Poetry Blog: "A Work Day in Hard Times"

Wednesday, September 27  {Posted on  May 11, 2016}

Readers often introduce me to poets I’d not met, and sometimes re-introduce an already well-known poet with surprise from that poet’s work.  That happened this week.  A soul friend and  list reader wrote on Monday about Joy Harjo’s birthday and the poem “Grace.”  “In any case, I do love to read Joy’s poems on your blog, as well as Mary Oliver’s.  I don’t read a great amount of poetry, but I do love both of those poets. And your blog has introduced me to many other amazing poems and poets.

Readers often surprise me with stories about a poem or a poet and stories about insight and decision in the reader’s life.  Sometimes the stories take me back to September 2013 when this list began during hard times in the city and on campus.  The hard times became an intuition that led to this list, c. 350 posts ago (now 504 posts).  The original wording appears at the top of the archive blog where all previous posts appear.  I read it now and then to remind me of origins.    Check it out.  https://sites.udmercy.edu/poetry

I found that Mary Oliver’s trenchant words in today’s post require several readings, with pauses.  But I say that most days, don’t I?  Strong poems do that.

Have a blest Wednesday.

john sj

Today’s post     “What I have Learned So  Far”

Meditation is old and honorable, so why should I
not sit, every morning of my life, on the hillside,
looking into the shining world? Because, properly
attended to, delight, as well as havoc, is suggestion.
Can one be passionate about the just, the
ideal, the sublime, and the holy, and yet commit
to no labor in its cause? I don’t think so.

All summations have a beginning, all effect has a
story, all kindness begins with the sown seed.
Thought buds toward radiance. The gospel of
light is the crossroads of — indolence, or action.

Be ignited, or be gone.

Mary Oliver b. 1935

Monday, September 25  “Amidst all this tripping about”   Catherine McAuley 1840

Catherine McAuley could have been writing about Detroit Mercy as our new year cranks up in this memorable saying from her over-busy life leading the fledgling Sisters of Mercy.  The Mercies were born in an Ireland made brutal by the Industrial Revolution of British textiles when the Enclosure Movement evicted subsistence farmers from small plots to open broad spaces for sheep grazing.  Dublin became a city where wealth flourished in the center while its growing periphery packed in desperate poor people driven off those small village plots.  She named her fast walking and flipping from task to task “tripping about.”   Lovely expression, “tripping about.”  Better to trip about, I guess, than to just trip.  Better to hustle and scramble with a moment of breathing here and there in the day.

“Amidst all this tripping about: our hearts can always be in the same place
centered in God, for whom alone we go forward, or stay back.”
Catherine McAuley (December, 1840)

The Catherine McAuley door at the University Chapel

Have a blest day,

john sj

Today’s Post “Enough”

Enough. These few words are enough.
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.

This opening to the life
we have refused
again and again
until now.

David Whyte, Where Many Rivers Meet

p.s. My mother lived for some years embarrassed that she was 3 years older than my dad (she 1903, he 1906).  When we all went out to dinner for her 75th she told us to tell people that she was only 60.  She got over it, though, and aged with a glad heart.

Today is her birthday, the 114th.

In her mid 20ies she drove a sporty car.

Friday, September 22  “Lovely as the roses are, I might rather hide huddled in a cave”
first posted October 28, 2015

Ordinarily, when people come to the Jesuit Residence for a few days of stillness and prayer, the house welcomes them with just that, stillness and hospitality that makes a place for prayer.   These last weeks, with heavy machinery digging out the space for UDM’s new main entrance, one of our prayer guests found stillness anyway.  S/he wrote this poem to remember that morning’s prayer, when s/he tasted fatigue and the grief from several deaths that came too close in time and very close in the soul.  And then was surprised by joy.

Right here on McNichols Road, s/he tasted grace.   Best to read the poem out loud.

Have a blest weekend

john sj

Today’s Post – morning prayer in the city

Wednesday, September 20

“it is the blight man was born for
it is Margaret you mourn for”

Several days ago a close friend told me that Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall,” when she read it, whispered deep down in her imagination.  I remembered that this morning and wondered whether these elegiac 15 lines (a sonnet less one?) had found their way onto the Work Day/Hard Time poetry list.  They had not; today they join six other gmh poems.  Thanks to my friend for bringing the poem to mind.

Hopkins (1844-1889) lived through the British industrial revolution at its most imperial, British innovations in factory design, the world’s master in ocean-going battleships, freighters, and luxury liners.  He lived close to the grinding wounds of expatriated farmers and machine-dominated factory workers.  Throughout his short life, he never lost his genius for sheer beauty either.   Perhaps he moves so many readers because his ability to write in language that does not compromise its playful elegance for its hard-edge tragedies, nor vice versa.

As Hopkins’ poems go, “Spring and Fall” is pretty accessible even on first reading.  Perhaps, however, on second reading surprises lurk.  It’s a good bet a second reading will have more pauses than the first.

Mid-week.  blessings wherever you live and work.

john, sj

Spring & Fall: to a young child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Monday,  September 18
“I longed for sleep but couldn’t bear his crying
so bore him back and forth until the sun rose
and he slept.”

Debra Spencer knocked on the door of my imagination this morning, asking “are these words enough that you can pay attention?”  A mom and her infant, two moments of holding him, the grace of a change in perspective.   Some poems speak to human awareness at its most sensual,  this one is deceptively simple.   So, for sure, best to read it out loud, with pauses, at least two times.

Have a blest beginning of this work day, the fourth, I think, in the McNichols campus semester.

john sj

Today’s Post –  “Day Bath”  

for my son

Last night I walked him back and forth,
his small head heavy against my chest,
round eyes watching me in the dark,
his body a sandbag in my arms.
I longed for sleep but couldn’t bear his crying
so bore him back and forth until the sun rose
and he slept. Now the doors are open,
noon sunlight coming in,
and I can see fuchsias opening.
Now we bathe. I hold him, the soap
makes our skins glide past each other.
I lay him wet on my thighs, his head on my knees,
his feet dancing against my chest,
and I rinse him, pouring water
from my cupped hand.
No matter how I feel, he’s the same,
eyes expectant, mouth ready,
with his fat legs and arms,
his belly, his small solid back.
Last night I wanted nothing more
than to get him out of my arms.
Today he fits neatly
along the hollow my thighs make,
and with his fragrant skin against mine
I feel brash, like a sunflower.

“Day Bath” by Debra Spencer from Pomegranate. © Hummingbird Press, 2004.

Wednesday,  September 13, 1017   “Flocking back to the D: Detroit Homecoming 2017”

Is this the third or the fourth Detroit Homecoming?   3 high-profile days when former Detroiter’s, now successful and resourceful, are invited back for a three day pitch to re-learn (and re-invest??) in the city.
http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20170910/news/638671/flocking-back-to-the-d-detroit-homecoming-2017#utm_medium=email&utm_source=cdb-afternoon&utm_campaign=cdb-afternoon-20170911

Among other events this week, expats will take one of three immersion tours in three neighborhoods (outside downtown and Midtown) where serious revitalization efforts are underway.  University District (see below) is one.   I can see it out my office window.   The excitement of a busload of expats with “real money” coming to our neighborhood, plus Brightmoor, and Dexter-Linwood is real.   It’s worth the effort to show off this come-back city.

It is also worth the effort to remember the decades where the wounds in these neighborhood were incurred,  remember the blight of fear of violence and of contempt for the city.  These thoughts led me to bring back Detroit poet Jamaal May’s blunt “There are Birds Here.”   Like every strong poem, the poet’s search for precise, flint-hard words can renew a reader’s imagination and vocabulary,  that, along with work on our neighborhood across the street, also counts as  rebirth.

Every poem does best when read aloud, with pauses.

Have a blest day.
john sj

 Today’s Post  “For Detroit”  Jamaal May

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. Source: The Big Book of Exit Strategies (Alice James Books, 2016) http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26196185-the-big-book-of-exit-strategies

University District

• Privateinvestment: $3.4 million
• Homerenovations: 276
• Homes:1,252
• Homesales (2016): 71
• City-ownedcommercial properties: 1

Overview: This area, anchored by the University of Detroit Mercy and Marygrove College, has been a key target in the city’s redevelopment efforts outside the greater downtown area. Development interest has been robust, as The Platform LLC, Century Partners and Matt Hessler  have projects afoot in the area. The Live6 Alliance, an effort by Detroit Mercy, Kresge and the Detroit Economic Growth Corp., launched two years ago to bring economic development to the Livernois-McNichols area, which includes the Fitzgerald neighborhood targeted by The Platform and Century Partners.

Source for data: TheNeighborhoods.org

Monday, September 11, 2017  “speaking in a soft voice,
speaking in a voice slightly colored with bitter wrongs
mingled with monumental patience”

This past week, while Attorney General Sessions announced the rescinding of the DACA window out of fear for c. 800,000 “Dreamers,” I thought of my family’s 9 lawyers, across 3 generations.  I am deeply proud of them;  not only do they practice the law without cheating (their clients or the law itself), they often use their skills to open paths to justice for vulnerable people.  Yes, they, and the rest of the family, love to argue and debate about large questions and crazy tiny ones.  Dinner tables pulse with conversational energy, only sometimes noble;  sometimes we rant and scold each other.  Sometimes we apologize, sometimes we don’t get that far in a dinner argument.  But, that said, . . . .

I have been schooled by my family’s habits to expect lawyers to use their skills to open paths to justice for vulnerable people.  And expect that pragmatic hope for wounded people requires what today’s poet, Carl Sandburg, describes as “monumental patience.”  These hard days got me searching in Garrison Keillor’s 2005 anthology (Good poems – for- Hard Times).  That’s where I found today’s poem.  I’m taking the liberty of dedicating this post to those nine lawyers with whom I have lived all of my life.  (n.b., Sanburg uses “him” for his lawyer; 4 of my 9 are women.)

Monday approaching mid-September.  Have a blest day.

john sj

Today’s Post  “Lawyer”  Carl Sanburg

When the jury files in to deliver a verdict after weeks of direct
and cross examinations, hot clashes of lawyers and cool
decisions of the judge,
There are points of high silence — twiddling of thumbs is at an
end — bailiffs near cuspidors take fresh chews of tobacco
and wait — and the clock has a chance for its ticking to
be heard.
A lawyer for the defense clears his throat and holds himself
ready if the word is “Guilty” to enter motion for a new
trial, speaking in a soft voice, speaking in a voice slightly
colored with bitter wrongs mingled with monumental
patience, speaking with mythic Atlas shoulders of many
preposterous, unjust circumstances.

Friday,  September 8  —  Connie de Biase, a day after her birthday 7 months after we buried her

I found myself writing a paragraph contemplation of Connie on her first birthday since leaving us.

Connie in our 4 decades of kinship partnered with me in our mutual commitment to noticing.   When I miss her most is on Saturday mornings when I am home and able to Sabbath the day, especially driving into center city to buy community bread.  I used to call her while driving back home with fresh food in two bags in the back seat and we would talk about the condition of our inner lives.  Our last year or more were more brave and sad as Connie recognized her growing diminishment and her grief at losing the life in Madison that she loved and lived so gracefully.  Talking with her was part of that inner movement,  Ignatius calls these “inner disturbances” and counsels a habit of paying attention to them whether consolations or desolations.   Noticing.

originally posted January 23, 2017

Perhaps this Denise Levertov poem came to mind because I flew into JFK Saturday, braved Long Island’s expressways with their too tight turns matched by slightly-too-narrow lanes, to spend time with a lifelong soul friend, Sr. Consuela de Biase, csj.   Connie has become frail, like the ancient poet in today’s poem.  She misses nothing, I realized, but you have to lean in close to hear;  worn with fatigue, she whispers, and pauses to breathe.  We visited three times  (c. 90 minutes,  25 minutes, and 4 or 5 when we said goodbye before I headed back to JFK early Sunday).  I love it that the 40 mile drive on the parkway was wearing;  it reminds me that those miles and our 3 conversations are of a piece with decades of mutual listening, the fabric of Connie’s life.

In today’s poem Denise Levertov writes of an ancient poet whose frail strengths remind me of Connie.   This beautiful early autumn day might tempt you to open your window or step outside so you can read “In Love” bathed in beauty, breathing a little too.

Have a blest weekend

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

Aug 21 Dunya Mikhail – a poet, a historian, a voice

I stray today from an editorial principle, “do not re-post the same poet/poem too soon.”  But here I am re-posting Dunya Mikhail’s “My Grandmother’s Grave” (August 21 and now September 6).   I do so to add the voice of this “Work Day/Hard Time” list to the voices of the Sisters of Mercy and the Jesuits in the network of 28 Jesuit universities across the US  (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/catholic-clergy-condemn-daca-decision_us_59af2475e4b0b5e53101d190?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009).   These networks of Detroit Mercy’s sponsoring religious communities join other voices as we object to the Trump administration’s decision to bring more misery and uncertainty to c. 800,000 Dreamer students.   I might have posted Warsan Shire’s “Home” or Joy Harjo’s “Grace” too.  All three women write poems to help readers get our imaginations around the fear of immigrants that, as in the violent years after World War I (c. 1919-1924), grips this country.

Perhaps Dunya comes to mind today because she shares my faith tradition as a Chaldean Catholic, and is a fellow citizen of Metro Detroit.

Have a blest day, awash as it is, in early autumn’s crisp clean air.

john sj

Friday September 1, 2017

A long time soul friend and fellow lover of poetry, emailed me two days ago – a poem by W H Auden, much loved by both of us over the years.  S/he wrote:

“This poem of WH Auden was quoted, briefly, at the end of a Sunday NYTimes op-ed a few days ago on the value of memorizing poetry, and also of reading it aloud.  I will send the link to you but also want to suggest the poem as one you might in turn suggest.  It seems to fit the political mood of a country that has to be thinking, often, ‘Didn’t we get rid of Hitler? Don’t we know enough to repudiate fascist demagoguery?’  Evidently not —  ”

Have a blest 1st weekend of September,

john sj

p.s. Yes, even the NY Times thinks it helps to read a poem out loud, to which I add, “with pauses.”

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-second Street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade:

Waves of anger and fear

Circulate over the bright

And darkened lands of the earth,

Obsessing our private lives;

The unmentionable odour of death

Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can

Unearth the whole offence

From Luther until now

That has driven a culture mad,

Find what occurred at Linz,

What huge imago made

A psychopathic god:

I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew

All that a speech can say

About Democracy,

And what dictators do,

The elderly rubbish they talk

To an apathetic grave;

Analysed all in his book,

The enlightenment driven away,

The habit-forming pain,

Mismanagement and grief:

We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air

Where blind skyscrapers use

Their full height to proclaim

The strength of Collective Man,

Each language pours its vain

Competitive excuse:

But who can live for long

In an euphoric dream;

Out of the mirror they stare,

Imperialism’s face

And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar

Cling to their average day:

The lights must never go out,

The music must always play,

All the conventions conspire

To make this fort assume

The furniture of home;

Lest we should see where we are,

Lost in a haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night

Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash

Important Persons shout

Is not so crude as our wish:

What mad Nijinsky wrote

About Diaghilev

Is true of the normal heart;

For the error bred in the bone

Of each woman and each man

Craves what it cannot have,

Not universal love

But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark

Into the ethical life

The dense commuters come,

Repeating their morning vow;

‘I will be true to the wife,

I’ll concentrate more on my work,’

And helpless governors wake

To resume their compulsory game:

Who can release them now,

Who can reach the dead,

Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice

To undo the folded lie,

The romantic lie in the brain

Of the sensual man-in-the-street

And the lie of Authority

Whose buildings grope the sky:

There is no such thing as the State

And no one exists alone;

Hunger allows no choice

To the citizen or the police;

We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere,

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the Just

Exchange their messages:

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame.

W.H. Auden
February 21, 1907 – September 29, 1973