Tuesday, January 7
“A whirlpool of frigid, dense air known as a polar vortex descended Monday into Michigan, pummeling metro Detroit with a dangerous cold that shut down universities, forced a delay in the Detroit bankruptcy case, and closed restaurants, shops and other businesses across the region.“
Crain’s Detroit Business Tuesday, January 7
This Polar Vortex reminds me of life on Pine Ridge when I learned to teach at Red CLoud Indian School. When it got to -10º or 20º the moisture in your nostrils froze as soon as you stepped outside and you felt a little ping as your nose hairs went stiff. The past few days remind me of those days in my 20ies.
And suggest another Joy Harjo poem. Harjo often uses winter to remind that seeking grace, or in today’s poem, seeking mercy, requires unblinking realism. Harjo’s hard edges in “Mercy” can open the senses to the labor of turning toward a semester of work in weather that tempts us to stay under the covers and flinch from the brave encounter of students with faculty, students on probation with deans’ offices, of the facilities crew with snow plows.
Mercy
Mercy
on this morning where in the air is a flash
of what could be the salvation of spring.
After all this winter,
I mean, it wasn’t just devil snow that rode us hard.
Mail me to jamaica.
I want to lie out on steaming beaches.
Find my way back through glacier ice another way.
Forget the massacres, proclamations of war,
rumors of wars.
I won’t pour rifle shot through the guts of someone
I’m told is my enemy.
Hell, my own enemy is right here.
Can you look inside, see past the teeth worn down
by meat and anger,
can you see?
Sometimes the only filter
is a dead cat in the road.
Sucks your belly up to your teeth
in fear of what might happen to you; all your sins
chase you in the street,
string what you thought was the only you
into a greasy field. I want to enter the next world
filled with food, wine
and the finest fishing.
Safe, so safe, like the beach in Jamaica
where bloodstains have already
soaked through to the bottom of the Caribbean
so you don’t have to see
unless this light
becomes a bayonet of sound, hands of fire
to lead you to yourself
until you cry
mercy.
In Mad Love and War 1990
p.s. What we begin on this January 7, one day late with a – 11º (wind chill – 33º) requires of us — students and faculty and staff and administrators – a bravery that continues even after we can put away our ear muffs and thick gloves. We are a university. Blessings on the new semester and the new year.
john sj