The Homeless and Indigent: Causes, Effects and Solutions will be the subject of a Panel Discussion and Public Forum being held from 5:00 to 8:00 PM on Thursday, April 5, 2012. The panel represents sectors of government, service organizations, veterans and community members and invites direct public comment and dialogue.
The program will start with tours of the exhibit - "Perspectives on Homelessness and the Indigent" - led by curator Benn Nadelman. The Panel discussion will be opened at 6:00 PM with a reading by Tompkins County Poet Laureate Gail Holst-Warhaft.
The panel will be moderated by Anne Rhodes and will include:
Svante Myrick - City of Ithaca Mayor The program will start with tours of the exhibit - "Perspectives on Homelessness and the Indigent" - led by curator Benn Nadelman. The Panel discussion will be opened at 6:00 PM with a reading by Tompkins County Poet Laureate Gail Holst-Warhaft.
The panel will be moderated by Anne Rhodes and will include:
John Ward - Red Cross, Director of Homeless Services
Joe Lotito - Resident of The Jungle
Jennifer (Jenny) Pacanowski - Veterans’ Sanctuary Coordinator
Gail Holst-Warhaft - Tompkins County Poet Laureate
Jackie Sayegh-Birch, who is from Liberia, will read from her work at the end of the panel.Her poems are featured in the anthology “Far from Home".
HOMELESS BY CHOICE, HER DAUGHTER LEAVES HER
By Katharyn Howd Machan
stark awake at 4 a.m.:
she sees the ice on her windowpanes
make silver of the night’s fake light
and hears her husband sleeping deep
in dreams of their dying daughter.
How to count a thousand sheep?
How to hum long breathless tunes
muffled in a flannel pillow
on a bed a century old?
Instead she sits up on the edge
and fumbles for her dark brown scuffs
and creaks her way out through the door
to new December silence. A poem
hangs taut and stiff out there
but she does not try to touch it.
Time now only for hot tea
in a cup of china roses.
Motherhood is an open hand
with thin fingers flat and useless.
