurricanes,  when you get some warning and can take action before the event (board up your windows, pick up a generator, batteries, and flashlights) tornadoes attack suddenly and destroy everything in their path.

Tornadoes were practically unknown in my area until one hit Springfield on June, 1, 2011. That day was hot and humid with severe thunderstorm warnings forecast.  The storms in my area began at about 4 p.m,  and shortly after, a tornado formed in Westfield, Massachusetts.  It made its way east to West Springfield, Springfield, Wilbraham, Palmer and Monson.  It ended somewhere east of  Sturbridge. The tornado was barely a mile and a half north from my house, so it was visible from the back yard, according to one of the neighbors.

(I never got a chance to take a photo of it because my daughter told me to get my ass in the basement...now!) Fortunately, someone with a camera captured the moment.

photo from Wikipedia Commons: "Tornado in Springfield"

I watched the devastation on TV and couldn't believe what I saw. Three people died and 500 became homeless.

The Springfield tornado was one of the worst natural disasters I had witnessed. Although I was fortunate enough to escape it unscathed (no damage to my house or property, no one in my family was injured), barely two miles from me there was devastation everywhere in the form of downed trees, damaged homes, and downed power lines. I remember driving home from work and being rerouted (because of downed trees) into the area affected by the tornado.  It looked like a war zone.  Rubble was everywhere, and people in a total daze gathered as many household goods as they could salvage,and loaded them into cars and vans. The Mass Mutual Center became an emergency shelter.

My neighborhood escaped the damage and we even had electricity.  One of my friends was not so fortunate and had downed trees in her yard.  She and another friend had no electricity for a week.  The elementary school that my children attended years ago took a direct hit.  This photo is of one of the apartment buildings right next to the school, a few days later.

Apartment Building on Hancock Street, by Katley Demetria Brown

The school has now been housed in mobile classrooms and a new building will be built in a another location in the near future.

Most of the damaged areas have been rebuilt, however, nearly three years later, you can see evidence of tornado damage in parts of town.

I wrote a poem about it shortly afterwards. You may or may not believe in a Supreme Being, but to me God is someone who creates and destroys.

Coming at You From a Pissed-off God

Nature is random

If there is a God

he gets bored sometimes and

natural disasters are his playthings.

Fire, flood, tornado and hurricane

are some of the weapons in his arsenal.

ready to be unleashed on unsuspecting people

when they least expect it.

June first was one of those days.

That afternoon God took out his camera

to take flash pictures of Springfield.

He was in one of his cantankerous moods

and decided to turn on the fan

but he got a little more than what he bargained for

when he turned the switch to “high.”.

The funnel cloud he created was

more than just a breeze and it danced

across the landscape toppling bricks and buildings

and hundred year old trees.

Roofs were torn off houses

from the force of the wind.

Debris flew down the streets and rain

drenched the land.

A city mourned its loss of innocence.

You never know when your time is up

It depends what kind of mood God is in that day.

Just don’t piss him off.

By the way, I have another blog, updated weekly, about music and dance from the Balkans, The Alien Diaries. I guarantee you'll enjoy it!

Copyright © 2014 Katley Demetria Brown. Site Designed by Katley Demetria Brown. All Rights Reserved. Photos and poetry © Katley Demetria Brown (with the exception of the photo from Wikipedia Commons.)

Mother's Day, A Female Activist's Blog, and Feminist Poetry

• 

Tulips, May 2014 

Don't forget to pick up a bottle of wine for your Mom for Mother's Day. After all, you're one of the reasons she drinks.
anonymous

May is one of the most beautiful months of the year as long as the sun shines.

Although we're in the middle of spring, it has been rather chilly.

I think that's why the Mother's Day falls on the second Sunday of May. Whoever chose the time of year for Mother's Day picked a perfect time of year.  The trees are in bloom, and there are flowers everywhere.  Retailers and online florists go crazy because they know there is serious money to be made selling flowers for people to give to Mom on her special day.  As for me, I prefer chocolate and a meal at an ethnic restaurant, the more exotic, the better.

The problem with Mother's Day is this holiday discriminates against women who aren't mothers.  I don't mind it when my children bring me gifts or take me out to lunch.  I think Mother's Day is unfair, however, for women who chose not to have children and women who are unable to have children due to infertility. The role of mother is not the only game in town  nowadays when women can do so much more with their lives than they were able to in the last century.

I prefer, instead, to celebrate International Women's Day on March 8th.  (You can read about it on my other blog, The Alien Diaries). It is a day which honors all women. There is also International Men's Day in November (equal opportunity, you know) in November, although many people have not heard of it.  These holidays are not observed in the States because Women's Day, especially is seen as a Communist plot. After, all, International Women's Day was  a Russian idea, and the Russians have been getting a lot of bad press lately for the situation in Ukraine.

I don't understand why anyone would see a holiday for women as a bad thing. Only women can be mothers, but not all women want to be mothers. So why not celebrate all women?

A young female blogger made a big impression on me by speaking out against injustice, especially against women. The Republican Party here in the States would have women barefoot and pregnant if they had their way,

The young woman, whose name  Madison Kimrey  is an atheist and lives in the Bible Belt.  I imagine she gets a lot of flak from the Bible Thumpers where she lives. I give her a lot of credit for standing up against injustice, whether it is discrimination against the female gender, or the fact that she notices the United States is turning into a theocracy.  It's the Christian Right who are behind this. They feel that the United States is a Christian nation.  This notion makes me very uncomfortable, since this country was founded upon separation of church and state.

Fundamentalist religion subjugates women, and makes them second class citizens. There is a jihad going on in this country, and it's not coming from Islamic terrorists, but from Fundamentalist Christians and Tea Party Republicans who try to force their fanatical brand of religion on the rest of us.  I ain't buying.

Speaking of religion, I have had some bad experiences that I was a little girl in Catholic school.  Back in the old days, the Catholic schools were run by nuns who had no problem hitting young children with ruler and pointers.  It was seen as discipline, you know the Bible aphorism "spare the rod and spoil the child." The punishment they doled out on these kids would be seen as child abuse nowadays. The nuns couldn't deal with the likes of me and kicked me out of school, so I attended public school, which I liked much better.

To this day, I avoid religion which is something that I see as crowd and mind control, although I respect the right of people to worship as they see fit. Just don't try to convert me.

Even though I'm a mother and a grandmother, I raised my girls to be strong women, and taught them to question everything. I'm glad they are following in my footsteps.

It's time to get off the soapbox since I've been standing on it too long.

Several years ago I wrote a poem based (loosely) on Heine's Lorelei.  Heine was a German poet who also happened to be Jewish.  He was persona non grata in Hitler's Germany, (even though he was dead a long time by then) and his books were burned, along with other works authored by those repugnant to the Nazi Party.  Heine, too, would have been burned had he been around during the Nazi era.  This is the kind of thing that happens when discrimination turns into downright hatred, and Hitler and his cronies had a passionate hatred of Jewish people.

Fortunately, the Nazis and their followers did not take over the world, and they lost the war.

Many years ago I had the good fortune to live in Germany, not far from the Lorelei. My husband and I often visited St. Goar, a tourist trap type town on the Rhine, across the river from that infamous rock.  German legend had it that a siren lived on top of the rock and sang to lure the sailors and the bargemen, and led them towards disaster.

This barge, which had just passed the Lorelei, got through the gorge in one piece. If it had crashed it would have meant death by hypothermia (or worse) for those aboard.

Rheingau by St. Goar, in February

Since I've saved the best for last, here's my poem Siren's Song. It's an excerpt from my chapbook The Visionary, and you can also find it in the anthology The Art of Being Human, Volume 7: Sagittarius2-Love Poems. . Also, please pardon the crazy formatting.  Microsoft Word gets lost in translation on Blogger.

I knew you from

another lifetime

and I'm sure I saw you once

in this one.

You were in a dream of mine

and years later I saw you

a young man

standing across the river.

You gazed at me with longing,

your eyes filled me with desire.

Although I never met you

you were so close and yet so far.

 I never forgot

the siren song of your smile

and the beauty of your eyes

for that brief moment.

I search for you everywhere.

You are always on my mind

yet I don't even know who you are.

But if I ever met you I'd be tempted

to leave my husband

and crash on the rocks

to repeat history

this time around.

Something in my soul told me

you had once loved me

and the affair had ended sadly.

Would I sell my soul

for a second chance?

Yes.

Copyright © 2014 Katley Demetria Brown. Site Designed by Katley Demetria Brown. Poetry and artwork on this site may not be reproduced or copied without permission of the author.