Poetry Blog: "A Work Day in Hard Times"

Wednesday, December 21  –  O Oriens”

At Detroit’s latitude we will have 9 hours and 3 minutes of daylight, 14 hours and 57 minutes of night time. Our shortest day. Today’s O Antiphon, “O Oriens” (“O Rising Sun”) tells us that the long-ago writers of these sung-blessings for Advent’s last days lived in the northern hemisphere. Deeper & deeper into the days of diminishing light they sing to human longing for liberation and dawn. Tomorrow the day will be 3 minutes longer (I think that’s accurate), the dawn of the majestic march of sunrise back from it’s southern-most point of Oriens.

“O Dayspring
splendour of light and sun of justice:
Come and bring light to those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death.”
These days are full of tenderness, of giving and hospitality, of forgiving old wounds, of allowing someone to forgive and welcome me when our connection had been wounded. Days, too, of longing for the healing of the world’s wounds, days of taking our places in the fatigue and longings of the whole human family.
Daring days of courage. “O Oriens” is quite a prayer.
Have a good day,

john sj

Dec 21 – 5th Antiphon O Oriens – O Dayspring

Today’s Post: “O Dayspring”
To listen to the Antiphon sung in Gregorian Chant

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAUzuw1l-7U

Tuesday December 20

This morning I’ll be driving down the Ohio Turnpike to the working class suburb of Pittsburgh, Baden.  Spending some of the days deepest into Advent hanging out with 5 or 6 Sisters of St. Joseph of Baden, soul friends of 40+ years.  We will tell each other stories of the year  as it winds down towards the Christian Christmas feast,  some of them playful, some tender, some burdened with grief or anger: storytelling as prayer and kinship: seasonal grace as 2016 turns toward 2017.  It’s only a short visit;  I’ll savor Ohio’s northern turnpike again on Thursday when I head back to Motown and our campus.

Have a blest day, the last before Winter Solstice with its graceful turning in the dimmest light of the year.

john sj

O Antiphon #4   O Clavis David – O Key of David

“O Key of David,
and scepter of the house of Israel,
you open and no one closes,
you close and no one opens

Come and lead us who sit bound with chains in the prison house,
sitting in darkness and the shadow of death.”

To listen to the Antiphon sung in Gregorian Chant

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

Monday December 19

Today’s Antiphon, “O Root of Jesse,” grew out of two Biblical texts recounting the geneology of Jesus (Luke 3:23 and Matthew 1:1)  Both versions locate the new born baby as Jesus, a human being, more than as The Christ, the Divine Lord of the all reality.  The human Jesus had ancestors who were heroes and ancestors who were criminals  (just like the long stories of ancestors for each reader of this post).  That, I take it, is the teaching embedded in the visual depictions of the “Jesse Tree.”  When teaching courses in the history of U.S. technological practice, I sometimes began a semeser inviting students to write one story about one of their ancestors.  I’ve forgotten which student wrote about a long-ago great (great-great?) grandmother who lived with her husband on the then mostly unsettled shore of Big Bay de Noc at the northern edge of Lake Michigan.  He had a habit, it was said, of taking his boat out on Big Bay in the night to visit and have sex with another woman.   The student’s grandmother, one dark night, turned off all the lights so that her unfaithful husband got lost in the dark and, if I remember the story accurately, drowned.

Ancestries, if one traces back far enough, carry the nobility and the venality of human beings.  So too with the tree of Jesse announced in Luke and Matthew to locate the new born Jesus deep within the human condition.

a note from Wikipedia for more background

Depictions of the Jesse Tree are based on a passage from the Book of Isaiah.

“And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots” (King James Version).

In the New Testament the lineage of Jesus is traced by two of the Gospel writers, Matthew in descending order, and Luke in ascending order. Luke’s Gospel’s description in chapter 3 begins with Jesus himself and is traced all the way back, via Nathan to David and then on to “Adam, which was [the son] of God.”. (Luke 3:23-38) Matthew’s Gospel opens with the words: “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” (Matthew 1:1) With this beginning, Matthew shows the Abrahamic and royal descent, passing through David, but then through Solomon

Our university begins its last work week before the Christmas break and the turning of the year.

Have a blest day.

john sj

O Antiphon #3   O Radix Jesse – O Root of Jesse

A 17th-century oak carving of the Tree of Jesse
from St Andrews Castle, Royal Scottish Museum

“O Root of Jesse’s,
Who stands as sign to the peoples
in whose presence rulers close their mouths
to whom the Gentiles send their prayers
come to set us free, hurry.”

Today’s Post:  “O Root of Jesse”

To listen to the Antiphon sung in Gregorian Chant

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8Z3nwkExUQ

Sunday, December 18  –  “to ease attention off when overtight”

We are 4 days out from the winter solstice, the shortest day, the sun rising as far south as it gets before turning round to begin its 6 months march of sun rises across the eastern horizon to the summer solstice, the longest day.   But that’s for the future.  Now is a season to treat the dim light of long nights with respect.   Robert Frost writes about dim light as an essential need.  Here is his poem, posted to celebrate this time in our year, and this specific day when many of us at the university treat our students to our care about the quality of their intellectual achievements, grading papers time.    {Note:  when Frost writes “more divine than any bulb or arc” he refers to arc lights and light bulbs.  Arc lights were the first economically feasible source of electrical power based artificial light.  Immensely bright, they hurt your eyes to look at and so were hard to manage.  Hard to breathe around them too, they gave off what people often called “noxious fumes.”  Back in 1875, though, people thought of them as the march of progress.   R Frost had another idea, as poets often do.}

Have a great weekend.

john sj

Today’s Post:   Robert Frost “The Literate Farmers and the Planet Venus”

Here come the stars to character the skies,
And they in the estimation of the wise
Are more divine than any bulb or arc,
Because their purpose is to flash and spark,
But not to take away the precious dark.
We need the interruption of the night
To ease attention off when overtight,
To break our logic in too long a flight,
And ask us if our premises are right

O Antiphon # 2  – “O Adonai”

“O Lord above and ruler of the house of Israel,
who appeared to Moses in the flaming bush,
who gave the Law to him on Mt Sinai
Come and save us with your strong arm’s reach.

Today’s Post:  “O Adonai”

To listen to the Antiphon sung in Gregorian Chant
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvafrxZ_Ww4

Robert Frost 1874-1963

Saturday, December 17

Campuses are quiet, winter chilly, and slushy.  Last final exams went down this morning.  We are beginning to button up for the heart and soul of Advent,  then the feast of Jesus’ birth, then the New Year until it’s time to stir the many fires of this place of teaching and research and learning.   But today is the 17th day of Advent, which also means the 1st of the seven days when the ancient and beautiful  “O Antiphons” create a context of stillness and wonder.

Advent hope, as D H Lawrence suggests, wants to stir our imaginations and our courage to wait for amazing grace[s].  That was on my mind 2 Decembers ago when I wrote these thoughts about the early returns of an astonishing breakthrough success of Detroit’s bankruptcy.  Now 2 years later, city investments turn up 3-5 times a week.  Still lots to do,  still sufferings, but  across the nation .

The notes from 2014?  are they a poem?  Not exactly.  But worth reading and remembering before you turn to the Lawrence poem and the Antiphon for the   day,  “O Wisdom.”

early evening, have a blest night.  Tomorrow “O Adonai”

john sj

About December 17, 2014

“Late December two years ago the Detroit bankruptcy had matured into grinding uncertainties;  surely for the c. 32,000 Detroit citizens whose futures looked harrowing — would their pensions, the magnitude of their underfunded status becoming obvious by then, be chopped down to $0.75 on the dollar?  Surely for the Detroit Institute of Arts — would their world class collection of treasures be gutted by hungry creditors?  Surely for the city — would Detroit lose any shot at a turn toward fiscal integrity if the bankruptcy went sour — any shot at rebuilding its bus system, its computer system, its water system, its neighborhoods, because the creditor process stripped the city clean until it resembled a carcass instead of a vital place in which people love to live?

I noticed in yesterday’s Crain’s Detroit Business (Dec 16, 2014), an article observing that Bankruptcy Judge Stephen Rhodes and, doubtless, Mediation Judge Gerald Rosen, had jawboned down the city’s legal bills from the most complex city bankruptcy in US history and freed up another $25 million that could go to pressing needs — like buses or computer systems or the neighborhoods, to go with the $1.7 billion fund already set aside as part of the Grand Bargain for those same rebuilding purposes.  No mistake about it,  Detroit still packs wounds and has a long list of rebuilding projects —>  but they are projects, which, like the rebuilding of Livernois just outside our McNichols Campus, are starting points with believable futures.  Last year’s knocking on our doors in the night of fiscal threat begin to look like D.H. Lawrence’s three strange angels.  It is a very Advent emotion to risk some rejoicing of a future reborn in a still demanding world.

Yes, gun-wielding violent people can still slaughter innocent children in place after place, country after country, just as some Taliban tried to murder Malala, Nobel Laureate champion of girls who risk their lives to attend school.   Yes, Detroit’s neighborhoods require daily courage to build on a miracle of cross-race and cross-politics mutual risk-taking through all this year of 2014.  Like the birth of every child, the birth of hope emerges into the world bloody and exhausted . . .  but pulsing with life.”

Have a blest day,

john sj

p.s. So the O Antiphons sing to us.   I hope you enjoy them each day until Christmas Eve and recognize as you listen to their centuries-old Gregorian Chant that millions of women and men and children have listened before us.

Thursday December 17  — “It is the 3 strange angels . . . ”

D. H. Lawrence, of Lady Chatterley fame, wrote poetry as well.

Here is an Advent prayer if there ever was one.

“What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody who wants to do us harm.
No, no, it is the three strange angels. Admit them, admit them.”

Today’s Post  December 17  — “O Sapientia”  

“O wisdom, coming forth from the Most High, filling all creation and reigning to the ends of the earth; come and teach us the way of truth.”

“O Sapientia,  quae ex ore Altissimi prodiisti, attingens a fine usque ad finem fortiter,suaviterque disponens omnia: veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae.’

To listen to the Antiphon sung in Gregorian Chant

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6zaiZxJIpU

Friday, December 14  –   “I am going to smuggle some more of your laughter into this poem”

Today has a feeling of wrapping things up for this academic term — even though academic work remains in many parts of the university for next week.  When undergrads finish exams, most of our younger citizens of Detroit Mercy pack and head out to Christmas break.  More and more faculty finish all of their grading labors and begin to taste the fresh air of break time.  And, for someone who has loved the great seven O Antiphons (December 17-24) this is opens thrilling place in the year’s seasons.

It’s a good moment to post  Dr. Fatemeh Keshavarz’s “O Highly Praised One” (i.e., “English translation of “Mohammad”).  Playful jokes at the heart of the sacred.  Posting it on Friday, the Day of Prayer in Islam, respects the poem’s form, a contemplative prayer of praise.   Placing it at the head of the seven “O Antiphons” celebrates this university’s Catholic roots as well as our place in Detroit where the wide world’s faith traditions live together.

“O Antiphons” begin tomorrow and end on Christmas eve.  No promises about when the next post will appear, but last year the next poem was posted on New Years eve day.   Have a blest break, filled with surprises and new depths of affection.

john sj

Today’s Post:  O Highly Praised One! 

My poems are silent about you, o highly praised one!
Where I live
You are exiled to impossible conversations walled up inside sound bites
And among not so funny cartoon figures that smell of ominous things
There
Divested of your famous smile, soft clean hands, and rose-scented perfume
You order your dim-witted followers
To hide bombs inside the folds of an oversized turban that history does not remember you to have worn … ever

History says you had curly black hair resting playfully on your shoulders
Gentle but penetrating eyes
An upright figure
A firm – but not haughty – voice
And a somewhat reserved – even bashful- personality
I was not surprised to read about your habit of sitting with your legs folded under and saying “I am not a proud king.”

No one had bothered to tell me that you recommended kind words to be the best type of alms for Muslims to give.

I never thought collections of your sayings would have funny anecdotes like when you said to this man who prayed too loud “Do not hurt your throat my son, the all mighty is not deaf.”
Then you added wisdom to laughter
“He lives in you … and knows how you live your life.”

Few biographers speak of your humor
They figure blood, blind anger, and other heart wrenching things go better with the war on terror
But I am going to smuggle some more of your laughter into this poem anyway:
One day, a dying woman asked you “Would a sick old retch like me be allowed into paradise?” “No” you answered with a straight face “you will be young and healthy by the time you get there.”

We need your humor, O highly praised One!
We need it now more than ever
Teach me how to smile
As I tear the veil of despair to reach your figure obscured
By that of Ben Laden and other “Abu”s and “Ibn”s
Obscured by the yellow mushroom clouds manufactured with anxiety and ignorance,
layer upon layer of not knowing and not wanting to know

Teach me to take in and cherish every glimmer of hope
The rays of tranquility that emanate from the perfect diction of peace be upon you!
Teach me to be that peace

Let me dream about flaunting my friendship with you
The way grandma publicized the perfection of your arched eyebrows which she saw in a dream so long ago she could not remember when

In her dream, you stood upon a hill far and near – and luminous with daylight
She stepped close
And closer to the foot of the hill and fragrance in the air overwhelmed her senses
From that point on she remembered little
Except the perfection of your bright face and arched eyebrows
Which echoed in the soft tremor in her voice
As she whispered under her breath:
Peace
Be
Upon
Him

Dr. Fatemeh Keshavarz

(https://sites.udmercy.edu/poetry/2014/09/12/sept-12-this-years-poet-at-celebrate-spirit-fatemeh-keshavarz/).

A poet and scholar, she holds The University of Maryland’s Roshan Chair Persian Studies

Thursday, December 15

Yesterday was busy with lots of valuable things,  didn’t make it to the day’s post.

Here.  One of my deepest poetry loves.  Read it out loud.   More tomorrow.

john sj

Yesterday’s post  Denise Levertov, from “Conversations in Moscow”

And the poet–it’s midnight, the room is half empty, soon we must part–
the poet, his presence
ursine and kind, shifting his weight in a chair too small for him,
quietly says, and shyly:
“The Poet
never must lose despair.”
Then our eyes indeed
meet and hold,
All of us know, smiling
in common knowledge–
even the palest spirit among us, burdened
as he is with weight of abstractions–
all of us know he means

we mustn’t, any of us, lose touch with the source,
pretend it’s not there, cover over
the mineshaft of passion
despair somberly tolls its bell
from the depths of,
and wildest joy
sings out of too,
flashing
the scales of its laughing, improbable music,
grief and delight entwined in the dark down there.

from  Freeing of the Dust

Denise Levertov
b. October 1923  d. December 1997

Monday, December 12   “Stories of beauty, fatigue, and doubt”

No post last Friday, I was hanging out with my sister Midge in Carson  City, NV, including time along the north eastern shore of Lake Tahoe.   Wiki tells me:  “Lake Tahoe (/ˈtɑːhoʊ/) is a large freshwater lake in the Sierra Nevada of the United States. At a surface elevation of 6,225 ft (1,897 m), it straddles the border between California and Nevada, west of Carson City. Lake Tahoe is the largest alpine lake in North America.^[3] Its depth is 1,645 ft (501 m), making it the second deepest in the United States after Crater Lake (1,945 ft (593 m)).^[1]Additionally, Lake Tahoe is the sixth largest lake by volume in the United States at 122,160,280 acre·ft (150,682,490 dam³), behind the five Great Lakes.”

Our first notable snow storm welcomed me back to Motown last evening and gave the university a lovely 10:00 am start, time to plow parking lots.  The snow reminded me of Jane Kenyon’s taut, crisp poem about the coming of winter as people around here re-learn winter skills for driving and walking and for tasting the  beauty of gradually dimming light.  The further north you live, the steeper the decline of light as the sun’s angle casts longer shadows over shorter patches of daylight. What we call Winter around here is as much about the thinning of the light as it is about ice and cold. As I walk around campus running M&I errands these days of December, I hear stories of courage and kindness along with  fatigue and doubt.     Perhaps that’s why the Christian Advent poetry brings captivity and fear close to hope and promise.   Several Swedish friends who live a little further north than I do, have designed their homes with small pools of bright light within dim spaces.  Learning from them, I try some of the same where I live.  Maybe the jagged self-doubt today’s poet finds while watching the last frozen apple fall into an early snow bank is part of what helps us recognize some necessary balance:

if no doubt, no new discovery;
if no fatigue, no joy,
if no discouragement, no place where soul friends can love us.

Thomas Merton wrote once, perhaps in the teeth of our doubts:
“There is no way of telling strangers they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

Have a blest Monday,

john sj

Today’s Post:  Jane Kenyon: “Apple Dropping Into Deep Early Snow”
Posted by Phyllis Cole-Dai on Nov 24, 2014 12:00 am

A jay settled on a branch, making it sway.
The one shrivelled fruit that remained
gave way to the deepening drift below.
I happened to see it the moment it fell.

Dusk is eager and comes early. A car
creeps over the hill. Still in the dark I try
to tell if I am numbered with the damned,
who cry, outraged, Lord, when did we see you?

“Apple Dropping Into Deep Early Snow” by Jane Kenyon, from American Poetry Review (online edition, March/April 1985).
Art credit: “Apple in the Snow,” photograph by Roger Lynn.

Wednesday  December 7

It’s late tonight and tomorrow am I’ll be prepping for one of Mission & Identity’s half day retreats.  This time there will be 8 recently hired people + 1 trustee.

Before heading to bed I fished from last November-December’s Advent posts and found Nov 30, 2015’s note on Dom Helder Camera, a saint in my book and worth a re-read.  Yes, it is also the anniversary of Pearl Harbor.   And no, the spectacular snow on the courtyard cloister walk roof did not fall overnight.  Last year, though,  it looked like the picture below my signature.  Sigh.  When will we get 10-15 inches?

Best to read Dom Helder’s saying out loud.

Have a blest mid-week day,

john sj

Monday,  December 5 –  “imagine grief as the
outbreath of beauty”

November 29 was the anniversary of Bill Pauly’s sudden death at 59, 2006, of a heart attack.  That year Bill played inside a lovely sabbatical after years of demanding pastoring on the Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation in western South Dakota.  Before Pine Ridge Bill had been pastor in a South Milwaukee Hispanic parish.  Bill is a soul friend and I miss him at especially at this time.   He loved beauty, and hospitality, and play, and sacred stillness.   Partly because of the date he died and partly because of the way he lived, Bill stays in my memory and imagination as an Advent figure.  He did not fear grief or fatigue.  Bill also introduced me to the poet Mary Oliver.  There’s a lot of him in today’s post, “Wage Peace,” and a lot of Advent too.  Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses.

Have a blest weekend when the weather looks to be teasing winter from a safe distance.

john sj

Today’s Post – Mary Oliver – “Wage Peace” 

Wage peace with your breath.
Breathe in firemen and rubble,
breathe out whole buildings and flocks of red wing blackbirds.
Breathe in terrorists and breathe out sleeping children
and fresh mown fields.
Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.
Breathe in the fallen and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.
Wage peace with your listening: hearing sirens, pray loud.
Remember your tools: flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.
Make soup.
Play music, learn the word for thank you in three languages.
Learn to knit, and make a hat.
Think of chaos as dancing raspberries,
imagine grief as the outbreath of beauty or the gesture of fish.
Swim for the other side.
Wage peace.
Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious.
Have a cup of tea and rejoice.
Act as if armistice has already arrived.
Don’t wait another minute.

Advent Creche

Advent Angel, Hummel;  Lakota medicine pouch, Don Montileaux;  Celtic cross, Waterford