the love you take is equal to the love you make (+ a summer blog break)

~ jama ~ 33 Comments
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The iconic Abbey Road crossing photo was taken by Iain Macmillan on August 8, 1969 outside EMI Studios. Abbey Road was the only original UK Beatles album to show neither the album title nor the artist name on the front cover.

When is the end not really the end? Some Beatles goodness in honor of Paul, who turned 84 yesterday.

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Abbey Road Studios (formerly EMI Studios), St. John’s Wood, London.
"HER MAJESTY"
by Richard Jones

Barely out of my teens,
I might as well have been climbing Mount Sinai
and hoping to see the burning bush
when I made my pilgrimage to Abbey Road --
that's how important the Beatles had been to me as a boy.
All through my childhood I wanted to go home to London,
where they lived and made their music.
The group's breakup was for me
the collapse of civilization,
the crushing of all hope.
The summer day I knocked on the door
of the white Georgian mansion,
a soft-spoken recording engineer greeted me
and improbably invited me inside.
He escorted the young man I was
down the hushed hall to Studio Two,
where I sat behind the idle console
with its myriad buttons, knobs, and sliders,
and gazed through the glass at the bare recording studio,
now silent and empty, haunted and ghostly,
the lonely microphones like three crosses
after the divine work was accomplished.
I wish I'd been more thankful
to be given so rare an opportunity,
so great a privilege,
but sitting before the console
all I knew was
Abbey Road marked the close of my childhood:
the Beatles were gone forever.
At the record's end, I'd felt the black world spinning,
the scratch and hiss of nothingness.
I would have fallen into that abyss
if I'd not been saved by the sudden guitar,
the resurrected voice singing,
"Someday I'm gonna make her mine.
Oh yeah, someday I'm gonna make her mine,"
a line that will live forever
though it comes to stop with a period,
and that last and final note.

~ from Stranger on Earth (Copper Canyon Press, 2018)

*

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[savory review] Mama’s Special Wonton Soup by Wai Mei Wong and Xin Yue Zhu

~ jama ~ 6 Comments
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There’s nothing more satisfying than a warm bowl of homemade soup. Whether bisque or broth, goulash or gumbo, soup speaks the universal language of comfort, and is especially tasty when flavored with kindness and shared with friends.

In Mama’s Special Wonton Soup by Wai Mei Wong and Xin Yue Zhu (Lantana, 2025), we travel to a rural village in Southern China, where a young girl tasked to purchase pork for her mother’s wonton soup comes home with so much more.

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One thing is certain: she loves Mama’s wontons, so she’s happy to go to the market. Bamboo basket in hand, she flies out the door, encountering some of the villagers on the way.

She first greets Ms. Chen, who’s busy in the fields pulling up radishes. Ms. Chen gives the girl “two big, long radishes” to take home to her Mama, explaining that they had a big harvest that year.

After thanking her, the girl walks around the pond, where she meets Mr Li and his daughters, who are hauling up a net full of shrimp. Mr. Li generously shares some shrimp from their large catch. After thanking him, it’s off to Grandma’s house just past the bridge.

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As the girl approaches the courtyard, she hears Chinese opera. Grandma and Aunt Ruby take a break from drying persimmons to give their little visitor a big hug. Grandma says, “Bring some persimmons for your mama. They are soft and sweet.” She places some in the basket along with rice cake, crackers and other sweets.

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the wonder of it all

~ jama ~ 36 Comments

“Children almost always hang onto things tighter than their parents think they will.” ~ E.B. White (Charlotte’s Web)

It’s true when they say the books you read as a child stay with you forever.

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Garth Williams (original illustration from Charlotte’s Web, 1952).
WONDROUS
by Sarah Freligh

I’m driving home from school when the radio talk
turns to E.B. White, his birthday, and I exit
the here and now of the freeway at rush hour,

travel back into the past, where my mother is reading
to my sister and me the part about Charlotte laying her eggs
and dying, and though this is the fifth time Charlotte

has died, my mother is crying again, and we’re laughing
at her because we know nothing of loss and its sad math,
how every subtraction is exponential, how each grief

multiplies the one preceding it, how the author tried
seventeen times to record the words She died alone
without crying, seventeen takes and a short walk during

which he called himself ridiculous, a grown man crying
for a spider he’d spun out of the silk thread of invention —
wondrous how those words would come back and make

him cry, and, yes, wondrous to hear my mother’s voice
ten years after the day she died — the catch, the rasp,
the gathering up before she could say to us, I’m OK.

~ from Sad Math (Moon City Press, 2015)
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Garth Williams (original illustration from Charlotte’s Web, 1952).
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Rebecca Aldernet: balancing act, or, a head of the game

~ jama ~ 12 Comments
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How’s this for an attention grabber?

You must admit, it’s not often one sees a striking woman balancing a cake on her head. There’s an air of mystery about her, too — what is she thinking with that intense expression on her face? Just as important, how does she make you feel?

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Figurative artist Rebecca Aldernet is based in St. John, New Brunswick.

Flirting on the edge of reality and surrealism, Canadian figurative artist Rebecca Aldernet likes to challenge conventional stereotypes while celebrating the beauty and strength of human connections. I’m drawn not only to the lush vibrant colors in her paintings, but also the strong tragicomic elements.

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[review] My First Words in Nahuat by Jorge Argueta and El Aleph Sánchez

~ jama ~ 18 Comments
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Imagine a small village in western El Salvador where the trees “know how to speak in leaves” and the pathways were once magical — “full of wizards who would turn into boars, into snakes, into birds, into anything they wished.” In ancient times, when the elders were surrounded by fireflies, they blew and blew on them until “some of them flew up to the sky and became stars.” Enchanting!

This is how esteemed Salvadoran poet and author Jorge Argueta describes Witzapan, the village of clay where he grew up. In his beautiful new trilingual poetry picture book, Tay naja nitajtaketzki achtu tik Nawat/Mis primeras palabras en nahuat/My First Words in Nahuat, illustrated by El Aleph Sánchez (Groundwood Books, 2026), Argueta celebrates the critically endangered language of his indigenous Pipil-Nahua ancestors and their intimate connection with Mother Earth via his own childhood memories.

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In twenty joyous, lovingly crafted lyrical poems (presented side by side in Nahuat, Spanish and English) we learn how Nahuat was born of nature’s sounds, sights, elements and beings; words were ‘alive,’ signifying an animistic belief system characteristic of the Nahua people’s history and culture.

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WITZAPAN

Witzapan is the name
of my village.
It means river of thorns
in the Nahuat language.

In the language of the birds,
in the language of the wind,
in the language of fire, of water
and of Mother Earth.

Witzapan.
Witzapan.
The thorns become
rivers of water.
WITZAPAN (Nahuat)

Witzapan ne itukay
ne nutechan.
Kineki ina apan ipal wijwitz
tik ne Nawat taketzalis.

Tik ne intaketzalis ne tujtutut,
tik ne itaketzalis ne ejekat,
tik ne itaketzalis ne tit, ne at
wan ipal ne Tunan Tal.

Witzapan,
Witzapan.
Ne wijwitz muchiwat
ajapan ipal at.
WITZAPAN (Español)

Witzapan es el nombre
de mi pueblo.
Significa río de espinas
en el idioma nahuat.

En el idioma de los pájaros,
en el idioma del viento,
en el idioma del fuego, del agua
y en el de la Madre Tierra.

Witzapan.
Witzapan.
Las espinas se vuelven
ríos de agua.
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