Poetry Blog: "A Work Day in Hard Times"

Wednesday October 14 — “What you can plan is too small for you to live”

Opening a book of poetry.  Turning pages until a poem catches your attention, stopping to read out loud.   Pretty good way to start a day.  The David Whyte poem that caught my attention today speaks precisely about just such an experience, entering a day.

Middle of the work week, have a blest Wednesday.

john sj

Today’s post  –   What to Remember When Waking

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?

— David Whyte (Dec 30, 2013)

– See more at: http://www.awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=994#sthash.3K2qfP1I.dpuf

p.s.       A lot of time on the road and a lot of company here at home have given way to days with more quiet in them; time to sort out details that accumulate in hustle times.   This morning when I was preparing today’s post I remember someone asking me to send her/him a digital copy of George Herbert’s “Love Bade me Welcome” (1633).   Trouble is, I can’t remember who asked.   I fussed a little while before noticing an obvious solution.  Here’s the poem, it runs deep and creates a place of stillness if read out loud, as great poems do.

Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lacked anything.
‘A guest,’ I answer’d,’ worthy to be here’:
Love said, ‘You shall be he.’
‘I, the unkind, ungrateful?  Ah, my dear
I cannot look on Thee.’
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
‘Who made the eyes but I?’
“Truth, Lord, but I have marr’d them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.’
‘And know you not,’ says Love, ‘who bore the blame?’
‘My dear, then I will serve.’
‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste My meat.’
So I did sit and eat.

George Herbert  1633

Monday  October 12,  “Breathing is the most ancient language”

I missed posting on Friday, the pace of interaction at the annual meeting of The Society for the History of Technology, this year in Albuquerque, old historians like myself, and lots of young scholars from around the world. Worth it for sure even if I didn’t see a single hot air balloon.   The mountains that cup the oasis of a city with the Rio Grande running through it, are as lovely as I remembered them.   

I’ve never met the poet Hannah Stephenson before.  She wrote this crisp, trim poem, reminding the reader to pause and breathe a little.  Perhaps today?

john st sj

p.s.       35 years ago today my father died in our arms.   Yesterday Bill Shaffer died, the father of a UDM grad and soul friend, Sarah.  Both Sarah and her dad are Vets.

Today’s Post  –  Hannah Stephenson: “Ancient Language”

If you stand at the edge of the forest
and stare into it
every tree at the edge will blow a little extra
oxygen toward you

It has been proven
Leaves have admitted it

The pines I have known
have been especially candid

One said
that all breath in this world
is roped together

that breathing is
the most ancient language

“Ancient Language” by  Hannah Stephenson. Text as posted on the poet’s blog (12/31/2013). © Hannah Stephenson. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
Art credit: “Pine Forest, Landes, Frances,” image by unknown photographer.

Wednesday, October 7,   “If there’s any image of her that’s lasting, it’s not of her talking, it’s of her listening to people.”
Shea Powell, Oakland University

One of Detroit’s compelling leaders died over the weekend at age 100.  Many readers of this list know her and many do not.  In either case today’s post is not a poem in the ordinary sense.   Nancy Kaffer, a Detroit Free Press columnist, wrote a eulogy that opens the reader to perceive grace everywhere,  but especially, because of Grace, all over the city of Detroit.

Blessings on  your Wednesday.

john sj

Today’s Post:  “Grace Lee Boggs, Detroit activist, dies at age 100”

Monday October 5    “Make no mistake. Of course your work will always matter. . . .    Yet  .  .  .  .  “

We posted Lynn Ungar’s poem, “Camas Lillies,” a year ago in September.  As the weekend’s weather change ushers in October and Autumn, this contemplation of beauty in the work lives of busy people bears repeating.  This gray Monday could be a good day to stand still for 30 seconds, or maybe 25  . . . . while you are on your way somewhere across campus, to allow some beautiful human being to reduce you to stillness.  Or some beautiful leaf on a tree?   Or just look out your window?

Or maybe, if you are crazy busy (this Monday I am, for example) you might want to save the poem for after work.   Whenever you read it, it’s best to read the poem out loud, with a couple pauses within it.

Have a great week.

john sj

Today’s Post

Consider the lilies of the field,
the blue banks of camas opening
into acres of sky along the road.
Would the longing to lie down
and be washed by that beauty
abate if you knew their usefulness,
how the natives ground their bulbs
for flour, how the settlers’ hogs
uprooted them, grunting in gleeful
oblivion as the flowers fell?

And you—what of your rushed
and useful life? Imagine setting it all down—
papers, plans, appointments, everything—
leaving only a note: “Gone
to the fields to be lovely. Be back
when I’m through with blooming.”

Even now, unneeded and uneaten,
the camas lilies gaze out above the grass
from their tender blue eyes.
Even in sleep your life will shine.
Make no mistake. Of course
your work will always matter.

Yet Solomon in all his glory
was not arrayed like one of these.

“Camas Lilies” by Lynn Ungar, from Blessing the Bread: Meditations. © Skinner House, 1995. Presented here as posted on the poet’s website.

Friday, October 2 – ” I want to be inspired by my faith, and I want to be excited and gleeful about it.”

A former history major student, now UDM graduate, and college faculty member — a mom with small children, a scholar with a reputation for her publications about Catholic feminists in the U.S. — told me early last week she and the family were treking to Philly for the Pope’s mass on the Parkway that leads to the art museum and features the famous stairs from Rocky I.   I asked her to describe the mass for me, and she did.   I asked her if I could use her description as this Friday’s post:   “You write with a voice that speaks like many people about Francis in America.”   Mary replied: “Sure, why not?  Redact at will!”

Have a great weekend as summer eases into autumn with classic autumnnal gusty winds and rain.  Even so, October is my favorite month.

john sj

Today’s Post:   one scholar, teacher, street smart mom’s thoughts about going to Philly for the mass. 

SO – I promised you some thoughts on the papal mass.  I find myself with a few minutes before class, so I’ll try to set some down.

We went with Tim’s cousin Lori and her family, who live in Willow Grove.  The night before, Ella had a relapse of a stomach bug, leaving her green and us very very sleep deprived.  Thankfully Ella’s aunts also live in Philly, and are nurses, and graciously offered to take her for the day, having planned a pope-cation.  So I was torn, having now abandoned my vomiting child to go see the pope on a jumbotron.

We left around 10 am to attend the 4pm mass, with three boys in tow (ages 7, 6, and 5).  The vibe was great all day.  Everyone was friendly and smiling and considerate as we made our way by train to downtown, then walked and walked and walked to the parkway.  There was a group of Mexican seminarians that was just a delight, basically screaming papal themed soccer chants as they walked down the street in their black cassocks.

I found myself reflecting quite a bit on John Paul’s trip to Philly in 1979.  The women I wrote about viewed the papal visit as a means of access, a chance to say their piece, even if it was only holding a banner as he drove by.  They wanted to have their voices heard.  Here I am how many years later, with nothing really changed for women in the church, and I’m acting like a superfan.  It gave me pause.  But honestly the last thing I wanted was disruption.  I like Pope Francis a lot.  I like how he’s trying to redirect us, wake us up to messages that were there all along.  Be present to the world.  Bring Christ to the world.  Go to the margins.  This is what the mass felt like to me; I listened to the words in a new way.  At the blessing I really felt like he was charging me with the power of the holy spirit to go out into the world.

Some of this has to do with being outside in an enormous gathering of people, sitting on a blanket (draped with a sleeping child for a good chunk of the time), staring at a screen (we couldn’t see the stage – we were right behind the grandstand).  Although I don’t want chant for my normal liturgical life, I found it very moving in this context, especially the chanted gospel which I thought was incredibly haunting.  And the papal umbrellas moving down in a seemingly endless procession to bring communion to the people is just a beautiful, charming image that I think I will always remember.

The day inspired high emotion on my part (the sleep deprivation might have something to do with this).  Lori and I both found ourselves tearing up at odd moments, and catching each other at it.  He represents the movement of the Holy Spirt for me, because I had given up hope of seeing anything inspiring coming out of the Vatican.  I want to be inspired by my faith, and I want to be excited and gleeful about it.  I love that people around me at work – colleagues and students – were excited too, whether they were Catholic or not.  So I got weepy a bit.  The kissing of the babies and sick children does this to me.  (Although watching the bodyguards carrying the babies makes me giggle every time).

Then he had to go and meet with Kim Davis.  That threw me this morning, but I’m filing it under the category of “Things for which Pope Francis needs prayer.”  He asked us to pray for him, and so I do: for his health, and his peace, and his courage, and his conversion on a few select items.  I also pray that he will do some reading in the field of gender history so we can convince him that gender theory is not from the devil.

Ella has recovered, although it was touch and go for getting home yesterday.  I managed to take communion (if anyone was going to be trampled it was then) and saved half to give to her when her tummy was more stable.  I don’t think the gesture meant much to her now, but I’m hoping it will later.  She got a hat with “I love Pope Francis” on it.  I’m keeping the pope doll for myself.  (He now presides over my office.  I might put him on my desk to inspire my students).

Aack!  Time for class!

With love,
Mary

Wednesday, September 30   –  “I needed welcome and wasn’t good at being welcomed.”

Some years ago George Herbert’s “Love Bade me Welcome” (1633) reminded me of Marion Sweetser. Marian lived in Minneapolis, a widow with 6 or 7 children and loads of grandkids. One day in summer 1965 I and 3 other young Jesuits showed up at her door. We were driving from Wisconsin to Pine Ridge South Dakota to begin the year’s teaching at Red Cloud Indian School and she cooked lunch for us. The 25 year old she saw at her doorstep was a wreck — underweight, on the verge of colitis, intense. Marian recognized instantly that I needed welcome and wasn’t good at being welcomed. She was a master at both and that day began a magical friendship. For 25 years I stopped by any chance I could to spend time with Marion. Until she died, in her nineties, in 1994.

Over and over these days of Cuba and the US welcomed Francis in any way its peoples could:  elected officials in Havana and Washington, homeless women and men,  children, prisoners and refugees,  huge crowds who seemed to love waiting . . . .  welcoming Francis.   Or was Francis welcoming all these people so that these crowds of people learned a bit more about how to be welcomed by someone with the soul of welcome in his bones?  Or was the Pope stepping up our welcome by reminding us that perhaps the bravest form of hospitality ito allow ourselves to be welcomed into other people’s places, to be received with the resources of the people of those places == “elected officials in Havana and Washington, homeless women and men,  children, prisoners and refugees.”    Who welcomes whom?   That might be the most important take-home from the Pope’s days on this side of  The Atlantic.

Today’s Post:   “love bade me welcome”  

Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lacked anything.
‘A guest,’ I answer’d,’ worthy to be here’:
Love said, ‘You shall be he.’
‘I, the unkind, ungrateful?  Ah, my dear
I cannot look on Thee.’
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
‘Who made the eyes but I?’
“Truth, Lord, but I have marr’d them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.’
‘And know you not,’ says Love, ‘who bore the blame?’
‘My dear, then I will serve.’
‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste My meat.’
So I did sit and eat.

George Herbert  1633

Monday, September 28  –  “The works that I have in hand I will finish afterwards.”

I’ve lost count,  maybe you have also:   “Have you ever been in the presence of someone like Pope Francis?”     “I’m totally worn out watching television these last days, glued to the screen, listening to Francis talk with people in fluent Spanish or halting English.”    “Words fail me,  he transcends ideology and steps deftly in and out of hard-edged political battles, taking positions but never attacking, never defending either.”

It happens that I flew into LaGuardia this morning for a one afternoon tv shoot about a pbs film in progress (David Grubin about Nicola Tesla).   In my imagination as I looked out the taxi window, Manhattan looks worn out and happy and alive to its common humanity,  just like Philly and DC.   Flying in this morning I caught myself wondering what the Pope’s Philadelphia-to-Rome flight last night was like.  Was everyone resting from the intensities?

Some rest for the imagination looks like a good idea today.  Breathe a little.   Rabindranath Tagore might help.  “Number 5”  a short poem that might release its annointing language best if it’s read with quite a few pauses.  Out loud for sure.

This Monday lots of people seem to be coming to their jobs smiling and a little slap-happy.

Blessings on your day.

john st sj

Today’s Post 

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 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.    These poems have no titles, only numbers.

Today is the first anniversary, plus one day, of Rx for Reading Detroit, founded by one of UDM’s professors, Mary-Catherine Harrison.  She accepted my invitation to edit today’s post.

Have a good day.

john sj

Friday, September 25  –  “Somebody has to go polish the stars”

Most of us didn’t fall in love with poetry in a college classroom.  We fell in love with it as children, listening to the lilt of nursery rhymes, learning to read in the company of Dr. Seuss.

When I founded Rx for Reading Detroit one year ago, I couldn’t have imagined where we would be today.  With the collaboration of community partners, the hard work of volunteers, and the incredible generosity of hundreds of donors and supporters, we have distributed over 15,000 children’s books to kids in our community, built 15 RX for Reading Libraries in low-income health, dental, and WIC clinics, and read with over 150 kids in our community.  Please take a moment to read more about our work and consider making a donation to help support children’s literacy in our community.

All children deserve poetry.

Mary-Catherine

Today’s Post:

One of my favorites by a great children’s poet, Shel Silverstein:

Rx Detroit team with students at Gesu School, across the street from the McNichols Gate on campus

Mary-Catherine Harrison reading with children and, 2nd picture,
standing next to the real tall guy in the Gesu group picture.

Associate Professor of English
Director, Academic Exploration Program
University of Detroit Mercy
4001 W. McNichols Road
Detroit, MI  48221
mc.harrison@udmercy.edu
(313) 993-1081

Wednesday, September 23 –  “I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it.”

I have not met most of the poets who find their way to this “Work Day in a Hard Time” poetry list; some lived centuries ago,  with others, our paths just haven’t intersected.   The mission of the Work Day list is to introduce poets who write flint-hard language that takes the reader into the heart of the human condition,  language that does not flinch from violence, does not evade tenderness.  Joy Harjo is a soul friend I have known since 1968.  When I heard last week that Joy had received the 2015 Wallace Stevens Award I was thrilled: {“The Wallace Stevens Award is given annually to recognize outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry. Established in 1994, the award carries a $100,000 stipend. Recipients are chosen by the Academy of American Poets Board of Chancellors. No applications are accepted.”}.

This week Pope Francis is on my mind too.   I looked for one of Joy’s poems that Pope Francis would  understand deep in his soul; and found an early poem, “Grace”  {In Mad Love and War, 1990}.    Francis does not work fluently in English, but his constant attention to people who are cut off from the world’s well-tended places, makes it easy to imagine that he would read “Grace” and feel at home here:  “I think of the Church is a field hospital on the world’s battlefield.  When someone arrives, battered and in crisis, you don’t test her cholesterol level.  You try to get to the heart of the violence that threatens his life.”  {n.b., loose translation on a busy morning w/o time to look it up}.   This poet and this pope have voices that touch the world as beautiful and brave, as tragic and comic and sacred.

Congratulations on the Wallace Stevens Prize, Joy.  Welcome to the US, Francis.

Best to read the poem aloud,  with pauses, several times.

Today’s Post:   “Grace”

I think of Wind and her wild ways the year we had nothing to lose and lost it anyway in the cursed country of the fox.  We still talk about that winter, how the cold froze imaginary buffalo on the stuffed horizon of snowbanks.   The haunting voices of the starved and mutilated broke fences, crashed our thermostat dreams, and we couldn’t stand it one more time. So once again we lost a winter in stubborn memory, walked through cheap apartment walls, skated through fields of ghosts into a town that never wanted us, in the epic search for grace.

Like Coyote, like Rabbit, we could not contain our terror and clowned our way through a season of false midnights.

We had to swallow that town with laughter, so it would go down easy as honey.

And one morning as the sun struggled to break ice, and our dreams had found us with coffee and pancakes in a truck stop along Highway 80, we found grace.

I could say grace was a woman with time on her hands, or a white buffalo escaped from memory. But in that dingy light it was a promise of balance. We once again understood the talk of animals, and spring was lean and hungry with the hope of children and corn.

I would like to say, with grace, we picked ourselves up and walked into the spring thaw. We didn’t; the next season was worse. You went home to Leech Lake to work with the tribe and I went south. And, Wind, I am still crazy. I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it.

Joy Harjo	Francis washing prisoners’ feet

Monday September 21, 1906   –  Louis W Staudenmaier

Today is my father’s birthday.   When sifting poems for this morning’s post, he came to mind.  He died of cancer when I was 40;  it was time enough for us to become something more than a son and his dad;  we became soul friends.  Dad was good at that.  He blended intelligence with the gift of welcoming the people who entered his life.  I remember thinking during his wake in our small northern Wisconsin mill town, how proud we kids were that judges and attorneys were not the only sort of people who came to say goodbye;  mill workers and farmers, women and men, ordinary people felt at home with him, told him their troubles, traded jokes, listened to each other.

While he was dying, after pancreatic cancer gone to the liver made him thin and jaundiced, one day he put on a business suit, now too big for his body, and went one last time to the little city bank where he had been president for years.   He stopped at each person’s work place, told each person goodbye, that he was proud to have worked with them, shook hands, and came back  home where we had moved his bed into the dining room for his last weeks.

A man who enjoyed the ordinary human condition and respected the women and men who lived it.  He would have liked this poem.  The poem likes him I think.

Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses.

Today’s Post  –  “Wild Geese”  Mary Oliver

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.