A crater is meteor footprint.
A volcano is lava footprint.
A canyon is river footprint.
A valley is mountain footprint.
A twister is wind footprint.
A flood is cloud footprint.
A desert is sky footprint.
A ruin is war footprint.
A war is man footprint.
A man is God footprint.
A God is void footprint.
(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
“Every time you misuse ‘diva,’ Maria Callas smashes a wine glass in heaven.”
(Christopher Muther, quoted here)
(c) 2026 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
This is the SYSTEM the FATHERS built.
These are the COURTS that rule in the SYSTEM the FATHERS built.
These are the JUDGES who bench the COURTS that rule in the SYSTEM the FATHERS built.
This is the PREZ who attacks the JUDGES who bench the COURTS that rule in the SYSTEM the FATHERS built.
This is the BASE that supports the PREZ who attacks the JUDGES who bench the COURTS that rule in the SYSTEM the FATHERS built.
This is the CONGRESS that sops the BASE that supports the PREZ who attacks the JUDGES who bench the COURTS that rule in the SYSTEM the FATHERS built.
These are the POLS who clog the CONGRESS that sops the BASE that supports the PREZ who attacks the JUDGES who bench the COURTS that rule in the SYSTEM the FATHERS built.
This is the MONEY that greases the POLS who clog the CONGRESS that sops the BASE that supports the PREZ who attacks the JUDGES who bench the COURTS that rule in the SYSTEM the FATHERS built.
This is the PRESS that covers the MONEY that greases the POLS who clog the CONGRESS that sops the BASE that supports the PREZ who attacks the JUDGES who bench the COURTS that rule in the SYSTEM the FATHERS built.
This is the DOC that protects the PRESS that covers the MONEY that greases the POLS who clog the CONGRESS that sops the BASE that supports the PREZ who attacks the JUDGES who bench the COURTS that rule in the SYSTEM the FATHERS built.
These are the VOTES that defend the DOC that protects the PRESS that covers the MONEY that greases the POLS who clog the CONGRESS that sops the BASE that supports the PREZ who attacks the JUDGES who bench the COURTS that rule in the SYSTEM the FATHERS built.
These are the CITIZENS who cast the VOTES that defend the DOC that protects the PRESS that covers the MONEY that greases the POLS who clog the CONGRESS that sops the BASE that supports the PREZ who attacks the JUDGES who bench the COURTS that rule in the SYSTEM the FATHERS built.
These are the MIDTERMS that beckon the CITIZENS who cast the VOTES that defend the DOC that protects the PRESS that covers the MONEY that greases the POLS who clog the CONGRESS that sops the BASE that supports the PREZ who attacks the JUDGES who bench the COURTS that rule in the SYSTEM the FATHERS built.
(c) 2018-2026 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
Adam goofed. The bird called wrentit (Chamaea fasciata) is neither a wren nor a tit.
A wrentit… is a secretive, sedentary, mouse-like bird endemic to North America, primarily found in western coastal regions of the U.S. and Baja California. It’s the sole species in its family, Chamaeidae, and is known for its loud, ping-pong-like song and its preference for dense, low shrubs, where it skulks and gleans insects and berries.
(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
The [2026 U.S. Supreme Court] case that felled the Voting Rights Act was Louisiana v. Callais…
The day after the Callais ruling, Gov. Jeff Landry took the unprecedented action of suspending the state’s U.S. House primary — in which tens of thousands of voters had already cast ballots — so legislators could redraw the election maps. Though one in three Louisiana residents is Black, Republicans intend to jettison at least one of two Black-majority districts…
Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama and Florida quickly moved ahead with their own redistricting plans. And the governor of Mississippi — which has just a single Black U.S. representative despite having the nation’s highest percentage of Black residents, at 38 percent — announced his intent to do the same…
“They are cementing absolute minority control because they do not represent a majority of this country. And when they — if they — get away with the heist, we will be locked out of multiracial democracy for at least a generation,” [ said Janai Nelson, who as president and director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund argued the Callais case before the Supreme Court].
(Nikole Hannah Jones, “The Civil Rights Era Is Collapsing Before Our Eyes,” New York Times, 5-22-26)
(c) 2026 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
I want to say Rae Armantrout springs a cavalcade of huggable schwas on me, but rumpled or purple or bubbly would describe them, too. As long as they’re duple bumpy words.
Joints grind like
shot brakes.
Food ignites
in our stomachs.
But we’re still muffin-bunnies,
muddle-buckets,
cuddle-chunks.
(From “Apocrypha,” Poetry, June 2026)
Armantrout’s boney, yet highly legible, minimalism does me that rare favor poetry can bestow on a reader, to wit, elicit laughter. Twenty-six syllables cresting in a persnickety streak of thud-nuts provide a rambunctious chuckle-ride. The wry-serious vocables smack of kid talk with a whiff of nursery rhyme and playground marketing. (“Muffin-Bunnies” are well positioned for the sugary snack rack at a 7-Eleven checkout.)
Also, who is one who has driven with frayed brake pads, and has complaining joints, that doesn’t seize immediately on the “grinding” simile? A brusque epithet plucked from the vernacular, “shot,” suits it to a tee.
(c) 2026 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
every need fights to make
(from K. LINES THAT AIM TO BE)
its voice heard, to be
fulfilled with a gentle touch
K’s lines, encountered after I had spewed the below caustic grump at the demons of my own distractedness, furnished an alleviating contrast.
It comes down to simple resolve to have
Your way with the day. Foreswear frittering.
Swear off salving every loopy freak
Flopped on the stoop, manky hat in hand.
Never mind the entreaties. No demand
Answerable except with laser seek,
Otherwise you haven’t gained a damned thing;
Just time lost and an empty crock of salve.
(c) 2026 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates.(Philip Roth on American life in the 1960s) I fear I’ve morphed into a carping nag.Crafting invective merely fêtes the boor,vomitous bilge the thing that feeds his root.It’s to priss froufrou-like at the galaof distress, … Continue reading
I compel you in the name of my HIMARS!
I compel you in the name of my ATACMS!
I compel you in the name of my GENERALS,
By the lashings of my terrible swift tongue!
You want a red sea? I will give you HISTORY.
By my decree events shall have occurred
When and where I choose and in the manner
Of my telling, on the slant of my twisting.
Shoot you in the face, shit on your parade,
This could I do, and “Sir,” they’d say, “You king!
“You glorify yourself and live deliciously!
“All hail the stiffest rod in any room.”
Old school, that’s me. I’m Moses in the flesh.
My word’s as good as law. They say I’ve got —
What do they call it? — “prophecy” no less.
Can you believe it? I’m a prophet. Boom!
(c) 2026 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
EthicalDative 
Purulence, Pus, Matter? Anointed or Kohl’d?
I was sleepless, and I passed the night keeping vigil, as if my eyes had been anointed with pus, […]
That’s Arberry’s reliable translation of line 1 of the sixth-century elegy on the death of her brother Sakhr by the poet al-Khansā’. (1)
I posted about this poem some time ago. I want to comment here on line 1. Here’s my transliteration:
1 ‘innī ‘ariqtu fa-bittu-l-lail(a) sāhiraẗ(an) | ka-‘anna-mā kuḥilat ^ain(ī) bi-^uwwār(i)
I love Arberry’s phrase “keeping vigil,” although there’s something of purposefulness to it that doesn’t feel quite right. It represents the Arabic’s adverb of manner, the feminine active participle (sāhiraẗ) of a verb meaning “to be wakeful.” Even less does “anointed” seem optimal in relation to applying what today would be eyeliner. The Arabic uses the passive voice of a verb (kuḥilat) meaning “to rub, paint or smear with kohl (the eyes).” (2) “Pus” is accurate for ^uwwār, just icky and dead-sounding, like “poo” for “shit.”
Here’s my translation:
Truly slept not I, so passed the night being wakeful, as if were kohl’d the eye of me with matter.
Yes, “eye” is symbolic singular in the source. Having experimented with “rimmed,” I’ve gone whole hog and jimmied “kohl” into a notional verb to represent kuḥilat. Hey, you miss all the shots you don’t take. “Matter” is a clinical reach, but I’ve already mentioned how “pus” makes me sad.
I know I’m beating my own drum here, but my version has a rhythmic alternation of stresses which pleases the ear. It replicates closely the Arabic sequence of wording. For example, “slept not I” matches the Arabic’s suffixed subject pronoun. Likewise, “the eye of me” approximates congruency with the Arabic’s suffixed possessive pronoun.
These expedients entail legible but inverted phrasing no longer much used. They don’t domesticate the Arabic into Arberry’s prosified English. They do make my translation sound “poetic” in the bad way, which is to say, mannered, highflown and slightly archaic.
Here’s the twist: I might be willing to live with the tradeoff in retrograde styling.
For the reader to think, We don’t talk that way now, might be what’s apt for preserving something of the alien feel of another language’s expression. My current view is that such feel need not be refined out of the readerly experience. This is true at least for poetry, whose mission is to discomfit and astonish, foregoing the familiar with verve that feels not fussily tawdry or facile or exquisite or rebarbative but rather inevitable — a fierce rope-walk.
As it happens, the verses of al-Khansā’ are expressed in the elevated manner of classical Arabic. Does the heightened tone of my version establish a felicitous concordance between it and the original? One not earned by design, but by simply adhering closely to the source’s syntax, falling back on disused but evergreen registers of English for equivalences? Does this hint at more affinities within the deep structure of two disparate languages than one might suspect?
Notes
(1) Arabic Poetry: A Primer for Students, Cambridge University, 1965, p. 39.
(2) A black powder made from antimony or galena and used to line the eyes.
(c) 2026 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved