Poetry Blog: "A Work Day in Hard Times"

Monday  March 13

“If anyone stumbles across it,
return it to me, please.”

Last Friday I spent the afternoon visiting with, and an evening listening to, Joy Harjo at the University of Michigan’s Michigan League.   Joy emailed on Wednesday to explore the possibility that I could drive to Ann Arbor.   It worked out because I had a free afternoon and evening, an unanticipated grace.  She read mostly from her most recent book  Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.  Listening took me into stillness for c. 2 hours;  to the language of her poems and of her flute, and her sax.  Definitely worth the 45 mile drive from our campus to Ann Arbor.

That night Joy introduced me to the Chaldean poet Dunya Mikhail.  Dunya and I share some of the sprawling space of Metro Detroit and we share the Catholic faith, hers Chaldean, mine 1840’s immigrant European.  When I got home, I looked for some of her poetry and found  “I Was in a Hurry.”

Best to read out loud,  with pauses.  It’s snowing here    Have a blest week.

john sj

Today’s Post:  “I Was in a Hurry”

Yesterday I lost a country.

I was in a hurry,

and didn’t notice when it fell from me

like a broken branch from a forgetful tree.

Please, if anyone passes by

and stumbles across it,

perhaps in a suitcase

open to the sky,

or engraved on a rock

like a gaping wound,

or wrapped

in the blankets of emigrants,

or canceled

like a losing lottery ticket,

or helplessly forgotten

in Purgatory,

or rushing forward without a goal

like the questions of children,

or rising with the smoke of war,

or rolling in a helmet on the sand,

or stolen in Ali Baba’s jar,

or disguised in the uniform of a policeman

who stirred up the prisoners

and fled,

or squatting in the mind of a woman

who tries to smile,

or scattered like the dreams

of new immigrants in America.

If anyone stumbles across it,

return it to me, please.

Please return it, sir.

Please return it, madam.

It is my country…

I was in a hurry

when I lost it yesterday.

“I Was in a Hurry” by Dunya Mikhail, translated by Elizabeth Winslow, from The War Works Hard,

copyright 1993, 1997, 2000, 2005 by Dunya Mikhail. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

(http://www.npr.org/2013/03/21/174773962/revisiting-iraq-through-the-eyes-of-an-exiled-poet)

Friday, March 10
“It’s so hot; there is not enough winter.
Animals are confused. Ice is melting.”

Joy Harjo emailed me while I was in Canada talking about my life with Bill Clarke.  She arrived in Ann Arbor yesterday afternoon to read, make music, and speak.  We worked our calendars for some face time this afternoon.  Sweet!

I posted Joy’s, for me, master piece “Grace” at the end of February.  Here’s a more recent poem, “Talking with the Sun.”  Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses.

Have a blest weekend.

john sj

Today’ Post   Joy Harjo  “Talking with the Sun”

I believe in the sun.
In the tangle of human failures of fear, greed, and
forgetfulness, the sun gives me clarity.
When explorers first encountered my people, they called us
heathens, sun worshippers.
They didn’t understand that the sun is a relative, and
illuminates our path on this earth.

After dancing all night in a circle we realize that we are a
part of a larger sense of stars and planets dancing with us
overhead.
When the sun rises at the apex of the ceremony, we are
renewed.
There is no mistaking this connection, though Walmart
might be just down the road.
Humans are vulnerable and rely on the kindnesses of the
earth and sun; we exist together in a sacred field of
meaning.

Our earth is shifting.  We can all see it.
I hear from my Inuit and Yupik relatives up north that
everything has changed.  It’s so hot; there is not enough
winter.
Animals are confused. Ice is melting.

The quantum physicists have it right; they are beginning to
think like Indians: everything is connected dynamically
at an intimate level.
When you remember this, then the current wobble of the
earth makes sense.  How much more oil can be drained,
Without replacement; without reciprocity?

I walked out of a hotel room just off Times Square at dawn
to find the sun.
It was the fourth morning since the birth of my fourth
granddaughter.
This was the morning I was to present her to the sun, as a
relative, as one of us.  It was still dark, overcast as I walked
through Times Square.
I stood beneath a twenty-first century totem pole of symbols
of multinational corporations, made of flash and neon.

The sun rose up over the city but I couldn’t see it amidst the
rain.
Though I was not at home, bundling up the baby to carry
her outside,
I carried this newborn girl within the cradleboard of my
heart.
I held her up and presented her to the sun, so she would be
recognized as a relative,
So that she won’t forget this connection, this promise,
So that we all remember, the sacredness of life.

Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo 2012.
(b. May 9, 1951)

Wednesday, March 8  “I was nine that summer . . . “

A mid-week break during our campus’ Spring Break:  some house-keeping time:  a big load of laundry, Nordictrack in the basement work out room, tending personal emails, and most of all, at about 2:45 I’ll drive up I-94 to the Blue Water Bridge into Canada to spend the evening with Bill Clarke, sj in Guelph.  I first met Bill in Omaha the summer of 1980 when he directed my silent 30 day retreat, something Jesuits do two times in a life time.  St. Ignatius called the 30 days “a school of the affections,”  a long time inside 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.   A wise Jesuit once told me, as I was getting ready for my second thirty days at age 40, “The thirty days are not to teach you how to pray; you already pray or you wouldn’t be here.   The thirty days are to teach you how you already pray, so you can trust that in yourself, good days and hard days both.”   That summer Bill mentored me, 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, most recently February 3, 2016 – – my niece Terri Breeden’s recollection of learning new words while playing cards with her grandmother on her front porch, learning of gratitude and mortality.  Best to read out loud, with pauses.

Breathe a little even if it’s a work day.  Back Thursday late morning.

john sj

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

Monday, March 6 “of weather, of corners,
of leisurely tensions between them
and private silence.”

Spring Break on McNichols Campus:  the youngest half of the university’s population is mostly invisible and inaudible.  For us employees there’s still plenty to do but I find somehow, even so, there’s more breathing space.  Maybe it’s the excitement of our women’s basketball team playing its tournament downtown in “The Joe,” and winning number one and gearing up for number two this afternoon.  “The Joe,”   a fixture, home for decades to the Red Wings but in its last year as the huge new arena rises a mile to the north in the growing cluster of stadia — the Tigers, The Pistons, The Lions, The Red Wings, another sign of the pulsing new energy in the city.  When she prayed with the team before yesterday’s game, Sr. Beth Ann Finster told the players:  “This is our building; our name is on the playing floor; you own this building.”  Made the team crazy excited as Beth often does.  They are, along with other men’s and women’s teams, staying at the refreshed 72 story Marriot hotel rising above the 4 office towers of GM’s world headquarters, looking out over the Detroit River and, off to the north-east, Belle Isle and Lake St. Clair and to the south, Windsor Ontario, the only city in the US where you go south into Canada.    A reborn waterfront and international border: for the players, a classy moment.  We are looking for another win today.

Maybe it’s the courage of the undergrad Alternative Spring Break teams who’ve headed off to their week long commitments in demanding places of various U.S cities.  When they come back at the week’s end, there will be new stories to tell.  Maybe it will be the less-public stories of faculty using the week to dig deeper into their research projects.

Whatever the sources, Spring Break has its own sound, its own pace.   Maybe that’s what led me to this Denise Levertov poem, one new to me.  An old man in a city walking his two mongrel dogs.   Sweet.   I hope you like it.   Out loud with pauses.

Whether for  you  this is break time or you are slamming high pressure work, have a blest day.

john sj

Today’s Post   “the Rainwalkers”

An old man whose black face
shines golden-brown as wet pebbles
under the streetlamp, is walking two mongrel dogs of dis-
proportionate size, in the rain,
in the relaxed early-evening avenue.

The small sleek one wants to stop,
docile to the imploring soul of the trashbasket,
but the young tall curly one
wants to walk on; the glistening sidewalkentices him to arcane happenings.

Increasing rain. The old bareheaded man
smiles and grumbles to himself.
The lights change: the avenue’s
endless nave echoes notes of
liturgical red. He drifts

between his dogs’ desires.
The three of them are enveloped –
turning now to go crosstown – in their
sense of each other, of pleasure,
of weather, of corners,
of leisurely tensions between them
and private silence.

Denise Levertov
b. October 1923  d. December 1997

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

Wednesday, March 3, 2017  “Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,”

Four days ago, a friend emailed me some lines from Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Kindness.”  The poet finds words to connect kinship and love with those elements of living in the world that wear us down.  Meanness and violence become a context for enduring kindness.  No wonder my friend thought to send “Kindness” in these times; no surprise either that it found a place in “Work Day/Hard Times” so soon after the poem landed here. Naomi Shihab Nye is becoming a welcomed presence here.

Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses.

Friday, a delicate dusting of snow in the parking lot, early, before any of us 22 Jesuits had left footprints.   Not the 20” blizzard I’ve been hoping for, but pretty damn beautiful even so.  Have a blest weekend.

john sj

Today’s Post  “Kindness”

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

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

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

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

Naomi Shihab Nye
(b. March 12, 1952)

Wednesday, March 1 –  Lent:  “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things”  {G. M. Hopkins, sj}

“Lent,”  originally the word initially simply meant “spring” (“as in the German language Lenz and Dutch lente) and derives from the Germanic root for “long” because in the spring the days visibly lengthen.” Wikipedia)  The English spoken in the United States originated in  England, as a blend of Anglo-Saxon (German roots) and French (from the Norman Conquest of 1066).

In Detroit’s climate, you might say that “Spring” means the season when trees and shrubs and flowers and grass look dead and very gradually tell the careful observer that they are coming back to life.  Very gradually.  For some years, I’ve followed a ritual to remind myself about how slowly Spring happens:  I look for a large shrub or a low-hanging tree branch somewhere along a campus pathway I walk.  I stop nearby, close, so I can look at one twig on its branch from a distance of 6 to 8 inches and look at the twig for half a minute or so, paying attention to signs of rebirth.   I try to remember to stop there 3-4 times a week.   From day to day not much new happens.   Little by little, though, attention at close range gets a chance to surprise to looker.

Stopping and looking is a form of Lenten prayer and helps more than giving up candy or beer.  Stopping and looking at a twig on a shrub can be a metaphor for close watching other parts of life and waiting there in hope: a  child growing up;  a city laboring through its rebirth; an angry country turbulent and contentious. A university teeming with people trying to learn, trying to teach, trying to renew our day to day operations.  Beauty all around us.  Fasting from gloom, stopping and paying attention to a nation short on hope, the Lenten prayer invites the pray-er to wait for the season’s improbable signs of new life.

The growing length of daylight during Lent comes to about 3 minutes more light each day.

Have a blest weekend.

john sj

Today’s Post:    “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

Monday, February 27   “The haunting voices of the starved and mutilated broke fences. . . ”

Last week, the national office of Jesuits of the U.S. published a statement calling the recent Dakota Pipeline decision of the Trump Administration “Morally Unacceptable.” (See the pdf file for the complete statement.)   Some controversies engage the peripheries of my imagination because I only perceive the people involved from some digitally-mediated distance.  Others engage me deeply because the life I have lived has connected me with women, men and children who touch the ragged edges of some power-wielding decision.   The experience of Lakota and Dakota people advocating for further scrutiny of the Dakota pipeline connects me with some Lakota companions who have shaped my life, kept me close in grief and despair, kept me company in laughter and teasing, in feasts and hunger and thirst.

This morning I looked for a strong poet who gives voice to native people.  It will not surprise readers of this blog that I returned to Joy Harjo’s unforgettable invocation of a hard winter in prairie country not unlike the Dakota pipeline encampment.

Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses.

john sj

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.

joy harjo  b. 1951

Jesuit Conference, Washington DC
February 22, 2017

Friday,  February  24
“To hear
another’s voice,
follow
your own voice”

For a few weeks David Whyte has been on my mind, wanting my attention.  I am pretty sure I bought one of his books of poems and scrambled around my office looking enough times that to doubt that any of his books ever made a home here after all.   Nudged by such little intuitions, I web wandered and stopped with the first DW poem that was new to me.

I hope it blesses your Friday.  Here in Detroit the day promises clouds and hints at rain.  Around here we’ve suffered from a drought of blizzards,  lots of sun, trees budding too soon, no swirling winds or sculpted drifts.  Well . . .  maybe my move from “I” to “we” is too facile;  lots of people with whom I share the Detroit River passage in the heart of the Great Lakes would just as soon take a pass on blizzards.  So, let me edit:   “ . . .  around here I’ve suffered from a drought of blizzards.”

This new David Whyte poem does me good as the work week ends.  I hope it helps you too.

Have a blest weekend.

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.

from  River Flow: New & Selected Poems
Many Rivers Press

David Whyte b. 1955

Wednesday, February 22  “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”  (Jan 25 post).  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.   Mid-week.  Have a blest day.

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’s “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  )

Monday, February 20,

I was gone most of last week to Long Island where we buried Connie di Biase in the heart of her Congregation of Sisters of St. Joseph of Brentwood, NY.    This morning as the university celebrates Presidents’ Day with a visit of high school students exploring our world as a possibility for the next fall, a friend from Brentwood, Jeanne Ross, c.s.j.  emailed to thank me for coming to share Connie’s funeral and cremation.

“I think we gave Connie a great send off. Your homily was quite poignant and we could hear the pain of your loss. I hope the days and weeks ahead will be grace-filled as you deal with the absence of your soul-mate.”

My sister Mary traveled with me; she was close to Connie too.  After the funeral, we took the Port Jefferson ferry from Long Island to Connecticut,  along the coast to Madison where Connie lived and welcomed hundreds of women and men to her condominium.  She lived on the banks of the tidal estuary Hammonasset River. Listening over a meal or on the phone, Connie helped storytellers find the beauty and grace alive in their confusing and hard places.    It mattered on last Thursday’s sun drenched afternoon that we could sit on Connie’s back porch and be still, honoring the years our friend sat on the porch, listening and allowing stillness to build and beauty to deepen on the estuary and in peoples’ stories.

From last February, when Gerry Stockhausen’s death was one month old, I found this poem.   It was first posted on February 26, 2016.

Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses.

Have a blest work week.

john sj