Jamie Dedes

We Will Emerge: Imagining the Future

Courtesy of freestocks, Unsplash

“ We will emerge with a better vision.

“Not until this moment are we seeing the people who make this world work: the myriad invisibles, the anonymous, the undocumented, the overworked and underpaid professionals—some of whom we don’t even grace with the status of ‘professionals’ or pay them a living wage or take care of their health.” Julia Alvarez, We Will…

Out of the Womb of Time, a poem

Photograph courtesy of Graham Holtshausen, Unsplash

“Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there’s nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fiber and, in some cases,…

#19 SuffrageStories . . .

Copyright the Smithson

“There never will be complete equality until women themselves help to make laws and elect lawmakers.” Susan B. Anthony

  The Smithsonian, Library of Congress and the National Archives have launched #19SuffrageStories, a nineteen-day social media campaign that is sharing stories about the long fight for women’s voting rights in the United States.  They started posting on…

“Night Mail” by W. H. Auden and “From a Railway Carriage” by Robert Louis Stevenson

: Publicity poster original artwork for the documentary film Night Mail by the GPO Film Unit Date 1936, Public Domain

“It’s not that we have to quit this life one day, but it’s how many things we have to quit all at once: music, laughter, the physics of falling leaves, automobiles, holding hands, the scent of rain, the concept of subway trains… if only one could leave this life slowly!” ― Roman…

PEN America Unveils Fall 2020 Pen Out Loud Lineup

Copyright PEN America

All-virtual rethinking of PEN America’s landmark event series features Yaa Gyasi, Roxane Gay, Ayad Akhtar, Ben Rhodes, Claudia Rankine, Marilynne Robinson, and Alexander Chee

Earlier this month PEN America announced its fall lineup for its PEN Out Loudauthor conversation series. This season, reimagined virtually for our current times, will continue its mission to present…

SUNNYSIDE UP: From the Edge of Eternity, Meditations on “The BeZine”

One Lifetime After Another

one day, you’ll see, i’ll come back to hobnob with ravens, to fly with the crows at the moment of apple blossoms and the scent of magnolia ~ look for me winging among the white geese in their practical formation, migrating to be here, to keep house for you by the river …

i’ll be home in time for the bees in their slow heavy search for nectar, when the grass unfurls, nib…

CALL ALL ARTISTS: “The BeZine” 100,000 Poets for Change Banner Contest

Are you artistically inclined? Do you believe in raising awareness about important issues like Peace, Environmental Sustainability and Social Justice? Would you like a chance to display your visual arts talent to a global audience for a whole year? Could you use an Amazon Gift Card?

If this sounds like you, then we want to see your art! The BeZine 100TPC (One Hundred Thousand Poets for Change)…

Spirit Incarnate. . . and other poems in response to the last (and final) Wednesday Writing Prompt

Photograph courtesy of Elena Joland, Unsplash

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.” Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

The delay in getting this posted for you and the reason for it being the finalWednesday Writing Prompt: I was rushed to the Emergency Department few weeks ago and was not expected to make it through that…

I am without computer for the moment and will have to publish the responses to the last Wednesday Writing Prompt later in the week. This is about as much of a post as I can manage on my cell.

The June edition of Mbizo Chirasha’s Womawords Literary Press will post on Monday. Search it out. Thanks to all those who submitted work. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Meanwhile, everyone can read…

With Twice Found Hope and Tender Love, a poem . . . and your next Wednesday Writing Prompt

“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.” Immaturity, George Bernard Shaw [The Collected Works of George Bernard Shaw: Plays, Novels, Articles, Letters and Essays]

We four, we fumbled our pas de quatre on river rocks in a faraway place of raging Hudson and an antique cloister. No escape from mutilation but for books and theater, old stories reborn, told in…

. . . and other poems in response to the last Wednesday Writing Prompt

Photograph courtesy of Jian Xhin, Unsplash

“All of us, whoever we may be, have our respirable beings. We lack air and we stifle. Then we die. To die for lack of love is horrible. Suffocation of the soul.”  Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

And this being Tuesday, it’s time to share the responses to the last Wednesday Writing Prompt, Hypoxic Moment,  June 17, which invited poets to share poems about…

Hypoxic Moment, a poem . . . and your next Wednesday Writing Prompt

“She closed her eyes and began very gently picking imaginary flowers from the blanket.  Then, peacefully and without any struggle, she stopped breathing.  It was January 1930.” from The Woman Who Remembered Paradise [about Ascencion Solorsano] by Larry Engelmann, San Francisco Chronicle, July 10, 1988 as quoted in A Story Also Grows, poems by Charlotte Muse

anyone who was anyone was lined up…

PEN America Opens Submissions and Nominations for 2021 PEN America Literary Awards

The multiple interconnected crises facing our nation have forced us to reimagine our norms and institutions from the ground up,” said poet and PEN America Trustee Gregory Pardlo. “As individuals and organizations, we have had to call on the ingenuity of our foremothers to ‘make a way out of no way,’ as Zora Neale Hurston puts it, ingenuity that yields opportunity where, previously, there had…

I Still Recall . . . and other poems in response to the last Wednesday Writing Prompt

Photograph courtesy of Jude Beck, Unsplash

“I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.”  Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

And this being Tuesday, it’s time to share the responses to the last Wednesday Writing Prompt, Hello Nazim . . . Hello, June 10, which invited poets to…

THE BeZine, Vol. 7, Issue 3, June 2020, SustainABILITY

Ultimately, talking points preserve narratives seeking to keep the status quo or create a reality that aligns with the person’s ideology or personal needs. Marshall Shepherd 3 Common Things In Race, Coronavirus And Climate Change Debates, Forbes, June 12 2020

We want to start this introduction to the SustainABILITY issue of The BeZine with a pause and breath.

Go ahead, breathe in…

On the 31st Anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre . . .

A replica of the memorial in the Polish city of Wrocław depicting a destroyed bicycle and a tank track as a symbol of the Tiananmen Square protests. The original was destroyed by Security Service despite the fact that it was after the 1989 elections./ Photograph courtesy of Masur and generously released into the Public Domain.

The Tiananmen Square protests or the Tiananmen Square Incident,…

Hello, Nazim . . . Hello, a poem . . . and your next Wednesday Writing Prompt

Photograph courtesy of Victor Rodvang, Unsplash

Let’s Give the World To the Children

Let’s give the world to the children just for one day like a balloon in bright and striking colours to play with let them play singing among the stars let’s give the world to the children like a huge apple like a warm loaf of bread at least for one day let them have enough let’s give the world to the children at…