Poetry Blog: "A Work Day in Hard Times"

Wednesday, February 19 –
“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field which someone has found;
he hides it again, goes off happy,
sells everything he owns and buys the field.”  (Mt 13:44)

People tell stories and people listen to stories.   This ancient rhythm weaves humans together over the centuries.   At universities we talk about “research;”  in my faith tradition, we tell each other how we understand sacred texts.   Telling and listening make the world go round.   The passage of time sifts words, sorting out “not very good” from “good” and “very good.”  But in a lifetime of listening, you may find a few sayings so compelling that they hold their shape, clear and unforgettable for decades.

Many people at my university have spent time and tears as they kept vigil with Gerry Stockhausen back in early January 2016 as he labored with his dying in an Omaha hospital room.  After he died, some of Gerry’s soul friends gathered in Omaha, in Milwaukee, and here on campus in Detroit, to anoint him with our love after he left us.  We told stories about him, sang songs he used to play and sing and lead in worship.

Once I heard Gerry preach a game-changer homily.   I write how I remember what he said then as a way of keeping vigil in these years since he died in that Omaha room.

Have a blest day, halfway into this work week when, tomorrow, the university’s trustees will gather to explore the current state of our University, which they collectively carry as a sacred trust.  Today’s poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, sj can sing the grace and courage of our shared presence on three campuses in Detroit.  Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses — when we might bless The University of Detroit Mercy.

john st sj

Today’s Post # 1 – a treasure in a field

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field which someone has found; he hides it again, goes off happy, sells everything he owns and buys the field.”
(Matthew 13:44)

Gerry Stock’s homily, (as I remember what he said that day):  “The saying tells of a treasure and a field.  Parables are not long and they reveal their meaning when you pay attention to the words.   This parable does not say, ‘He dug up the treasure, cleaned off the dirt, and carried the treasure away.’

‘If you want the treasure,’ Gerry told us, ‘you have to take the whole field, everything in it, what you treasure and what you wish was not part of the deal.  It’s that way when you fall in love and decide to commit to each other: (For better, for worse; good days and bad days; tenderness and fights; patience and impatience; grief and joy.)  It’s that way, too, when you decide to take on a new job or move to a new city, or commit yourself to a process of reconciliation that invests you more deeply in some real and earthy person or place.’”

This is how I remember what Stock said that one day some years ago.  I’ve not been the same since.

p.s.    One of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poems comes to mind when I remember  Stock.  Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses.  That’s especially true with Hopkin’s dense and demanding language.

Post # 2  “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, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

Gerard Manley Hopkins
28 July 1844 – 8 June 1889

Friday, February 14, “Prayer for Revolutionary Love”
“That a woman not ask a man to leave meaningful work to follow her
That a man not ask a woman to leave meaningful work to follow him”

“A couple weeks back (n.b., I lifted this post from April of 2015, loving the story of a friend finding Denise Levertov’s signed copy for me back then) a close friend came for some prayer time in our house.  On the second day, we were talking and I looked to loan her one of Denise Levertov’s great books of poetry, The Freeing of the Dust.  I looked all over my room’s bookshelves and couldn’t find it. Must have forgotten to whom I’d loaned it.   Grrrr.  You can print a poem up off the web but somehow it’s not the same as loaning the book; which has carried grace for a good while in a sensual form of paper and print and alphabet.

So what does my friend do but venture out onto the web and find me a signed copy.  If the sensuality of print on paper matters, so does the ink from a pen held by the poet herself.  Today’s poem is one of my all-time favorites.  It has appeared on this list before.”

Does today’s post celebrate the intimate power of “Prayer for Revolutionary Love” as enduring beauty,  or the web-care my friend took to bring the poet right here where I live and work and sleep?  Yes.

Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses.

Have a blest day; maybe taste this morning’s single-digit sunshine, even as it hints at the spring to come.

john sj

Today’s Post

Prayer for Revolutionary Love

That a woman not ask a man to leave meaningful work to follow her
That a man not ask a woman to leave meaningful work to follow him.

That no one try to put Eros in bondage
But that no one put a cudgel in the hands of Eros.

That our loyalty to one another and our loyalty to our work
not be set in false conflict.

That our love for each other give us love for each other’s work
That our love for each other’s work give us love for one another.

That our love for each other’s work give us love for one another.
That our love for each other give us love for each other’s work.

That our love for each other, if need be,
give way to absence.  And the unknown.

That we endure absence, if need be,
without losing our love for each other.
Without closing our doors to the unknown.

Denise Levertov, in The Freeing of the Dust  (1972)

Title page of signed copy.

1923 – 1997

Wednesday, February 12

Maria is the Southeast Michigan regional organizer for We the People Michigan. She immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico when she was nine years old and grew up Southwest Detroit and Dearborn. Maria has been fighting for immigrant justice for almost a decade, including grassroots organizing and political advocacy.

Yesterday, the Ignatian Solidarity Network reached out to Maria asking if she could “reach out to someone in the Jesuit network to ask them ‘what is at stake for the network if I, Maria, were to lose my DACA status.’”  Maria reached out to me.  Last night we decided to base our ISN response on Maria’s poem of last fall: “A different oral argument.”  While I am writing this morning’s poetry post, Maria is writing the first part of our response to the ISN’s question. We will finish our collaboration early this afternoon and submit it to ISN.  Mostly, we will base what we send on “A different oral argument”  (posted on this list last November 18). Working with Maria Ibarra, one of Detroit Mercy’s graduates whom I admire immensely, is an honor.

For a start on what we will send to ISN later today, here is her November poem.   Best to read it out loud with pauses.

Have a blest day;  looks like some pale February sun begins to anoint this Wednesday.

john sj

Today’s Post:   ”A Different Oral Argument” by Maria Ibarra

Today, November 12, the US Supreme Court
is hearing oral arguments on DACA.
Arguments on whether this pro-life
Country
Will let me keep the life
I lead.

I don’t want to argue.
I don’t want to talk to them.
The only people I want to talk to are
Other undocumented young people
Many with DACA, many without.

So this is to you, my loves.
We are not an argument.
We are warm honey
And the smell of cinnamon sticks
Simmering on the stove late at night.

We are sweet like guava fruit,
And prickly like cactus in the sun.
Ripe with possibility, wrapped
In self-protection.

We are powerful like our mothers,
Who break English in order to survive it.
We are gentle like our fathers
holding their new grandsons for the first time.

We are not an oral argument.

We are poetry dancing in the streets,
Hymns reminding us that
We survive each day despite
A military state trying to crush us.

How amazing it is that we are still here.
Powerful, and kind,
And beautiful, and yes
Resilient.
But most importantly
My dears
Most importantly, we are loved.
We are loved by our families and communities
Who crossed oceans and deserts
To give us this life.
This love is stronger than a supreme court decision, stronger than ICE,
Stronger than foolish
Arguments about whether or not we deserve to stay.

We already stayed. Now it’s time to live.

Monday, February 10, 2020  –  “a mutual commitment to noticing”

Over 4 decades of kinship, Connie de Biase and I lived our way into a mutual commitment to noticing. She died in  Brentwood Long Island 3 years ago today.  Since she left us,  I miss her most on Saturday mornings when driving into center city to buy loaves of fresh-baked bread.   I would call Connie after I’d placed my shopping bag on the passenger side.  As I drove home, we talked about the condition of our inner lives.  Through Connie’s last months, our talk became  more brave and sad as she recognized her growing diminishment, her grief at losing the life in Madison that she loved and lived so gracefully.  Ignatius calls conversations like this a way of paying attention to “inner disturbances, both consolations and desolations. ”

first written and posted January 23, 2017 (c. 2 weeks before she died)
“Perhaps today’s Denise Levertov poem came to mind because of what happened in me as I flew into JFK Saturday and braved  the Long Island’s expressway with its too-tight turns matched by slightly-too-narrow lanes.  I’d come to spend time with my dying soul friend, Sr. Consuela de Biase, csj.   Connie has become frail, like the ancient poet in today’s poem.  She misses nothing, I came to realize, but you have to lean in close to hear;  worn with fatigue, she whispers, and pauses to breathe.  We visited three times  (c. 90 minutes, c. 25 minutes, and 4 or 5  minutes early the next morning when we said goodbye before I headed back to JFK).  I love it that the 40 mile drive on the parkway was wearing;  it reminds me that those miles and our 3 conversations are of a piece with decades of mutual listening, the fabric of Connie’s life.”

Denise Levertov writes of an ancient poet whose frail strengths remind me of my friend.   This Monday morning, chilly and gray but still alive with the promises with which February can surprise us.  Who knows?  The poet and the morning might tempt you to open your window or step outside so you can read “In Love” while bathed in its beauty, and breathe a little too.

Have a blest week,

john sj

Today’s Post   “In Love”

Over gin and tonic (an unusual treat) the ancient poet
haltingly —not because mind and memory
falter, but because language, now,
weary from so many years
of intense partnership,
comes stiffly to her summons,
with unsure footing —
recounts, for the first time in my hearing, each step
of that graceful sarabande, her husband’s
last days, last minutes, fifteen years ago.

She files her belongings freestyle, jumbled
in plastic bags — poems, old letters, ribbons,
old socks, an empty picture frame;
but keeps her fifty years of marriage wrapped, flawless,
in something we sense and almost see —
diaphanous as those saris one can pass through a wedding ring.

Denise Levertov  1923 – 1997
Connie laughing,  smiling,  contemplative  August 2006

Friday, February 7, 2020
“It can be your brain, your
fingers, your toes,
You can listen anywhere”

Poems appear sometimes like this — a friend sends me a poem;  it sits on the edge of awareness for 2 or 3 months;  finally I notice the poem, read it, am moved by it, look around internet places to learn a little about the poet, and write a post to contextualize it.  This poet found his way into my attention during the winter of 2016.   The  poem introduced me to a poetry list titled “Poetry — for better or worse:  My favorite poems, one by one”  at a cheeky website  http://tiltingourheadsup.blogspot.com.  So far I have not found the editor’s name.

How do you like this poem, written when the poet was in fifth grade?  Lovely fresh snow on our campus corner + Nick’s fresh voice reminds me to thank this February Friday for its blessings and surprises.  Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses.

Have a blest weekend,

john sj

Today’s Post:  “Waiting in Line”:
[Curator’s note: Nick Penna was in fifth grade when he wrote this poem.]

When you listen you reach
into dark corners and
pull out your wonders.
When you listen your
ideas come in and out
like they were waiting in line.

Your ears don’t always listen.
It can be your brain, your
fingers, your toes.
You can listen anywhere.
Your mind might not want to go.
If you can listen you can find
answers to questions you didn’t know.
If you have listened, truly
listened, you don’t find your
self alone.

Waiting in Line, Nick Penna from Poetic Medicine, the Healing Art of Poem Making”, John Fox @ Jeremy P Tarcher,  Putnam 1997
Posted in “A Year of Being Here”  Phyllis Cole-Dai  January 29, 2013

Monday February 3
“ . . . a sudden, sweet, almost painful love for my students.”

On Monday mornings, I often begin by looking for a post in one or another books of poetry.   Some of the poets I have not met before.  Some read to my ears like the poet missed something.  I re-read and, sadly, come to the same conclusion.  But not very often.  Some stranger opens my ears to the day and to Monday’s work week.  A few minutes ago, that happened again.

Who, I wonder, is Al Zolynas?  His poem, “Love in the Classroom” knocks me flat.  And invites me into a classroom in the middle of an assignment, into fear of a teacher’s life, dulling the senses and blunting one’s bravery.  But then, I stop, and the whole poem opens my ears to the courage of exploring ordinary fears, that attend a teacher’s life.  Courage and fear will be at work all over this Monday campus at Six Mile and Livernois, on Jefferson at the Law School, on M L King Blvd at the Dental School: this week, and next, and next again.

A university is not only faculty.  All around the place people begin to suck it up and focus on the tasks that will shape the day, committed to ordinary courage and ordinary fears.  But this Monday Al Zolynas pays tribute to teachers as they teach, and to their students.  Beauty all around while we wait through our winter season.  Six or seven more weeks and spring will open the daffodils and remind us of beauty and wonder and courage.

Best to read the poet out loud, with pauses.

Have a blest February.

john sj

p.s.      Sr. Bette Moslander, C.S.J, a giant of a woman, died in February 2015 in her Kansas home.  I think she was in her 90s.  I know, from my own experience and that of many others, that her wisdom ran deep; its bite and edge softened by her kindness and her amazing wit.  A loss for many Sisters of St. Joseph and an uncounted number of other women and men.

Today’s Post  “Love in the Classroom”

— for my students

Afternoon. Across the garden, in Green Hall,
someone begins playing the old piano—
a spontaneous piece, amateurish and alive,
full of a simple, joyful melody.
The music floats among us in the classroom.

I stand in front of my students
telling them about sentence fragments.
I ask them to find the ten fragments
in the twenty-one-sentence paragraph on page forty-five.

They’ve come from all parts
of the world—Iran, Micronesia, Africa,
Japan, China, even Los Angeles—and they’re still
eager to please me. It’s less than half
way through the quarter.

They bend over their books and begin.
Hamid’s lips move as he follows
the tortuous labyrinth of English syntax.
Yoshie sits erect, perfect in her pale make-up,
legs crossed, quick pulse minutely jerking her right foot. Tony,
from an island in the South Pacific, sprawls
limp and relaxed in his desk.

The melody floats around and through us
in the room, broken here and there, fragmented,
re-started. It feels Mideastern, but
it could be jazz, or the blues—it could be
anything from anywhere.
I sit down on my desk to wait,
and it hits me from nowhere—a sudden,
sweet, almost painful love for my students.

“Nevermind,” I want to cry out.
“It doesn’t matter about fragments.
Finding them or not. Everything’s
a fragment and everything’s not a fragment.
Listen to the music, how fragmented,
how whole, how we can’t separate the music
from the sun falling on its knees on all the greenness,
from this moment, how this moment
contains all the fragments of yesterday
and everything we’ll ever know of tomorrow!”

Instead, I keep a coward’s silence.
The music stops abruptly;
they finish their work,
and we go through the right answers,
which is to say
we separate the fragments from the whole.

“Love in the Classroom” by Al Zolynas. Text as published in Under Ideal Conditions: Poems  (Laterthanever Press, 1994; no bookseller link available). © Al Zolynas.
Reprinted by permission of the poet.   http://www.russian-globe.com/N46/Zolynas.About.htm
Art credit: “Open Window,” acrylic on canvas, abstract painting by Filomena De Andrade Booth.

Wednesday, January 29

These mid-winter days, where I live in Michigan, do a lot of teasing.  Glorious sun with hints of warm weather to come, promising a rash of flowers; and then some gray days line up one after another.  Our February is just around the corner.  It’s not as tough as deep ice and snow in Maine, but the gray lineup can get wearing.  On our three campuses, the pulse of learning and teaching has pretty much hit stride for what we call “Winter Term.”   Final exams live off in the distance, and when they arrive, so will the flowering trees and tulips.

Today seems like a good day to read W. H. Auden’s puckish celebration of love’s passion and tenderness around and through these fickle, unpredictable work days.   A little time to pause and read this poem out loud (twice maybe?)  can do us all good.

Have a blest mid-week,

john sj

Detroit Mercy campus, April 22, 2006

Today’s Post –  “Song”

The chimney sweepers
Wash their faces and forget to wash the neck;
The lighthouse keepers
Let the lamps go out and leave the ships to wreck;
The prosperous baker
Leaves the rolls in hundreds in the oven to burn;
The undertaker
Pins a small note on the coffin saying, “Wait till I return,
I’ve got a date with Love.”

And deep-sea divers
Cut their boots off and come bubbling to the top,
And engine-drivers
Bring expresses in the tunnel to a stop;
The village rector
Dashes down the side-aisle half-way through a psalm;
The sanitary inspector
Runs off with the cover of the cesspool on his arm-
To keep his date with Love.

February 21, 1907 – September 29, 1973

Poem: “Song” by W.H. Auden, from As I Walk Out One Evening: Songs, Ballads, Lullabies, Limericks, and Other Light Verse. © Vintage Books. Reprinted with permission.

Monday, January 27
“She’s been in this world for over a year,
and in this world not everything’s been examined
and taken in hand.”

Over the weekend, I savored the aftertaste of Friday’s post,  “For John Barryman,” so unflinching, flint-hard – – suicide.  This morning, Maria Wislawa Anna Szymborska’s poem is playful and delicious, but still deeply an opening to the realities with which we live.  This Monday, how about some moments for breathing and smiling?

Best to read Nobel Laureate (1996) Maria Wislawa Anna Szymborska, several times, with pauses.

Have a blest day,

john sj

Today’s Post “A Little Girl Tugs At The Tablecloth”
Wislawa Szymborska

She’s been in this world for over a year,
and in this world not everything’s been examined
and taken in hand.

The subject of today’s investigation
is things that don’t move themselves.

They need to be helped along,

shoved, shifted,
taken from their place and relocated.

They don’t all want to go, e,g., the bookshelf,
the cupboard, the unyielding walls, the table.

But the tablecloth on the stubborn table
– when well-seized by its hems –
manifests a willingness to travel.

And the glasses, plates,
creamer, spoons, bowl,
are fairly shaking with desire.

It’s fascinating,
what form of motion will they take,
once they’re trembling on the brink:
will they roam across the ceiling?
fly around the lamp?
hop onto the windowsill and from there to a tree?

Mr. Newton still has no say in this.
Let him look down from the heavens and wave his hands.

This experiment must be completed.
And it will.

(Translation: Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak)

                           Maria Wisława Anna Szymborska
                                  (2 July 1923 – 1 February 2012)
Nobel Prize in Literature 1996
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisława_Szymborska

Thursday, January 23

“I wish, though,
I had known sooner, to have
helped you go on living”

Rebecca is surely not the only soul friend who has received, and carried, the violent news that her/his soul friend has taken a life away from her/him.  Soul friends trust soul friends with grinding surprises and slowly live their way into a new fabric of memory, bringing new wounds along with them, risking hope on a bleak landscape of the heart.

So, Rebecca,  my soul friend, your grief has its home in my house too, beginning now.

So too, so many readers of this list have sent surprises, exhaustion, sounds of despair, together with astonishing joy and stunning courage.   Do I thank our c. 3,000 readers often enough I sometimes wonder.   Never enough, never; but very often.

Best to read the poet’s words out loud, with pauses.

Have a blest ending of the week.  I’ll be traveling home from Denver tomorrow.  Next post Monday, I’d bet.

john sj

For John Berryman

You’re dead, what can I do for you?
I am not unsympathetic;
I thought about you often enough
though we never spoke together
but once when I shied away,
feeling something that I fought
in me too-and came out with this
manner of living, by living.
It is depressing to live
but to kill myself in protest
is to assume there is something
to life withheld from me, yet
who withholds it? Think about it.
What is the answer?
But suicide is not so wrong
for one who thought and prayed
his way toward it. I wish, though,
I had known sooner, to have
helped you go on living,
as I do, half a suicide;
the need defended by the other half
that thinks to live in that knowledge
is praiseworthy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Berryman

Tuesday, January 21  “Deeds, not words.”

I have heard this thought expressed many times recently. It’s spoken with a conviction that words have done little to change things in desperate need of change. Words are empty or, worse, they are smokescreens used to cover over unforgivable deeds. And yet, when thinking today of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., it seems impossible to separate the man of action from the man of words. I can’t envision the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom without hearing in my mind the cadences of Dr. King’s Dream. I can’t read “Letter From Birmingham Jail” without recalling the narrow cell in which King was imprisoned when he wrote.

“Beloved community,” “a single garment of destiny,” “I have a dream”—these are words of inspiration. These are the first words my daughters will hear in their grade school assemblies this week. But they are words of challenge, too—to us, and for us. How are we to think of violence and nonviolence in the wake of Ferguson, or New York, or Southfield? “I am at war with myself / Having trouble finding the Martin in me,” reveals Obasi Davis, a young poet from Oakland, CA, “Too much anger / Not enough tolerance.”

And yet, today people are gathering to speak with one another. People will come together to remember, and wrestle with, and re-vision communities in which so much is in need of change. I think of Dr. King, and I am both confronted and inspired by the thought it might always take both words and deeds.

Dr. Rosemary Weatherston, from her guest editorial January 19, 2015

“I Have A Dream . . . ,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., August 28, 1963
“Letter From Birmingham Jail,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., April 1963

Have a blest day,

john st sj

Today’s post “Precious Lord”  Mahalia Jackson

Wikipedia tells us that Rev. Thomas A. Dorsey (1899-1993) wrote “Precious Lord” in response to his inconsolable grief at the death of his wife, Nettie Harper, in childbirth, and his infant son in August 1932.” It was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s favorite song and he often invited Mahalia Jackson to sing it at civil rights rallies. At his request, she sang it at his funeral in April 1968.

Here is a five minute version sung by Jackson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as1rsZenwNc

“Precious Lord, take my hand,
Lead me on, let me stand.
I am tired, I am weak, I am worn.
Thru the storm, thru the night,
Lead me on to the light.
Take my hand, precious Lord, lead me home.

When my way grows drear, precious Lord, linger near,
When my life is almost gone, hear my cry, hear my call,
Hold my hand lest I fall;
Take my hand, precious Lord, Lead me home.”

Mahalia Jackson
October 26, 1911-January 27, 1972