My mother grew butterflies.

She had an old garden bed by the front door,

in which she grew milkweed.

She had eight children.

In a miracle of wings, monarchs –

yearly migrate from Central Mexico to Canada, and then make the trip back.

It takes five generations to make that trip.

They only lay eggs on milkweed.

She had eight children.

My mother knew about migrations.

She knew how children come and go,

Come and go.

She knew they needed a safe place.

The right home.

She knew about watching children launch into uncertain winds and futures.

Two of my nieces –

The third generation, spent time growing up in that house.

I like to think they needed milkweed like milk to grow.

Yesterday a wounded monarch lay in my yard.

I showed my granddaughter how to pick it up.

We carried it down the street to a neighbor’s patch of milkweed.

So if it still needed to lay eggs,

to carry on the next generation,

it could.

This was the fourth generation of children

Helping the fourth generation of monarchs.

My mother grew monarchs

And she knew how to grow families.

© words and pictures by Daniel DeMarle

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Growing up I spent a lot of time in my teens burning off energy splitting wood. In part this may have been because the wood was in the driveway in the way of the basketball net. In retrospect that may have been a clever parental ploy to encourage the splitting of wood.

During the pandemic, with indoor gatherings not allowed. I would gather wood in my urban forest to burn in the cold night air with socially distanced friends. That included large unsplit tree trunks, that at first were to wet to split.

After a wet winter and seven months they are now ready to split. I watch myself with sledge hammer and wedge, and wonder what that young man would think of this now grey haired man splitting wood. I know that If I could say something to him, I would tell him “ a life isn’t a life if you don’t live it, so live it as if each day is a gift, because it is.”

© words and picture Dan DeMarle 7/22/21

Currently there are a number of bills in the 21-22 legislative session aimed at restricting voting in NY. The Brennan Center for Justice has identified the following bills as restricting voting access. These include in the Assembly

A04326Requires a government photo identification card to be presented when casting a ballot

A04569Provides that absentee ballots shall not be mailed or delivered to a voter unless such voter has specifically requested to receive an absentee ballot

A04901Enacts the voter registration integrity act

A04929Relates to prohibiting ballot harvesting

A04969Clarifies the qualification to receive an absentee ballot and clarifies the process for delivery of an absentee ballot

A05783Relates to absentee voting application deadlines

A06970Establishes an electronic absentee ballot application transmittal system

https://www.nyassembly.gov/leg/?default_fld=&leg_video=&bn=A04326&term=2021&Summary=Y

In the State Senate the following bills have been submitted.

S1540 – Prohibits sex offenders who are on parole and in civil confinement from voting in certain elections

S1805 – Relates to prohibiting ballot harvesting

1853 – Enacts the voter integrity act

S264 – Relates to absentee voting application deadlines – Signed by Governor on 7/16/21

Bill S3625 – Relates to providing valid government issued photo identification when casting a ballot

S3820 – Authorizes any registered voter to vote by absentee ballot

S4447 – Relates to implementing driving privilege licenses and requiring a social security number to register to vote on an application for a motor vehicle driver’s license; repealer

S6540 – Voter ID law for first time voters

https://www.nysenate.gov/search/legislation?searched=true&type=f_bill&bill_printno=6540&page=1

I grew up enclosed in white racism. Reading “Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and you” by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi. I was struck by how many of my childhood heroes are really just racist tropes. It took me decades to unlearn the messages I learned in my childhood.

I grew up loving Tarzan. I did not know that Tarzan came from a cultural response to the great boxer and fighter Jack Johnson who as a black man kept humiliating white challengers. You may know the phrase, the great white hope. Well he defeated them all. Hence the need for a white male hero to defeat all those Africans and apes. Remember those apes, they show up again in the next paragraph.

Then as the Black Power movements rose, the culture came up with a blockbuster to encourage all Whites to fear that Black Power. The Planet of the Apes – where white astronauts land on a planet run by apes (just another derogatory name for black people). I loved those movies.

Then in the 1970s when the idea of the slum, and of fear of powerful black men was running rampant, the new powerful white hero rose up from the streets of Philadelphia, Rocky.

I grew up with those figures. I enjoyed those movies. Yet I was clueless as to what the real message of those movies and figures were. Now, I know better, and maybe now you do as well.

© words by Daniel DeMarle 7/19/21

While Rochester and many other cities have seen a rise in violent gun deaths so far in 2021 everyone likes to point to their favorite issue of the day to tell us what is causing these deaths. This includes attacking any progressive politician they can possible point to. So lets go through the facts, our current upswing in violent deaths is due to:

bail reform

poverty

black on black violence

the fact Biden was elected

the ongoing decline of the American family

progressive female politicians

the Supreme Court

Guns

OK the answer is the Supreme Court, particularly the deceased Honorable Justice Antonio Scalia, and the rest of the Roberts court, Roberts, Kennedy, and Alito, and and many other previous and subsequent Supreme Court Justices who have taken the Second Amendment and turned it into a open spickit for conservative christian causes and the Republican NRA.

And of course guns.

© words by Daniel DeMarle 7/6/2021

My great grandfather was a farmer.

My very German grandmother and grandfather,

were gardeners and canners.

Many cells of my body –

were formed eating food from their garden,

their cherry tree,

and their canned food.

My parents were gardeners.

Many cells of my body,

were formed from sweet corn,

grown in their yard.

Epi-genetics.

inheritance.

While I may know no German words.

I know what a German garden looks like.

Inheritance works in so many twisted ways.

Are planting tomatoes a dominant or recessive trait?

What about canning produce grown in the sun,

that falls on you while you work in a garden?

Of my siblings those who own land,

garden.

The few that don’t grow other things.

My sister grows planets in cyberspace.

My brother grows plants in window boxes.

My other sister grows pets.

The rest grow a variety of plants

Will those traits continue?

Will my grandchildren someday say,

its canning time,

excuse me while I pick some of those ripe tomatoes?

© words by Daniel DeMarle 5/27/21

The White Lion –

Don’t forget that name.

How many times have you heard that so and so,

is a distant relative of someone who came across,

on the Mayflower. You know that name!

The Mayflower, one of the most famous and mythic ships,

in the American cosmology.

Landing near Cape Cod with those Pilgrims in 1620.

We all know their god and worship.

Yet, while the First People were here with their religion and government

The Pilgrims were not the second.

What of the White Lion?

What you do not know about the 1st ship to bring people to America?

Could it be because their cargo had beautiful black skin?

That they were in truth the second people.

Yet those 20 or so people were from the Ndongo people,

in what is now Angola.

They were taken from Africa in the São João Bautista,

a Portuguese ship.

They probably gave praise when their ship was attacked,

by the English ship the White Lion.

They probably hoped and prayed that this meant their freedom,

for who could be so barbaric to reenslave newly enslaved people?

After defeating the Portuguese, the English sailors,

did not free them.

Imagine the tears!

As they were simply transferred from one hold to another.

To eventually be traded for food in the Virginia Colony.

What of their descendants?

Who are the descendants of those men and women,

who came to America in 1619 a year before,

those pious Pilgrims arrived.

What of the gods of the Ndongo people?

You know they were prayed to.

Why do we all not know of the White Lion?

We mostly know of the centuries of woe that the white men and women

who accepted that trade,

brought to this country.

Where are the monuments to the men and women of the White Lion?

Where are the memorials to their tears?

to our tears?

© words by Daniel DeMarle

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i was born in a place where we only saw two colors,

those colors were white and black.

i was born in a place where history was only taught,

from a white book,

where the world was paper-thin.

Where history was only two dimensional,

where only white men had agency,

where only white men made history.

i was born in a time where we watched Westerns,

where the white settlers or calvary,

were doing right by massacring first nation people,

both men, women, children, and infants.

It would be decades before I learned the term first nations.

There was no black in my life other than images on a screen.

It would be years before I knew someone who was not white.

I was born in a twisted and malformed world!

A world were you were taught 2+2 was 4;

but not cuatro, or أربعة or nne, or even ceathrar.

At some point, my foot and then I, fell through that paper-thin world.

I, like Dorothy, found a beautiful technicolor world;

of life, food, love, experience, and taste and oh so many glorious tastes,

and stories,

and lives,

and vibrancy,

and pathos and sorrow,

and JOY!

Let alone agency and power!

It’s amazing that I grew up in the shadow of the company,

that made Kodachrome,

but yet it took me decades to live in a Kodachrome world.

Today at the Doctors the receptionist was having a hard time getting the computer to print,

She made a comment about oh you know women,

I answered, Yes I know women are strong, and vibrant, and heroes and the foundation of this country.

She started to cry and later thanked me.

After I thought what system do we live in that a random stranger has to tell you a truth that is so,

true.

Yet the fact is,

the fact is,

that I myself, besides having strong women in my life,

did not know that about women,

until I could see more than white and black.

It’s a beautiful world,

Come see it with me.

© words by Daniel DeMarle 5/13/21