Jay Amberg's Blog, page 3

2019 Red City Review Book Awards

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Red City Review Book Awards has honored me with “Best Social Media” in the 2019 contest. Here is the complete list of winners. I’m very happy and grateful. Red City is an excellent organization. Thank you!

Bone Box free on Kindle

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Bone Box is free to download on Kindle, now until April 4th. I hope you enjoy the read.

“cracked hands that ached”

Thank your local grocery, postal, and construction workers. Thank the truck drivers and bank tellers. Thanks to everyone that is working hard.

The poem below is part of my 52 Poems for Men collection, available here. The painting is by Rahela Majidi, available here.

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Those Winter Sundays

by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

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Sekhmet, goddess of healing and justice

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Sekhmet is a complex goddess. She is the warming sun and destruction, plagues and healing. This website has an excellent description of her healing aspect:

While she may bring about disease and plague to those who wrong her as the Lady of Pestilence, she is also a master of the art of medicine as she provides the cure to various ailments she may have brought to man. She was the patron goddess of all healers and physicians. In fact, her priests were known to be very skilled doctors. As a result, the gruesome “Lady of Terror” becomes the benevolent “Lady of Life”.

She is also “the protector of Ma’at (balance or justice) with the epithet: ‘The One Who Loves Ma’at and Who Detests Evil’.”

Her name is mentioned often in The Healer’s Daughters. Elif is especially close to Sekhmet and her complicated relationship with the world.

(You can purchase the above artwork, as a prayer card, here. The art is credited to Lynn Perkins.)

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Support your local restaurants: Three Tarts Bakery and Cafe

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Three Tarts Bakery and Cafe is located at 301 South Happ Rd, right down the street from the Amika Press office in Northfield. Three Tarts makes marvelous sandwiches, salads, breads, cookies, pies, and more. Visit their website here; you can call your orders in to 847 446 5444 or text at 847 447 6446.

“Earth’s the right place for love”

Below is one of my favorite poems. It’s part of my 52 Poems for Men collection, available here. Poetry can be therapeutic.

Birches

by Robert Frost

When I see birches bend to left and right

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.

But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay

As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them

Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning

After a rain. They click upon themselves

As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored

As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.

Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells

Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—

Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away

You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.

They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,

And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed

So low for long, they never right themselves:

You may see their trunks arching in the woods

Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground

Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair

Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.

But I was going to say when Truth broke in

With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm

I should prefer to have some boy bend them

As he went out and in to fetch the cows—

Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,

Whose only play was what he found himself,

Summer or winter, and could play alone.

One by one he subdued his father’s trees

By riding them down over and over again

Until he took the stiffness out of them,

And not one but hung limp, not one was left

For him to conquer. He learned all there was

To learn about not launching out too soon

And so not carrying the tree away

Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise

To the top branches, climbing carefully

With the same pains you use to fill a cup

Up to the brim, and even above the brim.

Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,

Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.

And so I dream of going back to be.

It’s when I’m weary of considerations,

And life is too much like a pathless wood

Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs

Broken across it, and one eye is weeping

From a twig’s having lashed across it open.

I’d like to get away from earth awhile

And then come back to it and begin over.

May no fate willfully misunderstand me

And half grant what I wish and snatch me away

Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:

I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.

I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,

And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk

Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,

But dipped its top and set me down again.

That would be good both going and coming back.

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

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Hygieia, goddess of health, cleanliness, and hygiene

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Here is a lovely pen-and-ink drawing of Hygieia. She is the goddess of health, cleanliness and hygiene and one of the daughters of Aesklepios, god of medicine. You can learn more about her on Wikipedia.

This artwork is courtesy Barashkova Natalia and can be found on Shutterstock. I considered it for the cover of The Healer’s Daughters.

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Hygieia, goddess of health, cleanliness and hygiene

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Here is a lovely pen-and-ink drawing of Hygieia. She is the goddess of health, cleanliness and hygiene and one of the daughters of Aesklepios, god of medicine. You can learn more about her on Wikipedia.

This artwork is courtesy Barashkova Natalia and can be found on Shutterstock. I considered it for the cover of The Healer’s Daughters.

Rescheduled, Let’s Just Write! conference

The Let’s Just Write! conference is being rescheduled.

Here is a “comment on the moment” from author Betsy James.

Let’s Just Write!, the best writing conference in Illinois

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For the second year in a row, Let’s Just Write! has been named best writing conference in Illinois by The Writer magazine. Impressive, considering that Let’s Just Write! is only in its third year. I’m eager to participate. John Manos of Amika Press will be on the Small Press panel discussion. Here is the full schedule of events. Have you signed up yet?