Poetry Blog: "A Work Day in Hard Times"

Monday, March 11, 2019  

“Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”

Often when I wake, sometime between 5:30 and 7:00, I pick up my iPhone 8 and whisper “weather” to it and wait for its modest trove of predictions for the day;  later at my laptop, I stretch weather capacity with Weather.com on my laptop’s larger screen. But the 8’s first look invites my eyes out the window looking West and sometimes my next move is to open my window and lean out into the weather and the soft sounds of morning traffic on Livernois.  Today, though, the 8 confused me.  Clear all day it told me even though the sky was dull gray instead of the dawn sunlight kissing the tops of the trees in the yard.

It only took a few minutes to solve that riddle – – – >  Daylight savings time,  of course! My body is up when the earth, rather than clocks, treats me to early dawn, no traces yet of its first bright touches on the trees.   Some research tell us that traffic accidents increase c. 6% on this day; losing an hour of what your body had come to expect as normal sleep time dulls the senses and makes for driver errors — about 6% more of them than last week or probably next week.

Why these ruminations about sleep and sunrise took me to one of my deepest poems from one of my most beloved poets I am not sure.  Doesn’t matter.  It would be hard to find more sheer linguistic beauty than Gerard Manley Hopkins celebration of the earth as a dwelling place of God.

Best to read the poet out loud, with pauses,  several times.  Perhaps as a moment of gladness and gratitude for an open sky that traces its finger tips across Livernois and caresses my city.    Yours too, I hope.

Have a blest week.

john sj

Today’s Post:   Gerard Manley Hopkins, sj  “God’s Grandeur”

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Gerard Manley Hopkins  28 July 1844 – 8 June, 1889

Friday, March 8, 2019  “You can’t order a poem like you order a taco.”

“poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,
they are sleeping.”

Last night (March 8, 2016), I sent a friend who lives in San Francisco a NYT piece “In San Francisco and Rooting for a Tech Comeuppance” and asked how it read to her.  {n.b., that friend just returned to her home from my city after 3 days of coaching people learning to live with Michigan’s resent anti-gerrymandering law (n.b., “just returned” = March 6, 2019).  She told me Detroit was damn cold laced with vitality and real people.

She responded:

“SF is ground zero for the clash between young, affluent techies and San Francisco’s famously diverse communities. The Airbnb controversy epitomized the conflict as rental properties are taken off the market in favor of higher-priced, short-term Airbnb rentals…which only serves to further exacerbate the lack of affordability. The article has a lot of truth to it.”

I wrote back:  “I only know SF as it has evolved from what I read (with one exception).  2 Decembers ago The American Experience producers of “Thomas Edison” flew me to SF for a couple hours on camera as a talking head.   I stayed in boutique hotel a couple miles due east of USF.  I was confused by the neighborhood.  It felt as if it had been a neighborhood with close to the ground long rooted people.  Didn’t feel much that way now.  I looked for a place to eat with plain earthy people and waitstaff and food.  Took two days to find one.  That said, your few lines confirm my take.  SF has long been shaped by its fixed, relatively small, perimeter which, like a piston’s cylinder cycle, generates power by compression.   Feels, though, like it’s gotten out of hand.”

The metaphor of San Francisco as like an engine’s piston,  whose fixed cylinder wall and the tight fit with its cylinder, makes high compression possible.  The compression generates the power that makes the engine do its work.  But what happens when the pressure overloads the strength of the cylinder wall?  Boom!, like the 19th century river steam boats whose high pressure engine drivers sometimes raced each other down or up the river by hammering a shim into the pressure release valve to build more compression and greater speed.  Quite a few of those high pressure boilers blew up as did the famous Mozelle a few hundred yards out from Cincinnati’s wharf (c. 1838) and spewed tiny body parts all over Cincinnati’s harbor streets and out over the river.  [for a short historical account see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moselle_(riverboat)]  All this led me to ruminate about the power of anger in the wake of the 2018 mid-term blue wave sweep.  And that led me to look for a good poem about anger for today.

But while looking for an anger poem, I found this previously-unread masterpiece.  It was love at first site.  For you too, I hope.  In an angry time, gracefully crafted tenderness and wit can be like fresh clean air in the lungs.

Have a blest weekend.

john sj

p.s.  Brilliant sun in my town today.  Daylight Savings time is just around the corner.  Left-over piles of snow here and there to whet our appetites for daffodils and crocuses.

Today’s Post  “Valentine for Ernest Mann”
Naomi Shihab Nye

You can’t order a poem like you order a taco.
Walk up to the counter, say, “I’ll take two”
and expect it to be handed back to you
on a shiny plate.

Still, I like your spirit.
Anyone who says, “Here’s my address,
write me a poem,” deserves something in reply.
So I’ll tell you a secret instead:
poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,
they are sleeping. They are the shadows
drifting across our ceilings the moment
before we wake up. What we have to do
is live in a way that lets us find them.

Once I knew a man who gave his wife
two skunks for a valentine.
He couldn’t understand why she was crying.
“I thought they had such beautiful eyes.”
And he was serious. He was a serious man
who lived in a serious way. Nothing was ugly
just because the world said so. He really
liked those skunks. So, he re-invented them
as valentines and they became beautiful.
At least, to him. And the poems that had been hiding
in the eyes of skunks for centuries
crawled out and curled up at his feet.

Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us
we find poems. Check your garage, the odd sock
in your drawer, the person you almost like, but not quite.
And let me know.

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

Ash Wednesday,   March 6,  2019   – – >  “Lent”  =  “Spring”

Mardi Gras has come and gone, opening the Christian tradition to the season of prayer called “Lent.”  That word has Anglo Saxon roots and means “Spring,” the season when, in northern parts of the planet, what had looked dead — frozen earth, leafless trees — shows new life.  But gradually, re-birth takes its time.   The 40 day Lenten prayer season is less about giving things up (e.g., sweets, beer, other fancy things) and more about coming close to growing things to watch for new life.   You might try this during the 40 days.   Choose a little tree that you pass most days,  one where you can stand close to one of its branches, say 6 inches away from your nose.  Stand still and breathe;  look closely.  Look again.   Try not to hurry.  The tree’s buds will not storm into fresh growth like a brass band.  You hardly notice any change from day to day; but if you wait, new life will show up.  The Prophet Habakkuk teaches   – –  “For the vision has its own time, presses on toward fulfillment.  If it delays, wait for it, for come it will, without fail.” (Hab 2:3).  At a university committed to learning in our students, staff, and faculty, standing near a tree that begins this season looking dead makes a good short prayer, alive with surprises.

Denise Levertov wrote a poem I call one of my “top 5 lifetime,” though there are many more than 5 of these.   Dedicated this morning at the dawn of Lent, to everyone who stake her/his hopes on the labors of love that thrive in a university – –  learning and teaching and mentoring and challenging.

Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses,  twice.

Blessings in this Lenten season.

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.

The Freeing of the Dust

Denise Levertov  (1923-1997)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denise_Levertov

Monday, March 4
“She had some horses she loved.
She had some horses she hated.”

Joy Harjo’s “She had some horses” has become a signature early poem in her increasingly powerful body of work – poetry, memoirs, music.   I haven’t posted this poem for a long time.  I think it’s time re-post this just as it appeared on November 14, 2013.  You may notice that I had not yet begun invoking the principle:  “best when read out loud, with pauses.”   Still, it works for this early Joy Harjo work too.

Have a blest day.

john sj

Today’s poem

I met Joy Harjo, a Muscogee-Cherokee poet, when she was 16 and I was assigned to teach her in place of her Bureau of Indian Affairs English teacher. I was at The Institute of American Indian Arts for half a year in 1968 teaching remedial reading. Joy was brilliant and deeply insightful. We are still close friends.

john sj

She Had Some Horses

She had some horses.

She had horses who were bodies of sand.
She had horses who were maps drawn of blood.
She had horses who were skins of ocean water.
She had horses who were the blue air of sky.
She had horses who were fur and teeth.
She had horses who were clay and would break.
She had horses who were splintered red cliff.

She had some horses.

She had horses with long, pointed breasts.
She had horses with full, brown thighs.
She had horses who laughed too much.
She had horses who threw rocks at glass houses.
She had horses who licked razor blades.

She had some horses.

She had horses who danced in their mothers’ arms.
She had horses who thought they were the sun and their
bodies shone and burned like stars.
She had horses who waltzed nightly on the moon.
She had horses who were much too shy, and kept quiet
in stalls of their own making.

She had some horses.

She had horses who liked creek Stomp Dance songs.
She had horses who cried in their beer.
She had horses who spit at male queens who made
them afraid of themselves.
She had horses who said they weren’t afraid.
She had horses who lied.
She had horses who told the truth, who were stripped
bare of their tongues.

She had some horses.

She had horses who called themselves, “horse”.
She had horses who called themselves “spirit”; and kept
their voices secret and to themselves.
She had horses who had no names.
She had horses who had books of names.

She had some horses.

She had horses who whispered in the dark, who were afraid to speak.
She had horses who screamed out of fear of the silence, who
carried knives to protect themselves from ghosts.
She had horses who waited for destruction.
She had horses who waited for resurrection.

She had some horses.

She had horses who got down on their knees for any saviour.
She had horses who thought their high price had saved them.
She had horses who tried to save her, who climbed in her
bed at night and prayed as they raped her.

She had some horses.

She had some horses she loved.
She had some horses she hated.

These were the same horses.

Friday,  March 1

“neither earth
nor
heart lies scarred
with
your passing,”

“March comes in like a lion but goes out like a lamb”  a saying meant, perhaps, to encourage refugees from February to believe in daffodils and tulips and fresh grass.   Jim Janda’s poetry emerges from a heart so brave and playful and tender.   Readers of the list have witnessed before the play of Jim’s improbable eye and ear;  I often wonder how his imagination finds such tenderness in such mean human places.  Is the Madonna of the Subway homeless, waiting to surprise the passers-by with their own courage?   However we might read today’s post, Janda’s language rewards two or three readings, out loud, with pauses.   So will breathing in and out the promises March makes even when its cold gusts frighten us.   Have a blest weekend.

Today’s Post:  “Madonna of the Subway”  Jim Janda

I see you
in
the tunnels
the city

dedicated
to
begging
and
non-injury

you do not
crush the bruised reed
nor
quench smoldering
flax

you are the
trust
of the sparrow
and
field lily

neither earth
nor heart lies scarred
with
your passing.

Jim Janda   d. August, 2010

published 2000   In Embrace,  Poetry by J, Janda
(Press America, American Fork, Utah)

Wednesday,  February 27,  2019

“I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,”

One of the deep blessings of writing and posting on the “Work Day/Hard Time Poetry list” often arrives as a surprise, sent to me by someone from among the 2500+ readers of the list from my university or other places in the world.  Such was an email from Mary-Catherine Harrison, Chair of our Department of English last Thursday afternoon.   A short note with a link to this poem by Naomi Shihab Nye whose poems we’ve posted before.    Here’s the short note.  “I hadn’t read this poem by Naomi Shibab Nye, which I found in an article on “The Good-Enough Life” in yesterday’s NYTimes. I think you will like it (and the article, for that matter).”    Mary-Catherine was right,    I like this a lot.   Bet you will also.   Mary-Catherine,  I owe you again.

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

If we get lucky here around our city, it will start snowing again.

john sj

Today’s Post  –  “Famous”

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.

Born	March 12, 1952 (age 66) St. Louis, Missouri, United States
Occupation	Poet, Songwriter
Genre	Poetry

Naomi Shihab Nye (Arabic: نعومي شهاب ناي‎), (born March 12, 1952) is a poet, songwriter, and novelist. She was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother. Although she calls herself a “wandering poet”, she refers to San Antonio as her home. She says a visit to her grandmother in the West Bank village of Sinjil was a life-changing experience. Nye was the recipient of the 2014 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature.

p.s.
I find two spellings of Naomi Shihab Nye – the other is Naomi Shibab Nye.  So far I am not fluent enough to choose a definitive version so I am sticking with the Poetry Foundation and the Wiki article and just above.

Monday,  February 25,
“When Thou commandest me to sing
it seems that my heart would break with pride”

We are a university, where people listen, take each other seriously.  When I taught full-time, some students told me one day that I was most frightening when one of them would say something and I would turn around and write her/his words on the board, circle one word then turn around again and ask: “Why did you choose that word?”

Teachers do that.  Listen for the voice, call it forth; expect respect for words.   Not only teachers though.  Universities call on students to listen to each other, to expect meaning from each other.   Administrative assistants,  staff in the registrar’s office,  nurse practitioners in the student wellness center,  campus security officers, coaches;  lots of listening.  On good days, each of us knows that.  And on hard days, maybe one of our peers will notice and ask how we are doing, and listen to our story.

Rabindranath Tagore writes of God expecting a song from human beings, thrilling us by sacred attention.  (Gitanjali # 2)   {Posted before on January 5, 2015}

Have a good week as February comes to its end,

john sj

Tagore # 2

When Thou commandest me to sing
it seems that my heart would break with pride
and I look to Thy face
and tears come to my eyes.

All that is harsh and dissonant in my life
melts into one sweet harmony
and my adoration spreads wings like a glad bird
on its flight across the sea.

I know Thou takest pleasure in my singing
I know that only as a singer I come before Thy presence
I touch by the edge of the far spreading wing of my song
Thy feet which I could never aspire to reach.

Drunk with the joy of singing
I forget myself
and call Thee friend
who art my lord.

Rabindranath Tagore  (7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabindranath_Tagore

Wednesday, February 20,   

“Beautiful is the new snow falling
in the yard and the fox who is staring boldly
up the path to the door. And still I believe
you will
come, Lord”

I have not posted this Mary Oliver winter poem since 3 years and 5 days ago.  This gray Monday morning, however, I stood at an East-facing window in the Jesuit Residence looking out onto the large parking lot and watching university employees straggle in …  another work day.  Were the snow serious and exquisite, perhaps another poem would have come to mind.  Today the snow is unassuming and ordinary, work-a-day snow.  M Oliver’s poem strikes me as work-a-day too.   “Making the House Ready for the Lord” emerges from the depths of winter.  “It’s cold outside,” says the poet, “How deep might the capacity for welcome run?  Whose house is it anyway?”

Winter won’t last forever.   Have a blest day.   Read the poem out loud if you can.

john sj

Today’s Post:  “Making the House Ready for the Lord”

Dear Lord, I have swept and I have washed but
still nothing is as shining as it should be
for you. Under the sink, for example, is an
uproar of mice – it is the season of their
many children. What shall I do? And under
the eaves
and through the walls the squirrels
have gnawed their ragged entrances – but it is
the season
when they need shelter, so what shall I do?

And the raccoon limps into the kitchen and
opens the cupboard
while the dog snores, the cat hugs the pillow;
what shall I do? Beautiful is the new snow falling
in the yard and the fox who is staring boldly
up the path to the door. And still I believe
you will
come, Lord: you will, when I speak to the fox,
the sparrow, the lost dog, the shivering
sea-goose, know
that really I am speaking to you whenever I say,
as I do all morning and afternoon: Come in,
Come in.

Mary Oliver

p.s. When I pulled this February 11, 2014 post off the archive blog, the blog header came along with it, along with a right margin banner.   I decided to keep it today; something I’ve only done once before.  The header and banner can remind us readers that since its September 2013 beginning, the Work Day/Hard Time list has posted 658 poem-posts.  All searchable looking for an author’s name or any other word at https://sites.udmercy.edu/poetry  The most recent post appears at the top.

Monday,  February 18

Why, I wonder this morning, have I never posted one of Wendell Berry’s poems?   He has written great and supple poetry since, at least, the early 1960s, poems and novels and essays about the land and the place of humans in relationship with the land.   Betsy Linehan, RSM, a friend and university trustee, sent me her favorite W. Berry poem.   A fine beginning to this 2nd last week in February.   It’s brief; and, yes, it’s best to read it out loud with pauses.

Our campus this morning shows off what a steady light snowfall can do for the land and streets and buildings if you give it 7 or 8 hours to work its magic.

Have a blest day.

john sj

Today’s Post – –  Wendell Berry

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Wendell Berry

Wendell Erdman Berry (born August 5, 1934) is an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a recipient of The National Humanities Medal, and the Jefferson Lecturer for 2012. He is also a 2013 Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Berry was named the recipient of the 2013 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. On January 28, 2015, he became the first living writer to be inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.

On July 4, 1965, Berry, his wife, and his two children moved to a farm that he had purchased, Lane’s Landing, and began growing corn and small grains on what eventually became a homestead of about 117 acres (0.47 km). They bought their first flock of seven Border Cheviot sheep in 1978. Lane’s Landing is in Henry County, Kentucky in north central Kentucky near Port Royal, and his parents’ birthplaces, and is on the western bank of the Kentucky River, not far from where it flows into the Ohio River. Berry has farmed, resided, and written at Lane’s Landing ever since. He has written about his early experiences on the land and about his decision to return to it in essays such as “The Long-Legged House” and “A Native Hill.”

Friday,  February 15, 2019
“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.”

It’s hard to walk through a full day without hearing angry calls to build to keep out unwanted migrant people, women and men, infants and children. Walls are technologies that cannot get far from mistrust, statements in wire and digital stone that privilege fear of little understood human beings other than oneself.  Robert Frost’s masterpiece, “Mending Wall,” treats his neighbor’s entrenched suspicions playfully.

“He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors?”

Here on campus,   in late February 2016, we blessed a lovely gate out onto McNichols Road.  Its digital tools make it easier to get in and out; the broad oval arch frames Detroit Mercy’s legendary clock tower.   I hear the gate say “Welcome,” over and over:   EZ-pass cards for students and employees, leaving more time for guests who need directions from a live person in the other lane;  “Welcome” the gate says to neighbors who come to walk the track and use the library’s internet work stations;  “Welcome” it says to EZ-pass homies who come to work on mean days, come to work worn down and impatient.

We’d suffered with a stingy-looking gate for years.  The new gate, now in its third year, makes me smile even on hard days.  I’ve been looking out our living room window and watching Detroit Mercy people arrive for another work day.  Those people, my peers, the new gate makes them look a little more beautiful, and brave, and noble.  Perhaps that’s why Robert Frost came to mind.   “Mending Walls” is a great poem, a source of wisdom and playful humor during crabby times.

Best to read the poet out loud, with pauses.  Have a blest day.

john st sj

Today’s Post, “Mending Walls”

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

Robert Frost, 1874 – 1963