Inhospitable landscapes

A friend sent me an email this morning, extolling Weeds, by Richard Mabey, reviewed here by a clever young writer named Bella Bathurst, who says, "There's something eerie about weeds--their speed, their ingenuity, their almost supernatural resourcefulness." Mabey admires weeds. They are, after all, plants nobody wants, growing where nobody takes care of them. And yet they grow so well.

I've also been reading about the 1700 California prisoners now entering the eleventh day of a hunger strike protesting the horrors of the so-called Special Housing Units (SHU), vast blocks of human beings stored in noisy metal boxes where no flesh touches theirs, where if anything touches their bodies, it is steel. This madness.

All morning, as I stood at the window watching the rain come down, as I packed a couple more boxes of "miscellaneous," I was thinking about weeds. About inhospitable landscapes. About the American prison system and its two million inmates, hundreds of thousands of whom are in "Administrative Segregation" (Ad Seg, or SHU).

For updates, petitions, and ways to express solidarity with the striking prisoners, see this blog.

I wanted to read again a poem written by a prisoner who called himself Abiola and participated for a few years in a writing workshop I led, but my books are all packed. Then I remembered I had included his poem in a blog I was keeping back in 2007. Abiola is a free man now, and I hope he's still writing poems. This was his dream:

Release me to the streets
Drop me off in a dark alley
Where bag ladies and dope fiends sleep
Where used-twice needles and broken glass be everywhere
Surrounding dumpsters
Housing unwanted newborns
While a brass horn creates jazzy blues
In a smoke-filled room upstairs.
I'll live there
And write poetry all night
Sleep till noon
After dreaming of blue birds*
Migrating eastward.
Drop me off in this heaven
In comparison with where I've been.

This Blip's for him, although it's unlikely he'll ever know it's here.

*Buses used to transport prisoners in Texas are called Blue birds.