Poetry Blog: "A Work Day in Hard Times"

Monday, April 8, 2019 “There’s just no accounting for happiness”  

I’d not met Jane Kenyon until David Grubin caught my attention with her “Happiness” in an email this morning.   Kenyon gets it about understated and playful joy emerging from tough work-a-day realities.  She reminds me of Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem” and W H Auden’s “Song”.  It happens that during these past days of angry news, I’ve been looking for subtle poems that show readers playful delight that has paid its dues in grief but are not locked down there.

In severe and dangerous times, strong poetry is more important than in easier times. J K makes space for both in “happiness.”

Best to read out loud, with pauses.   —->  Have a blest week.

john sj

Today’s Post:   “HAPPINESS”

There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

Jane Kenyon (b. 1947 – d. 1995  {leukemia} )

Note # 1)

In Today’s AJCU Conversations, Ron Bernas’ “Living the Mission at the University of  Detroit Mercy” is a great read;  makes me proud to work here.

(http://www.ajcunet.edu/february-2017-connections-mission-identity-programs-on-jesuit-campuses/2017/2/14/university-of-detroit-mercy-thematic)

Friday morning Pre-note:   We sent this post yesterday at 11:21 a.m. as you will see it just below.  It didn’t go through despite multiple tries.  We could not engineer a fix until late last night.  In the meantime, the Tigers, especially a crew of very young players, won again, another strong pitching effort . . . and a few even hit the ball to good effect.   So we are being treated to an improbable early start (https://www.freep.com/story/sports/mlb/tigers/2019/04/04/detroit-tigers-opening-day-win/3370714002/).

Hope springs eternal.    Have a blest weekend.   Gray today,  some sun + high of 64° tomorrow.   Sweet!    Have a blest weekend.

john sj

Thursday, April 4

Opening Day in Motown = Ernie Harwell and The Song of Solomon.

For me, Opening Day in Detroit brings the turn from winter to spring into focus.   Better even, perhaps, than a 20 inch blizzard,  well . . .  maybe they are even sources of beauty and joy for me.     Can’t say how good it feels to listen to Ernie Harwell.  Here he is on a YouTube clip and in print from The Song of Solomon.

https://sites.udmercy.edu/poetry/2017/04/07/april-7-opening-day-at-the-ball-park-ernie-harwell/

For, lo, the winter is past,
The rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth;
The time of the singing of birds is come,
And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.

Song of Solomon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGbwTyK-OIs
Read on Tigers Opening Day for decades by Ernie Harwell

January 25, 1918 – May 4, 2010

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

Ernie, lots of us miss you.  jstsj

Monday,  April 1, 2019

“To what purpose, April, do you return again?”

Several years ago, The New York Times ran a piece on the 1924 Democratic National Convention.  When teaching US history, I found it helpful to single out 1924 as the meanest of the mean years that roamed the land in the wake of World War I, that brutal, demoralizing war.   Clumsy reconstructive surgery for veterans who had not died from their their wounds, marked their bodies life-long.  None worse, perhaps, than damage from the new chemistry, poison gas.  And for a young nation alive with fresh new art forms and  industrial achievement, exultant with liberating moral codes (e.g., U.S. women won the right to vote in 1920), the post-war years woke anger and fear on many fronts.  Racism in the US reached one of its most intense boiling points.  The Ku Klux Klan peaked in numbers and influence in 1924; lynchings of African Americans peaked that year as well.  The Democratic National Convention played all this out in a way that makes current Partisan nastiness look tame; 103 votes to name a candidate, two evenly matched caucuses (Irish Catholic Tammany Hall vs the Klan).  Violence was strategic and colorful:  fist fights, live roosters released in the galleries, thrown chairs on the convention floor (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/nyregion/gop-path-recalls-democrats-convention-disaster-in-1924.html?_r=0)  —>  Read it; guaranteed to blow your mind.)

Such was the world in which Nobel Laureate Edna St. Vincent Millay, 31 at the time, wrote this hard poem. She lifts a line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth who understood that beauty in words can carry hard edges and liberate the imagination (“Life in itself/ Is nothing,/An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.”).  The poem can invite the reader to recognize human kinship with the mean and violent as well as the tender and brave.  “Out loud with pauses?”  Give it a try.  Edna might hear our efforts to pay attention and be smiling.

Have a blest week.

john sj

p.s. Hard news from today notwithstanding,  opening day for Tigers baseball is just around the corner; trees begin to bud; I hear rumors of daffodil sightings and I saw my first robin 20 feet outside my West-facing window.

Today’s Post   “Spring”   1921

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

Edna St. Vincent Millay  in 1933
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edna_St._Vincent_Millay

Friday, March 29, 2019  “I was nine that summer . . . ”

I saw & heard my first robin yesterday,  standing on the roof of our courtyard cloister walk inspecting the early morning, then leaping up into the air and getting about the day.  A few light-work days allow me to catch up on small tasks, the beginnings of building back toward strong Nordictrack habits, and opening day for baseball.  The Tigers won in the 10th in Toronto.  Soon too I’ll drive up I-94 to the Blue Water Bridge into Canada to spend an evening with Bill Clarke, sj in Guelph.  I first met Bill in the summer of 1980 when he directed my silent 30 day retreat, something Jesuits do at least two times in their lives.  St. Ignatius called the 30 days “a school of the affections,”  a time during which you re-learn the patterns of your feelings:   what dis-affections distract you, what affections open you to a wider, deeper world of the heart, a school of your affections.   The thirty days teach you how you already pray, so you can trust that in yourself, good days and hard days both.   That summer Bill taught me how to trust the graces of my life.  Every few months, this four hour drive gives me time with him; it’s worth every mile.  Oh yes, and as I drive over the Blue Water Bridge, I sing “O Canada.”

“Octogenarian” appeared on this list twice before, my niece Terri Breeden’s recollection of learning new words while playing cards with her grandmother on the front porch, learning of gratitude and mortality.  Best to read out loud, with pauses.

Have a blest weekend.

john sj

p.s. We buried my mother in 2015 at age 102.

Today’s Post   “Octogenarian”

I was nine that summer
when you taught me satiated.
It came after precocious
and pernicious, but was obviously
and immediately the best word yet.

We refill the drinks with extra ice, cool ourselves
with condensation, that slick of sweat dripping down
our glasses. You proffer crackers; I decline,
satiated and smug about it. You shuffle and deal, while the sun
slowly loses its glower in the Menomonee River.

I place each card carefully, fingers splayed,
intent.  I hunch a bit, slanting my anticipation
toward the deck in those gnarled fingers, toward
the sheen of sun on water, the road and the bridge,
the cities on the far side, toward you.

It doesn’t matter what we play: 66, gin rummy,
cribbage, even two hands of solitaire, laid out
like opposing armies or fields fresh planted, seven shirts
spaced out on each side of the clothesline, falling straight,
quiet in the fading heat.

You hold your cards loosely, competent,
a word from last summer, but you don’t
always win.  I learn to bridge the cards without
spraying any into the porch screen,
dragonflies darting toward the river.

I learn about matrimony from the thin band
embedded in the swollen skin of your ring finger, about eternity
from the way you refer to Grandpa as though
he were still here. And I learn about gratitude
without noticing, even how to spell it.

Some things though I didn’t learn, like when you taught me
octogenarian and I thought it meant
a person eight decades old, thought
it meant you at your next birthday, never comprehending
that it really meant
you would leave me someday.

Terri Breeden, Carson City, NV

Wednesday, March 27, 2019

“something
you already had
And set it down in
A new place.”

This week, at least in my part of the university, feels like some settling in after 3 weeks of hammer-slammer multi-tasking.   It reminds me of a short-form prayer I have shared for many years with a soul friend.   Every so often, when the intuition catches my attention,  I text my friend this short message:  “have you breathed yet today?”     “Breathing” in this context works like this:  you stop where you are (i.e., stop walking to a next task;  you straighten your shoulders and stand tall;  you draw in a slow deep breath, filling your lungs;  you release the deep breath).  You imagine that this ritual has created a place of stillness where you can hear the sound of a tree or the grass around you as they grow. Within that stillness, you make a commitment: “I love my life, exactly as it is now, with nothing changed.”   You go on your way again.

Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem feels just like that prayer.   Have a blest day.

john sj

Today’s Post   “Fresh”  Naomi Shihab Nye

“Fresh”

To move
Cleanly.
Needing to be
Nowhere else.
Wanting nothing
From any store.
To lift something
You already had
And set it down in
A new place.
Awakened eye
Seeing freshly.
What does that do to
The old blood moving through
Its channels?

Naomi Shihab Nye
b. March 12, 1952 (age 66)

Monday,  March 30 , 2019

“and yet there are chances that come back”

A friend introduced me to the poet, W. S. Merwin late in 2014;  all sorts of recognition for his poetry.  It makes me wonder how I missed him for so long.  Wikipedia’s short bio concludes:  “In June 2010, the Library of Congress named Merwin the seventeenth United States Poet Laureate to replace the outgoing Kay Ryan.  He is the subject of the 2014 documentary, Even Though the Whole World Is Burning.”  Today’s post remembers a strong poet in these days after his dying.

How many times have I noticed —- remembering something that I had missed the first time around  — something, hindsight now tells me, that was already important, and then becomes important again in a later remembering?   Remembering, teaches St. Ignatius, can reweave the fabric of a life.  “Attention should be paid to some more important places in which I have experienced understanding, consolation, or desolation.” (Spiritual Exercises  Par. 118)   Noticing matters.    Best to read the poet out loud, with pauses.

This last Monday of March clean, fresh sun and sky, and 33º.  Have a blest day.

john st sj

Today’s Post

W. S. Merwin –“Turning”

Going too fast for myself I missed
more than I think I can remember
almost everything it seems sometimes
and yet there are chances that come back
that I did not notice when they stood
where I could have reached out and touched them
this morning the black shepherd dog
still young looking up and saying
Are you ready this time

W.S. Merwin
(1927 – 2019)
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._S._Merwin

Friday,  March 22, 2019

In my local world, we are gathering at our university on 6 Mile Road gathering to send Sally Baker on her passing from this life and grieve an undergrad’s unanticipated death this week.  A soul friend engaging the South Dakota blizzard now in a second week of deep mud on the back roads of Pine Ridge.  Another soul friend listened to my hard stories and then told me that she was still awake at 3 a.m. as she tried to pay down the debt of intense overwork still unfinished.  Still another friend lies in traction in week two after falling and breaking his pelvis.  These are some of the front-page headlines from unanticipated crises and the wounds they’ve generated just lately.

I’ve been meditating this morning about what poem to suggest to readers of this “Work Day/Hard Time” poetry list and changed my mind three times.  Finally, I’ve settled on Joy Harjo, another soul friend of many years.  We posted her famous “She had some horses” on March 4.  Today’s poem is more geographical with hard winter edges in a prairie town which clothes winter’s winds with kinship and meanness both.  Naming the poem “Grace” can remind a reader that contemplating ordinary reality during a hard patch of time can call out courage and a mystical attentiveness to our human condition.

To each of my close kin who have told me hard stories these past two weeks, I wish we could all gather in a kitchen with some Detroit Bold “8 Mile” fresh roasted coffee, and tell each other how we are doing during this hard patch of living.  I am imagining that you, and all the list’s readers, could stand some good strong coffee and some good strong company.  We are, good days and mean days both “beautiful,”  “brave,” and “beloved.”

Have blest weekend.

john sj

Pine Ridge Blizzard 2019

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.

Monday, 2019  two poems for angry times
Anger does best when I can bring it to stillness, when an anger’s source in grief becomes accessible to me.   There’s lots of anger in the land these days and on our campus. We are living a ritual of grief as we send our companion Sally Baker on her deepest and final journey.  Here are two poets who frequently grace this list, writing their way into healing and sacred sorrow.   Try reading them, but not both right in a row; put pauses in between to let the words seep into your day.

Have a blest week here in mid-March and the 2nd week of  Christian Lent.

john sj

Post # 1   David Whyte  “The Well of Grief” 

Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface on the well of grief,

turning down through its black water
to the place we cannot breathe,

will never know the source from which we drink,
the secret water, cold and clear,

nor find in the darkness glimmering,

     the small round coins,
thrown by those who wished for something else.

David Whyte b. 1955

Post  # 2  Denise Levertov  “the Mineshaft of passion”

And the poet–it’s midnight, the room is half empty, soon we must part–
the poet, his presence
ursine and kind, shifting his weight in a chair too small for him,
quietly says, and shyly:
“The Poet
never must lose despair.”

Then our eyes indeed
meet and hold,
All of us know, smiling
in common knowledge–
even the palest spirit among us, burdened
as he is with weight of abstractions–
all of us know he means
we mustn’t, any of us, lose touch with the source,
pretend it’s not there, cover over
the mineshaft of passion
despair somberly tolls its bell
from the depths of,

and wildest joy
sings out of too,
flashing
the scales of its laughing, improbable music,
grief and delight entwined in the dark down there.

Denise Levertov
b. October 1923  d. December 1997

from: “Conversation in Moscow” in Freeing of the Dust

A Companion Has Left Us

Sally Baker
Rest in Peace
January 15, 1942 – March 13, 2019

Today’s Post:   Blessing in the Dust

You thought the blessing
would come
in the staying;
in casting your lot
with this place,
these people;
in learning the art
of remaining,
of abiding.

And now you stand
on the threshold
again.
The home you had
hoped for,
had ached for,
is behind you—
not yours, after all.
The clarity comes
as small comfort,
perhaps,
but it comes:
illumination enough
for the next step.

As you go,
may you feel
the full weight
of your gifts
gathered up
in your two hands,
the complete measure
of their grace
in your heart that knows
there is a place
for them,
for the treasure
that you bear.

I promise you
there is a blessing
in the leaving,
in the dust shed
from your shoes
as you walk toward home—
not the one you left
but the one that waits ahead,

the one that already
reaches out for you
in welcome,
in gladness
for the gifts
that none but you
could bring.

— Jan Richardson from The Cure For Sorrow

Jan Richardson
https://janrichardson.com/about.html

Photo Credits: Anthony Lanzilote on Twitter @ALanzilote

Wednesday, March 13, 2019
“To hear
another’s voice,
follow
your own voice”

This post last appeared eleven month ago, April 16, 2018 to be precise. We sibs gathered at our sister Mary’s home for her birthday. Here’s how I began the context paragraph that day. “I am writing from my sister Mary’s snow-bound home where 20+ inches of snow was blown around for 2 days of blizzard winds (c. 25 mph). Lovely for sure; every few minutes a car drives by the riverfront road.” What a difference eleven months makes! This first half of March 2019 has scattered hints of spring here and there around Detroit, though a Lakota soul friend, Mary Tobacco, tells me that they are digging out from a hefty blizzard today in South Dakota. March offers unpredictable weather twitches, no? A blizzard-loving person like myself may yet be pulling on my high top snow boots. I’m not taking responsibility for the weather though, “enjoying” does not = “causing.”

Today’s poem by David Whyte has blessed me several times over the Work Day/Hard Time poetry list’s six-year existence. Yes. best to read the poem out loud, with pauses, several times over the day. Have a blest day.

john sj

April 2018 deep into a lovely storm

Today’s Post: “Start Close In”

Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.

Start with
the ground
you know,
the pale ground
beneath your feet,
your own
way to begin
the conversation.

Start with your own
question,
give up on other
people’s questions,
don’t let them
smother something
simple.

To hear
another’s voice,
follow
your own voice,
wait until
that voice

becomes an
intimate
private ear
that can
really listen
to another.

Start right now
take a small step
you can call your own
don’t follow
someone else’s
heroics, be humble
and focused,
start close in,
don’t mistake
that other
for your own.

Start close in,
don’t take
the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.

from River Flow: New & Selected Poems
Many Rivers Press

David Whyte b. 1955
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Whyte_(poet)