Lights, Macon Street, Brooklyn 2016
Two days ago I wrote this on FB: I live in a city where Arabic music plays on “new sounds”. where sirens rove the night air. where friends chat on sidewalks or take weeks to meet for 2 hours in a bar. i live in a city often characterized as cold and dark and and expensive and lonely and terror ridden. and for some this city lives up to these negatives. but i live in a city where i have a tea for my girlfriends. where i find beauty in unlikely places. where music good or bad is played on the subway platforms. where at times you can see real stars. and those stars are twinkling this night, so many talented people who lived in, danced in, made love in, laughed in and gave of their considerable gifts to this city left this plane for what is that higher realm. but the city has their traces and i live in the city where those traces surround me. I am thankful to be part of stardust.
Poet Patricia Spears Jones says farewell to 2016
but of course, there is more. I am grateful for the many opportunities I had to share my work and collaborate with fellow poets and artists. I traveled three times to California and read in places where my work was heard and honored. I talked with young people and old people and many folks in between. I wrote poems that grew from hanging out in Coney Island to ones dealing with the hangover of the Presidential Election. I kissed and hugged and dreamed and dared to do things differently. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it did not. Many good people I know and love are gone. But many remain. And new ones are coming. What was it that Laura Nyro sang: “and when I die/there’ll be one child born to carry on. So for Vertamae and Monica and Laurie and countless others, I hear those infants’ wailing.
PEACE
Christmas dinner, East Village, 2016