Poetry Blog: "A Work Day in Hard Times"

Monday,  May 4 –  “I watch the spring come slow-ly”

Traveling north to south or south to north during season-changing time lets trees and ground plants show their stuff to visitors.  Readers from where I live this early May morning will recognize how much farther north it is in mid-Maine.  Sometimes if we get lucky and have time, we can catch three or four spring-unfolding times with a little traveling.   Poet Rhonda Neshama Waller offers readers who live south of her a taste of what down here was weeks ago — “warm sun, after a week of rain, hail, snow.”   In Detroit, most of our leaves have spread almost to full size, tulips have already blown our minds.   Which part of spring is more beautiful?  “Yes.”

Have a great weekend.

john sj

Today’s Post  –  Rhoda Neshama Waller:
“Spring Comes to Maine”

Sonnet May 10

Almost mid-May, I watch the spring come slow-
ly day by day, pale lime-green moving up
from Sheepscot Valley towards my mountaintop,
up here the leaves still furled. Two eagles flew,
late afternoon, just past the east window.
Today, wild violets everywhere I step,
bright golden dandelions on the slope,
warm sun, after a week of rain, hail, snow.
Remembering to match my pace to this,
to note the details of each day’s new turn,
the distant hills still patched with lavender,
deep green of fir, the changing moments pass.
For dinner I’ll have buttered fiddlehead fern,
The daffodils are opening in the grass.

“Spring Comes to Maine” by Rhoda Neshama Waller.
Presented here by poet submission.

Art credit: “Two adults from the local Bald Eagle family,” photograph taken August 19, 2012, near Pembroke, Maine (USA), perhaps.

Wednesday,  April 29   “The world’s otherness is antidote to confusion”

A Jesuit soul friend, Bill Pauly, who died, too young in 2006 (heart attack), gave me Mary Oliver’s New and Selected Poems, Vol 1 in 2004 when I drove to Santa Clara, CA for sabbatical after 3 years as interim dean of Liberal Arts & Education. Knowing that I had not embraced Mary Oliver’s poetry despite his advising, he wrote on the title page: “This is your one required reading for your sabbatical. Enjoy.” Here I am, sixteen years later wanting a message board to where Bill is, telling him that I’ve finally gotten his point.  I must like her poetry.

It’s a good poem for the week after final exams on the McNichols Campus: “. . . . I do not want anymore to be useful . . . to lead children . . . into the text of civility, to teach them that they are (they are not) better than the grass.” She reminds me of a prayer I learned 40 + years ago on the Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation. If I stand still, still enough and long enough, I can hear the sound a cottonwood makes, and a different sound of grass growing beneath my feet. The stillness and the listening help me to be where I stand and walk upon the earth.

It helps to read a poem out loud, several times.

Have a blest day,

john sj

Today’s post: “Early Morning, My Birthday”

The snails on the pink sleds of their bodies are moving
among the morning glories.
The spider is asleep among the red thumbs
of the raspberries.
What shall I do, what shall I do?

The rain is slow
The little birds are alive in it.
Even the beetles.
The green leaves lap it up.
What shall I do, what shall I do?

The wasp sits on the porch in her paper castle.
The blue heron floats out of the clouds.
The fish leaps, all rainbow and mouth, from the dark water.

This morning the water lilies are no less lovely, I think,
than the lilies of Monet.
And I do not want anymore to be useful, to be docile, to lead
children out of the fields into the text
of civility, to teach them that they are (they are not) better
than the grass.

“I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything – other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion – that standing within this otherness – the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books –  can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.”

Mary Oliver
1935-2019
New and Selected Poems, Vol. 1 (1992)

Pope Francis, July 2013 on the island of Lampedusa, spoke these words to a world just getting used to him as a new world figure. Francis chose this place of horrors at sea to call attention to the violence where refugees live.. Among other things, he said:

“Immigrants who died at sea, from that boat that, instead of being a way of hope was a way of death
. . . . . I felt that I ought to come here today to pray, (n.b., a few months after his election)
to make a gesture of closeness,
but also to reawaken our consciences so that what happened would not be repeated.
Not repeated, please!”

What might make a poem that can compel us to pay attention to the violent places in this world?  Somali poet Warsan Shire helps me not to lose focus. One estimate sets the number of refugees who have had to leave home and walk the roads of the world at c. 60,000,000. I am proud of my brother Jesuit, Pope Francis, for bringing his gift of hospitality – and bring us who hear him speak – into very hard places. Warsan Shire’s poems, flint hard, unrelenting, reminds me of Francis and Francis reminds me of Warsan Shire.

Best to read her poem out loud, with pauses. An inner place of listening to restore our kindness with courage so we can continue to pay attention.

Have a blest day,

john sj

Text # 3: – Warsan Shire, “Home”

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark.
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well.

your neighbours running faster
than you, the boy you went to school with who kissed you dizzy behind
the old tin factory is
holding a gun bigger than his body,

you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.

no one would leave home unless home chased you, fire under feet,
hot blood in your belly.

it’s not something you ever thought about doing, and so when you did –
you carried the anthem under your breath, waiting until the airport toilet

to tear up the passport and swallow,
each mouthful of paper making it clear that you would not be going back.

you have to understand,
no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land.

who would choose to spend days
and nights in the stomach of a truck
unless the miles traveled
meant something more than journey.

no one would choose to crawl under fences,
be beaten until your shadow leaves you,
raped, then drowned, forced to the bottom of
the boat because you are darker, be sold,
starved, shot at the border like a sick animal,
be pitied, lose your name, lose your family,
make a refugee camp a home for a year or two or ten,
stripped and searched, find prison everywhere
and if you survive and you are greeted on the other side
with go home blacks, refugees

dirty immigrants, asylum seekers
sucking our country dry of milk,
dark, with their hands out
smell strange, savage –
look what they’ve done to their own countries,
what will they do to ours?

the dirty looks in the street
softer than a limb torn off,
the indignity of everyday life
more tender than fourteen men who
look like your father, between
your legs, easier to swallow
than rubble, than your child’s body
in pieces – for now, forget about pride
your survival is more important.

i want to go home, but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home tells you to
leave what you could not behind, even if it was human.

no one leaves home until home
is a damp voice in your ear saying
leave, run now, i don’t know what
i’ve become.

Warsan Shire b. 1 August 1988
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsan_Shire

Friday, April 24

In 2015, the Detroit News estimated 10 million walleye migrating from Lake Erie into the Detroit River.  My web search this morning estimated c. 500,000.  Either way, that’s a lot of spawning fish.  Here’s what our April 29, 2015 post settled on.  Nature’s gift to our city and region during these demanding times.

Walleye, The Spring Run and its River

“April and May mark the start of the walleye spawn. An estimated 10 million walleye (sander vitreus, if you know your dead languages) migrate from Lake Erie in search of the shallow rocky bed common along the shipping channel of the Detroit River. Here, these tasty fish lay their eggs.   The spring run draws thousands of fishermen, or anglers, to the 24-nautical mile straight.”   Crain’s Detroit News, April 29, 2015

All around us, here in the middle of Detroit, lives abound and follow rhythms older than Detroit’s 317 years, waiting to add drama and texture to the press of our duties and strategies.  Fisher men and women know about the vast spring Walleye spawn; good news about the river that it hosts these millions, a sign of water health.

Today’s poet, Mary Oliver, knows that other startling living beings will send us a blessing if we pause to notice.

Read out loud if you can, pause here and there.

Have a good day.

john sj

Today’s Post  The Lark

And I have seen,
At dawn,
The lark
Spin out of the long grass

And into the pink air—
Its wings,
Which are neither wide
Nor overstrong,

Fluttering—
The pectorals
Ploughing and flashing
For nothing but altitude—

And the song
Bursting
All the while
From the red throat.

And then he descends,
And is sorry.
His little head hangs,
And he pants for breath

For a few moments
Among the hoops of the grass,
Which are crisp and dry,
Where most of his living is done—

And then something summons him again
And up he goes,
His shoulders working,
His whole body almost collapsing and floating

To the edges of the world.
We are reconciled, I think,
To too much.
Better to be a bird, like this one—

An ornament of the eternal.
As he came down once, to the nest of the grass,
“Squander the day, but save the soul,”
I heard him say.

in  What Do We Know (2002)

Mary Oliver
1935 – 2019

Wednesday, April 22 — Three Cairns – sculpture

“Cairns [are] stone structures [or markers]
that identify a place of great importance.”

This little boy exploring a large stone egg got me wondering the way art does. Two artists here, the sculptor and the mom with the camera. So I emailed his mom back asking about the egg. She’s a close friend living in La Jolla, CA: “it’s a sculpture by Andy Goldsworthy, called ‘Three Cairns,’ in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art; my son calls it the ‘egg rock.’”

I found an explanation on the website of the Greater Des Moines Public Art Foundation (http://dsmpublicartfoundation.org/public-art/three-cairns/). Just below is their great picture of the central cairn at the Des Moines Art Center. “Cairns,” Public Art tells us, are “stone structures [or markers] that identify a place of great importance. Their dry-stone construction represents an engineering feat as well as artistic creativity. The process of shaping and stacking the stones into a simple oval shape is challenging and intense. The form symbolizes fullness and ripeness, time and energy, loss and endurance.” The Foundation also tells us that this is the largest project in the Western Hemisphere by British artist Andy Goldsworthy.

The photo, by Doug Millar, shows the central cairn at home among Iowa grass and trees. Goldworthy’s placement of the two hollow-out stone frames isn’t random. One points toward New York, a matching cairn outside the Neugerger Museum of Art; the other points west to the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla and the cairn my friend’s son showed off for us. The limestone for each comes from long before its physical home was inhabited by people calling their place “Iowa.”

Lots going on here. Not one place but three, not three places but a continent, not one time but millennia, all crafted with the precise skills of a contemporary worker of stone. I like to imagine the work we do at the university like that. These are exam days, demanding precise thinking and some memory. But, our Mission Statement reminds our students, the point is not the exam or the grade; the point is a lifetime of their citizenship in a world that is vast and beloved of God.

While getting reacquainted with the Cairns, I opened a poem feed that lands in my inbox each day to find a gift from Emily Dickenson. Just below my signature, you will find Emily Dickenson’s 12 line poem about an unnamed bird. Which form of beauty opens me to deeper stillness this mid-April day in 2017, the trans-national sculpture or this poem from the 19th century? Answer? “yes.”

Looks like spring rains today, encouraging grass and flowers and trees to do their thing.

Have a blest day.

john st sj

Today’s Post  “Hope”

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Emily Dickinson
December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886

Monday,  April 20   Rabindranath Tagore # 2   {Gitanjali}

“When Thou commandest me to sing  .  .  .  . ”

Finals week, fatigue, worries and self-doubt.  Finals week, courage, the joy of intellectual engagement.   Final exams reminded me of Tagore’s great poem which often reminds me of the courage at the heart of students encountering their university.

We are a university, where people listen, take each other seriously.  Teachers listen to students.   When I taught full-time, some students told me one day that I was most scary when one of them would say something and I would turn around and write her/his words on the board, circle one word then turn around and ask: “Why did you choose that word?”

Teachers do that:  listen for the voice, call it forth; expect respect for words.   Not only teachers though.  Universities call on students to listen to each other, to expect meaning from each other.     Administrative assistants,  staff in the registrar’s office, nurse practitioners in the student wellness center,  campus security officers, coaches;  lots of listening.  On good days, each of us knows that.  And on hard days, maybe one of our peers will notice our distress and ask how we are doing, and listen to our story. These days many of our stories are tales of fear and fatigue; pretty much everything takes longer, our futures are deeply uncertain.  Perhaps that is what led me back to Tagore’s Gitanjali #2.  Rabindranath Tagore writes of God expecting a song from human beings, thrilling us by sacred attention.

Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses.

Have a blest day, perhaps even with three good surprises.

john sj

Today’s Post   Tagore # 2   Gitanjali  # 2

When Thou commandest me to sing
it seems that my heart would break with pride
and I look to Thy face
and tears come to my eyes.

All that is harsh and dissonant in my life
melts into one sweet harmony
and my adoration spreads wings like a glad bird
on its flight across the sea.

I know Thou takest pleasure in my singing
I know that only as a singer I come before Thy presence
I touch by the edge of the far spreading wing of my song
Thy feet which I could never aspire to reach.

Drunk with the joy of singing
I forget myself
and call Thee friend
who art my lord.

Rabindranath Tagore
রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর
May 1861  – August 1941

Friday, April 17, 2020
“These things are a tiny taste of the bigness of the world.
They were there before you looked;
they will be there after you go.
None of it depends on you.”

I came across this short NY Times essay on Friday, April 15, 2016.   It marks a rare occasion for the Work Day/Hard Time poetry list.  No poem.  Instead, another great literary form, the short contemplative essay.   Sam Anderson’s essay, which I’ve read slowly twice so far, makes me cry in its final paragraph.  Settle in and let his English prose sing to you.

I think of this as a wisdom-read to inch us readers into another day of careful attention to our bodies, the air we breathe, the distances we maintain between one another . . .  careful attention.   Seen from that perspective, this 2016 NYT essay seems like more than a happy accident.  I’d love to claim that, as I contemplated our present world situation, my astonishing memory took me right to Sam Anderson, as in “what a smart guy I am!”  False claim though;  I just looked back in the poetry blog to an earlier April and looked around.  Pig lucky?  or perhaps Amazing Grace.  Either way, I am very glad Sam’s essay found me this Friday morning in 2020.   And as we turn into this weekend, I wish you 3 surprises, each one “Good News.”

Have a blest weekend.

john sj

Today’s Post # 1   “Looking Out the Window”
“But this is the power of windows: They contradict your easy assumptions.”

The view from the writer’s office in upstate New York. Credit Noah Kalina for The New York Times

Our windows keep shrinking. Our vision narrows and narrows. Mine roams, for much of each day, in a space roughly the size of a playing card: the rectangle of my phone’s screen. The view through that piece of glass is not out onto the actual world but inward, down a digital depth over which I exercise near-­dictatorial control. If I want to see a bird on my phone, I see a bird. If I want to see a manatee captioned by a motivational slogan, I see that. This means, of course, that my phone is not really a window at all. A real window is something that frames our fundamental lack of control.

Windows are, in this sense, a powerful existential tool: a patch of the world, arbitrarily framed, from which we are physically isolated. The only thing you can do is look. You have no influence over what you will see. Your brain is forced to make drama out of whatever happens to appear. Boring things become strange. A blob of mist balances on top of a mountain; leafless trees contort themselves in slow-­motion interpretive dance; heavy raindrops make the puddles boil. These things are a tiny taste of the bigness of the world. They were there before you looked; they will be there after you go. None of it depends on you.

Sometimes what you see can be astonishing. One day, I was taking a nap in the red chair in my office when I woke up to the sound of a car crash. I sat up and looked, immediately, out my window. Across the street, in a parking lot, a car had just backed into a chain-link fence. The car must have been moving fast, because it was in bad shape: Its hood had popped up, its windshield wipers were snapping back and forth under a perfectly clear sky and part of its bumper was sitting on the ground. The fence was mangled, bent out in exactly the shape of the car’s back end.

I couldn’t believe I was seeing this, on an otherwise ordinary weekday morning, out of my office window. I watched the driver get out of the car. He was stocky with a shaved head; he wore cargo shorts and a flannel shirt unbuttoned to expose his chest hair. I disliked him immediately. After a few seconds of assessing the damage, he walked around the car and opened the passenger door — from which a very small child scrambled out. A toddler in the front seat! My disdain for this man increased exponentially.

As the child ran around the parking lot, the man tried to repair the damage he caused. He attempted to tug the ruined fence back into place, but it wouldn’t move. He tried to shove the fallen piece of bumper back onto his car, but that only made the rest of his bumper fall off too.

Average number of windows in an American home: 22
Children injured by window falls per year in the U.S.: 15,000
Bird deaths caused by windows per year in the U.S. (conservative estimate): 365 million
Bird deaths caused by windows per year in the U.S. (liberal estimate): 988 million

I sat in my red chair, looking out my window, silently cheering.

The man tried, a little harder, to fix the fence. He grabbed its vertical support pole, which was wickedly bent, and pulled against it with his full weight. The pole suddenly broke, and the man fell hard onto the blacktop. The entire fence fell on top of him, and one of his sandals flew off and landed 10 feet away on the sidewalk.

I think I laughed out loud. This was a slapstick masterpiece. It was brightening my whole day, the failure of this terrible man. He climbed out from under the collapsed fence and limped back to the apartment building above the lot, rubbing his elbow.

That, I thought, would be the end of it. The man — that villainous man — was going to leave all the chaos behind for someone else to clean up. It was only the middle of the morning, but I imagined him sprawled out on his sofa with a case of beer, eating horrible snacks, while his child played with fire and broken glass and battery acid near a malfunctioning electrical socket.

But this is the power of windows: They contradict your easy assumptions. They scribble over your mental cartoons with the heavy red pen of reality. The man emerged a few minutes later with some tools. He got to work immediately, detaching one of the fence’s bent support bars and hammering it straight on the asphalt. For the next hour, I watched out my window as he doggedly fixed the fence, straightening and reattaching its support bars, scrupulously unbending its bent chain-link. He even improved it. He stole a support bar from another fence farther back in the parking lot and added it to this one. Now the fence would be extra secure, stronger than before, impervious to damage.

This odious man was actually a hero. I was the lazy one, with my knee-jerk judgments and distant clichés, my superiority from three stories up. My window had taken a break, that day, from its usual programming — crows and squirrels roaming over a dead tree, cars piling up at a stoplight — to put on a little passion play for me, an allegory about the nobility of the human spirit. My ugly assumptions, I realized, were all about myself. I would never have fixed that fence; I would have panicked and run away. My window had woken me up from a nap to teach me a lesson in humility.

The incident changed my entire day. I went back to my shallow screens with new determination. Years later, I still look out my window at that fence almost every day. It still looks brand new. It makes me wonder what else that man has improved, and how I can make myself more like him.

Today’s 2nd post – the one minute Doner advertisement about Detroit’s shut-down;  blows my mind.  I bet you watch it more than once.

https://www.doner.com/advertising-news/doners_powerful_message_to_stay_safe/

Remember the Detroit Super Bowl 2 minute ad some years back?  This piece picks up those same cadences.  Moves me deeply.

Wednesday, April 15  –  Mary Oliver and Pine Ridge, SD

A friend sent me a Mary Oliver writing, new to me.  It doesn’t quite read like a poem.  More like two small essays connected.  They remind me of a saying-set I wrote ten years ago or so imagining Lakota (Sioux) wisdom opening places in my imagination.  Living on Pine Ridge for much of my twenties and now for one Sabbatical month last September and, Pandemic allowing, some weeks this coming summer, I try to spend time with Lakota friends and visit 5 or 6 sacred places there:  meadowlarks, prairie grass and badlands, the profile of the Black Hills 60-70 miles to the west, thunder and lightning storms, horses running free.    A restorative time.

Mary Oliver’s two paragraphs nourished my imagination and memory & inspired today’s post. Thanks to a soul friend who introduced me to “Foolishness.”

Have a blest day, with 2 or 3 surprises.

john sj

Today’s Post:  “Foolishness?  No, it’s not.”   Mary Oliver

Sometimes I spend all day trying to count
the leaves on a single tree. To do this I
have to climb branch by branch and
write down the numbers in a little book.
So I suppose, from their point of view,
it’s reasonable that my friends say: what
foolishness! She’s got her head in the clouds
again.

But it’s not.  Of course I have to give up,
but by then I’m half crazy with the wonder
of it – the abundance of the leaves, the
quietness of the branches, the hopelessness
of my effort. And I am in that delicious
and important place, roaring with laughter,
full of earth-praise.

a wisdom-saying born on the Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation

“Time spent baking bread follows the pace of yeast”

“Motorcycling alone; I move as a tiny person in a vast world”

“If I pause long enough, I  hear the sound of grass growing, and trees, each at its own pace.”

“There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”
Thomas Merton

A Birthday Note to My Sister

Good morning, Mary.  I chose this amazing sentence from Thomas Merton for your birthday.   Over the years of your life, your eyes have seen people, young and old, women and men, “all walking around shining like the sun,”  and made the world better each time.

I will call you later on this day of your birthday.

love you

Monday, April 13

Just above is my birthday note to greet  my sister who lives in our home town of Marinette, Wisconsin.  I love this one-line sentence written by Thomas Merton when a young adult near the beginning of his astonishing life as a world famous writer and mystic.   It happens that he died — too young — on my birthday in 1968 while at a meeting in Bangkok, Thailand.

Ellen Bass has roots in Philadelphia (b. June 16, 1947) and Boston (Goucher College, Boston University).  A soul friend from Fordham University in New York, sent this poem last week.   “The Thing is” written with what another poet friend would call “flint-hard” word choices.  A strong poem for these hard times.

Have a blest week.

john sj

Today’s Post:  Ellen Bass “The Thing is”

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

Ellen Bass
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ellen-bass

Wednesday, April 8, 2020  

During these demanding times the Work Day/Hard Times List has been receiving more poems than usual.   Their authors are women and men, adults and children.  They risk fresh language that often surprises us as we read and edit.  Perhaps a collective solitude and the pandemic’s ominous portents – news of death and grief – opens our imaginations to the sheer beauty we hear and see around us.  “We are brave and beautiful,” these moments seem to tell us:  “Beautiful,” “Brave,”  and “Beloved.”   Our lives remind us that we are worth strong poems.

Best to read Maria Ibarra-Frayre’s contemplation of a pot of orchids on her window sill out loud, with pauses.    Have a blest day.

john sj

p.s.      In Detroit our pre-midnight offered us rolling thunder, punctuated by astonishing lightning bolts, enclosed in a strong hail storm.  Had me leaning out my west window.  Three hours later, I woke to fresh clear skies and an astonishing full moon.  Such beauty!  I lost some sleep gazing at it.

Today’s Post:  “Orchids on a sill”    

The orchids on my windowsill
Don’t know the world
On the other side of the glass is shattering.
Their velvet, white and purple petals
Don’t know
That outside we can’t touch
The faces of our loved ones.
That I haven’t held the
Hand of the person I love in seven weeks,
But really it feels like seven lifetimes.

My orchids,
So gently unaware
That everyday this week I’ve spent
Twelve hours a day in front of a computer
Sifting through plans and names and stories
Of people who don’t know how they will
Pay rent, keep their lights on, or keep themselves safe.

All I know is that I want to keep them safe.
Safe and nourished like the orchids
On my window sill
So full of blooms that it looks like they
could topple over with joy.
Their roots entangled with each other,
Leaning on the cold and smooth glass,

A comfort for lean times.
Lean times,
Like when all their button blooms dried
And only two bare stick-stems remained.

They lost their color
I almost threw them out.
Instead, with doubt I dug the
Nail of my index finger into the glossy long leaf.

It bled.
Bled enough to keep me from throwing it out.
A sign of life.

Many months later, at their own pace, my orchids are blooming again.
Unaware that outside the world is bleeding.
Holding in their tiny pea-sized blooms
a quiet trust that life will grow again.

I walked by the orchids again this evening.
They laughed at me in their secret delight,
Saying, “We do know. We are leading you into bloom”.

Maria Ibarra-Frayre
Writer, feminist, unapologetically undocumented