Poetry Blog: "A Work Day in Hard Times"

Pre-note:

In the last three decades or so, a new theory for identifying  human life on an archaeological site treats the organic remains of flowers at a burial site as more compelling evidence of humanity than finding tools on the site.   Beauty offered to treat someone who has died as beautiful and sacred may run more deeply human than the ability to set goals and marshal resources to achieve them.  This early May weekend will bring some citizens from our university community of learning on Six Mile and Livernois across the state to St. Joseph where we will cherish one of our Robotics Engineering students, Miles Kelleher.  He left us, and his young life, last Saturday. We will drive, carrying with us our love for Miles, to join other student and teacher friends, and his family, in this deep goodbye.  The drive, the stories we will tell and listen to today and tomorrow, are beautiful deeply human;  perhaps we can imagine the stories as the flowers we bring to say, with their beauty, that Miles’ beauty will endure and travel our lives with us.

Today’s Post

Today poem was written by another of our students and posted here last August.  It evoked more email comments than any of the nearly 700 posts since the list began in September 2013.  The beauty of Maria Ibarra’s language and cadence has stayed in my imagination all this year.  As I post her words again, I  imagine them as flowers brought to Mile’s place in the world.

Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses.   May these next days bless you.

john sj

Today’s Post  Maria Ibarra Frayre

Friday, May 3, 2019
“But how can they believe me?

When sometimes I don’t even believe myself.
Maybe it’s time to be loud.”

*****

*****

“Being Catholic”

I wear my faith quietly,

like a pebble in your pocket

Smooth and cold,

Comforting when you hold it tight in your hand.

But to be more honest,

I wear my faith secretly, cautious of who

to tell the truth because

I’m not sure how my circle

of liberal, leftists, almost

socialists would take it.

How could I, a feminist who uses reason,

logic, and kindness, follow a church

that doesn’t let women be leaders?

Follow a God

who believes LGBTQ loved ones will rot in hell?

follow an institution

that rapes children?

Stop.

I want to tell them that

that isn’t my church, isn’t my God.

My God lives in jails and detention centers,

in water bottles left in the desert,

and school teachers who work too much for too little.

My God is in parents who love their gay

and trans kids as reflections

of God’s own image.

My faith is the holiness of women, the life

in service for others.

My God is liberation.

She is the power of the storm

and the stillness of it when it’s over.

She is Brown laborers

rebuilding a city,

and the sweat of their foreheads

feeding their families.

But how can they believe me? When

sometimes I don’t even believe myself.

Maybe it’s time to be loud.

As loud as the annoying (and wrong) fetus

fanatics who are pro-life without

really being pro-living.

Maybe it’s time to let my faith breathe. Take

my pebble and let throw it

in the water.

Let it make ripples.

No.

Let it make a fucking tsunami.

p.s.  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. She works closely with grassroots organizations to create alternative systems of immigrant-centered support and working to put people of color and women in positions of leadership. Maria graduated from the University of Detroit Mercy with a degree in English, and then went on to get a Masters of Social Work at the University of Michigan. On her free time Maria likes going for hikes, drinking expensive tea, and trying to publish her poetry.

Today’s Post  –
“Almost mid-May, I watch the spring come slow-
ly day by day . . . ”

Traveling north-south, south-north during season-changing time lets trees and ground plants show their stuff to visitors.  Readers from Detroit, where I live this May morning,  will recognize how much farther “north” it is to 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 to her south a taste of what down here was weeks ago — “warm sun, after a week of rain, hail, snow.”   In Detroit, this year, spring lags a little; mostly May’s first ten days will top out in the low 60ºs; still our 1st tulips cooperate with daffodils to splash our courtyard with once-a-year fresh colors.   This morning, too, the tell-tale smell of fresh cut grace makes its presence known for this year’s first time.    Which part of spring in a northern place is more beautiful, this early delicate teasing or a head-spinning explosion of  leaves and a vast new presence of mature flowers everywhere?  “Yes.”

john sj

“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.

April 30, 2019 courtyard in the Jesuit house – U Detroit Mercy

Monday, April 29, 2019

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

Last year in early March, a friend emailed me some lines from Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Kindness.”  She  connects kinship and love with other things that wear us down.  In her poem, deep personal wounds become a context for enduring kindness.

Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses, to allow the poet’s deep and careful language to make a place in your imagination and your memory.

john sj

Today’s Post  “Kindness”

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

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

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

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

Naomi Shihab Nye

(b. March 12, 1952)

Friday, April 26,
“. . . they begin in the ear and the eye,
they go on to live and hum inside the body . . . ”

Robin Bradford,  playwrite friend from San Francisco sent me word of Joy’s Jackson Poetry Prize this morning.   She led off her email with the words  “one of your faves.”  Surely true.  From the time that Joy and I met, student and teacher, 51 years ago until now she stands in my imagination as one immensely unanticipated surprise of grace.  Here’s a note from the Judges’ prize citation this week.

“Harjo’s work speaks not only to the world we live in, but to the unseen world that moves through us, the thread that has connected us all from the start…. Harjo’s poems embody a rich physicality and movement; they begin in the ear and the eye, they go on to live and hum inside the body…. Throughout her luminous and substantial body of work, there is a sense of timelessness, of ongoingness, of history repeating; these are poems that hold us up to the truth and insist we pay attention.”  From the judges’ prize citation.

https://www.pw.org/about-us/joy_harjo_wins_jackson_poetry_prize

And here is my most often cited and most deeply moving of her poems.   Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses, Absolutely!  Have a blest weekend.

john sj

Today’s Post:  “Grace”

Today’s Post  –  “Grace”

I think of Wind and her wild ways the year we had nothing to lose and lost it anyway
in the cursed country of the fox. We still talk about that winter, how the cold froze
imaginary buffalo on the stuffed horizon of snowbanks.

The haunting voices of the starved and mutilated broke fences, crashed our thermostat
dreams, and we couldn’t stand it one more time.

So once again we lost a winter in stubborn memory, walked through cheap apartment
walls, skated through fields of ghosts into a town that never wanted us,
in the epic search for grace.

Like Coyote, like Rabbit, we could not contain our terror and clowned our way through a
season of false midnights.

We had to swallow that town with laughter, so it would go down easy as honey.

And one morning as the sun struggled to break ice, and our dreams had found us with
coffee and pancakes in a truck stop along Highway 80, we found grace.

I could say grace was a woman with time on her hands, or a white buffalo escaped from

memory. But in that dingy light it was a promise of balance.

We once again understood the talk of animals, and spring was lean and hungry with the
hope of children and corn.

I would like to say, with grace, we picked ourselves up and walked into the spring thaw.

We didn’t; the next season was worse.

You went home to Leech Lake to work with the tribe and I went south.

And, Wind, I am still crazy.

I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it.

A glimpse of spring from three years ago   —- >  leaves and flowers waking up

Posted Monday, April 18, 2016:
“Must be spring.  I checked Weather.com’s allergy tracker this morning, a respiratory spring ritual for me and for many others.  Worth it, though.  Today’s dawn might be the seventh glorious morning in a row.  Campus trees and flowers begin to show their stuff.  Adults and children skip and laugh.    Yesterday, two girls (8 years old?) played among older people who have come to watch Detroit Mercy’s women’s softball team play Green Bay’s.  The girls, one African American, one Caucasian, ran and laughed with reckless abandon and filled our urban space with . . . . with Spring.”

A year ago on a similar morning the season’s sheer beauty led me to Gerard Manley Hopkins, s.j.   “The Windhover” helps the reader come alive as its beauty of word and sound match these days.  Even if it takes two or three readings to adapt your ear to his word play, it’s worth it.   Hopkins is  [in]famous for the packed meaning of his vocabulary.   His life-long friend Robert Bridges often ground his aesthetic teeth at what seemed to him to be GMH’s unnecessary complexity.   On November 6, 1887, Hopkins wrote Bridges, attempting to explain the density of his language.   Did GMH tease his frustrated Poet Laureate friend by creating a single sentence that never seems to run out of breath?

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

Which is more wild and crazy challenging?  Hopkin’s masterpiece “Dapple dawn drawn falcon” or his tease to his friend?   If you find the time during this spring-sunshine 2019 Monday, test it out by trying to read both out loud, with pauses.

More sun than clouds or rain this week.   Have a blest Monday.

john sj

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

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

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

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

Gerard Manley Hopkins
28 July 1844 – 8 June, 1889

https://owlcation.com/humanities/Analysis-of-Poem-The-Windhover-by-Gerard-Manley-Hopkins

Unusual Words in Windhover

Line 1 : minion – darling
Line 2 : dauphin – french for eldest son of the king
Line 4 : rung upon – to lead a horse in a circle on a long rein wimpling: rippling
Line 10 : buckle – either to fasten into one, or to collapse/crumble away.
Line 11 : chevalier – french for knight, champion
Line 12 : sillion – ridge between two furrows
Line 14 : gall – break the surface of.

Good Friday, 2019

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 since 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!”

The Jesuit Gesu parish just north of our campus, entrances me each year as the rhythm of Holy Week invites us into this Thursday, Friday, and Saturday before exploding into Easter beauty. Tonight in church I looked around at friends with whom I have shared so much living. We welcomed each other again into our Holy Week rituals, alive with children and singing and stillness. We become, for a time and more than usual, a listening church. I read among us the commitments and the losses we have lived. Good Friday, tomorrow, asks that we stay close to the violent wounds, and violent wounding, which wear on us all. Good Friday is a day to “reawaken our consciences.”

What might make a poem that can compel us to pay attention to the violent places in this world? This year for me Warsan Shire’s refugee poem helps me not to lose focus, the way strong poems do. 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

Wednesday,  April 17, 2019

“Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows . . . ”

In traditional Catholic faith practice, Holy Week can take a lot of living up to.  The intimate closeness of the Christian teaching that points to Jesus as human and divine, rubs closely with playful human tenderness together with work-a-day violence that wears the world all year long.   But, this week pays particular attention to the collision of Christ and violence.  I incline to treat the impulse for “living up to” this week as a distraction.  Better, perhaps, to let the texts and music of these seven days knock on the door of my awareness now and then, surprising me in the middle of the plans and deadlines and the joys of kinship that make up a lot of daily life.  And remind me that there lives beneath the ordinary stuff depths that open me to stark and delicate graces.

Rumi’s poem, “The Guest House,” explores this mystery of living a reality both ordinary and vast.    Best to read the poem out loud.  From a person still growing in this faith tradition, still learning to allow what runs deep to mingle with what hustles along on ordinary daily paths . . . .  Have a blest week.

john sj

Today’s Post:   “The Guest House”

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī  (جلال‌الدین محمد رومی‎)
Persian poet, jurist, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic 1207-1273

Monday April 15, 2019 – “a mutual commitment to noticing”

Over 4 decades of kinship, Connie de Biase and I shared a mutual commitment to noticing.   Now that she’s left us,  I miss her most on Saturday mornings when driving into center city to buy Avalon Bakery fresh bread for my Jesuit community.    As I drove home, we would tell stories  about our inner lives.  Through Connie’s last year, our talk became more brave and sad as she recognized her growing diminishment and her grief at losing the life in Madison, CT that she loved and lived so gracefully.  Ignatius calls this kind of story-telling, paying attention to our “inner disturbances” (i.e., both  consolations and desolation), a commitment to noticing.

N.B., what follows was originally posted January 23, 2017 (c, 2 weeks before Connie died)

“Perhaps this Denise Levertov poem came to mind because this last Saturday I flew into JFK, braved Long Island’s expressways with their too tight turns and  too-narrow lanes, to spend time with my dying soul friend, Sr. Consuela de Biase, csj.   Connie has become frail.  She misses nothing, I gradually realized, but you have to lean in close to hear.  Worn with fatigue, she whispers, with long pauses to breathe.  We visited three times  (c. 90 minutes,  25 minutes, and 5 minutes when we said goodbye before I headed back to JFK early Sunday).  She let me know that she heard every word even as her life’s energy slipped away. The 40 mile drive on the parkway immersed me in sadness from one of my life’s deepest goodbyes, tender and still.  The miles and our 3 whispered conversations are of a piece with decades of mutual listening, the fabric of Connie’s life.

Monday of Holy Week, 2019

In today’s poem Denise Levertov writes of an ancient poet whose frail strengths remind me of my friend.   This Monday of Holy Week in Detroit, even with its soft morning rain,  invites me to open a window to read “In Love” out loud, with pauses.  No matter where you are as you read today’s post, the Levertov’s language holds a promise of surprise.  For Christians these days are called “Holy Week.”  Wherever your soul and imagination locates you in the world, I wish you the poet’s story telling and its sacred place for listening.

johns 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, April 12, 2019

“the singing robes fly onto your body and cling there silkily,
You step out on the rope and move unfalteringly across it . . . ”

Is it harder to stand still in a place of grief or a place of joy?   About two years ago, a friend described a moment of  liberating joy that took her/his breath away that would s/he thought require weeks of revisiting the joy, learning not to be afraid of its depth and inner resonance.  My friend and I agreed, as it turned out, that learning to be still with grief, hard as that is,  usually comes more readily than learning to be still with joy.  Both of us were surprised that we had encountered this invitation to deep presence in a moment of shocking joy.   The memory will take some living into, perhaps for months and years.

All of which reminded me of one of Denise Levertov’s strongest poems.   Try it out,  reading aloud with pauses.  N.B., the poem’s core metaphor is a supple, Houdini-like risk-taker on a high wire above a deep pit.

rain this morning in the mid-U.S., a monster storm gradually following a typical West to East pattern;   lots of troubles in Denver, and Western South Dakota, both places dear to me, especially my Lakota soul friends on Pine Ridge, some had to take refuge in motels.

Have a blest weekend,

john st sj

Today’s Post

“The Poem Rising By Its Own Weight
The poet is at the disposal of his own night.”
Jean Cocteau

The singing robes fly onto your body and cling there silkily,
You step out on the rope and move unfalteringly across it,

And seize the fiery knives unscathed and
Keep them spinning above you, a fountain
Of rhythmic rising, falling, rising
Flames,

And proudly let the chains
Be wound about you, ready
To shed them, link by steel link,
padlock by padlock–

but when your graceful
confident shrug and twist drives the metal
into your flesh and the python grip of it tightens
and you see rust on the chains and blood in your pores
and you roll
over and down a steepness into a dark hole
and there is not even the sound of mockery in the distant air
somewhere above you where the sky was,
no sound but your own breath panting:
then it is that the miracle
walks in, on his swift feet,
down the precipice straight into the cave,
opens the locks,
knots of chain fall open,
twists of chain unwind themselves,
links fall asunder,
in seconds there is a heap of scrap-
metal at your ankles, you step free and at once
he turns to go —
but as you catch at him with a cry,
clasping his knees, sobbing your gratitude,
with what radiant joy he turns to you,
and raises you to your feet,
and strokes your disheveled hair,
and holds you,
holds you,
holds you
close and tenderly before he vanishes.

Denise Levertov

b. October 1923  d. December 1997
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denise_Levertov

Wednesday, April 10, 2019

“If you remove from your midst oppression,
false accusation and malicious speech” . . . Isaiah 58

Pre-note: today’s post is longer than ordinary, and quotes 3 authors, the prophet Isaiah, Pope Francis, and the muslim poet Warsan Shire. I think you will find them worth the time they require.

Have a blest day.

John st sj

********    ********    ********

When I first encountered these three texts, they seemed at first glance somewhat unrelated. The Warsan Shire poem, “Home,” was new to me, sent by a friend in our English Department. The second is familiar, Isaiah’s eloquent prophecy from Chapter 58.   “Unrelated”?  What was I thinking?  Unrelated only on the surface.  The tensions roiling the world  – –  fear of, and anger at,  the millions of women, men and child immigrants on the roads of the world today,  so like the little family of Mary, Joseph, and their child Jesus,  torn from their sleep to flee in terror from soldiers trying to find and kill them – –  fear and anger about “the stranger” confronts every reader of the “Work day in a Hard Time” poetry list.  Our fear wears on us all. It can remind us that violence toward immigrants has erupted in this country before, (e.g. 1844, 1877, 1920-24). Such troubles aren’t limited to the 2+ centuries of the U.S. either.  Isaiah addressed them centuries ago.

Text # 1: Isaiah 58:7-10

Thus says the LORD:
Share your bread with the hungry,
shelter the oppressed and the homeless;
clothe the naked when you see them,
and do not turn your back on your own.
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your wound shall quickly be healed;
your vindication shall go before you,
and the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard.
Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer,
you shall cry for help, and he will say: Here I am!
If you remove from your midst
oppression, false accusation and malicious speech;
if you bestow your bread on the hungry
and satisfy the afflicted;
then light shall rise for you in the darkness,
and the gloom shall become for you like midday.

Text # 2: Pope Francis:

In July, 2013, for his first trip as Pope, Francis chose the tiny island of Lampedusa, just off Sicily, a place home to the dangers and deaths of immigrants trying to enter Europe. That day Francis spoke to the whole world to “reawaken our consciences.”   Here is a short clip.   “Immigrants who died at sea, from a 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, to make a gesture of closeness, but also to reawaken our consciences so that what happened would not be repeated. Not repeated, please!”

Text # 3: – Warsan Shire, “Home”

This is the second Warsan Shire poem for the Work Day/Hard Time list. Her words remind me of Isaiah 58.  As always, it’s best to read the poet out loud, with pauses.  However, I find it a lot harder than with most Work Day posts, to read these next words out loud.

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 neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
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 leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilet
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough

the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off

or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
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 told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here

Warsan Shire

(Somali: Warsan Shire, Arabic: ورسان شرى‎‎, born 1 August 1988)
is a London–based- Somali writer, poet, editor and teacher.[1]  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsan_Shire)