Poetry Blog: "A Work Day in Hard Times"

Friday November 20 —  the Work Day poetry list is back from its November break and G Stockhausen is heading home to DC

{see G Stock’s Caring Bridge message}

Sharp winds and, compared with an idyllic 1st half of November autumn, cold air is blowing around today:  it’s easy to imagine Winter on its way despite today’s brilliant sunshine:  1-3 inches is predicted for tomorrow.    I looked for a poem about winter and found that I’d posted a good one exactly 1 year less 1 day ago (Nov 21, 2014).   The more I read David Whyte, the more I become a fan.   His “The Winter of Listening” reminds me of a splendid one-liner written decades ago by the mystic Thomas Merton.

“There is no way of telling strangers they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

Have a blest weekend.

john sj

Today’s Post “The Winter of Listening”

No one but me by the fire,
my hands burning
red in the palms while
the night wind carries
everything away outside.

All this petty worry
while the great cloak
of the sky grows dark
and intense
round every living thing.

What is precious
inside us does not
care to be known
by the mind
in ways that diminish
its presence.

What we strive for
in perfection
is not what turns us
into the lit angel
we desire,

what disturbs
and then nourishes
has everything
we need.

What we hate
in ourselves
is what we cannot know
in ourselves but
what is true to the pattern
does not need
to be explained.

Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.

Even with the summer
so far off
I feel it grown in me
now and ready
to arrive in the world.

All those years
listening to those
who had
 nothing to say.

All those years
forgetting
how everything
has its own voice
to make
itself heard.

All those years
forgetting
how easily
you can belong
to everything
simply by listening.

And the slow
difficulty
of remembering
how everything
is born from
an opposite
and miraculous
otherness.

Silence and winter
has led me to that
otherness.

So let this winter
of listening
be enough
for the new life
I must call my own.

David Whyte

I doubt that a new post will find its way into this week of stillness and beauty and prayer.   But here’s the one I sent from this same place of retreat last year.   Back to regular order next week Wednesday.

john sj

Wednesday  November 4   “Now is the time to sit quiet”

Packing for my annual Jesuit retreat, on Connecticut’s south shore of the Long Island Sound and on the bank of The Hammonasset River, a tidal estuary with sea birds and marsh grass.  Some breathing time, with short meetings before and after.   Back Wednesday Nov 18.

Blessings,

john st sj

I ask for a moment’s indulgence to sit by thy side,
The works that I have in hand
I will finish afterwards.

Away from the sight of thy face
my heart knows no rest nor respite,
and my work becomes an endless toil
in a shoreless sea of toil.

Now is the time to sit quiet,
face to face with thee
and to sing dedication of life
in this silent and overflowing leisure.

Tagore 5

Tagore’s poem # 5 in Gitanjali  fits these days

Monday November 2 – a saint who lived with us,  Art McGovern, sj

This time of year Art McGovern seems to come and find me.  Yesterday was, in the R Catholic calendar, the feast of all the saints.  At the opening of the Sunday 12:30 mass, I invited the congregation to think of some one person who had touched their life and pay attention to her/him as we worshipped.  I hadn’t chosen my own person yet but as we listened to the readings, I settled on Art, who died at 70 in 2000.  Art lived close to the ground — at home with play (“health food is the kind you like so much you feel good while eating it:  my 3 are pretzels, ice cream, and bacon.”) and grief, at home with losses and wins, at home  leading difficult committees, at home with impeccably prepared classes laced with kind teasing and learning (“Fr. McGovern is like feathers; he makes you laugh while  you think hard.” said a student one time).  If someone can be a world class scholar, a beloved teacher, a rabid Ohio State football fan and a kinsman day in and day out . . . .    No surprise he came to mind yesterday.

Last year on October 27, I wrote about the tree we planted for Art while he was living toward his death.  In lieu of a poem, here’s what that tree said to me one year ago.

Have a good week.

john sj

Today’s Post
Monday  October 27, 2014 

After  yesterday’s Sunday noon mass in the Ignatius/McAuley C&F chapel, walking home past the energy of parking lots packed in for the Detroit high school cheerleading competitions,  I stopped in my tracks in front of the tree we dedicated in 1999 for Art McGovern, sj.  It’s leaves were still solid green, contrasting with the yellows of older trees around it.   Sheer beauty surprised me into seeing it fresh.   I went to my room, got my digital camera, and came back to contemplate Art’s tree with the help of a pretty good lens.

For those of you who never knew him, Art was a soul friend for my first twenty years here at Six Mile and Livernois.  He was soul friend for many people,  more beloved, perhaps, than any person who taught and worked here until he died too young of bone cancer at age 70.   In his last months at the Jesuit Colombiere Center in Clarkston,  the staff told us  he set records for the astonishing number of people who came to tell him goodbye.

We planted a tree for him before he died.    Most days I just walk by and  I doubt that bothers Art at all.   Yesterday the tree found me.  “It’s gotten so big!” I whispered.

Stillness and beauty, the blessings of autumn.

Wednesday October 28  “My life overflows with Death’s toll”

Ordinarily, when people come to the Jesuit Residence for a few days of stillness and prayer, the house welcomes them with just that, stillness and hospitality that makes a place for prayer.   These last weeks, with heavy machinery digging out the space for UDM’s new main entrance, one of our prayer guests found stillness anyway.  S/he wrote this poem to remember a morning’s prayer, when s/he tasted fatigue and the grief from several deaths that came too close in time and very close in the soul.

Right here on McNichols Road, s/he tasted grace.   Best to read the poem out loud.

Enjoy today’s remnants of H Patricia soaking the earth.

john sj

Today’s Post – morning prayer in the city

Monday, October 26  —  {Brilliant sun today.  Autumn’s winsome beauty —> sun rises at 7:59 and sets at 6:36: each day a little shorter and the sun a little lower in the sky, sunrise a little farther to the south.}.    This is a season when how far north or south one lives can get our attention.  I love it that we have a large open space in the north east corner of the McNichols Campus and that McNichols Road (aka 6 Mile) makes our northern boundary a true east-west survey line, keyed to 8 Mile road which dates to the 1789 Northwest Territory mapping project.   All that makes it easier to locate this campus against the majestic march of sunrise all through the year, and reminds that Detroit has been around a while.   Do I go a little nuts in autumn?  Sure do.  You?

19th century Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, loved autumn also (see today’s poem just below)   Even more than most great poets, GMH rewards  investment in the sounds of his language.  Best to read out loud, with pauses, several times.

Have a great day.

john sj

Today’s post   —  14. Hurrahing in Harvest

SUMMER ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And, éyes, heárt, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder
Majestic—as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!—

These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.

[jwplayer mediaid=”1588″]

g m hopkins, sj
July 1844 – June 1889

Friday, October 23  “not grandeur,  nor fear . . .  affection”

Pretty much everyone I know around here is slamming work these days, the heavy equipment pushing and growling as skilled workers build the university’s new main entrance on 6 Mile could be a metaphor for lots of us as we hustle from task to task, honoring our commitments to mid-term grades rooted in the integrity of the challenges we open with our students, and our commitments to focus groups and colloquia along with pretty ordinary work-a-day stuff.

It would be a shame, I thought during morning prayer today, if all our honorable work allowed autumn to slip by us.  Wherever you live, in motown where the colors are breaking open these days, or Colorado, or Sweden, pause and listen 3 times today.  Want to?

john sj

p.s. the weekend might make a great time to bump that listening pauses up to 4 or 5.
Have a great weekend.

Today’s Post – “Autumn’s russet colors age . . .”
“For the dogwood in our yard, middle of October
West Philly c. 1976 during grad school”

Autumn’s russet colors
Age without solemnity
Earthy and simple, they linger
Linger,

Not for grandeur
Nor from fear of the dust they will become

Their affection for this place
These ripening moments
Even me the beholder
Slows the pace of changing.

Let me be won by this warmth
To slow my chosen pace
To ripen affectionately.

jstsj

Wednesday, October 21  “the world offers itself to your imagination”

I happened on Krista Tippett interviewing Mary Oliver on npr’s  “On Being” this afternoon.   Oliver’s poetry often visits this list.  That tipped me, for tomorrow morning’s post, to “Wild Geese,” which came to mind as I listened to her speak of her work ethic and of learning to live at home with stillness, mystery, wonder, and vast transcendence.   As I drove back to campus, I decided that this achingly beautiful mid-October day was a perfect moment for the poem.

Then, when I looked in the Work Day/Hard Time archive blog to see how long it had been since I  posted “Wild Geese,” it turns out that this Wednesday, October 21, is exactly one month since I posted it last, in honor of my dad’s birthday.

“Should I run it again, after only a month had passed?”  “Why not?”  Mid October offers a perfect day to celebrate 80 years of this poet’s life on the earth.

Worth reading out loud.  Several times maybe.

john sj

Today’s Post  “Wild Geese”

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

mary oliver september 10, 1935
national book award 1992
pulitzer prize 1984

To listen to her interview with Krista Tippett check here.
http://www.onbeing.org/program/mary-oliver-listening-to-the-world/7267/audio

Monday October 19  – ”          not because mind and memory
falter, but . . . ”

Mid October, a brisk, chilly, breath-taking weekend across the whole city and more.  Now a new work week.  Friday’s post was hard, a close look into the terrors of refugee journeys.  I looked this morning for a love poem to honor last Friday’s funeral for Bill Shaffer, a Vet, a member of the UAW, for 58 years married to Barbara.  And to remember my mom, then a widow of 25 years at 102,  who died on this day in 2005.  I found a poem in Evening Train, one of the later works of Denise Levertov.

Some poems require readers to look out onto vast realities; that was Friday and W J Auden’s “Refugee Blues”.  Some lead into intimate, enduring, resonant love.  That’s today’s “In Love.”  A university engages all sorts of reality.  That’s what we do here.

Best to read this a couple times,  out loud with pauses.

Have a blest Monday in this mid-October week.    Sunrise here at 7:51; sunset at 6:46, the sun rides lower in the heavens each day til December’s  Solstice.

john sj

Today’s Post   “In Love”   {dedicated to Barbara and Bill, and Hildegarde and Louis}

Over gin and tonic (an unusual treat) the ancient poet
haltingly —            not because mind and memory
falter, but because language, now,
weary from so many years
of intense partnership,
comes stiffly to her summons,
with unsure footing —
recounts, for the first time in my hearing, each step
of that graceful sarabande, her husband’s
last days, last minutes, fifteen years ago.

She files her belongings freestyle, jumbled
in plastic bags — poems, old letters, ribbons,
old socks, an empty picture frame;
but keeps her fifty years of marriage wrapped, flawless,
in something we sense and almost see —
diaphanous as those saris one can pass through a wedding ring.

                                    Denise Levertov  1923 – 1997

Friday, October 16 — “So Joseph got up and, taking the child and his mother with him, left that night for Egypt . . .” Matthew 2: 14

While driving around my neighborhood yesterday, I heard on NPR a set of stories hard to listen to; refugee stories.  Does it matter whether the stories arose in Mexico, as these did? or Syria? or Congo?   Does it matter that W H Auden’s “Refugee Blues” was written 70 years ago about European Jews? Women and men and children who must learn to live without toilets, live without a stove?  They live stories that need listening.   Yesterday afternoon NPR helped me pay attention.  So, this morning, does W H Auden.  Sometimes, it is a blessing to be still inside beauty; sometimes, to be still inside of violence.

Definition:  “Blues: a slow, sad son, traditionally with 3-line stanzas with 4 beats to each line.”

Blessings on your weekend.

john sj

Today’s Post – “Refugee Blues” W H Auden.

Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.

Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you’ll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.

In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,
Every spring it blossoms anew;
Old passports can’t do that, my dear, old passports can’t do that.

The consul banged the table and said:
‘If you’ve got no passport, you’re officially dead’;
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.

Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;
Asked me politely to return next year:
But where shall we go today, my dear, but where shall we go today?

Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said:
‘If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread’;
He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.

Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;
It was Hitler over Europe, saying: ‘They must die’;
We were in his mind, my dear, we were in his mind.

Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,
Saw a door opened and a cat let in:
But they weren’t German Jews, my dear, but they weren’t German Jews.

Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay,
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.

Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren’t the human race, my dear, they weren’t the human race.

Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors;
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.

Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.

w h auden 1907 – 1973