Poetry Blog: "A Work Day in Hard Times"

Friday, January 20

Three sayings have come to mind over this week, each speaks to uncertainty and suspicion.    I think of them as poems though they were written as prose.   I have long cherished these writers as brave enough, and wise enough, to pay attention to inner experience in a demanding world.  When I decided to place all three as a set for Inauguration Day, I was helped by a January 1 email from a soul friend;  she wrote:  “came across this line from Simone Weil.

 “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

Best to read the three sayings out loud, with pauses, as if they were poems.

Have a blest weekend.

john sj

One, President Lincoln’s First Inaugural:
     “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.
Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.
The mystic chords of memory,
stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land,
will yet swell the chorus of the Union,
when again touched, as surely they will be,
by the better angels of our nature.”
Abraham Lincoln — 1861 Inaugural

Two, Garrison Keillor:  (I cannot remember when I first read this, twenty years ago?)
A little  faith will see you through.
What else will except faith in such a cynical corrupt time?

When the country goes temporarily to the dogs,
cats must learn to be circumspect, walk on fences, sleep in trees, and have faith
that all this woofing is not the last word.
Even in a time of elephantine greed and vanity,
one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people.
Lacking any other purpose in life, it would be good enough to live for their sake.

Fr. Pedro Arrupe, S.J.  
I often remind myself that this man of great hope and playful humor served as the Jesuit Novice Director in Hiroshima the day the atomic bomb fell upon that city.  As the scale of destruction began to be clear, he and the novices formed medical emergency teams (Arrupe had medical training before he became a Jesuit) and walked the city looking for people who were still alive.  They carried as many as could fit all over the floors their home to the Novitiate, and tended wounds:  Not many world leaders came so close to nuclear weapons in action as this man.   “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

Nothing is more practical than finding God,
that is, than falling in love in a   quite absolute, final way.
What you are in love with,   what seizes your imagination,
will affect everything.
It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning,
what you will do with your evenings,
how you spend your weekends,
what you read,   who you know,   what breaks your heart,
and what amazes you with   joy and gratitude.
Fall in love;  stay in love,
and it will decide everything.

  Attributed to Pedro Arrupe, sj while he was Superior General of the Society of Jesus.   

Wednesday January 18  – 

The signs that divide us – both literal and metaphorical – have often targeted people of color.   This was especially true during the era of segregation.  Wherever one went, particularly in the South, placards reading “for White only” or “for Colored only” identified racially-segregated spaces.  In the following segment from her autobiography Brown Shoes (1956), Pauli Murray recounts the pervasiveness of these signs and their effects on African Americans.  She also points to the influence of less overt “signs” of the color line.  Murray (1910-1985) spent much of her life fighting against the race and gender divide – as a civil rights lawyer, college professor and administrator, deputy attorney general of California, and a founder of the National Organization for Women.  Late in life, she was ordained as an Episcopal priest.

What “signs” target people of color today?

Roy E. Finkenbine and the Martin Luther King Week/Black History Month Planning Team

Today’s post:  Pauli Murray, Excerpt from Brown Shoes

I saw . . . the signs which literally screamed at me from every side – on streetcars, over drinking fountains, on doorways:  FOR WHITE ONLY, FOR COLORED ONLY, WHITE LADIES, COLORED WOMEN, WHITE, COLORED.  If I missed the signs I had only to follow my nose to the dirtiest, smelliest, most neglected accommodations or they were pointed out to me by a heavily-armed, invariably mountainous red-faced policeman who to me seemed more a signal of calamity than of protection.  I saw the names of telephone subscribers conspicuously starred “(C)” in the telephone directory and the equally conspicuous space given to the crimes of Negroes by the newspapers, the inconspicuous space given to public recognition and always with the ignominious and insulting “negro” and “negress.”

Each morning I passed white children as poor as I going in the opposite direction on their way to school.  We never had fights; I don’t recall their ever having called me a single insulting name.  It was worse than that.  They passed me as if I weren’t there!  They looked through me and beyond me with unseeing eyes.  Their school was a beautiful red-and-white brick building on a wide paved street.  Its lawn was large and green and watered every day and flower beds were everywhere.  Their playground, a wonderland of iron swings, sand slides, seesaws, crossbars and a basketball court, was barred from us by a strong eight-foot-high fence topped by barbed wire.  We could only press our noses against the wire and watch them playing on the other side.

I went to West End [School] . . . on Ferrell Street, a dirt road which began at a lumberyard and ended in a dump.  On one side of this road were long low warehouses where huge barrels of tobacco shavings and tobacco dust were stored.  All day long our nostrils sucked in the brown silt like fine snuff in the air.  West End looked more like a warehouse than a school.  It was a dilapidated, rickety two-story wooden building which creaked and swayed in the wind as if it might collapse.  Outside it was scarred with peeling paint from many winters of rain and snow.  Inside the floors were bare and splintery, the plumbing was leaky, the drinking fountains broken and the toilets in the basement smelly and constantly out of order.  We’d have to wade through pools of foul water to get to them.  At recess we herded into a yard of cracked clay, barren of tree or bush, and played what games we could improvise like hopscotch or springboard, which we contrived by pulling rotten palings off the wooden fence and placing them on brickbats.

It was never the hardship which hurt so much as the constant contrast between what we had and what the white children had.  We had the greasy, torn, dog-eared books; they got the new ones.  They had field day in the city park; we had it on a furrowed, stubbly hillside.

They got wide mention in the newspaper; we got a paragraph at the bottom.  The entire city officialdom from the mayor downward turned out to review their pageantry; we got a solitary official.

Our seedy run-down school told us that if we had any place at all in the scheme of things it was a separate place, marked off, proscribed and unwanted by the white people.  We were bottled up and labeled and set aside – sent to the Jim Crow car, the back of the bus, the side door of the theater, the side window of a restaurant.  We came to know that whatever we had was always inferior.  We came to understand that no matter how neat and clean, how law abiding, submissive and polite, how studious in school, how church-going and moral, how scrupulous in paying our bills and taxes we were, it made no essential difference in our place.

It seemed that there were only two kinds of people in the world – They and We – White and Colored.  The world revolved on color . . .

The MLK Week and Black History Month Planning Team:

Roy Finkenbine, Ph.D., Professor of History and Director of the Black Abolitionist Archive
Lanae Gill, Director, Residence Life
Fr. J. Timothy Hipskind, SJ, Director of Service-Learning, Institute for Leadership and Service
Adam Hollmann, Assistant Director, Student Life Programming
Anita Klueg, Director, University Ministry
Drew Peters, Assistant Director, Student Life Office
Dorothy Stewart, Associate Dean of Students
Monica Williams, Dean of Students
Alex Zamalin, Ph.D., Director of African American Studies
Invited Guests:  Jillian Stewart, Campus Kitchens Manager; Rafael Cruz-Serrano, Professional Mentor I, King-Chavez-Parks (KCP); and Janice Strickland, Professional Mentor II, King-Chavez-Parks (KCP)

pre-note:

I am honored that the “Work Day/Hard Time”  Poetry list can host the Martin Luther King Week/Black History Month Planning as a guest team this week.   Immediately below you will find Professor Roy Finkenbine’s explanation and of this Monday — Wednesday publication.   The Team designed both posts to build on and call attention to the university’s library traveling exhibit based on the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia  (Ferris State University).

To Roy and your fellow Planning Team members  —  thank you for placing this language on the Work Day Post this week.    Look on Wednesday for the companion post, “Jim Crow Signs”.  

Have a blest day.

john sj

Introduction

The Martin Luther King Week/Black History Month Planning Team is providing guest reflections on January 16 and 18.  Consisting of faculty and staff from relevant areas of the University, including Campus Ministry and Student Life, we plan a variety of thought-provoking events, dialogues, and service opportunities each year related to these commemorations.

Our theme for these reflections is “Signs” and builds on the exhibit “THEM: Images of Separation,” which will be displayed January 17-24 on the first floor of the McNichols Library during library hours.  It is a traveling exhibit from the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University (http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/) and includes contemporary and historic images (including actual signs) that demean a variety of groups.  It isn’t meant to offend, but to promote awareness, civil dialogue, reflection, and learning.

Monday January 16  – “Signs”

Signs are everywhere.  Some inform and direct us.  Others – both literal and metaphorical signs– divide us.  “THEM: Images of Separation,” an exhibit at the McNichols Library, takes me back to the song “Signs,” which the Five Man Electrical Band, a Canadian group, took to number 3 on the Billboard charts in 1971.

The song came out right about the time my brother showed up for a summer internship with long flowing blonde hair and was immediately sent packing.  The first stanza spoke to us.

What signs divide us today?

Roy E. Finkenbine and the Martin Luther King Week/Black History Month Planning Team

Today’s post:  Five Man Electrical Band

And the sign said “Long-haired freaky people need not apply”
So I tucked my hair up under my hat and I went in to ask him why
He said “You look like a fine upstanding young man, I think you’ll do”
So I took off my hat, I said “Imagine that. Huh! Me workin’ for you!”
Whoa-oh-oh

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign
Blockin’ out the scenery, breakin’ my mind
Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign?

And the sign said anybody caught trespassin’ would be shot on sight
So I jumped on the fence and-a yelled at the house, “Hey! What gives you the right?”
“To put up a fence to keep me out or to keep mother nature in”
“If God was here he’d tell you to your face, Man, you’re some kinda sinner”

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign
Blockin’ out the scenery, breakin’ my mind
Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign?

Now, hey you, mister, can’t you read?
You’ve got to have a shirt and tie to get a seat
You can’t even watch, no you can’t eat
You ain’t supposed to be here
The sign said you got to have a membership card to get inside
Ugh!

And the sign said, “Everybody welcome. Come in, kneel down and pray”
But when they passed around the plate at the end of it all, I didn’t have a penny to pay
So I got me a pen and a paper and I made up my own little sign
I said, “Thank you, Lord, for thinkin’ ’bout me. I’m alive and doin’ fine.”
Wooo!

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign
Blockin’ out the scenery, breakin’ my mind
Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign?

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign
Sign
Sign, sign

Thursday,  January 12   –
“I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,”

“Stock”   –  August 27, 1949 – January 12, 2016

Someone, last January, introduced me to today’s  Mary Oliver poem, “When Death Comes.”   Her language engaged the shock of his dying, when many of Stock’s soul friends had been confident that he was growing through his bone marrow transplant back into the trim and vital man we knew.   Within our shock there also lived the intimate grace of Stock’s way of living;  Mary Oliver’s words gets that too.   I find graceful remembering and tender affection more accessible this one year since the shock hit in January 2016.    Mary Oliver’s expression “each body a lion of courage” helps me find my way to Gerry today.   That, and the poem’s last line ‘’I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”  Stock,  I miss your face, and your voice, your eyes, your puns; you were not a visitor in this world, you were a presence.

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

love,

john sj

Today’s Post  –  “When Death Comes”

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say:  all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Mary Oliver   New and Selected Poems, Vol.1

Monday January 9 -“Drunk with the joy of singing”

What poem might speak to the courage and hope and anxiety that stirs a university campus at the dawn of Term 2 —  —  after the holy day intimacies, visiting,  eating and drinking that waken deeper than usual places of hearts and memories?   Rabindranath Tagore’s Poem # 2 in Gitanjali can remind readers that the challenges of starting a fresh season of learning are not limited to anxiety and the sticker shock of reading all the term’s syllabi at once,  15 weeks of work, for every class, yikes!

Tagore’s Poem # 2 exults in beginnings and finding one’s voice.   Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses for breathing a little in the spaces around the words.

Have a blest first week.

john st sj

Today’s post:  Rabindranath Tagore

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.

Tagore  Gitanjali  # 2

mcnichols campus after snow, december 13, 2010

Friday, January 6

On November 21, Monday of Thanksgiving Week, I published the poet Ray Carver for the first time,  a new voice for me.  That morning I introduced the post thus:   “I found a new poet for the occasion.  Ray Carver (1838-1988), never met him before.  Reading “Happiness”  on a morning like this helps me breathe.  You too, I hope.   I want to get to know him some more.”

Over the break, one of our readers sent me another.  This one,  “Late Fragment,” makes me want to get to know him some more again; maybe that’s a good definition of the expression, “ . . .  get to know him some more”:  the early stages of friendship begun from his place in the grave to “Work Day/Hard Time” readers alive in the world now.

Have a blest weekend.

john st sj

Today’s Post  “Late Fragment”

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.

And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

p.s.

citing part of a wikipedia biographical sketch can be a risky business and gave me pause just now.  This account, titled “Decline of first marriage” is written with grace and spare prose, offering readers a story of loss and love and loss that frames today’s short poem.  So here it is.

Decline of First Marriage”

The following excerpt from Scott Driscoll’s review^[9] of Maryann Burk Carver’s 2006 memoir^[10] describes the decline of Maryann and Raymond’s marriage.

The fall began with Ray’s trip to Missoula, Mont., in ’72 to fish with friend and literary helpmate Bill Kittredge. That summer Ray fell in love with Diane Cecily, an editor at the University of Montana, whom he met at Kittredge’s birthday party. “That’s when the serious drinking began. It broke my heart and hurt the children. It changed everything.”

“By fall of ’74”, writes Carver, “he was more dead than alive. I had to drop out of the Ph.D. program so I could get him cleaned up and drive him to his classes”. Over the next several years, Maryann’s husband physically abused her. Friends urged her to leave Raymond.

“But I couldn’t. I really wanted to hang in there for the long haul. I thought I could outlast the drinking. I’d do anything it took. I loved Ray, first, last and always.”

Carver describes, without a trace of rancor, what finally put her over the edge. In the fall of ’78, with a new teaching position at the University of Texas at El Paso, Ray started seeing Tess Gallagher, a writer from Port Angeles, who would become his muse and wife near the end of his life. “It was like a contretemps. He tried to call me to talk about where we were. I missed the calls. He knew he was about to invite Tess to Thanksgiving.” So he wrote a letter instead.

“I thought, I’ve gone through all those years fighting to keep it all balanced. Here it was, coming at me again, the same thing. I had to get on with my own life. But I never fell out of love with him.”

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

Wednesday, January 4  – “just average changes”

Our campus is gradually waking into 2017;  staff and faculty arrived yesterday, classes on the main campus begin next Monday.  One year ago today, I posted this poem, sent by Mary Ann Buckley, a soul friend of 40 years.  She wrote me on December 31, 2015 to introduce this understated poem written by “a young Afro-American man in prison.”     Here’s her cover note.   “Hi, John, thanks for the poems. Here’s one by a young Afro-American man in prison — from a web-site connected with an organization that teaches literacy to prisoners. I met the director of the organization in November when she was among those honored by the Library of Congress for their work to promote literacy. I was there because our school in the Dominican Republic was also honored, and it turned out that her mother was taught by our sisters [i.e., Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus]. She’s started sending me her blog which includes some poetry by the prisoners she helps.”

Read outloud, each line works best with a pause.  Short lines, short pauses create a cadence, which is the poet’s intent I think.

Happy New Year,  this Wednesday of our first work week on 6 Mile Road.

john sj

Today’s Post —  “Changing Ways”

No New Year’s resolution for me
No crying decree
No promises, just average changes
Less time stressing

More time working out
Less time talking
More time learning

Not so many haters
A few more friends
Not so much sadness
A little more happiness

Less weakness
More strength
Less Sleeping
More thinking

Change after all…is good
Change after all
Is all I know

By VB,  September 1, 2015

In  http://freemindsbookclub.org/changing-ways

December 24, 2016

This photo was taken, probably by my Dad, in 1946.  Dr. Redeman, a family friend, was Santa. He visited the homes of parents with children on Christmas Eve in our small town. Three of us four children sit in little chairs, adults behind us, waiting for Santa’s silver chimes outside our front door. Midge, the baby, sits on Mom’s lap on the left. Santa came in and took his black book out of its pouch. He read to us from the gospel of Luke and talked with us about the coming of Jesus into the world. The photo captures our stillness. our attention fixed on this mysterious person. How did Dr. Redemon move us to stillness? Perhaps by the depth of his voice, and its cadence; perhaps by the way he moved, a solemn dancer, with no sign of hurry as he and his Eskimo partner took presents out of large cloth bags, read our names, and placed each one under the tree.

Whoever took the picture captured my attention. The lighting takes me first to Santa’s face and beard and to his hand raised in a good-bye blessing; his poise, mid gesture, makes the entire photo hold its breath. The children show how focused we felt that night, absorbed with wonder. Dr. R taught us that sacred mystery is story telling with no hint of hurrying. All my life since, the pace of my life helps me recognize when I have found the grace to pay attention and not to interrupt.

All of us are better when our life’s pace makes us as still as the children in this 1946 photo. Writing about a moment from childhood makes me grateful for the “Work Day/Hard Times” poetry list. When I write, imagining all of you who read fills me with gratitude and wonder.

love,

john st sj

N.B., two addenda to this longer than usual Christmas Eve post

Addendum One, Lori Glenn: 

In response to yesterday’s “O Emmanuel’ post,  Lori Glenn, a member of our McAuley School of Nursing faculty, wrote me.  That’s not unusual; in the 3.4 years since the Work Day/Hard Time list began, we’ve received 2207 comments, some brief (e.g. ‘great poem today’) some longer.  Lori’s is a little longer.  She wrote last night from a hospital in Flint MI where, in her other health-care job,’ she wove her reading of yesterday’s post with keeping watch, as a nurse midwife, with mothers giving birth in Flint, MI.

I asked her if I could include her email in today’s Christmas Eve post.   She said yes.

Lori, I am proud to work in the same university with you.

From Lori Glenn to the Work Day list, Friday, December 23, from a Flint hospital delivery room.

John,

At times we are sent messages from God that support our work and enhance our appreciation of it.  In addition to teaching nursing, I also am a nurse midwife in the troubled city of Flint.  As I sit and read the first poem, I am awaiting the arrival of the baby boy at the hospital.  This beautiful poem speaks of fresh life, being eternally new, breathing, touch, and hands–perfectly relevant for my work today.  I am work at the hospital that is at the forefront of the lead contamination crisis and witness the tremendous stress this has put on Flint’s people. Yet there is perseverance of these people and the kindness of strangers responding to their need that gives me hope.

For today, I am able to put aside all the stress and worry about the water crisis, the political state of the world, and my own Christmas, and replace it with the anticipation of the purest joy of all — a baby’s birth.  How fitting this poem is for me on this fine day. Thanks for the inspiration!

Merry Christmas!

Lori Glenn DNPc MS RN CNM
Assistant Professor
University of Detroit Mercy
McAuley School of Nursing

Addendum Two:

It turns out my home-town paper ran a short article, by Larry Ebsch, this year about Dr.  Redeman, seen above in the 1943 photo.  Here are couple quotes:

“While all Santa’s are special, Dr. Redeman, a dentist, was the star Santa of his era who was honored by the community  with a special tribute in 1952 with a party attended by 210 people at Riverside Country Club.  . . .  His love affair with the Christmas season began in the Northern Marinette County community of Amberg while visi†ing children of relatives and friends in his Santa Claus suit.  He expanded his performance in 1937 with visits to 41 families dressed in a special fur trimmed costume. . .  announcing his coming by ringing bells . . . the colorful yard decorations attracted national attention during the Great Depression years of the 1930’s.

Tuesday, December 23  —   “my little heart loses its limits in joy”

Advent ends today: three plus weeks of prophecy daring us to see the world, realistically,  as  beautiful and beloved.   That dare can shake us when Advent’s antiphons compete with frightened and angry language as they surely do this election year.   Let’s match the 7th O Antiphon from a thousand years ago with the first prayer-poem in Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali,  a song of praise from the first decades of the 20th century.    Please consider them both as an offering to each of this list’s c. 2200 readers   Best to read out loud with some pauses.

Blessings during these holy days.   One more post tomorrow on what Christians call “Christmas Eve.”

john sj

p.s.       Tagore died in the city of his birth, Calcutta, in 1941.  He vastly influenced poetry, sacred and secular, not only in India but around the world.  He is the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.  If you buy Gitanjali, a book of 100 short sacred poems, prepare yourself to only read one poem at a time so you can sit with it.  Here is # 1.   These poems have no titles, only numbers.

Today’s post –  Gitanjali # 1

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.

The 7th O Antiphon,  “O Emmanuel”

O Emmanuel!  ruler  and giver of our laws,
Hope of the people from across the whole world,
Come to save us
O Lord our God.

To listen to the Antiphon sung in Gregorian Chant

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWGM9bJR2Cs

Thursday  December 22  “I have found you in the story again”

Joy Harjo has written a new book this fall, “Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.”   A young friend — living in immediate grief when one of his soul friends died suddenly, age 24, while out running — he,  one of a close group of young friends living this same loss  —  pointed me toward this new poem from one of my oldest soul friends.  “Fall Song,” is a new song alongside “O Antiphon 6:  O Rex Gentium,” one of the oldest writings that have appeared in the Work Day/Hard Time poetry list.  Joy Harjo and the anonymous medieval artist both touch vulnerable contact points that require tenderness to work their mysteries in a demanding world.

Best to read both poems out loud, with pauses.   Blessings this 22nd of December, the day when, in our northern hemisphere, daylight begins to tip a little bit longer after touching its deepest darkness yesterday.

Today’s Post –  Joy Harjo, “Fall Song”

It is a dark fall day.
The earth is slightly damp with rain.
I hear a jay.
The cry is blue.
I have found you in the story again.
Is there another word for ‘‘divine’’?
I need a song that will keep sky open in my mind.
If I think behind me, I might break.
If I think forward, I lose now.
Forever will be a day like this
Strung perfectly on the necklace of days.
Slightly overcast
Yellow leaves
Your jacket hanging in the hallway
Next to mine.

poem by Joy Harjo – Nov 13, 2015
The New York Times Magazine

Have a blest day, the first day a little longer and the sun a little higher in the sky for us who live in the northern hemisphere.

john sj

Antiphon #6   “O Rex Gentium”

O Leader of many peoples,
O Leader desired by many peoples
O Corner Stone who holds such different peoples together
Come and save us human beings whom you formed out of the earth’s clay.

To listen to the Antiphon sung in Gregorian Chant

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwDdEQCtIF4