Poetry Blog: "A Work Day in Hard Times"

Monday, April 6, 2020

Maryann McLaughlin, an alumna and good friend, sent this long-famous poem (1624) to accompany her observation about the world’s present condition.  She wrote yesterday: “someone said something today about how we can’t be all about just America right now, and this came into my mind.  No man is an island.  So i looked it up.”

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

john st sj

Today’s Post:  Meditation XVII  – Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe;
every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine;
if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse,
as well as if a Promontorie were,
as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were;

any mans death diminishes me,
because I am involved in Mankinde;

And therefore

never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.

John Donne  1572 – 1631
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Donne

Monday, April 3 —  capricious weather  +  still early buds at the tips of trees  =  “Spring”

Rabindranath Tagore, a master of sacred presence, writes in today’s post, that tastes of wonder and courage and beauty and tenderness compete with gloom and restless edginess.   Distractions lose connection with the deep down mystery.  “Trust the mystery,”  says Tagore, “even when trust feels out of reach.”

Have a blest weekend.

john sj

Today’s Post  —  Tagore  # 38, in Gitanjali

That I want Thee, only thee–let my heart repeat without end.
All desires that distract me, day and night,
are false and empty to the core.

As the night keeps hidden in its gloom the petition for light,
even thus in the depth of my unconsciousness rings the cry–
“I want thee, only thee.”

As the storm still seeks its end in peace when it strikes against
peace with all its might, even thus my rebellion strikes against thy love
and still its cry is–“I want thee, only thee.”

Rabindranath Tagore
1861 – 1941
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1913

Wednesday April 1, 2020 – 

“When children have access to books their world expands.”  Mary-Catherine Harrison

During these weeks as the world’s Pandemic grips our inner attention, weeks marked by quarantine protocols and exploding infection rates, April has arrived in our living places.  Here in Detroit one of our educational traditions might expand our imaginations.  The children in the photos woke my imagination and stirred gratitude for the years of work that Dr. Mary-Catherine Harrison, Chair of our English and Writing program has dedicated to encouraging children to take books home and to form a habit of reading.   Today’s post is dedicated to the thousands of children’s books which transform the lives of little people in our neighborhoods.

have a blest mid-week.

john sj

Preface, April 22 2015:  “Our guest editor for today is associate professor of English and Director of RX for Reading Detroit Mary-Catherine Harrison.  She calls attention to the celebration tomorrow afternoon of a birth.  In the Gesu School playground, just across McNichols from UDM’s campus, what looks like a large bird house or mailbox will be publicly welcomed into the neighborhood.  It carries books for young children rather than birds or letters.  This cooperation between UDM faculty and staff with children in Gesu School is as beautiful as the new book box.  Makes me proud that our Work Day list can be part of it.”

Have a good day.

john st sj

Today’s Post –  Mary-Catherine Harrison

April 2015 – –  RX for Reading works to expand access to children’s books in Detroit and support families in reading with their children.  Over the 2014-2015 school year, they have distributed 5,000 new and gently used books to kids and community partners in the city, and UDM students have read with children at Emmanuel Head Start, Peggy’s Place Head Start, Bright Beginnings Childcare at COTS, and Gesu Elementary School. You can read more about their work at the RX for Reading website.  This post, “What Happens When College Students and Preschoolers Read Together?,” talks about the RX for Reading partnership between UDM undergraduates and the preschoolers at Emmanuel Head Start.

Tomorrow (4/23/2015) at 3:00, University of Detroit Mercy will host a campus and community celebration to launch the new RX for Reading Detroit Little Free Library in the Gesu Community Green.  Supported by a UDM Mission Micro Grant, the Little Free Library was built by Emilie Wetherington, Director of UDM’s Student Success Center, and her husband Terry Wetherington.  RX for Reading Detroit will keep the library stocked with books to be enjoyed by all children in the neighborhood.  Members of the UDM community are invited to the “bookies and cookies” themed party, along with the kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd grades at Gesu Elementary School.  Gesu Community Green is across the street from UDM at McNichols and Oak Street.

As a literary critic, I have spent much of my career considering what literature does in the world, how it affects readers’ emotional states, our beliefs and behaviors, our commitments.

Since starting RX for Reading, I have thought even more about what reading offers.  Reading proficiently by the third grade is the single greatest predictor of high school graduation and a successful career.  In Michigan, only 19% of low-income children are reaching this benchmark.  Young people with low literacy skills are at greater risk of incarceration and poor health outcomes.  Their children and their children’s children are more likely to live in poverty.  Reading is opportunity.  Reading is the foundation of equality.

When children have access to books their world expands.  Literature functions as both a window and a mirror.  It allows us to see and understand lives different than our own; it reflects our own life in a way that makes us understand our experience more fully.

Literature takes us places. When we lose ourselves in a book, we are transported to those scenes; we experience events as if we were present for them and we imagine ourselves in the place of characters in that world.  Scholars call this phenomenon narrative transportation.  Emily Dickinson understood it well.

There is no Frigate like a Book (1286) – Emily Dickinson

There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll –
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul –

Emily Dickenson 1830 – 1886

RX for Reading Detroit—Raising Readers, One Book at a Time

Read more about our work:
http://rxreading.org/

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Monday, March 30  

“Then you relax your hand, and all the skin relaxes,
letting go the taut shine of youth . . .”

March 30 — the second last day of March which, the saying goes, “comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb.”  Whoever thought the saying first must have lived somewhere where March weather is fickle and tentative.  Blustery.  Surely not Tucson or Miami.   Tentative weather months are the blessing of geographies where the tilt of the sun against the earth creates seasons rich with teasing, soft breezes swept away by 25 mph bluster.  The teasing sharpens the appetite for new flowers and fresh grass.  A great moment in the year for the Christian feast of Resurrection, thousands of tiny explosions of new life and improbable beauty.

Today’s post comes from a list that often expands my horizons (“A Year of being Here: mindfulness poetry by wordsmiths of the here & now”).  Susan Rooke is new to me and, perhaps, to you.  Today’s post, “A Marriage in the Hands,” can be read any day in any season of the year.  Understated love, so intimate.  It measures time in decades, not the rapid fire swirl of springtime energy only.

p.s. This morning I searched the Poetry List, looking for a March poem that was posted so long ago, that it appeared to my eye and ear as fresh and new, full of surprises.  Then too, the story Susan Rooke tells fits our present situation — love without showy extravagances-  tender love — enduring love: a song of human intimacy.

Have a blest day.

John sj

Today’s Post —  Susan Rooke: “A Marriage in the Hands”
Posted by Phyllis Cole-Dai on Mar 25, 2015 midnight

You make a fist, that I might see
your skin grow tight again,
smoothed across your hand.

Those big hands that you like
to joke are too heavy when carried
all day at the ends of your arms.

Then you relax your hand,
and all the skin relaxes, letting
go the taut shine of youth,

and I see your sacrifice,
the thirty years you’ve held
us close, held my strength

for me, and all your tenderness.
I put my own hand out, relaxed,
palm down, next to yours.

You are aging, so am I, and this
is something we have sworn
always to do as one. Undeniably

I see we have. Then you make
a fist again. I make my own.
As one we smooth the way ahead.

“A Marriage in the Hands” by Susan Rooke.

Susan Rooke lives in Austin, Texas.  Despite her normal façade, she’s always been interested in the mysterious and odd, and has completed the first novel of a fantasy series. Her work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in The Texas Poetry Calendar 2013, Pulse: voices from the heart of medicine, San Pedro River Review, and on Austin Capital Metro buses.  She and her husband of almost 30 years (who indulges her interests without subscribing to them himself), spend as much time in the mountains of West Texas as possible.

Friday, March 27, 2020

“Dear John,

Here’s one from Naomi Shihab Nye. I know you’ve posted her poems before, but don’t know if you have seen this one, so just in case, take heart from Naomi at Gate A-4.

David”

https://www.grubin.com/america1900
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Grubin

****
****

David Gruben, TV producer/director with whom I’ve had the grace to work as a “talking head” on several American Experience films – – “America 1900” & “Tesla” (2016) – – emailed the other day asking if I was familiar with “Gate A-4.”    He’d read several Naomi Shihab Nye’s poems on the “Work Day in Hard Times” poetry list and wondered if I’d seen her extraordinary short story about a frightened and confused airline passenger in Albuquerque’s airport. (She spoke Arabic; the terminal workers couldn’t understand her nor make themselves understood.)  Then a human magic happened.  David is right; the Naomi’s story helps the reader to take heart in these frightening times.  It’s not a poem, however, this brilliant poet wrote the story in gripping prose so you may find it hard to read as a poem (i.e., “read slowly, several times, with pauses”) but I’ll bet “Gate A-4” stays with you all this weekend.

p.s. Turns out we had posted Gate A-4 once before, Wednesday before Thanksgiving 2016.  A-4 knocked me flat then,  knocks me flat again this week.

Have a blest weekend,

John sj

Today’s Post:   “Gate A-4”

Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning
my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement:
“If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please
come to the gate immediately.”

Well—one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.

An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just
like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing. “Help,”
said the flight agent. “Talk to her. What is her problem? We
told her the flight was going to be late and she did this.”

I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly.
“Shu-dow-a, Shu-bid-uck Habibti? Stani schway, Min fadlick, Shu-bit-
se-wee?” The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly
used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled
entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the
next day. I said, “No, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just later, who is
picking you up? Let’s call him.”

We called her son, I spoke with him in English. I told him I would
stay with his mother till we got on the plane and ride next to
her. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just
for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while
in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I
thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know
and let them chat with her? This all took up two hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling of her life, patting my knee,
answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool
cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and
nuts—from her bag—and was offering them to all the women at the gate.
To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the
lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered
sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie.

And then the airline broke out free apple juice from huge coolers and two
little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they
were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend—
by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag,
some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country tradi-
tion. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, This
is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that
gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—seemed apprehensive about
any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too.

This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.

Naomi Shihab Nye
March 12, 1952

From Honeybee. Copyright © 2008 by Naomi Shihab Nye.
Naomi Shihab Nye reading “Gate A-4″
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Shihab_Nye

March mid-month 2020

“The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror”

A good friend sent me this poem which, she thinks, sounds like the poems that move me.

She’s right about Derek Walcott.   His poem makes a place where I feel welcome and at home.  A good way to begin a day when  the morning teases me with hints of Spring sunshine, a fine day.  Even as we listen to one another’s whispering and turn our attention to the loves of our lives, surprising us again today.

Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses. without hurry.

john sj

Today’s Post   “Love after Love”

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,

and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

– Derek Walcott

Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL OBE OCC (born 23 January 1930) is a Saint Lucian– Trinidadian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is currently Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex

Monday, March 23, 2020

A new work week begins;  pretty much every person, in each neighborhood of the world, turns into the new day, taking stock of cumulative inner fatigue, anxious predictions about what might befall us next, and befall people who share love with us.

A few days ago the poem “Lockdown” found its way among many of us;  free of cliche’s, pretty daring language too.  Maybe pull the words over your head like a blanket and wake up breathing in and out as you befriend the day.

I haven’t discovered a poet yet.   A good one though, for sure.

Have a blest day.

john sj

Today’s Post  Lockdown

Yes there is fear.
Yes there is isolation.
Yes there is panic buying.
Yes there is sickness.
Yes there is even death.
But,
They say that in Wuhan after so many years of noise
You can hear the birds again.
They say that after just a few weeks of quiet
The sky is no longer thick with fumes
But blue and grey and clear.
They say that in the streets of Assisi
People are singing to each other
across the empty squares,
keeping their windows open
so that those who are alone
may hear the sounds of family around them.
They say that a hotel in the West of Ireland
Is offering free meals and delivery to the housebound.
Today a young woman I know
is busy spreading fliers with her number
through the neighbourhood
So that the elders may have someone to call on.
Today Churches, Synagogues, Mosques and Temples
are preparing to welcome
and shelter the homeless, the sick, the weary
All over the world people are slowing down and reflecting
All over the world people are looking at their neighbours in a new way

All over the world people are waking up to a new reality
To how big we really are.
To how little control we really have.
To what really matters.
To Love.
So we pray and we remember that
Yes there is fear.
But there does not have to be hate.
Yes there is isolation.
But there does not have to be loneliness.
Yes there is panic buying.
But there does not have to be meanness.
Yes there is sickness.
But there does not have to be disease of the soul
Yes there is even death.
But there can always be a rebirth of love.
Wake to the choices you make as to how to live now.
Today, breathe.
Listen, behind the factory noises of your panic
The birds are singing again
The sky is clearing,
Spring is coming,
And we are always encompassed by Love.
Open the windows of your soul
And though you may not be able
to touch across the empty square,
Sing.

March 13th 2020

Jen passed this along to me;  thank you kinswoman.

Friday, March 20, 2020

“It is possible to travel alone,
but we know the journey is human life
and life needs company.
Companion is the one who eats the same bread.”

Sheer beauty can look inadequate for repairing violent storm damage, such as COVID-19,  our new global visitor.  But I doubt it.  Beauty does not deceive when we find more spring in our step and smiles in our eyes.  The work of beauty is to remind us that deep down, under the exhausting burdens of our adult commitments, lives a wellspring of grace.

Dom Helder Camera, Fortaleza, Ceará, Northeast Region of Brazil –February 7, 1909 – August 27, 1999:  He was archbishop of Recife and Olinda Brazil from 1964 to 1985 during a severe military dictatorship.  He interpreted Catholic teaching with a consistent, fierce attention to the violence of systems that maintain brutal poverty.  Not surprisingly,  he made serious enemies who worked to silence him.   It is said that some of Dom Helder’s enemies hired a hit man to assassinate him.  Like the professional he was, the hit man stalked the archbishop for some time, learning his habits, seeking a place and time most apt for killing.   In the process, he listened to Dom Helder Camera speak a number of times until, one day, he fell at his feet, weeping, and begged for the grace to change his profession and his life.

Dom Helder’s unblinking attention to the violence of poverty was matched by legendary playfulness.  Here is one story among many; this one I witnessed.  Once Dom Helder was speaking to about 1500 people who sat on the St. Louis levee overlooking the Mississippi River (by the Arch). In the middle of his talk, a helicopter took off right behind him filled with tourists taking a ride for a bird’s eye view of the river and the city.   It made so much racket that it was impossible to hear what the Dom Helder was saying.  He paused, and turned around toward the helicopter which flew at that moment just above him,  and offered the helicopter pilot and the tourists a puckish little wave.  When the helicopter got a little farther out on its trip, he turned back to us and blew our minds as we listened.

A Friday in March,  morning sunshine is dancing for us in the midst of our vast worries.   Blessings.

It’s been a hard week everywhere you look;  hence two beautiful poets, brimming with beauty and courage.

john sj

p.s.      Here’s my favorite DH photo.  Alas, I’ve never found one of him waving to the helicopter.

Today’s Post-  a saying of Dom Helder

“It is possible to travel alone, but we know the journey is human life
and life needs company.
Companion is the one who eats the same bread.

The good traveler cares for weary companions, grieves when we lose heart,
takes us where she finds us,  listens to us.
Intelligently, gently, above all lovingly, we encourage each other to go on
and recover our joy
On the  journey.”

                                                                                Dom Helder Camera

p.p.s.  William Carlos Williams also understood about life-weariness and beauty’s restorative powers.   Try reading it aloud once or twice.

The Maneuver

I saw the two starlings
coming in toward the wires
But at the last,
just before alighting, they

turned in the air together
and landed backwards!
that’s what got me —
to face into the wind’s teeth.

William Carlos Williams
September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Carlos_Williams

Wednesday, March 18, 2020

Anxieties, anxieties, anxieties  —>  a fair sample of COVID-19 denials;  often pretty noisy denials at that.  They remind me of a joke my dad used to tell from his early days growing up in a Kansas farm town.  The story goes that the preacher had written out his sermon so he could read it from the pulpit with notes that occurred to him as he got closer to the service.    My Dad’s joke:  the preacher had written on one place in the margin — “Weak Argument;  SHOUT LIKE HELL.”   I loved this bit of prairie humor as a boy who worshiped his dad;  I still love it.

Best to read this, to me anonymous, Haiku out loud.  Then breathe a little, then read it out loud again, then breathe a little, then read it a third time.  These frightening days invite some serious slow breathing.

No matter how busy you are, I hope there’s time to stand still and read these few, spare words.  Perhaps as a mind rinse.

Have a blest day,

john sj

Today’s Post – Anonymous

By way of pretext, I said:

“I will go to consider the condition of the bamboo fence”

but it was really to see you.”

Rocky Mountain National Park  during Ignatian Colleagues Silent Retreat – July 2011

March 16 – Night skies a long ago healing time  – Rev. Lynn Ungar,  March 11, 2020

Sabbath and memory

(September 18, 2019;  Pine Ridge, SD) Two Lakota sisters, Carmel and Serena Two Elk, caught my attention today, during a morning alive with memories from 1968 and 1969 when I spent two summers living on the Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation.  This past March weekend, awash as it has been with frightening and shocking news of the Corona Virus ramping up here and across the world, six readers of the Work Day, Hard Time Poetry list have sent me Rev. Lynn Ungar’s new poem, “Pandemic.”  Her words have touched the nerves, apparently, of people whose attention to Corona Virus is forming a community with a broad global scope.  Rev. Ungar invites her readers to imagine technologies of containment and cautionary testing as Sabbath,  “the most sacred of times.”

Keeping up with news about the pandemic brought me back to two Lakota sisters, soul friends since the late 1960s.  The past September they both told me their childhood memories of a prairie hill top on the Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation where I lived what turned into a compelling Sabbath summer.   Here are my notes from last summer when they surprised me with their memories of that long-ago time.

“Carmel and Serena Two Elk, two sisters now in their sixties – – reminded me of when they were children during my second summer living in the Tios’paye of Luke and Rose Weasel Bear deep in The Rez. Everyone there knew that some hard inner attention was eating at my spirit all that summer. It showed every night after it got too dark for our kerosene lamps to provide light to read by.  Each night I walked c. a quarter mile away from our camp and up a hill that framed our horizon. I stood on top of the hill looking into the sky, for perhaps an hour each night. I remember those darkening night skies as a time when I began to heal, very gradually, from a deep, year-long depression that would end some weeks later and seven miles down the road when Caroline Tobacco told me the story of the tragic death of her husband Steve Tobacco and welcomed me more deeply into her and her family’s life.

This morning when Carmel and Serena told me their memories of those long nights on the hill in the dark, I took this picture.   It happened that a soft rain storm came to rest on the hill top where I used to stand.

These long memories remind me that ‘sabbatical’ comes from ‘Sabbath’ which for several thousand years has meant a time when stillness reveals a sacred moment of human presence in the world.”

Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses.

Have a blessed mid-week,

john sj

Sacred Hill – Oglala, South Dakota – September 17, 2019

Today’s post:  “Pandemic”  Lynn Ungar

What if you thought of it
as the Jews consider the Sabbath—
the most sacred of times?
Cease from travel.
Cease from buying and selling.
Give up, just for now,
on trying to make the world
different than it is.
Sing. Pray. Touch only those
to whom you commit your life.
Center down.
And when your body has become still,
reach out with your heart.
Know that we are connected
in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.
(You could hardly deny it now.)
Know that our lives
are in one another’s hands.
(Surely, that has come clear.)
Do not reach out your hands.
Reach out your heart.
Reach out your words.
Reach out all the tendrils
of compassion that move, invisibly,
where we cannot touch.
Promise this world your love–
for better or for worse,
in sickness and in health,
so long as we all shall live.

https://www.uua.org/offices/people/lynn-ungar