Tea-Time: Mumbai

The Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai on fire after terror attacks
Photograph: Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty

Tea-Time: Atomic Age

           by-- Joanne de Longchamps

Afternoon. Create the delicate hours
With measured murmurs. Thrust thin towers
Of conversation; white spires pricking air,
Frail cities of sound, pale minarets,
Ringed with the fine, dry mist of cigarettes.

Play piano, notes like apples, round
And firm with pink delicious sound
Called wizardly from vast, invisible trees.
(Eclipse the vision of our bitter fruit,
Wind-blasted orchard and the poison-root.)

Sip amber, plucking courage from a tray.
Speak love or art. Revive the wilting day
And close a quiet curtain to efface
Impatient whines of anger, idiot-feet,
A monster loose along the peaceful street.

I was a student of Joanne de Longchamps at the University of Nevada, Reno, in the early 1970s. Creative writing/poetry. One semester. I didn't apply myself, budding alcoholic at a party campus. She was blond and beautiful. The students in the class, about 20 around one long wooden table, seemed brilliant. A poem written by one of them remains a favorite of mine to this day. One Monday Ms. de Longchamps came to class with stacks of our poems. She told us she and her son, Dare, had spent the weekend at their cabin in the Sierra foothills, that he had pored over the poetry, had selected one poem, had told her "this moves me." It was mine. I remember the exchange of my poem from her hand to my hand. I remember her approving smile. (I may follow this post with that poem during the weekend.)

I discovered Joanne de Longchamps again when I looked for poetry to include in a post about Pyramid Lake in Nevada. My search found her book Torn by Light: Selected Poems. A description of it online says:

This collection spans the entire writing and artistic career of a gifted collage artist and poet, widely regarded as Nevada's foremost poet of the 1960s and 1970s. Sadly, she died in isolation in 1983 and was quoted as saying "Nevada hardly knows me."

In reading this short bio of de Longchamps I once again lived my sorrow for her when the news of Dare's suicide was released to the community. He ended his life at their cabin in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas.




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An excellent Wall Street Journal World personal view article of the Mumbai attacks ends with these lines.......Joe Biden was right, Barack Obama will face an international test in the first six months. South Asia looks to be that test.

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