Poetry Blog: "A Work Day in Hard Times"

Monday, November 18, 2020  —  Dan Berrigan sj – a prophet for his moment in time

It’s safe to say that no US Jesuit of my generation or the next ignored Dan Berrigan, sj.  He died on Saturday, April 30, 2016 at 94, a prophet relentlessly called to name the violent evasions of the 2nd half of the 20th century and the first two decades of our current century:  at home with prison, a source of fury to some in leadership positions — government officials and bishops come to mind.  He wrote, and spoke, and created symbolic acts so vivid that — love them or hate them — you could not ignore their presence on the landscape.   One of my favorite thinkers of that era, the child psychologist Robert Coles, held extended secret conversations with Berrigan while Dan lived in hiding, hunted by the FBI.   Some agents finally caught him.  While Dan was in prison, Coles edited the transcripts from their hidden talk and so the two of them co-authored a great and demanding book, The Geography of Faith: conversations between Daniel Berrigan, when underground, and Robert Coles (1971).  The book revealed my youth to me, opening depths in my imagination that I was still learning to live with during my early 30ies.

Yesterday, thinking ahead to this morning’s post, I looked for one of his poems that got it about his fierce presence in the world: flint-hard words.  Pax Christi’s eulogy offered “Some.”  Like many poems that have graced this list, it will want you to read it several times,  out loud with pauses.

Have a blest week during these days of deep autumn,

john sj

Today’s Post  “Some”

Some stood up once, and sat down.
Some walked a mile, and walked away.

Some stood up twice, then sat down.
“It’s too much,” they cried.
Some walked two miles, then walked away.
“I’ve had it,” they cried,

Some stood and stood and stood.
They were taken for fools,
they were taken for being taken in.

Some walked and walked and walked –
they walked the earth,
they walked the waters,
they walked the air.

“Why do you stand?” they were asked, and
“Why do you walk?”

“Because of the children,” they said, and
“Because of the heart, and
“Because of the bread,”

“Because the cause is
the heart’s beat, and
the children born, and
the risen bread.”

Some, by Daniel Berrigan

May 9, 1921 – April 30, 2016

Friday, November 14, 2014

I’ve never posted after work on Friday before.  But, just before heading over to our Faculty Achievement Annual Dinner, I read this account from Mary Jo McConahay, a reporter who came very early to the Jesuit University of Central America on this day 25 years ago Sunday, to see the murdered bodies of six Jesuit faculty members, their cook and her daughter, all murdered by the right wing military of Salvador in the middle of the night.   She got there before the blood had been cleaned up.  One thing Ms. McConahay does not mention that has stayed in my mind:  the killers split open the skulls of some of the faculty members, scooped some of their brains out, and left them beside their dead bodies.  It was, I think, a statement by that vicious police state, that professors with PhDs, working to find a voice for brutally poor people, would not win.  Their brains were reduced to trash.

These martyrs were well known across the Academy in the US;  many US scholars had studied with them, respected their intelligence, in many cases loved them the way PhD graduate students come to love each other.   They were like our faculty, dedicated to research, teaching and mentoring new generations of students.  Because they were such credible teacher-scholars, their murders woke the US Congress, thanks especially to Representative Joe Moakley whose Legislative Commission forced some truth into the light about the US funded military who murdered these 8 people, who then joined the tens of thousands of Salvadorans killed with savage brutality in that hard war.  As a result of their murders and Joe Moakley, the US began to back off from funding a brutal regime.

Today, 25 years later, it remains an imperfect world.  Still the beauty of these 2 women and 6 men shines.    When Joe Moakley died of cancer in 2001, I heard on the news that construction workers on projects along the funeral route in Boston, stood to attention as his body passed.  I plan to stand to attention on Sunday.

http://ncronline.org/print/news/global/clear-voices-silenced-remembering-murder-six-jesuits

November 9, 2020

One of Detroit’s great African American poets has passed.  Naomi Long Madgett stands with Dudley Randall as a founding spirit for this city and a host of companions.   I am honored to include her in the “Work Day, Hard Times” Poetry List.   On November 7, The Detroit Free Press’s John Monaghan wrote this eulogy;   one of her poems appears here for the first time.   Best to read “Midway” out loud, with pauses.

Have a blest week,

john sj

Naomi Long Madgett, an acclaimed Detroit-area poet, educator and publisher, died Wednesday at the age of 97.

“It was her joy and passion to selflessly advance Detroit poets,” said graphic designer Leisia Duskin, who had worked with Madgett in publishing for the past two decades.

Madgett was born Naomi Cornelia Long in Norfolk, Virginia, but came to Detroit in 1946. She had been Detroit’s poet laureate since 2001 and was awarded a Kresge Foundation Eminent Artist fellowship in 2012. Her poems appear in numerous journals and more than 180 anthologies.

“She was especially honored and humbled by her position as poet laureate,” said Duskin. “She was always about others more so than herself.”

Madgett, who saw her first poem published at age 13, earned a bachelor’s degree  at Virginia State College (now Virginia State University) and a master’s degree in English education from Detroit’s Wayne University (now Wayne State University) in 1955.

In the 1960s, she taught at Detroit’s Northwestern High School, launching the school’s first course in African American literature. In 1968 she became a teacher of creative writing and black literature at Eastern Michigan University, where she worked until her retirement in 1984.

Frustrated by the lack of publishers for black poets, Madgett founded Lotus Press (now Broadside Lotus Press) in 1972. She said one of her proudest projects was editing the anthology “Adam of Ife: Black Women in Praise of Black Men” in 1992. She also served as poetry editor for Michigan State University Press in the 1990s.

Her poetry was influenced by Emily Dickinson, John Keats and especially Langston Hughes, whom she cited as a mentor. Her poems often mirror the blues-based lyricism of Hughes’ work, casting a light on themes of African American spirituality and civil rights.

“What I have done with my life is only what I was supposed to do,” Madgett said during a reading at the Charles Wright Museum of African American History in 2017.

“I believe the purpose of my life is to serve, to make a positive difference in someone’s life, to redirect someone who is heading in the wrong direction, to be a good role model, to inspire someone to lead a more meaningful life.”

While funeral arrangements are pending, Madgett is being memorialized by the area’s arts community through social media. “We have lost one of Detroit’s brightest lights,” said Rochelle Riley, the city’s director of arts and culture, “someone whose genius spanned generations. She was indeed the godmother of African-American poetry.”

Friends and colleagues also are recalling her generosity, especially when it came to giving a voice to black writers.

Rapper Mahogany Jones, who performed at Madgett’s 2012 Kresge induction, said, “Her work and spirit will live on in those of us who have been inspired by her courageous bravery to use the pen as a means to bring about justice and shift thought.”

‘Midway’
By Naomi Long Madgett

First published in 1959, “Midway” was inspired by U.S. Supreme Court desegregation rulings in the wake of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954.

I’ve come this far to freedom and I won’t turn back
I’m climbing to the highway from my old dirt track
I’m coming and I’m going
And I’m stretching and I’m growing
And I’ll reap what I’ve been sowing or my skin’s not black
I’ve prayed and slaved and waited and I’ve sung my song
You’ve bled me and you’ve starved me but I’ve still grown strong
You’ve lashed me and you’ve treed me
And you’ve everything but freed me
But in time you’ll know you need me and it won’t be long.
I’ve seen the daylight breaking high above the bough
I’ve found my destination and I’ve made my vow;
So whether you abhor me
Or deride me or ignore me
Mighty mountains loom before me and I won’t stop now.

While funeral arrangements are pending, Madgett is being memorialized by the area’s arts community through social media. “We have lost one of Detroit’s brightest lights,” said Rochelle Riley, the city’s director of arts and culture, “someone whose genius spanned generations. She was indeed the godmother of African-American poetry.”

Friends and colleagues also are recalling her generosity, especially when it came to giving a voice to black writers.

Rapper Mahogany Jones, who performed at Madgett’s 2012 Kresge induction, said, “Her work and spirit will live on in those of us who have been inspired by her courageous bravery to use the pen as a means to bring about justice and shift thought.”

Many members of the Work Day/Hard Times Poetry List have emailed this morning; they remind me, as do the 4 poems we’ve prepared for tonight’s class session (on the teachings of Catherine McAuley and St. Ignatius on prayer) – – remind me of the List’s mission statement that I wrote in 2013.   That 2013 Mission Statement — written during Detroit’s bankruptcy troubles and before those hard times had turned toward hope.  We have posted hundreds of strong poems over these years.

Today’s 4 poems (which we prepared for our online class today) read with such an apt presence for these Election Day tensions that I decided to post them, not only for the online students but also for the c. 2600 readers to whom we dedicate each poem over these many years.

Have a blest day;  best to read the mission statement out loud, as if it were itself a strong poem.  Today’s four poems fit the mission statement, spot on.

john st sj

“The Guest House” – Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī (جلال‌الدین محمد رومی‎)
https://sites.udmercy.edu/poetry/2020/11/02/monday-november-3-the-guest-house-jalal-ad-din-muhammad-rumi-%d8%ac%d9%84%d8%a7%d9%84%e2%80%8c%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%af%db%8c%d9%86-%d9%85%d8%ad%d9%85%d8%af-%d8%b1%d9%88/

“Being Catholic” – Maria Ibarra
https://sites.udmercy.edu/poetry/2020/10/19/oct-19-maria-ibarra-being-catholic/

“The Well of Grief” – David Whyte
“the Mineshaft of passion” – Denise Levertov
https://sites.udmercy.edu/poetry/2020/11/03/nov-3-for-angry-moments-in-nervous-times-david-whyte-and-denise-levertov/

November 3, Election Day 2020 – – for angry moments in nervous times

About midnight last night, I opened my window to say goodnight to 6 Mile and Livernois, and the city. Astonishing. After some days of damp and pretty dark, a nearly full moon lit up the night. This morning, softer light on traces of snow, with my iPhone promising little icons of sun. Grief requires stillness, but it is surely helped along by unexpected surprises and delicate beauty.

A thought about the news lately: fire and anger and fear do best when I can bring them to stillness, when their source in grief becomes accessible to me. There’s lots of anger in the land these days. Here are two poets who frequently grace this list, writing their way into holy sorrow. Try reading them, perhaps not both right in a row, with pauses in between to let the poets’ words seep into your evening.

Have a blest evening,

john sj

Post # 1 David Whyte “The Well of Grief”

Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface on the well of grief,
turning down through its black water
to the place we cannot breathe,
will never know the source from which we drink,
the secret water, cold and clear,
nor find in the darkness glimmering,
the small round coins,
thrown by those who wished for something else.

David Whyte b. 1955
Risking Everything

Post # 2 Denise Levertov “the Mineshaft of passion”

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.

Denise Levertov
b. October 1923 d. December 1997
“Conversation in Moscow” in Freeing of the Dust

from my window looking west – morning on November 3

“The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.”

One of my soul friends of many years emailed Rumi’s “Guest House” yesterday.   When readers send poems, they create a place of stillness in me and sometimes change my plans for a given day’s post.  So it is this morning.

Rumi’s poem, posted on the cusp of this year’s election day, creates a place alive with realism and laughter, grief and joy.   Best to read this out loud with pauses, several times, breathing as you read.

Have a blest week;  with three surprises today.

john sj

p.s.  At about 3:00 am, this blue moon’s radiant full shining in the western sky out my window led me to open the window and lean out,  gazing at our precise 1789  surveyor-line intersection of Six Mile and Livernois.  Fits with Rumi’s “Guest House,” makes a place of wonder.

Today’s Post “The Guest House”

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī  (جلال‌الدین محمد رومی‎)
Persian poet, jurist, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic 1207-1273.

Friday, October 30    “a billion times told lovelier”

Autumn’s gusty winds;  Covid weariness across our land calling for courage and hope in the teeth of fear and anger as our national elections loom.   A good morning for story-telling and story listening, to stand still a minute, breathe in deeply, stand still a little more, and read one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ magical poems.

Hopkins’ poems are [in]famous for the density of their vocabulary.  If you want to catch all the descriptive meaning packed in these 16 sonnet lines, bring a good dictionary.  Hopkins’ life-long friend poet laureate Robert Bridges often ground his aesthetic teeth at what seemed to him to be Hopkins’ unnecessary complexity.

On November 6, 1887, Hopkins wrote Bridges, simultaneously teasing his friend and attempting to explain the density of his poetic language.    Try reading GMH’s explanation out loud; note that this apologia for demanding word choices emerges as a single, grammatically-correct sentence. So, take a deep breath before you begin.  For that matter, try reading “The Windhover” out loud as the poet intended.

“Plainly if it is possible to express a subtle and recondite thought on a subtle and recondite subject in a subtle and recondite way and with great felicity and perfection in the end, something must be sacrificed, with so trying a task, in the process, and this may be the being at once, nay perhaps even the being without explanation at all, intelligible.”

Don’t you wish you could write like that?  You’d have to have patient friends as readers though.

Have a blest day,

john sj

Today’s Post    –   “The Windhover:  To Christ our Lord”

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in
his riding

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

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

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

Gerard Manley Hopkins
28 July 1844 – 8 June, 1889

The prayer below appears on the first day of January each year.  If I am not mistaken, it is the oldest prayer I ever recite, several thousand years deep in the liturgy that helps open the first day of each year in the Christian tradition.   Yesterday, my Lakota daughter, Mary Tobacco, and my sister, Mary Staudenmaier, and I joined in a mid-afternoon prayer — several sacred prayers followed by prayers for, and in gratitude for, people who know us, and who bless us, and who need us.  Because Mary Tobacco lives in an intense infection zone – – The Pine Ridge Lakota reservation is generally considered the poorest county in the United States – – Mary lobbies for desperate people.  Yesterday through c. one foot of snow, she and her team of 35 men and women delivered firewood and food along the district’s back roads.   We prayed for the elders and the children, prayed about hunger, and the pandemic’s dangers.

When we turned to the January 1 prayer, the two Marys with whom I prayed found this ancient prayer nourishing and beautiful.   Mary T asked us to pray it again this morning as we began our day.   Here it is;  best to read the prayer out loud, with pauses.

May the Lord Bless you
and keep you
May she make her face
shine on you
and be kind to you
may he turn his face tenderly toward you and bring you peace.

Have a blest week,

john sj

Friday, October 23
“She was covered in a quilt, the Creek way.
But I don’t know this kind of burial:”

Poet Laureate Joy Harjo calls Tulsa her home, lives there and, in subtle ways, lives from there also. As with her many poems, she brings her unflinching memory and voice, tender and alive with vitality, to a resilient human place. I am only now meeting Jennifer Elise Foerster. She stopped me into stillness when I read “Leaving Tulsa” this morning, and, yes, she reminds me of Joy Harjo.

“I understand how to walk among hay bales
looking for turtle shells.
How to sing over the groan of the county road
widening to four lanes”

Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses. Have a blest weekend, here as October continues its songs for us.

john sj

Today’s post: “Leaving Tulsa”
By Jennifer Elise Foerster
for Cosetta

Once there were coyotes, cardinals
in the cedar. You could cure amnesia
with the trees of our back-forty. Once
I drowned in a monsoon of frogs—
Grandma said it was a good thing, a promise
for a good crop. Grandma’s perfect tomatoes.
Squash. She taught us to shuck corn, laughing,
never spoke about her childhood
or the faces in gingerbread tins
stacked in the closet.

She was covered in a quilt, the Creek way.
But I don’t know this kind of burial:
vanishing toads, thinning pecan groves,
peach trees choked by palms.
New neighbors tossing clipped grass
over our fence line, griping to the city
of our overgrown fields.

Grandma fell in love with a truck driver,
grew watermelons by the pond
on our Indian allotment,
took us fishing for dragonflies.
When the bulldozers came
with their documents from the city
and a truckload of pipelines,
her shotgun was already loaded.

Under the bent chestnut, the well
where Cosetta’s husband
hid his whiskey—buried beneath roots
her bundle of beads. They tell
the story of our family. Cosetta’s land
flattened to a parking lot.

Grandma potted a cedar sapling
I could take on the road for luck.
She used the bark for heart lesions
doctors couldn’t explain.
To her they were maps, traces of home,
the Milky Way, where she’s going, she said.

After the funeral
I stowed her jewelry in the ground,
promised to return when the rivers rose.

On the grassy plain behind the house
one buffalo remains.

Along the highway’s gravel pits
sunflowers stand in dense rows.
Telephone poles crook into the layered sky.
A crow’s beak broken by a windmill’s blade.
It is then I understand my grandmother:
When they see open land
they only know to take it.

I understand how to walk among hay bales
looking for turtle shells.
How to sing over the groan of the county road
widening to four lanes.
I understand how to keep from looking up:
small planes trail overhead
as I kneel in the Johnson grass
combing away footprints.

Up here, parallel to the median
with a vista of mesas’ weavings,
the sky a belt of blue and white beadwork,
I see our hundred and sixty acres
stamped on God’s forsaken country,
a roof blown off a shed,
beams bent like matchsticks,
a drove of white cows
making their home
in a derailed train car.

Jennifer Elise Foerster, “Leaving Tulsa” from Leaving Tulsa. Copyright © 2013 by Jennifer Elise Foerster. Reprinted by permission of University of Arizona Press.

Wednesday, October 21 — Three Cairns – sculpture
“Cairns [are] stone structures [or markers]
that identify a place of great importance.”

This little boy exploring a large stone egg got me wondering the way art does.  Two artists here, the sculptor and the mom with the camera. So I emailed his mom back asking about the egg. She’s a close friend living in La Jolla, CA: “it’s a sculpture by Andy Goldsworthy, called ‘Three Cairns,’ in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art; my son calls it the ‘egg rock.’”

I found an explanation on the website of the Greater Des Moines Public Art Foundation (http://dsmpublicartfoundation.org/public-art/three-cairns/). Just below is their great picture of the central cairn at the Des Moines Art Center. “Cairns,” Public Art tells us, are “stone structures [or markers] that identify a place of great importance. Their dry-stone construction represents an engineering feat as well as artistic creativity. The process of shaping and stacking the stones into a simple oval shape is challenging and intense. The form symbolizes fullness and ripeness, time and energy, loss and endurance.” The Foundation also tells us that this is the largest project in the Western Hemisphere by British artist Andy Goldsworthy.

The photo, by Doug Millar, shows the central cairn at home among Iowa grass and trees. Goldworthy’s placement of the two hollow-out stone frames isn’t random. One points toward New York, a matching cairn outside the Neugerger Museum of Art; the other points west to the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla and the cairn my friend’s son showed off for us. The limestone for each comes from long before its physical home was inhabited by people calling their place “Iowa.”

Lots going on here. Not one place but three, not three places but a continent, not one time but millennia, all crafted with the precise skills of a contemporary worker of stone. I like to imagine the work we do at the university like that – demanding precise thinking and some memory. But, our Mission Statement reminds our students, the point is not the quizzes or the grade; the point is a lifetime of their citizenship in a world that is vast and beloved of God.

While getting reacquainted with the Cairns, I opened a poem feed that lands in my inbox each day to find a gift from Emily Dickenson. Just below my signature, you will find Emily Dickenson’s 12 line poem about an unnamed bird. Which form of beauty opens me to deeper stillness this mid-October day in 2020, the trans-national sculpture or this poem from the 19th century? Answer? “yes.”

Looks like autumn rains today, encouraging grass and flowers and trees to do their thing as this hard and challenging academic year continues to surprise us in our city and on our campus.   Best to read the poem and savor these cairns slowly, with pauses and gratitude.

Have a blest day,

john st sj

Today’s Post  “Hope”

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Emily Dickinson
December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886