Linda Breitag, 1992.
I wrote this for my pal Frank Hall, for a co-op food shelf commercial. The commercial never happened, but there are more people to feed than ever. As it turns out, helping each other out in life is fun and completely rewarding.
Linda Breitag 2006, for Nanci Olesen
The original idea for Mother’s Day was no Hallmark card. Julia Ward Howe, who wrote “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” also called for an international Mother’s Day for Peace:
Arise all women who have hearts…
Say firmly: “We will not have questions decided by irrelevant agencies; our husbands shall not come to us reeking with carnage for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, Disarm!” (Boston, 1870)
Linda Breitag, 2004.
Written during a hard winter when friends and the larger mystery helped get me through. As Vietnamese poet-monk Thich Nhat Hanh put it: “You cultivate the flower in yourself so that I will be beautiful / I transform the garbage in myself so that you will not have to suffer.” The first verse is a humble homage to the Navajo Beauty Way. “People” means “all my relatives,” including strangers and tadpoles.
written by Linda Breitag, 2004.
It all started at Sunset Hills swimming pool at the bottom of 96th Street, where I lay on my towel next to the sleek and bronze Lori Christell and suspected we weren’t from the same planet…
Linda Breitag 2008, with thanks to Mark Nunberg
A lust-along song for the “everything-wanter”(a term from the great Seth Kantner book Ordinary Wolves). This little greed-fest began as an attempt to exorcise ad absurdum my attractive habit of comparing my own (lacking, under-achieving, hamster-wheelish,) life with everyone else’s (fulfilling, exciting, commander-in-chiefish) life. Then, as desire, envy, and western civilization are wont to do, it took on a bloated life of its own. A comment on our modern insatiability for things, experiences, and nothing—including youth and (what the heck) life itself—ending until we decide it’s over. Parents, talk to your kids about what irony means…
Linda Breitag 2003
with inspiration from the kids of Peace Village
Embarrassingly enough, people around the world often seem to know and care more about what the U.S. is up to—starting wars, polluting, torturing, etc.—than we ourselves do. ¡Basta! sprouts new verses continually; here’s today’s snapshot. (Plus one thankfully-obsolete, full-snark stanza, below).
lipstick on a pitbull, lipstick on a pig
lipstick on a polar bear who runs an oil rig
well I don’t care if she wears lipstick, has fresh and minty breath
‘cause Palin near the White House, well, that’s the kiss of death