My Dear Readers/ Poet Friends:
Mental Health Awareness Month takes place across North America in May every year. During this month, Americans and Canadians can learn about mental illnesses and how they affect people's lives in different ways. In addition, the public can learn more about how to reduce the stigma around mental illnesses.
I would like to encourage each one of you to read and/or write the poems about the issues of mental health.
We read to know we're "not alone" (which is good for our mental health)
-- The character of C.S. Lewis in William Nicholson's play, "Shadowlands"
The proper response to a poem is "another poem."
-- Phyllis Webb
Even in times of distress/pain/grief ...
waking half way
through the day
half the sunshine
half the pain
-- still time for a poem
Little Purple Universes, 2011
Helen Buckingham
I look forward to reading your haiku and tanka (see revised submission guidelines).
To conclude today's "call for submissions" post, I would like to share my haiku with you:
in slanted moonlight
the hospital's revolving door ...
an old man mutters
Chen-ou
FYI: This haiku was inspired by The New Yorker's in-depth analysis of the medical system that failed the people with mental illness: "What a subway killing reveals about New York City’s revolving-door approach to mental illness and homelessness."
...Most of the funding that had been promised by lawmakers for community-based outpatient care never arrived. The dream of deinstitutionalization collapsed. In 1985, the president of the American Psychiatric Association summed up the situation in an interview with a newspaper: “The chronic mentally ill patient has had his locus of living and care transferred from a single lousy institution to multiple wretched ones.”
Meanwhile, police and corrections officers became de-facto mental-health-care providers, one 911 call at a time...According to a Washington Post database, since 2015 about a fifth of people killed by police nationwide have been in the midst of a mental-health crisis.
And this haiku could be read as a sequel to the following one:
some wounds
take forever to heal
tonight’s red sky
Honorable Mention, 2013 Betty Drevniok Award
Elehna de Sousa
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