Month: December 2006

  • This a Cat and her newborn kittens a few days before her kitchen exploded taking a large chunk of house with it. Do you ever wonder about the people our TV's leave behind? The Neo Nazi's are rising in Europe. We rush to blame Muslims.The police decreed it a gas leak--perhaps so. If we turn away from the main fact--the rise of Racism and fanatisism in Europe, who will suffer most?


    Mormon, I think of the Tapestry/Larry King documentaries--repeated 3 times on weekend prime time. About a false steward who needed deposing,
    a daughter who needed to bring a suit against her father for sexual
    abuse, and rural girls who desperatly needed a boarding house in town.
    My mother met my father in such a boarding house. She was Elaine
    Cannon's, the Deseret News Women's Columnist's Secretary.

    A friend of mine, then Peggy Fletcher, the editor of Sunstone, lived in one. To conserve funds for the magazine, she lived in a tiny garret with a fire escape which friends used when visiting her. That these girls needed a town place to live, with the usual housemother was not worth dumping our unfamiliar culture on a unsuspecting public.


    A Pennsylvania man mistook them for Amish and there was a mass killing by the time I got to TV on monday morning. A Utah fifth grader could have done more research in an Evening than was done in preparation for this interview. I know of no law against the religious     practice of Polygamy outside the states where it is practiced in this way.

    It should be possible for the Amish families to sue the network and win--how much for the loss of 5 daughters.

    Kj.

  • La Corazon y los Mentiros

    Today a small man told a small tale of China. Why do people spoil the miricals of others.
    Odd assumtions.All millennial religions are Christian.

    All millennial religions are Christian.
    All Pentocostal religions are Christan.


    Ukbar/Akbar is not important along the silk road--he was a Muslim who became vegetarian and forbade the desecration of Hindu shrines. He also brought Jesuits to china in the Sixteenth
    Century. These then translated important manuscripts on physics which were then taken to Newton. They may have been important to Newtonian and more modern physics.

    In the Falong Gong teachings matter was thought to be comptosed of finer and finer gradations of corpusles full of empty space and one live Golden Budda full of empty space full of one empty corpuscle and one meditating Golden Buddha.
    For such dangerous teachings has a great nation imagined itself small and inferior--Truth, Compassion, Restraint.  

    Daoists visited Black Mountain
    in 400BC.  They called Navaho Mountain the world naval.  They sat in
    the caves about her.  The Chinese Communist Party beleives Falong Dafa
    to be non-Chinese.  It is as likely, from the Geography of religion,
    that Falong Dafa originated in China and was taken by mendicants to all
    parts of the world.

    Ketja

  • Shellie Leggat’s Summer Poems

    From the Seventh Floor.
    1977

    Even at this height,
    the city casts brittle
    light over our shadows,
    which move with us,
    slithering, over lamps
    and chairs.

    Beneath the light
    at dinner, always when
    we are together
    with the lights on,

    our shadows move secretly
    someone else’s memory
    moving overneverything,
    changing everything.

    We are just shadows - -
    our bodies off somewhere
    only partly filled in,
    the children who began
    to color us grown now,
    gone now.

    Insubstantial,
    we move inside larger forms
    which are more and more
    hollow until finally even
    our room is only what two
    fragile stars remember,

    an old man and an old
    woman whose bodies
    in our room are beaded
    with fever, and smeared
    with finger marks.

    Parrot’s Ferry

    The fish are shadows
    flying in the air
    between my eyes
    and the river.

    Tiger Swallowtail flicker
    just under the surface
    of the water:

    They are the same color
    as the fish before the
    air transforms them
    into bright things.

    Beneath our Window

    branches rattle.
    The trees are girls wearing
    thin green sweaters that the
    wind cuts through.

    Beneath our window
    they try to shake the snow
    off their shoulders;

    even though it is
    California, even though it is
    midsummer, even

    though we say,
    sometimes,
    that we are in love.

    Lunt’s Hotel

    We twitch like serpents
    each on our own
    side of the bed.

    Our words
    are indifferent ravens
    that flap away from us
    in opposite directions.

    In cubicles up and down
    the hall the inmates lie
    in narrow beds.

    An old man
    shouts in his sleep,
    another curses himself.

    In the morning
    we are the only ones
    who leave.

    Stopping at the Junction

    Sage and wind
    take our feelings from us
    as easily as breath.

    Everything is invisible.

    The darkness is a mouth,
    yawning:

    It takes even tenderness
    into its teeth
    and closes on it.

    The Yellow Widow

    True, she was a big spider:
    but I was looking up at her
    through her shadow
    on her web.

    I think we look at Death
    like that.

    1987

    The Dew

    They came, more
    softly went. How we
    shine in the arms
    of our tormentors.

    Only the dew knows
    where they've gone.

    Where they lay down
    he is not.

    1990

    Sue:

    My sister and I have made our bed
    from the forgotten wigs of the algae
    women. I would wish that she could
    hold me, but she has no arms.

    Instead, I will lie along her back.
    I will stroke her belly as she feeds
    among the willow roots. When the
    shadow of the fisherman’s net
    falls upon us, I will be entangled in it.

    I will go to His house, wear His clothes,
    get stickers in my feet.

    The Catfish :

    The sun is warm along my spine.
    my sister’s body is curled about me.
    I long to touch her, but I have no
    hands. Instead, I will buck
    when she tries to ride me.

    Instead I will leap
    into the Fisherwoman’s net.
    I know She will not take me.
    She never takes me.
    “Catty,” She will say,
    “the problem with you is
    you don’t know
    you’re a fish.”

    Then She will kiss me and throw me
    away out into the middle of the river.
    Sue'll be cussing and rattling the
    sides of the Woman’s basket.

    I don’t think it’s fair.
    She should take me.
    I want to live in a house.
    I want to go about on two legs,
    I want to ride upon
    the backs of the
    four-leggeds.

    I’ll tell you something else.
    If the Woman does take me,
    I won't forget my river friends.
    I’ll go to the river bend
    every morning.

    I'll wade into the shallows,
    bread crusts between
    my toes.

    KMW

  • Bunny, Preface


    Bye-Bye, Bunny, Book Three,
    Dad's War,  2002 Edition

    BYE,BYE BUNNIE, BOOK ONE: CALL THEWIND MORIAH
    SECTION A compare forward and character list with section 8
    KWM

    (Move to end of each book. Include all characters.)

    l.)  Doctor  Talbot Coleridge Jefferies,  (Jeff, Lord Jeff), b. London l840,

    2.)  Lady Susan Higbee Jefferies, b. Ludlow, Mass., l845

    3.)  Llyman Talbot Jefferies, b. London, l865

    4.)  Mona Higbee Jefferies b. London l867

    5.) Gleddy  Plash Woodseaves (Sophie's mother) b. l846

    5.5.)  Prue Woodseaves Wainwright, (Mary's mother)
    b. Lillingford, Northumberland, l847

    6.)  Mary Wainwright Sutherland, b. Baube, (East End) London l862, l child too weak to survive

    7.)  Sophie Woodseaves Sutherland Marshall, b. London l867

    7.5)  Fergus Sutherland,  b. l856, Sutherland, Scotland

    8.)  Sampson Jefferies Sutherland,  b. l882, 2 children

    9.) Mavis Sutherland  b. l885 London, 4 children,2 deceased

    l0.)  Laura Sutherland b. l887, 3 children,b1 deceased

    ll.) Lizzie Sutherland b. l895, l child deceased.

    ll.5.)  John Eliot Marshall,second husband of Sophie, b. l86 Nantuktucket

    l2.)  RuthEllicott Marshall,  b. l893 Cape Cod, Mass., mother deceased.

    I am with you altogether, though I
    live not where I love
    Jean Redpath

    PREFACE

    Writing has been, for me, both consolation and vocation; an element of my fate.  During most of my writing years I have been ill. Bye Bye Bunnie  has formed gradually in my mind. It is a Morman American novel. I have not argued with time and contemplation for placing this work and no other in my hands. It has been my passion, obsession, and when death has hovered and I feared that I would not finish it, my salvation and dispair.

    For Bunny,  I have heavily relied on oral sources which are my legacy. My mother's parents were collectors of Southern Utah physical and oral history. I felt very much in their historical soup when I read the somewhat unpolished Dixie classic,The Giant Joshua, at B.Y.U.. During World War II Joshua  was purchased wholesale by the British government for the distraction of Londoners confined to the subway tubes during Hitler's bombing raids. Later, my grandfather told me that Maureen Whipple stayed overnight with he and his bride while collecting material for her book.
    I began formal research for my novel as a student spouse and frequent auditer at the Y. I owe much to Gene England and my great aunt Marie's grandson, Clifton Jolley. literature professers who allowed my penurius and spectral presence in classes for which I could not afford tuition. I also haunted and am indebted to BYU.s fine manuscript collection where the true story of Sophie and Mary Jewkes can be found.

    I have taken broad liberties with the account of their lives I had from their granddaughter, Mellisa Pearl Mc Call.

    I hope that wherever they are they will be amused by the wild liberties I have taken with their lives. My own dear grandparents will be less pleased. They considered Joshua a profane work . They faulted Maurine Whipple for returning to secular notice private and  sacral marital customs then practiced by many who were  old and sometimes frail.

    In Bunny I have tried to recreate a delicate historical landscape that is dissappearing beneath the sediment of time. There are many types of Mormons. I have heard that more than half speak Spanish and most retain their culture and customs. I hope there will be many other Mormon writers to write other books about other Mormon traditions.

    Some beleive that it is possible and safer to conceal the tradition of plural marrage, however, history leaves traces. I think of the ancient reptiles and fish, extinct now, but ever revealing fossil evidence of the truth of their existence. As Utah Mormons, we revere our ancestors and love the courage of their lives.
    Lest we forget.

    Ketja


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