Poetry Blog: "A Work Day in Hard Times"

Monday, September 16, 2019  “Wage Peace”  (1st posted December 2, 2013)

Friday, November 29, 2013 was the anniversary of Bill Pauly’s sudden death at 59 of a heart attack while taking a lovely sabbatical after years of demanding pastoring on the Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation in western South Dakota.  Before Pine Ridge, Bill was pastor in a South Milwaukee Hispanic parish. Bill is a soul friend and I miss him whenever he comes to mind, often.  This Mary Oliver poem to which he introduced me captures his earthiness and urgency and his passion for the sacred ordinary.

Welcome to this mid-September week of 2019 while my 3+ weeks on Pine Ridge, remembering as I walk or drive these roads and taste the stunning vistas of the Black Hills, c. 70 miles away.  The vistas frame what are to me still soul-stopping moments of stillness.   This year, after one year away from this home of c. 50 years I am living a sabbatical, like Bill lived one in 2013.

You are still one of my deep soul friends, Bill.  I miss you when I taste the flavors of this space which we shared for a while.

Best to read the poem outloud, with pauses.   Have a blest week.

john sj

“Wage Peace”  –  Mary Oliver

Wage peace with your breath.
Breathe in firemen and rubble,
breathe out whole buildings and flocks of red wing blackbirds.
Breathe in terrorists and breathe out sleeping children and fresh mown
fields.

Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.
Breathe in the fallen and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.
Wage peace with your listening: hearing sirens, pray loud.
Remember your tools: flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.
Make soup.

Play music, learn the word for thank you in three languages.
Learn to knit, and make a hat.
Think of chaos as dancing raspberries,
imagine grief as the outbreath of beauty or the gesture of fish.
Swim for the other side.
Wage peace.

Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious.
Have a cup of tea and rejoice.
Act as if armistice has already arrived.
Don’t wait another minute.

Mary Oliver
September 10, 1935 – January 17, 2019

Friday September 13 –

I have not posted this compelling e e cummings post in several years. When i read it, i wonder how i could have passed over one of e e’s master works. Brave and strong enough to stand erect where Friday the 13th and mean political winds blow across the world.

Best to read out loud, with pauses. Have a blest weekend.

john sj

p.s. i am in the second week of my sabbatical, here on the vast high plains of the pine ridge Lakota Reservation, surely one of the sacred places of my last 50 years.

e. e. cummings, a self-portrait

i am a little church(no great cathedral) by e.e. cummings

i am a little church(no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
-i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth’s own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying)children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope,and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

i am a little church(far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature
-i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring,i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)

Tuesday, September 10  “Talking with the Sun” & “The high plains of Pine Ridge, SD”

Mary, a Lakota soul friend, and Joy Harjo, National Poet Laureate, are friends.   They share a love of the land and sky, an intimate understanding of the beauty and the wearing fatigue of poverty so often marked with deep racism but also with the mystical surprises that close family ties offer.   This morning, I was listening for a voice I had not heard recently.   I found Joy Harjo, soul friend and strong poet.  Two years ago, she sent me a new book, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.   On September 2, 2016, I found my first poem there, “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 that highway as the sunset shows off a front being pushed East by the 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

Highway 18,  Pine Ridge, SD  sunset with a storm front

September 4 — taking off for Sabbatical

Dear kinswomen and kinsmen,

I flew out to Denver on Monday. After a couple days in Denver, I will drive c. 6 hours north to Pine Ridge, S D, one of the sacred places in my life.  I will spend c.3 weeks in the BadLands and Black Hills before driving back to Denver for the Regis U board meeting.  Then I’ll pass through Motown Oct 1-3 or 4 before heading into New England for some October prayer time, followed, in November,  a meeting at The Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurs plus family time in Wisconsin near where we sibs were born and grew up.   November should also open some travel time along the Great Lakes especially along the south shore of Lake Superior.   That’s about as far as my planning has moved to date.  More to come.   I will be posting the Work Day/Hard Time Poetry List as usual.  I should be moved back into Motown some time near the end of Advent and the turning of the new year.

During these Sabbatical  months, I plan to  pray the Lakota Prayer of the Six Directions frequently.  For many years, the prayer has helped locate me in sacred places.   While I’m on the road it will also help me locate you, the c. 2700 readers of the Work Day, Hard Times Poetry List.

Today’s Post – the six directions

Here’s an explanation I’ve used to introduce this prayer in various people.  Best to read the prayer outloud, with pauses.

Blessings to you during these months.

John sj

Friday,  August 30  “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 that 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 intended 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 months.  It helps, when I read this saying from Mark 1:15, to open into deep, shocking, surprise, like every strong poem.  Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses.

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.

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, August 28   –  Gerry Stockhausen’s birthday week — in memory

People tell stories about what they see, and hear, and touch, and other people listen.   This ancient rhythm weaves humans together over centuries.   Telling and listening make the world go round.   The passage of time sifts words, sorting out the not very good from the good and the very good.  But in a lifetime of listening, you may find a few sayings so compelling that they remain unforgettable for decades.

Many of us at the university remember spending time and tears keeping vigil as Gerry Stockhausen, back in early January 2016, labored with his dying in an Omaha hospital room kept company by some of the close women and men of his life.  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 had left us too young.  We told stories about him, sang songs he used to play and sing and lead for worship.  Once I heard Gerry preach a life-changing homily, suitable for his birthday week (August 27).

Have a blest day,

john st sj

Today’s Post – 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 it):

“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 but also 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 on his  birthday.

Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses.  That’s especially true with Hopkin’s dense and demanding poems.   His poems open their meaning more after 3 or 4 readings.

“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

Two days ago, one of our students email me the following post.  It is so compelling that we’ve decided to post a second post on the same day.  She says it’s not a poem, but it is deeply powerful and we are honored to post it.

john sj

p.s. It happens that Tom Florek, whose picture is in this post and is referred to by the student, is in our Jesuit house today and that fills me with joy.

*****************

Service trip student reflection

Good afternoon,

I have read many of your poetry communications and some have covered the topics of empathy and immigration. Perhaps you can share my reflection in your poetry emails, although it’s not poetry. I want to share what I saw and remind us all of the importance of being active members of a loving and global human family.

Vania Noguez

IMMIGRATION, VOICES FOR JUSTICE
“FAITH IS ALL THEY HAVE LEFT”: ENCOUNTER ON THE U.S.-MEXICO BORDER 
BY VANIA NOGUEZ | May 9, 2019

When I heard this provocative statement from Rafael Garcia, S.J., a Jesuit with the Encuentro Project, an immersion program on the U.S.-Mexico border region in El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, during an orientation reflection, I was immediately confused, yet intrigued. Little did I know, these words would be one of many life-changing realizations during my experience, aiding my understanding of the faith and suffering of asylum seekers and refugees. My personal encounter with such a discomforting reality helped me to better understand what most never will.

Vania Noguez speaking with residents of Ciudad Juarez through the U.S.-Mexico border wall.

The Encuentro Project facilitates learning about the current immigration crisis through meetings with lawyers, community activists, spiritual leaders, Border Patrol, and visits to a refugee shelter and ICE detention center. This specific location has been in the media spotlight as the epicenter of the U.S. refugee crisis. A few days before we arrived, a 7-year-old girl from Guatemala died in Border Patrol custody in El Paso.

As a 21-year-old Hispanic-American from the Michigan suburbs, I experienced a reality check of privilege in college when I met other Hispanics my age who were impacted by current immigration policies. With this, I realized my own ignorance of these issues because they had never impacted me personally. I knew I wanted to see the truth at the border with my own eyes, explore my social role as a Hispanic-American woman, and bring back knowledge to promulgate change.

My first encounter began when a bus arrived at the shelter where we were volunteering. It was carrying nearly 100 refugees, mostly from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. They had just been released from ICE detention. As they stepped out of the bus to enter the safety of the shelter, we welcomed them with smiles and “bienvenidos” (welcome) but this became increasingly difficult as we saw women, children, and men carrying looks of fear and limping from exhaustion. Few carried personal items in flimsy garbage bags and most arrived with no belongings at all. There were young and old women carrying toddlers in their arms with a strength I could not comprehend.

As I went back and forth from the clinic and cafeteria translating, one woman called for me and asked me if I could spare a sanitary pad. I realized she was sitting on the edge of her seat while holding her young son. She explained that she was denied feminine hygiene products in detention and had bled into her pants. They were dried stiff with blood. I immediately ran to the resource room to find sanitary pads, wrapped them in a bag, and delivered them to her discreetly. I told her I would help her to find a change of pants as soon as possible but the available donated pants were all too big. During this encounter, I felt weak with anger as I realized this mother had been reduced to a level that was beyond inhumane. She was embarrassed and her dignity as a woman had been degraded. I asked her how old she was and she said she was 23, which is only 2 years older than me. Around us, there were mothers breastfeeding their babies with no privacy and I felt a strong presence of motherhood, extreme endurance, and sacrifice.

My most powerful encounter was at the women’s mass during our visit to an ICE detention center. I held a microphone and greeted over a hundred women in orange jumpsuits. I was taken aback at their strong response, “buenas tardes” (good morning), all in unison. They all wanted their voices heard. Fr. Tom Florek, S.J., a Jesuit in residence at the University of Detroit Mercy focused on Hispanic/Latino Formation Development who was a member of our delegation, and Fr. Garcia told the nativity story of Mary and Joseph. Fr. Garcia mentioned that the story had many connections to the women. Mary, who traveled on the back of a donkey, pregnant, about to give birth, feared the future. She ended up giving birth to Jesus in a humble stable. The pregnant women who arrived at the shelter similarly faced the possibility of giving birth in a detention center, on a bus, in the desert, or in imminent danger. This made me reflect on the courage and strength of Mary, which was reflected in the hundred women listening to the mass, many of whom had been separated from their families and children.

During the sermon, one woman suddenly collapsed and had an apparent seizure. The women closest to her held her as she fell to the ground and helped prevent her from hitting her head. After paramedics took her away, another woman standing in the front row began to sway. She began to sob loudly and I noticed her legs were trembling. We had been given instructions to not engage in any physical touch, but I went to her and kneeled next to her squeezing her hand in support as the sermon continued. This was a reciprocal moment. We were two women, strangers who looked alike, close in age, holding each other, unified in our hearts, crying mutually during Christmas mass. This was the crescendo of compassion. When I kneeled with this woman, we connected in faith, journey, understanding, and solidarity.

The women held each other up as a loving community and together they shared an interconnected sorrow. As I looked around, I felt the spirit of encounter in this unsettling experience and began to encounter myself through others and through their faith. This was the first time in my life that I experienced faith in its rawest form. I saw people hardly able to stand on their own feet from the emotions, crying for their children, profusely praying “ten piedad” (have mercy). This moment transcended all the division I had felt and I realized I was amongst living members of the nativity story, the story of Mary and Joseph. They were fleeing from violence, poverty, and persecution, but were faced with rejection at every door they knocked upon along their journey. The refugees I met fled to America for safety but were met with rejection again and again, along with imprisonment.

After mass, some women approached me, kissed me on the cheek, and told me I reminded them of their daughters. One woman told us to pray for her because her five children had been murdered in Honduras. An older woman came up to me and whispered in my ear asking if I could help her. She showed me a crumpled document with handwritten scribbles in English that I could barely understand. She asked me what the scribbles meant. I told her I wasn’t sure but that it seemed to say that something was pending, maybe a court date. They were captive without explanation, didn’t know what time of day it was, and were negated explanation of their legal rights and process.

Bishop Mark Seitz from the Diocese of El Paso with University of Detroit Mercy Encuentro Project participants.

These transformative encounters with a refugee population made me realize that I couldn’t understand the immigration crisis by just looking at the news and reading headlines. However, I only encountered small amounts of the truth, as all of us do. In order to better understand the wrongs against humanity, we need to reverse the tables and ask ourselves how we would want to be treated. Catholic Social Teaching explains that we have a universal responsibility as Catholics and as human beings to embrace and support suffering communities. By learning about people who suffer differently than ourselves, through interaction with diverse cultures, we can connect as a holy human family and truly be moved to action.

Vania Noguez

Vania Noguez is a student at the University of Detroit Mercy.

Monday, August 26, 2019

“I am impressed by the level of commitment to the mission and to the city of Detroit that exists at the University.”  (Dr. Punsalan-Manlimos)

Catherine Punsalan-Manlimos and her family met and mingled with c. 125 women, men and children in the Jesuit courtyard last evening as we gathered to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Si Hendry’s Jesuit life.   Such an apt beginning to her time here as “Assistant to the President for Mission Integration”:  several generations of the life-blood of faculty and staff and neighbors unmistakably living out what Dr. Punsalan-Manlimos identified in her job interview as a defining quality of Detroit Mercy, “the level of commitment to the mission and to the city of Detroit.”

Catherine and I now hold one thing uniquely in common; to date we are the only two to have held this position at Detroit Mercy.  No surprise then, that when searching for a strong Detroit poem to honor her coming, I should settle on Jamaal May, who grew up in our neighborhood and who lives and breathes the life of our city, perhaps nowhere more powerfully than in his “There are birds here.”

Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses, several times.

Catherine, welcome to the university.

john sj

For Detroit

There are birds here,
so many birds here
is what I was trying to say
when they said those birds were metaphors
for what is trapped
between buildings
and buildings. No.
The birds are here
to root around for bread
the girl’s hands tear
and toss like confetti. No,
I don’t mean the bread is torn like cotton,
I said confetti, and no
not the confetti
a tank can make of a building.
I mean the confetti
a boy can’t stop smiling about
and no his smile isn’t much
like a skeleton at all. And no
his neighborhood is not like a war zone.
I am trying to say
his neighborhood
is as tattered and feathered
as anything else,
as shadow pierced by sun
and light parted
by shadow-dance as anything else,
but they won’t stop saying
how lovely the ruins,
how ruined the lovely
children must be in that birdless city.

Jamaal May, “There Are Birds Here” from The Big Book of Exit Strategies.
Copyright © 2016 by Jamaal May. Reprinted by permission of Alice James Books.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26196185-the-big-book-of-exit-strategies

Friday, August 23, 2019

“Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:

I wish her a lucky passage.”

Students moved into our residence halls these past several days.  Moms and Dads and students hauling bedroom and study room stuff onto and off elevators.  Settling in;  a new year.  Next Monday morning the classes for Term One, 2019-20 begin.  The parking lots get crowded.

Richard Wilbur’s “The Writer” speaks to the hopes and restraints of parents as their children launch themselves out into a wider world.  The verse that leads this post comes three stanzas in (see just above), such a fine blessing when helping the leap out from home.

Best to read the poem out loud,  with pauses.   Blessings on our new term.

john sj

Today’s Post  “the writer”

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

     richard wilbur  March 1, 1921  –

About Wilbur’s poems, one reviewer for The Washington Post said, “Throughout his career Wilbur has shown, within the compass of his classicism, enviable variety. His poems describe fountains and fire trucks, grasshoppers and toads, European cities and country pleasures. All of them are easy to read, while being suffused with an astonishing verbal music and a compacted thoughtfulness that invite sustained reflection.”  {poets.org}

Wednesday,  August 21
“Four hundred years is a mighty long time.  Courage.”

Several days ago, my colleague and friend in the Detroit Mercy History Department suggested that The Work Day/Hard Time Poetry List give its attention to a vicious and important anniversary in the history of slavery.  As editor of the list, I am honored to post Roy’s essay interpreting Langston Hughes’ poem “We are the American Heartbreak” just one day after the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown landing of the first “20 Neggers” there.

Here is Roy’s interpretative post for today.  Best to read his historical note slowly, with pauses.

Thank you, Roy.

john sj

Jamestown 1619 – and Now:

On August 20, 1619, a privateer named the White Lion landed “20 and odd Negroes” at Jamestown, Virginia, then a lonely outpost of the English empire in the far-flung Atlantic world.  These Africans, who were stolen from their villages and families in Angola and forcibly transported across the vast ocean, were the first black slaves landed in the English colonies in North America, the forerunners of what a century and a half later would become the United States.  The English colonists bought these first twenty African souls with “victuals.”

We stand four hundred years removed from that foundational event in what Rev. Jim Wallis has called “America’s original sin” – our long and troubling encounter with slavery and racism.

And yet we remain deeply impacted by that event and what it set into motion.

African American poet Langston Hughes reflected on the meaning of that event in his brief poem, “We are the American Heartbreak,” which appeared in The Panther and the Lash (1967).  In these verses, he speaks for all African Americans of those earlier times and our own.

Today’s Post – “We are the American Heartbreak”

We are the American heartbreak —
The rock on which Freedom
Stumped its toe —
The great mistake
That Jamestown made
Long ago.

As contemporary Americans, we live – whether black, white, or something else – with the lingering effects of that foundational event at Jamestown in 1619 and the way our path to the present has unfolded over the past four centuries.  We’re not very good, individually or collectively, in thinking about, talking about, or doing something about the giant “elephant in the room,” that is American racism.  We prefer apathy and indifference and hopes and prayers for a brighter tomorrow.  We prefer to believe that time alone will heal the wounds, or that we’re already living in a “post-racial America,” or that those descended (if only metaphorically) from the “20 and odd Negroes” are being just a little too sensitive.

Hughes’s poem challenges us to reflect, I think, about what we can do, individually and collectively, to heal “the American heartbreak” – to correct “the great mistake.”  As the late poet Maya Angelou said at the 1992 inauguration of President Bill Clinton: “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, and if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”

Four hundred years is a mighty long time.  Courage.