« The Value of the Gold they covet so much – Our real goods are the things of the forest: its waters, fish, game, trees and fruit. Not merchandise! »

More from Barbara Crane Navarro. This has to stop!

Barbara Crane Navarro

Yanomami boy with pet monkey, Alto Orinoco, Amazonas, Venezuela
photo – Barbara Crane Navar

«When a human being dies, his ghost does not carry any of his goods onto the sky’s back, even if he is very greedy. The things he made or acquired are left on earth and only torment the living by rekindling the longing for his presence.

We are different from the white people and our thought is other. Among them, when a father dies, his children are happy to tell each other: ‘We are going to share his merchandise and his money and keep them for ourselves!’

Our real goods are the things of the forest: its waters, fish, game, trees and fruit. Not merchandise! This is why as soon as someone dies we make all the objects he kept disappear. We grind up his bead necklaces; we burn his hammock, his arrows, his quiver…

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Faith in the Heights

Hey meh, Whaddee do? A'ait meh. How you? I knows what I know. I dues what I do. Who's tight wit chew? I been yer day one, man. Day one. That's the thing, man. You feelin' me? Cain't take the hood otta This here. Why you sayin' that? Hope, meh. Gots to keep the faith …

Memorial for a Lost Poem

My writing teacher loved you. Well, especially: "M&M faced ragsters jumbling pell-mell into a faded pink station wagon at dawn." A morning of summer blueberry picking was what it was all about. Donning belts to hold buckets to hold berries freshly plucked from their limbs. Later, somewhere in the field, a radio blared Diana Ross …

Barn’s Loft

Rafters loom large between rusty nails. A small raccoon peers out diamond at roof's gable. Ladder, missing rungs of course, stands ready. Pine wood, walnut casings, large barrel stuffed with radio parts, Mr. Bowles, struck dead by a mail truck on Henry Street, left treasures up there. Sleepovers, flashlights, sleeping bags, pillows, Tiger Beat magazine. …

What fresh hell…

I love Dorothy Parker's famous quote, "What fresh hell is this?"  It comes to mind so often in the wake of one of the worst presidential tenures this country has ever suffered--that of, well, his name doesn't deserve the time it would take me to type it.  He's banned on FaceBook, Twitter, and my computer …

Good Mourning

Is there ever a good mourning? Recently my mother passed away followed the next month by my mother-in-law. Two very different, loving women whose nine decades were filled to the brim with what mattered most to each of them, and family was right up there. The Covid19 pandemic altered the way in which we were …

Be the P.O.O.P

Our neighborhood group has turned into an exhausting string of email complainers.  Someone's dog pooped on someone else's grass.  Someone else's dog pooped on someone else's grass and failed to bag it up.  Someone else's dog pooped on someone else's grass and the dog's owner took it upon themself to place the dainty orange plastic …

Helios and Selene

Helios and Selene A thick, deliciously dense and ferny woods beckoned behind our house when I was young. This other world presented itself next to a small white church, obscured behind a few modest homes in our gritty working class neighborhood. Beechnut, pine, ferns, moss, and decaying wood all sent up a heady amalgam of …

Plastic Trash Dip Anyone?

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“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

I've been thinking quite a bit about a poem written over one hundred years ago by the poet T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."  Written in 1910, the poem was immediately cast into a new category of poetry called modernism, "a literary movement at the turn of the 20th century that emphasized …