Assyrian king portrayed as a lion hunter Many of you have read about the dentist who paid $54,000 for the privilege of luring the lion Cecil out of a wildlife sanctuary, shooting him, and taking his head and skin home as trophies. People were outraged, but it wasn’t a unique occurrence. Just in the last […]
Author Archive | Martha Shelley
The First Little Girl on Mars
When I was ten, my ambition was to go to Mars. I imagined stepping out of a spaceship and onto the surface of the red planet, greeting the little green natives. In my mind’s eye I would look very much as I did then: around four feet tall, bespectacled, wearing a knee-length wool jumper, my […]
Stars, Planets, and Poetry
The Willamette meteorite, with children When I was young, I wanted to be an astronomer or an astronaut. My parents were kind enough to take me to the Hayden Planetarium once or twice a year, where I got to see the sky show, step on a scale that told me what I’d weigh on Jupiter, […]
Losses
A couple of weeks ago we suffered some losses on our little farmette in Portland. (For those readers who aren’t in the neighborhood, we have a double lot, and cultivate it intensively.) I was pretty miserable, so I coped with it the only way a writer can–I wrote a poem:: A Crack in the Crust […]
In Jail: New York, 1970
Strip search from a how-to-do-it manual In my last post I described witnessing police assaults on citizens. Of course the cruelty doesn’t stop on the streets. I was arrested during Women’s Liberation actions in 1970. The police treated us quite gently, since all of us were white, and they considered feminists more of a joke […]
The Cops or the Cameras?
Police beating antiwar protestor, NYC Part I of a series, in which I explore the nature of policing in modern society. Every week we read at least one account of police officers assaulting or killing some unarmed person, usually (but not always) a person of color. If I tried to recount all the stories I’ve […]
By Special Request
Sylvia & Martha, photo by Steven Dansky Two weeks ago or thereabouts, I posted a humorous poem about traveling by air. Last week I read that poem at the benefit to save our local bookstore, and also read a poem about love–in this case, finding the love of my life, only to have her undergoing […]
Reading at the Bookstore Benefit
Martha reading at the benefit This past Friday, lots of local artists got together to raise money for St. Johns Booksellers. For my blog readers who don’t live around here, a little background: our neighborhood independent bookstore is housed in a 91-year-old building. Part of the facade crumbled and fell to the sidewalk on May […]
Traveling Blues
I’ve been traveling lately, to the Rainbow Book Fair in NYC and also to visit elderly relatives. Gives one food for thought. The characters in my novels travel by foot, horse, camel, boat, and even chariot. In Sylvia’s new novel, they cross the country in a covered wagon, and it takes them months. So why […]
False Witness: Baltimore & Ancient Israel
Police choking Eric Garner to death I’ve been steamed this week, reading about the latest victim of police murder–Freddie Gray. As often happens, perjury is committed by those sworn to uphold the law. The medical examiner says that the probable cause of death was a “rough” ride in a police van. Mr. Gray sustained a […]