Poetry Blog: "A Work Day in Hard Times"

Wednesday,   August 30

“Though your seeds are tiny
you grow with fierce will”

My sibs and are going to take advantage of what looks to be a rain-free day and check out the many ways the city interacts with the vast Great Lake world that flows through its most narrow channel in our downtown (“Detroit” in French means “the narrow place”).  Hence the city’s relatively long life for a U.S. city, 1703.  I chose this post from early August last year.

Laura Grace Weldon’s celebration of Rutabagas fresh from the garden feels like a song for beginnings, which are happening on all three of our campuses these days.  Like many strong poems, Weldon sets us a table that looks ordinary but turns to become a gate into legitimate wonder.  Still pretty cheeky.  Wise too.

Try reading it out loud with some pauses.

john sj

Today’s Post:  “Rutabaga”

You darken as my knife slices
blushing at what you become.

I save your thick leaves
and purple skin
to feed the cows.

A peasant guest at any meal
you agree to hide in fragrant stew
or gleam nakedly
in butter and chives.

Though your seeds are tiny
you grow with fierce will
grateful for poor soil and dry days,
heave up from the ground
under sheltering stalks
to sweeten with the frost.

Tonight we take you into our bodies
as if we do you a favor—
letting your molecules
become a higher being,
one that knows music and art.

But you share with us
what makes you a rutabaga.
Through you we eat sunlight,
taste the soil’s clamoring mysteries,
gain your seed’s perfect might.

“Rutabaga” by Laura Grace Weldon,
Tending (Aldrich Press, 2013).
© Laura Grace Weldon. Presented
here by poet submission.

Art credit: “Rutabaga,” unknown
medium, by Lara Call Gastinger.
© Lara Call Gastinger, 2004.

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

People tell stories about what they see, and hear, and touch, and people listen.   This ancient rhythm weaves humans together over the centuries.   At universities we talk about “research”  and in my faith tradition, we tell each other what we perceive in sacred words.   Telling and listening make the world go round.   The passage of time sifts words, sorting out the not very good from the good and the very good.  But in a lifetime of listening, you may find a few sayings so compelling that they hold their shape as clear and unforgettable for decades.

Many people at the university have spent time and tears keeping vigil as Gerry Stockhausen, back in early January 2016, labored with his dying in an Omaha hospital room kept company by some of the close women and men of his life.  After he died, some of Gerry’s soul friends gathered in Omaha, in Milwaukee, and here on campus in Detroit, to anoint him with our love after he had left us.  We told stories about him, sang songs he used to play and sing and lead for worship.  Once I heard Gerry preach a game-changer homily.   I write how I remember what he said then as a way of keeping vigil in these months since he died in that Omaha room.

Have a blest day,

john st sj

Today’s Post – a treasure in a field

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field which someone has found; he hides it again, goes off happy, sells everything he owns and buys the field.”
(Matthew 13:44)

Gerry Stock’s homily, (as I remember what he said that day):  “The saying tells of a treasure and a field.  Parables are not long and they reveal their meaning when you pay attention to the words.   This parable does not say, “He dug up the treasure, cleaned off the dirt, and carried the treasure away.”  If you want the treasure, Gerry told us, you have to take the whole field, everything in it, what you treasure and what you wish was not part of the deal.  It’s that way when you fall in love and decide to commit to each other: “For better, for worse”; good days and bad days; tenderness and fights; patience and impatience; grief and joy.  It’s that way, too, when you decide to take on a new job or move to a new city, or commit yourself to a process of reconciliation that invests you more deeply in some real and earthy person or place.”  This is how I remember what Stock said that one day some years ago.  I’ve not been the same since.

p.s.    One of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poems comes to mind thinking of Stock on his 2017 birthday.

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

“The Windhover:  To Christ our Lord”

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

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

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

Gerard Manley Hopkins  28 July 1844 – 8 June, 1889

p.s. My sibs are coming to Detroit this afternoon, 3 days to hang out and talk and look around Detroit.  Midge and Jim celebrate their 50th year this month,  all of us will gather.

Friday, August 25

The Jesuits here spent last evening and today at the Manresa Jesuit Retreat Center (c. 10 miles north of campus)  to tell stories about the hard and lovely moments of the past year, + house keeping practices and such.  Most of us were so tired we took to our guest room beds moments after our 2.5 hours of beautiful telling and listening.   Back at things today though.

I’m back on campus for a wide open weekend (=  YIPPEE!!)

lean post today. More Monday morning.   Have a blest weekend.

john sj

p.s. 60 years ago today I walked into the Oshkosh, WI Jesuit “novitiate” to begin the attempt to enter the Jesuits.   From my biased perspective, that risk has turned out all right.

💞  😇

Rabnindranath Tagore # 1   Gitanjali 

Thou hast made me endless,  such is thy pleasure.

This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again,

and fillest it ever with fresh life.

This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales,

and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.

At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart

loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable.

Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine.

Ages pass, and still thou pourest,

and still there is room to fill.

“There is no way of telling strangers they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

Thomas Merton

Wednesday, August 23

How many times might someone learn the vast depths of one’s soul?  – –  Resilient, brave, playful, patient, accessible.   Maybe I should write “re-learn” rather than “learn.”  In these very early days of a new academic year, I love looking at new students walking around campus, learning where the toilets are,  and classrooms, and places to get coffee, and quiet spaces in the library, and the university’s place in the big city.   New students begin to learn that they will be up to the challenges, even though early term sticker shock, the magnitude of their semester’s requirements make that confidence seem laughable (in hard anxious moments).

If you work with new students, you might give them a copy of today’s poem.  Remind them please:  “best to read a  strong poem out loud, with pauses, and more than once.”

Have a blest mid-week day.

john sj

Today’s Post  “Wild Geese”

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

mary oliver september 10, 1935
national book award 1992
pulitzer prize 1984

Monday, August 21
“watching the fragments of our first dreams
for a lifetime.

My hand on the map
as if on an old scar.”

Every so many weeks, I look to a poem by Dunya Mikhail, a fellow citizen of Metro Detroit, and a refugee from Iraq in 1996.   I’ve only known her poetry since last March when Joy Harjo introduced us.   Poems like today’s locate the sensuality of lived experience in long stretches of remembered history.   In “My Grandmother’s Grave,” delicate memories remembered through the poet’s senses — touch and sight and hearing —  can take a reader’s imagination thousands of years into the past, only to abruptly relocate her grandmother in the ruins of wars.  The poet places her grandmother amid the ruined artifacts that recall her heritage.

A challenging poem for this week when many new students arrive to risk the challenges a university places before them, many openings out into a wide world.

Have a blest week.

john st sj

Today’s Post   —  “My Grandmother’s Grave”
When my grandmother died
I thought, “She can’t die again.”
Everything in her life
happened once and forever:
her bed on our roof,
the battle of good and evil in her tales,
her black clothes,
her mourning for her daughter who
“was killed by headaches,”
the rosary beads and her murmur,
“Forgive us our sins,”
her empty vase from the Ottoman time,
her braid, each hair a history —

First were the Sumerians,
their dreams inscribed in clay tablets.
They drew palms, so dates ripen before their sorrows.
They drew an eye to chase evil
away from their city.
They drew circles and prayed for them:
a drop of water
a sun
a moon
a wheel spinning faster than Earth.
They begged: “Oh gods, don’t die and leave us alone.”

Over the Tower of Babel,
light is exile,
blurred,
its codes crumbs of songs
leftover for the birds.

More naked emperors
passed by the Tigris
and more ships . . .
The river full
of crowns
helmets
books
dead fish,
and on the Euphrates, corpse-lilies floating.

Every minute a new hole in the body of the ship.

The clouds descended on us
war by war,
picked up our years,
our hanging gardens,
and flew away like storks.

We said there isn’t any worse to come.

Then the barbarians came
to the mother of two springs.
They broke my grandmother’s grave: my clay tablet.
They smashed the winged bulls whose eyes
were sunflowers
widely open
watching the fragments of our first dreams
for a lifetime.

My hand on the map
as if on an old scar.

Dunya Mikhail

b. 1965, Baghdad, Iraq

Friday, August 18

These past few days I’ve read several news reporters who wrote something like this: “I will be so glad for this week to end!  So much hard news,  so confusing and frightening as well.  It’s not clear either, whether things events will not seem more threatening a week from now.

Keeping up with the world’s news always requires courage and patience but these past weeks! !   They test our mettle.

What, then, might make a helpful Friday read?

A love poem, a poem about revolutionary love, a brave poem.     I often think this is my all time favorite.

Best to read out loud, with pauses.

Have a blest weekend.

john sj

Today’s Post – “Prayer for Revolutinary Love”

That a woman not ask a man to leave meaningful work to follow her
That a man not ask a woman to leave meaningful work to follow him.

That no one try to put Eros in bondage
But that no one put a cudgel in the hands of Eros.

That our loyalty to one another and our loyalty to our work
not be set in false conflict.

That our love for each other give us love for each other’s work
That our love for each other’s work give us love for one another.

That our love for each other’s work give us love for one another.
That our love for each other give us love for each other’s work.

That our love for each other, if need be,
give way to absence.  And the unknown.

That we endure absence, if need be,
without losing our love for each other.
Without closing our doors to the unknown.

Denise Levertov

1923 – 1997

Wednesday, August 16  “the step

you don’t want to take”  David Whyte

Convocation gathers women and men who come to work at our 3 campuses, week in and week out, to take the thousands of small steps that make a university come to life again and again.  In our tradition, today marks the first of those small steps, a day in the August calendar dedicated to beginning again.

David Whyte writes about 1st steps.  reading this poem on this particular day,  gives me a taste of rebirth.  I hope for you too.   We live days of tedious bickering in the U.S. political world, days of alarming anger, days of fear.  Perhaps we can find grace in the poet’s words, some surprises, even joy.

Best to read out loud with pauses.

Have a blest day, and a blest year

john sj

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.

River Flow: New & Selected Poems
Many Rivers Press

David Whyte b. 1955

Monday, August 14, 2017    “Never angry
Always smiling quietly
Dining daily on four cups of brown rice
Some miso and a few vegetables”

In late August 2015,  Japanese poet Kenji Miyazawa met me for the first time when I first posted this poem; it was found in his trunk after he died young in 1933.    His poem stops me —  as the middle of Lake Michigan can under its stars at 2:00 am,  or 18 men this weekend,  still and leaning in on our chairs to hear each other telling stories from our lives across 60 years.   Some of us are Jesuits, some former Jesuits; we gathered in Oshkosh, Wisconsin where we first met to risk Jesuit life 60 years ago this month in August 1957.  Mostly we were teenagers with our lives waiting for us. So we told stories — falling in love, engaging with our children, burying our loves, taking deep wounds and sometimes inflicting them, going to work and coming home — paying the prices that adults do.  60 years gave us many stories —  “good times and bad, in sickness and in health.”  So we listened to stories, laughing and crying and breathing.  We were sad when we left that place of grace Sunday afternoon.

Kenji Miyawa’s voice was schooled by the 1920s and 1930s, hard times on the Pacific rim.    Even more than most poems, “Be Not Defeated” should reward reading aloud with pauses.

Have a blest work week.  Breathe sometimes today.

john sj

Today’s Post  —  “Do not be defeated by the rain”

Unbeaten by the rain
Unbeaten by the wind
Bested by neither snow nor summer heat
Strong of body
Free of desire
Never angry
Always smiling quietly
Dining daily on four cups of brown rice
Some miso and a few vegetables
Observing all things
With dispassion
But remembering well
Living in a small, thatched-roof house
In the meadow beneath a canopy of pines
Going east to nurse the sick child
Going west to bear sheaves of rice for the weary mother
Going south to tell the dying man there is no cause for fear
Going north to tell those who fight to put aside their trifles
Shedding tears in time of drought
Wandering at a loss during the cold summer
Called useless by all
Neither praised
Nor a bother
Such is the person
I wish to be

Kenji Miyazawa, 27 August 1896 – 21 September 1933, was a Japanese poet and author of children’s literature from Hanamaki, Iwate in the late Taishō and early Shōwa periods. He was also known as an agricultural science teacher, a vegetarian, cellist, devout Buddhist, and utopian social activist.[1]}  “Be Not Defeated by the Rain”  translated from the original Japanese by Hart Larrabee. Text as posted on Tomo 友(08/05/2012).

Curator’s note: After the poet’s death, a black notebook containing this text was found in his trunk. The poem appears in bold strokes amidst his repetitious copying of a Buddhist mantra. According to its date (November 3, 1931), he had composed it while on his deathbed. He was only in his thirties. Visit this link to view a photograph of the poem in the notebook, the original Japanese text, two very different translations (including Larrabee’s, which I prefer), and interviews with the interpreters.

Posted by Phyllis Cole-Dai on Aug 19, 2015 12:00 am

Art credit: “Girl in the rain,” Giclée print by Pavlo Tereshin.

Friday, August 11   “Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.”

Richard Wilbur wrote this poem about his young daughter, as she labored to write important words,  in 1921.  The date matters.  1921 falls early in one of the meanest short stretches of fear and anger in U.S. history.  House to house raids by the federal government in violation of citizen constitutional rights (wiki “Palmer raids”),  anti-immigration undoing of the promise that had come to define The Statue of Liberty, tear gas training for police forces trying to contain street riots, 1924 the high water mark of the Ku Klux Klan’s numbers and power, and of the number of lynchings of black people.  Fear and anger and more fear.  For cause:  World War I’s chemical weapons did not kill all the wounded; lovely young people who went off to war with innocent energy returned maimed, stumbling through the streets of their home towns.

This 90 year old historical context helps me read Richard Wilbur’s lyrical love poem to his daughter with some awareness of courage in a hard time:  her courage as she labors to write something that matters and her dad’s courage to write her story.  Would these two writers, one generation apart, imagine some of us 2017 citizens finding stillness and a moment to read what he wrote about her?  Probably yes, they both show strong imaginations.

Friday in the 2nd week of August on a university campus.  Lots of courage here too as women and men work to prepare for this year’s students who are coming soon.   Best to read the poem out loud,  with pauses.

Have a blest weekend.

john sj

Today’s Post  “the writer”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     richard wilbur  March 1, 1921  –

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

Wednesday,  August 9, 2017 —  “then it is that the miracle walks in, on his swift feet . . .”

Is it harder to stand still in a place of grief or a place of joy?   Last evening, on the phone, a friend was finding words to describe a liberating moment of joy that took her/his breath away and promised to require weeks or months of revisiting the joy, learning not to be afraid of such a depth of hope.   My friend and I agreed, as it turned out, that learning to be still with grief, hard as that is,  can come more readily than learning to be still with joy.

St. Ignatius has a teaching about contemplation that suggests that both are equally important. “Attention should be paid to some more important places (i.e., in my memory of already lived experience) in which I have experienced understanding, consolation or desolation.” (Sp. Exercises par # 118).    Ignatius suggests that when I notice any of these three memories wanting my attention, I try to experience the specific memory with as much sensual recollection as possible (e.g., what time of day was it?  who was there? what were you saying to each other? what was the weather like?  what did the place smell like? . . . etc.” ) The teaching is that finding my way into a memory that wants my attention is best understood as a sensual journey that helps me get there, and stay there for a while.

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 deepest poems.   Try it out,  reading aloud with pauses.  N.B., the poem’s core metaphor is a Houdini-like supple risk-taker on a high wire above a deep pit.

Have a blest work week,

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 in The Freeing of the Dust

Denise Levertov
b. October 1923  d. December 1997