Poetry Blog: "A Work Day in Hard Times"

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

We are 4 days out from the winter solstice (http://www.calendarpedia.com/when-is/winter-solstice.html).   But that’s for the future.  Now, deep into December,  is a time to treat long nights with respect (today: sunrise 7:56 am – sunset 5:01 pm).   Robert Frost writes about dim light more as an essential need than a grinding burden. When he calls the interruption of the night “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 because 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.  The O Antiphon sings of Adonai as Lord and Leader appearing in the fire of the burning bush of Moses in the Sinai.

Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses.   Today’s early winter sky dawns with hints of sunshine, a medley of gusty winds and traces of cloud.  When the winter night’s dance arrives,  may its precious dark anoint you.

john sj

p.s. friends in Massachusetts told me stories, last night, of beautiful, dense blizzards outside their house.

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.

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

                               
                              Robert Frost 1874-1963

Advent folds toward Christmas with O Antiphon 1: “O Sapientia” the first day
Monday December 17  — “It is the 3 strange angels . . . ”

The “O Antiphons” are one of the few song-sets from the seven monastic liturgical hours.  Their poetry and song bring Advent wisdom to bear on this  season of fear and meanness and dawning joy.   They remind us that our hard times come to us as only part of a vast historical fabric, that hope runs deeper by far than the weariness of ourselves and of the women and men among whom we live.  When I follow the news and bring my 2020 awareness into the antiphons, they help me walk the world a little taller and with attentive sensual awareness.

May these prayers do something like that for you too.  D. H. Lawrence, of Lady Chatterley fame, wrote poetry as well.  Here is an Advent prayer if there ever was one.   Blessings for each of the coming seven “O antiphon” days.

john sj

Today’s Post  “the three strange angels”

“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.”

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

Sometimes joy after grief awakens slowly,
filled with stillness and soft footsteps.
Sometimes joy after grief runs so hard
it messes your hair and makes you giddy.

This winter morning teases us here on The McNichols Campus, snow so light you can hardly know it’s there outside our windows.   Lots of strong Final Exam Essays (the exam question:  “Tell me a good story and tell me why you call your story GOOD.”)   Students reveal their courage when they sift their memories and listen to what their memories tell them.

Have a blest Wednesday,

john sj

Today’s Post:  The Manoeuvre

I saw the two starlings
coming in toward the wires
But at the last,
just before alighting, they

turned in the air together
and landed backwards!

that’s what got me —
to face into the wind’s teeth.

William Carlos Williams
September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Carlos_Williams

December 10, 2020

A birthday note from my Dad on his son’s (i.e. my) birthday in 2020

“this is where I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love.”

This day, 109 years ago,  my grandmother brought my dad into the world with pain and courage: farm people who lived in the far east of Kansas, close to the Missouri River.  Dad lived long enough that we grew to be friends, to tell each other stories across our generational lines. (E.g.,  On rare occasions someone would bring candy from the store and each kid got their portion. But, one of his sisters told me years later, “Louis would eat his quickly and then go beg some more from the rest of us.”)  When the family moved to central North Dakota,  he learned to swim in the Hart River by holding onto the horse’s tail,  so he told us.  He learned the responsibilities of an oldest boy so that when, in 1921 the family swapped farms with strangers in Wisconsin, sight unseen from a farm journal (!), his mom and dad packed the Model T to overflowing and drove east with the younger kids.  He, the oldest boy, took their small herd of dairy cows on the train, across the prairie, down through central Wisconsin into Chicago where he and the cows changed trains and headed north through Milwaukee and Green Bay to Marinette.  He was 14.  He told me a story thread once, when he’d gotten up before 5:00 so he could drive 2 hours to where I was staying for vacation .  .  . he picked me up at 7:00 when the Jesuits allowed him to pick up his Jesuit man-child for an overnight at home.   On the ride home he observed that he had worked his way through Marquette U law school in the depths of the Great Depression so that he would not have to spend his life getting up in the pre-dawn to tend cows.  And here he was, getting up on farmer hours to pick up his son.

Stories, lots of them to remember decades later in 2016 when stirred by David Whyte’s poem, in conjunction with a birthday 109 years today.  Is it deeper love to listen to a father’s stories or to live one’s own?  Yes.  All around me, on this university campus, in this city, in this hard-times world,  stories live.  At the university we teach precision skills;  we also teach listening and the conviction that everyone’s stories are worth the telling.

Have a blest day this mid-week.

john sj

p.s.  On their first (blind, set up by mutual friends) date, deep in The Depression in the fall of 1933, my mom told us kids that her date’s best shirt had a frayed collar.  “But he kept it clean,” a promising early sign she thought.  Stories.

“THE HOUSE OF BELONGING”

by David Whyte

I awoke
this morning
in the gold light
turning this way
and that

thinking for
a moment
it was one
day
like any other.

But
the veil had gone
from my
darkened heart
and
I thought

it must have been the quiet
candlelight
that filled my room,

it must have been
the first
easy rhythm
with which I breathed
myself to sleep,

it must have been
the prayer I said
speaking to the otherness
of the night.

And
I thought
this is the good day
you could
meet your love,

this is the gray day
someone close
to you could die.

This is the day
you realize
how easily the thread
is broken
between this world
and the next

and I found myself
sitting up
in the quiet pathway
of light,

the tawny
close grained cedar
burning round
me like fire
and all the angels of this housely
heaven ascending
through the first
roof of light
the sun has made.

This is the bright home
in which I live,
this is where
I ask
my friends
to come,
this is where I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love.

This is the temple
of my adult aloneness
and I belong
to that aloneness
as I belong to my life.

There is no house
like the house of belonging.

Dec 4 — e e cummings, “a little church”  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._E._Cummings)
“around me surges a miracle of
birth and glory
and death and resurrection”

A mid-December day:  lots of scrambling these days inside and across our work lives. Here’s one of e.e. cummings’ poems praising the timeless beauty that underlies our generosities, our anxieties, and the demands they make on us.  It could be called an Advent poem, interrupting today’s agenda, inviting attention and stillness.

Have a blest day & a blest weekend,

john sj

Today’s Post: e e cummings

“i am a little church (no great cathedral)”

far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
–i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

my life is the life of the reaper and sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth’s own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying) children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope, and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

i am a little church(far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish) at peace with nature
–i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring, i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)

e. e. cummings
b. October 14, 1894
d. September 3,  1962

December 1, 2020 – Tuesday of Advent Season

“Companion is the one who eats the same bread.”
–Dom Helder Camera

This show stopping photo was not taken this year; weather.com predicts something like a wintry mix — some snow, temps ranging from the mid-thirties to mid-forties so the view outside my window this year doesn’t take my breath away; just an ordinary workday.  This Tuesday, though, takes us a little deeper into Advent – – a season of outrageous promises of hope mostly from Isaiah.  Advent’s prophets are meant to be read out loud, taken seriously, placed in tension with our gloomiest predictions of a mean world’s worst.  Here are some verses from Isaiah 35, the prophecy for late in Advent’s first week.

“The desert and the parched land will be glad;
the wilderness will rejoice and blossom

Then will the eyes of the blind be opened
and the ears of the deaf unstopped.
Then will the lame leap like a deer,
and the mute tongue shout for joy.

Water will gush forth in the wilderness
and streams in the desert.
The burning sand will become a pool,
the thirsty ground bubbling springs.

In the haunts where jackals once lay,
grass and reeds and papyrus will grow.
Gladness and joy will overtake them,
and sorrow and sighing will flee away.”

The pic at the beginning of the post was taken some years ago early in Advent’s second week – – Sometimes Detroit is gloomy; sometimes exquisite.  For more than 4 million people, metro Detroit is home no matter its weather.

Advent reminds me of one of the great saints in my life.  Here’s an Advent meditation about Dom Helder Camera I wrote some years ago.

Dom Helder Camera February 7, 1909, Fortaleza, Brazil – August 27, 1999.  He was archbishop of Recife and Olinda from 1964 to 1985 during a military dictatorship in Brazil.  He interpreted Catholic teaching with consistent, fierce attention to the violence of systems that sustained brutal poverty.  He made serious enemies.

It is said that some of them hired a hitman to remove him.  Like the professional he was, the hitman stalked Dom Helder for some time, learning his habits, seeking a place and time apt for killing.   In the process, he listened to the Archbishop speak a number of times until, one day, he fell at Dom Helder’s feet, weeping, and begged for the grace to change his life and his profession.

When he walked this earth, Dom Helder’s presence engaged the world’s wounds.  This unblinking attention to the violence of poverty was matched by legendary playfulness.  Here is one story among many, this one I witnessed.  Once Dom Helder was speaking to about 1500 Sisters of St. Joseph who sat on the St. Louis levee overlooking the Mississippi River (by the Arch); in the middle of the talk, a helicopter took off right behind him filled with tourists taking a ride with a bird’s eye view of the river and the city.   It made enough racket that it was impossible to hear what the Dom Helder was saying.  He paused, turned around to the helicopter, and gave the tourists a puckish little wave.  When the helicopter got a little farther out on its trip, he turned back to us.

Here is one of his sayings.  Read it like a poem, out loud, with pauses.

Have a blest work week,

john sj

Today’s Post – Dom Helder Camera

“It is possible to travel alone, but we know the journey is human life
and life needs company.
Companion is the one who eats the same bread.
The good traveler cares for weary companions, grieves when we lose heart,
takes us where she finds us, listens to us.
Intelligently, gently, above all lovingly, we encourage each other to go on
and recover our joy
On the journey.”

7 February 1909 – 27 August 1999

November 30, early in this year’s Advent season

My Lakota daughter, Mary Tobacco, lives on the Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation.  For some years, she and Fr. Bill Pauly, sj walked and ran and drove across that same land. She and I talked about Bill this morning, each of us telling the other stories about Bill; stories of a man who died “too young.”  As we remembered him, Mary T said,  “if you could live in this hard world like him – – brave and strong and full of playful joy – –  you are an amazing person..”  I’ve taken to calling him “an Advent Angel.”  Here is the memorial I wrote for him several years ago, early into the Advent season that year.

“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 we miss him 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 lives in my 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 Advent Monday 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.

my personal Advent Creche

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

Friday, November 27 — first day after U.S. Thanksgiving

This delicate and demanding Hopkins poem is beautiful; these days of less and lesser sun make a sweet time for Gerard Manley Hopkins’ brilliant, understated poem about soft paced sorrow, and beauty, and the griefs of 2020, another year that, with its gusts of wind and chilly temperatures,  salutes its ending days.

However, not every day will be gloomy.  This morning looks gloomy, but it carries promise of autumn’s best gifts to come. Here’s a look at morning sun rising above our snow dusted courtyard.  That this picture’s pale and delicate rising sun could appear one day soon – – after months when the late afternoon light showed off its summer glory — reminds us that Autumn teases us with shorter days (today’s Detroit: sunrise to sunset — 7:30 am – 5:05 pm) while in Stockholm, home to Nina, one of my Swedish soul friends, the days are already much shorter, nearly 2.5 hours shorter — 7:55 am – 3:10 pm).

These surprises invite our attention;  I am writing this context paragraph at 9:31 am,   what will this afternoon have on offer?  How many times might one of us return to this Hopkins poem?

Have a blest day,

john st sj

Today’s Post “Spring and Fall”

to a young child

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

For an audio version, please visit: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44400/spring-and-fall

01844 – 1889
G.M. Hopkins Bio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Manley_Hopkins

Morning sun rising
November 20, 2018

“to cry for a vision
is a sacred task”

The Lakota expression “hanblechia” means “he or she cries out for a vision.” It is the name of one of the most sacred Lakota rituals.  It begins with a sweat bath, singing begging-prayers as the bodies of the people in the sweat lodge welcome supersaturated steam from igneous rocks (n.b., which won’t explode when they have been fire-heated to deep red), the people in the dark lodge have broken a sweat before the singer pours the first dipper of water onto the rocks.  The lodge has the shape of a half circle. The singer does not pour the first water until the door flap is closed and the people have all taken a position sitting cross legged and naked.  In that posture, the roof of the lodge is only a few inches from the top of your head while you have bent forward to be close to the red hot stones which are a few inches from your face.

When the one seeking a vision finishes the sweat, s/he lets the holyman lead them to a place to pray alone, sometimes for 4 days of complete fasting, crying for a vision to help you, “unsimala ya” “have pity on me.”  So I can receive a vision to live by.

It sometimes occurs to me that this ritual of begging for a vision can make a powerful prayer in these times when anger and danger and fear want to cloud our sense of our lives as sacred.   Jim Janda, a mystic poet and once a mystic Jesuit, wrote this poem out of his awareness of  “hanblechia.”

Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses.

Have a blest Thanksgiving,

john sj

Today’s Post 

To cry for a
vision
is a sacred
task

after hearing
a holyman
after taking
a sweat bath
with sage and
sweet grass

one must climb a
mountain alone—

here a song
may be heard
here a vision
may be given
here a dance
may be learned—

one must then
leave
the mountain

to sing the
song
to live the
vision
to begin the
dance

J Janda

Jim Janda   d. August, 2010

p.s. Jim Janda lived as a mystic pilgrim for most of his 74 years. He died August 7, 2010 in Salt Lake City, a priest of that diocese since 1996. Jim also lived for a quarter century as a Jesuit which is when we met. Jim was “well known for his gentle and generous heart. . . . During his life he wrote and published a series of short religious stories for children, school plays and books of poetry.” So reads his obituary in the Salt Lake Tribune. The obit is accurate, as was the stated cause of his death, emphysema; I think he smoked too much. I can’t remember ever visiting with Jim without feeling bathed in wisdom and tenderness, and in his awareness of how deep grief runs in human beings, right there along with whimsy.

The Tribune’s evocation of “stories for children, school plays and books of poetry . . .” does not even hint at the flint-hard prose and fine-tuned ironies that throb and flow through his poems.

Jim Janda reminds me of Joy Harjo. I am glad I thought to pull his book off my poetry shelf.

November 23 – a late November poem from G M Hopkins

Who knows what intuition led Hopkins to this metaphor – – a skylark’s wild explosions of energy and what happens when all that free spirit gets caged — skylark caged, a human being caged . . . . “day-laboring-out life’s age”?
The cage does not define the lark, nor do daily burdens define the person. Our campus is approaching final exams; lots of hard work and lots of worn down students, faculty, and staff. This afternoon’s low-in-the-sky sun, pale & delicate can anoint our fatigue.
It helps when reading Hopkins, to give his word play a practice run until you get the cadences right and until you give his word choices a chance to startle your imagination and make you smile.
Welcome to Thanksgiving week,

john st sj

Today’s Post: “The Caged Skylark”

As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage
Man’s mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells—
That bird beyond the remembering his free fells;
This in drudgery, day-labouring-out life’s age.

Though aloft on turf or perch or poor low stage,
Both sing sometímes the sweetest, sweetest spells,
Yet both droop deadly sómetimes in their cells
Or wring their barriers in bursts of fear or rage.

Not that the sweet-fowl, song-fowl, needs no rest—
Why, hear him, hear him babble and drop down to his nest,
But his own nest, wild nest, no prison.

Man’s spirit will be flesh-bound when found at best,
But uncumbered: meadow-down is not distressed
For a rainbow footing it nor he for his bónes rísen.

G. M. Hopkins, sj 1844-1889