Poetry Blog: "A Work Day in Hard Times"

Wednesday,   May 27  Gerard Manley Hopkins, s.j.   “God’s Grandeur”

“Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”

The 19th century Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, revolutionized poetry with his unchained cadences, which he called “sprung rhythm,” and daring vocabulary, words often from Anglo-Saxon, rather than Latinate roots.  This shocked his Poet Laureate friend, Robert Bridges,  who berated him for the density of his word choices and cadences both.

On November 6, 1887, Hopkins wrote Bridges, simultaneously teasing his friend and attempting to explain the density of his poetic language.    Try reading GMH’s explanation out loud; note that this apologia for demanding word choices emerges as a single, grammatically-correct sentence.

“Plainly if it is possible to express a subtle and recondite thought on a subtle and recondite subject in a subtle and recondite way and with great felicity and perfection in the end, something must be sacrificed, with so trying a task, in the process, and this may be the being at once, nay perhaps even the being without explanation at all, intelligible.”

So, take a deep breath before you begin.  For that matter, try reading “God’s Grandeur” out loud as the poet intended.

Best to read the poet out loud, with pauses,  several times.  Perhaps as a moment of gladness and gratitude for an open sky that traces its fingertips across Livernois and caresses my city, its beauty and its troubles both.

Have a blest week.

john sj

Today’s Post:   Gerard Manley Hopkins, sj  “God’s Grandeur”

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Gerard Manley Hopkins  28 July 1844 – 8 June, 1889

“To attach oneself to place is to surrender to it, and suffer with it.”

Fear and anxious anger may be the primary distraction of this current cluster of years, pretty much all over the world.   St. Ignatius, my mentor of 500 years ago, teaches that the main temptation of “the enemy of our human nature” (his term for the devil) is distraction  — to absorb my inner attention about something that isn’t so very important, to draw my inner eye away from my deepest graces, replacing joy with anxiety and to fuss about the wrong things.

Maybe that’s why Kathleen Norris came to mind today.   She writes words that open deep into ordinary living.   In 1974, after learning her way into New York City’s world of poetry with mentoring from the legendary Betty Kray at the Academy of American Poets (http://www.nytimes.com/1987/11/24/obituaries/elizabeth-kray-patron-and-friend-of-poets-and-their-art-dies-at-71.html), Kathleen and her husband shocked their East Coast peers by moving to Lemmon in northwestern South Dakota where Kathleen had inherited the family home of her grandmother.  They stayed a long time.

In 1993, her Dakota: A Spiritual Geography took the literary world by storm.  Took me by storm too.  If a book of micro essays, some only half a page, ever approaches the taut, lean focus of strong poetry, for me this is the book.  In those South Dakota years she became friends with vast horizons, and with Benedictine monks at St. John’s Monastery in Minnesota.  She’s written more than one memoir about the intersection of her secularity with the roots of Benedictine prayer and wisdom.

Think of the following four quotes from Dakota as poems.   Best to read them out loud, with pauses in between.

Have a blest day,

john sj

Today’s Post:  Four texts from Dakota

“Once, when I was describing to a friend from Syracuse, New York, a place on the plains that I love, a ridge above a glacial moraine with a view of almost fifty miles, she asked, “But what is there to see?” The answer, of course, is nothing. Land, sky, and the ever-changing light.”

“Maybe the desert wisdom of the Dakotas can teach us to love anyway, to love what is dying, in the face of death, and not pretend that things are other than they are. The irony and wonder of all of this is that it is the desert’s grimness, its stillness and isolation, that brings us back to love.”

“To be an American is to move on, as if we could outrun change. To attach oneself to place is to surrender to it, and suffer with it.”

“For me, walking in a hard Dakota wind can be like staring at the ocean: humbled before its immensity, I also have a sense of being at home on this planet, my blood so like the sea in chemical composition, my every cell partaking of air. I live about as far from the sea as is possible in North America, yet I walk in a turbulent ocean. Maybe that child was right when he told me that the world is upside-down here, and this is where angels drown.”

meadowlark on a fence,   Fog Basin, SD  2008

Kathleen Norris
(born in Washington, D.C. on July 27, 1947)

Friday, May 22  – –  “being surprised”

When I pray from Mark or Matthew or Luke (i.e., the three “synoptic gospels”),  it helps me to treat the evangelist like a poet, to allow the surprise buried in the text to stop me in my tracks,  like a strong poem does.

Long ago, when I took a job here in 1980,  I wrote this poem based on Mark 1:15. I found the challenges facing the university daunting.   This gospel text, “Repent and believe the good news” began to get my attention,  as strong poems can.    A teaching of St. Ignatius, that I ask to grow in “intimate knowledge of our Lord who has become human . . .”  began to challenge me.

“To become human” implies being born in some particular place with its own history.  Jesus was born in one of the world’s meanest, poorest, and most violent places — the Roman Empire’s grinding police state where crucifixion of people who opposed that state became horrors up and down this small country (e.g., as many as 2000 rebel fighters were crucified during one period in the early childhood of the boy Jesus).  Sometimes it took a day or two for a strong man to suffocate to death;  crucifixion was designed to intimidate and subdue opposition.

For me that became a deep surprise, taking the teaching of the young man Jesus, “Repent and believe the good news” seriously.  What could the evangelist poet Mark mean?   And that led me, little by little, to notice that where I was born (Marinette, WI, 1939) was a much less frightening place than where Jesus was born.  The place where Jesus was born was more like the lives of immigrant children torn away from their mothers and fathers at U.S. borders the past few years.  It helps, when I read this saying from Mark 1:15, to open into deep, shocking, surprise, like every strong poem.

Not everything about my Catholic faith makes me proud; but this teaching and men and women who have tried to live it often stop me in my tracks,  like any strong poem should.  Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses.

Have a blest weekend.

john sj

Today’s Post  “Repent and believe the good news.”   {Mk 1:15}

Is our main repenting, perhaps, made of believing good news,
that there is news,
something new,
and it is good?

That what we already know is not all there is,
that we must approach the presence of God
knowing we will be surprised,
committed to being surprised
and so to living in a surprise-able way?

Monday May 18 – “Let no one touch this gentle sun  —   In whose dark eye  —  Someone is awake.”

Five years ago, a weekly selection of 7 poems, from “A Year of Being Here,” confronted me with a short demanding poem written by Thomas Merton.  More than many sacred writers, Merton dove deep into the secular west (Paris, London, New York) into Trappist monastic living (Gethsemani Abby from entrance on Dec 10, 1941 until his accidental death Dec 10, 1968) into Eastern Mysticism in creative tension with Western mysticism.

Mystics respect the poverty of human language. Words are not the author’s property, contained and owned.  Words are not the reader’s property either.  The poet’s words invite you to find yourself somewhere — mysterious and alive with awe.  During these spare covid times, the days sometimes feel impoverished.   So do our words.  Mystic poets, such as Merton remind me that finding language calls out our courage.

Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses.    Have a blest day.

john sj

Today’s Post – A Song to Nobody

A yellow flower
(Light and spirit)
Sings by itself
For nobody.

A golden spirit
(Light and emptiness)
Sings without a word
By itself.

Let no one touch this gentle sun
In whose dark eye
Someone is awake.

(No light, no gold, no name, no color
And no thought:
O, wide awake!)
A golden heaven
Sings by itself
A song to nobody.

“There is no way of telling strangers they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

Thomas Merton
January 31, 1915  – December 10, 1968                                     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Merton

Monday, May 18
“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.”

Last year in early March, a friend emailed me some lines from Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Kindness.”  She connects kinship and love with other things that can wear us down.  In her poem, meanness and violence become a context for enduring kindness.  No wonder my friend thought to send “Kindness” in these times.  Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses.

I learned to love this poem long before Covid-19 appeared and began to demand our attention, distracting us from other matters of deep meaning.   This Monday morning, what looks like a steady spring rain splashes out of the roof’s rain spouts down onto the courtyard walkway, cleansing and chilly, not great picnic weather, a contemplative morning.

p.s. after today’s post, let me tip my editor hat to the students of Loyola High School.  Six boys, dressed formally, carry a coffin as volunteer pallbearers for a nameless, homeless man who passed.   It’s not always that homeless people are buried with such reverent grace; perhaps even less often, does a picture of volunteer pall bearers help to give that person a name.  Kindness breathes all through today’s post.

Have a blest weekend.

john sj

Today’s Post  “Kindness”

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

Naomi Shihab Nye
b. March 12, 1952

post script: In another sister school  Loyola High School on 5 Mile in Detroit, Ann Riley has mentored these boys for many years and sent this picture.  (N.b.,  “Our guys” would be the boys carrying this homeless man to his funeral.  Posting the picture on Facebook gave him a name and that re-connected him with his daughter.  Her post makes a footnote to Naomi Shihab Nye’s wise poem, “Kindness.”)

Ann Riley explained in her post.  “Six of our guys volunteered to be pall bearers for a homeless man that St. Clare of Montefalco held a funeral service for.  We posted a picture of our guys on Loyola’s Facebook, and this is one of the responses we got.”

Marlita N. Chapman I am the Daughter of Henry Stanton…. and because of this Picture being posted on Social Media & by Patrick Harbin Jr my family was able to discover the loss of our loved one, who had been missing for quite some time…. on behalf of my brothers, myself and the rest of my family. We would like to say “Thank you” and extend our deepest gratitude to the young men of Loyola High School…who served as pallbearers, to St. Clare of Montefalco Parish and to Verheyden Funeral Home for providing a proper Burial Service. Although we are deeply devastated to discover the loss of our father this way… it gives us a little peace knowing he was laid to rest. Henry Stanton is loved by his family and will be truly, truly missed. Please keep us in your prayers and thank you again to all who participated in his funeral services our hearts ache finding out a day too late.  Daddy! Take care of Mom

Friday, May 15  –  A mother contemplates her daughter
“I want her to think of this as a connection rather
than a severing . . . “

Some years ago, I sent several of my niece Terri’s compelling poem-stories about her grandmother (my mother died in October 2005 at 102 years) to a richly gifted poet, asking what he thought of Terri’s writing.   He wrote back with the highest praise I can imagine for describing a poet’s language.
“She writes with ‘flint-hard’ word choices.”

Terri’s recent poem strikes me the same way; how deep and deftly can a poet’s word choices reach?

Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses.

Have a blest weekend,

john sj

Deliberate Practice

My daughter is practicing.
Every minute of every waking hour
she remains consistent, committed.
I can see her improving,
day after day of concentrated attention-
every detail accounted for.

When we walk she slows her steps
to let the world know with certainty
that she is not walking with me.
That there is no one else
wandering the sage, makes it clear that I
am the target of her silent discourse.
When I pause to show her a centipede
swarming the dirt, or an anthill
cratering the path, she speeds past until,
at the same set distance as before, she walks,
but not with me.

Back in the house she shifts
her shoulder from beneath my hand, and in the evening,
when I settle on the end of the couch where she’s sprawled,
she moves to a chair.

The breakfasts I make for her harden
until, dry and discolored, I scrape what remains
into the trash. And when I ask “What’s wrong?”
she says “You wouldn’t understand.”
“I’ll try,” I say.
Please let me try.

She doesn’t say, “I won’t”
but that’s what I hear
as she shrugs and turns away.

Until I realize that she is trying.
Trying as hard as she can
and improving with each deliberate effort,
honing an expertise in rebuke and hatred.
And, as when she was six and constantly calling “Watch me, mama!”
she’s working to make sure I notice.

I want to think of this as a connection rather
than a severing. But as she excels
day after practiced day, I worry she will become so skilled
at bearing grudges
that she’ll have no room to master anything else.
And I wonder
if I am her first true heartbreak
as she is mine.

Terri Breeden

Wednesday, May 13  “ a billion times told lovelier”

Looks like a fine strong spring day — high pressure, breezy, leaves and flowering trees dancing all around.   A good morning to stand still a minute, breathe in deeply, stand still a little more, and read one of Gerard Manley Hopkin’s magical poems.

Hopkins’ poems are [in]famous for the density of their vocabulary.  If you want to catch all the descriptive meaning packed in these 16 sonnet lines, bring a good dictionary.  Hopkins’ life-long friend poet laureate Robert Bridges often ground his aesthetic teeth at what seemed to him to be Hopkins’ unnecessary complexity.

On November 6, 1887, Hopkins wrote Bridges, simultaneously teasing his friend and attempting to explain the density of his poetic language.    Try reading GMH’s explanation out loud; note that this apologia for demanding word choices emerges as a single, grammatically-correct sentence. So, take a deep breath before you begin.  For that matter, try reading “The Windhover” out loud as the poet intended.

“Plainly if it is possible to express a subtle and recondite thought on a subtle and recondite subject in a subtle and recondite way and with great felicity and perfection in the end, something must be sacrificed, with so trying a task, in the process, and this may be the being at once, nay perhaps even the being without explanation at all, intelligible.”

Don’t you wish you could write like that?  You’d have to have patient friends as readers though.

Have a blest day,

john sj

Today’s Post    –   “The Windhover:  To Christ our Lord”

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in
his riding

Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy!  then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl
and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,–the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valor and act, oh, air, pride, plume here
Buckle!  And the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it:  shéer plốd makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, a my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

Gerard Manley Hopkins  28 July 1844 – 8 June, 1889

Monday, May 11  —
      “Talking with the Sun” & “The high plains of Pine Ridge, SD”

This week begins with late spring sun & its crisp wind gusts.   For me, today’s morning stillness stirs memories of two great native women, soul friends both. Last Saturday was Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s birthday.  Yesterday, Mary Tobacco and I talked about her children helping her set in the new garden after early plowing.

Mary, a Lakota tribal leader on Pine Ridge, and Creek poet Joy Harjo are soul friends.   They share a love of land and sky, an intimate understanding of the beauty and fatigue of poverty often marked with racism but also with the deep harmonics both women can hear as they live more and more closely with earth and sky.  Yesterday Mary told me playful stories about the way her children honored her on Mothers’ Day,  (i.e., cleaning the trailer house and helping with the next steps in building a new one-acre garden with its rich promise of vegetables for the summer season).

Anya at the new garden’s edge  May 9, 2020

Mom and the kids,  re-posted for Mother’s Day, 2020

Joy Harjo  “Talking with the Sun”   (in  Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings).

For her birthday, I returned to Joy Harjo’s “Talking with the Sun.”  How does a grandmother carry her fourth granddaughter out into the sun on a rainy New York Times Square morning?  You could read the poem with pauses.   Or you may imagine driving along SD highway 18 as the sunset shows off a front being pushed East by a storm’s energy.

Have a blest week,

john sj

Today’ Post   Joy Harjo  “Talking with the Sun”

I believe in the sun.
In the tangle of human failures of fear, greed, and
forgetfulness, the sun gives me clarity.
When explorers first encountered my people, they called us
heathens, sun worshippers.
They didn’t understand that the sun is a relative, and
illuminates our path on this earth.

After dancing all night in a circle we realize that we are a
part of a larger sense of stars and planets dancing with us
overhead.
When the sun rises at the apex of the ceremony, we are
renewed.
There is no mistaking this connection, though Walmart
might be just down the road.
Humans are vulnerable and rely on the kindnesses of the
earth and sun; we exist together in a sacred field of
meaning.

Our earth is shifting.  We can all see it.
I hear from my Inuit and Yupik relatives up north that
everything has changed.  It’s so hot; there is not enough
winter.
Animals are confused. Ice is melting.

The quantum physicists have it right; they are beginning to
think like Indians: everything is connected dynamically
at an intimate level.
When you remember this, then the current wobble of the
earth makes sense.  How much more oil can be drained,
Without replacement; without reciprocity?

I walked out of a hotel room just off Times Square at dawn
to find the sun.
It was the fourth morning since the birth of my fourth
granddaughter.
This was the morning I was to present her to the sun, as a
relative, as one of us.  It was still dark, overcast as I walked
through Times Square.
I stood beneath a twenty-first century totem pole of symbols
of multinational corporations, made of flash and neon.

The sun rose up over the city but I couldn’t see it amidst the
rain.
Though I was not at home, bundling up the baby to carry
her outside,
I carried this newborn girl within the cradleboard of my
heart.
I held her up and presented her to the sun, so she would be
recognized as a relative,
So that she won’t forget this connection, this promise,
So that we all remember, the sacredness of life.

Joy Harjo: Poet Laureate  June 19, 2019
Born‎: ‎May 9, 1951 (age 68); ‎Tulsa, Oklahoma‎

Highway 18, c. 3.9 miles from Mary Tobacco’s home

Monday May 12 — A silence in which another voice may speak

Looks like we will be fasting from commencement gatherings this early May. So I pulled a Poetry post from 2014 to remind us of what a normal commencement tastes like.   The wonder and bravery that every commencement honors is right here. “Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.”

May you meet three good surprises this May 8 Friday, tastes of a blest day and weekend.

john sj

Commencement days May 12, 2014.   “Lots of immediate work to dress campus at its best (missed, though, on the laggard cherry trees alongside Briggs). Lots of logistic work to get graduates and faculty+admins dressed for the solemnity; get the music right, get hospitality ready for speakers and 50 year alums.

In Dentistry many graduates are hooded by one or two or three of their kin who are already dentists; In Law three faculty have the hooding down to a rhythm. Even so, one tall grad knelt down as if to help the hooders reach over the top of his head, only to take an engagement ring out of his pocket and hold it out to the woman, one of those hooding, he asked to marry him. Saturday’s Baccalaureate Mass packed the Gesu Church. At the main campus commencement, The University first hooded Gerry Stockhausen, sj our immediate past president. His address was laced with wisdom and corny jokes. No one who had shared time with him at UDM was surprised. One UDM trustee, Brian Cloyd from Steelcase in Grand Rapids, told me how moved he was by the diversity of the main campus students as they walked to receive their diplomas. The whole human fabric, it seemed, showed itself; all of us were invited to pay attention to the beauty that we are.”

Today’s post has a name for this kind of paying attention; Mary Oliver calls it “Praying.”

Have a good day.

john sj

Praying

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

Mary Oliver

Something to catch my attention
a flower muscling its way through concrete on our front sidewalk
July 20, 2008 – 8:31 am

Wednesday, May 6, 2020 —  Nurse as Miracle Worker
“From a great distance, gaze but do not know
Why they are glad to see me come and go.”

In his 2014 Writer’s Almanac, Garrison Keillor introduced me to Mary Borden, a flamboyant millionaire heiress who, dissatisfied with the standard of care for wounded soldiers, used her money to create a mobile field hospital that moved along the hell-hole death traps called battle lines during World War I.  A messy, high profile life as an elegant Parisian Salon hostess, Keillor tells us that  “She is best remembered for The Forbidden Zone (1929), a memoir of her work as a nurse on the front lines.”    Flamboyant or not, Borden recognized a nurse’s central grace:  to follow wounded and desperate people into the heart of their fears and pain, knowing that damaged people “seem in some strange way to gather hope”  from fearless, competent companionship.  This bold conviction continues to live at the heart of nursing education in the 21st century — “no good science, no competence, no fearless tenderness, no miracle of healing.”

A memorable quote from a McAuley School of Nursing faculty member:  “I interviewed a young woman and asked her to tell me what nurses do.  She could not describe what nurses do.  I suggested, that if she wants to become a nurse she should first get a nurse’s aide job in a hospital for a while and then come back and tell me what she’s learned.”  When we teach students to find the heart of the profession they study, any discipline, we open the world to them.  I am proud to work in a university with a great nursing school named after the Founder of the Sisters of Mercy, Catherine McAuley.

For Detroit Mercy’s McAuley Health Center over on the East Side, see:  https://healthprofessions.udmercy.edu/about/mcauley-health.php

Have a blest day,

john sj

The patients wounded in their narrow beds
Welcome me and smile as I go by
Down the long wooden buildings where they lie
Wan weary rows of helpless haggard heads —
Mysterious burning eyes that seem to gaze
From a great distance, gaze but do not know
Why they are glad to see me come and go.
Sometimes with feeble hands as in a daze
They beckon me, poor things that vaguely grope
Out of great darkness toward a distant light;
And from the unknown woman dressed in white
Seem in some strange way to gather hope —
They do not know that in this shadowed place
It is your light they see upon my face.

Mary Borden  (Sometime during World War I?)
b. May 15, 1886  d.  December 2, 1968
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Borden

Catherine McAuley
1778-1841
https://www.sistersofmercy.org/about-us/our-history