When Pain Becomes a Poem

Two video narratives you won't want to miss

Daisy Photo by Şeyma D. at Pexels

Welcome to another Friday edition of PeaceLinks, a digest of web finds relating to peace, cooperation, and plain decency.

This week a daisy chain of Substack links led me to two virtuoso videos about hope and community in adversity. Both are exceptional.

Here is how it all unfolded.

First came a Note from Sarah Fay, who is serializing her memoir

Cured the Memoir by Sarah Fay

. She Restacked a post from

Kimberly Warner - Unfixed

, another memoir serializer and the creator of a documentary called Unfixed, about the way people deal with adversity.

Video #1

In a Substack update a week ago, Kimberly shared the documentary video about the way chronic illness turned her attention toward other people whose lives had come “unfixed.” It’s a moving 6 1/2 minutes of “yes to the messy, uncomfortable journey of being alive”:

The birth of Unfixed

After mashing my empty Kleenex box into the recycle bin and replacing it with a fresh one, I hit the subscribe button on

Unfixed

, which is how I learned about virtuoso video #2.

Yesterday’s Unfixed post in my inbox promised, “You are in for a treat,” and shared a link by a poet new to me, Andrea Gibson. A short (1 1/2-minute) poem about joy “undimmed by cancer” piqued my interest enough to send me to Andrea’s archive, where I found more to love.

Video #2

“MAGA Hat in the Chemo Room” hammers out justice for the MAGA era. I know you can’t get a whole country into a single poem — even though Walt Whitman made a pretty good show of it, and Allen Ginsberg tried to follow suit — but if you could do that, this would be the poem of this time, right now:

MAGA HAT IN THE CHEMO ROOM

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Update on a continuing story:

Last week’s edition included a story by investigative journalist

Lee Hedgepeth

about James Barber, a man on death row in Alabama who was put to death early this morning, after requests for a stay of execution were denied in Alabama and (late last night) by the U.S. Supreme Court. There were dissents at both levels. For more perspective on this story, see recent posts at

Tread by Lee Hedgepeth

and

Moth to flame

by

Beth Shelburne

.

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From my other Substack:

Last week saw the conclusion of the friendly competition asking “When were you enchanted by a book, poem, or story?” See the five winning essays here. This morning, I’ll be sending a custom poem, as promised, to one of the prizewinners. Next Monday breaks the recent series of posts from me on children’s books, as we sink our teeth into the dark magic of Octavia Butler’s speculative fiction novel Kindred, in which a late-twentieth-century California woman travels back in time to 1815 — and slavery. This is nobody’s idea of a sweet enchantment.

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Coming Up:

Next Friday, PeaceLinks will announce a lighter transition-to-fall schedule as we get ready to start school here in mid-August! We’re also getting ready to turn on a paid subscription option in August, with initial revenues supporting a community literacy project. I can’t wait to tell you about that! Subscribe to learn more in a future post.

Until next Friday — Peace,

Tah-ra