Poetry Blog: "A Work Day in Hard Times"

Friday  September 18           “Anonymous”

This weekend before the Equinox, media energy grows about Pope Francis in Cuba, then DC, then NYC, then Philly.   Weather today and tomorrow looks made to match the moment:  Blustery winds and storms coming from the Southwest until around noon Saturday.  Then the wind swings around to our cleanest air weather, North Northwest.   Better breathing after the rinsing rains and some sun by Saturday’s dinner time, it looks like.

For this mix of intensities, here’s a shy love poem, in haiku format.  I don’t know the author so I’ll call her/him “anonymous.”

No matter how busy you are, I hope there’s time to stand still and read these few, spare words.  Perhaps as a mind rinse.

Have a blest weekend.

john sj

Today’s Post -Anonymous

By way of pretext, I said:

“I will go to consider the condition of the bamboo fence”

but it was really to see you.”

Wednesday  September 16  –  ” To attach oneself to place is to surrender to it, and suffer with it.”

Author Kathleen Norris writes prose and poems that cut deep into ordinary lived reality.   In 1974, after living her way into New York City’s world of poetry with mentoring from the legendary Betty Kray at the Academy of American Poets (http://www.nytimes.com/1987/11/24/obituaries/elizabeth-kray-patron-and-friend-of-poets-and-their-art-dies-at-71.html) Kathleen and her husband shocked their peers by moving to Lemmon in northwestern South Dakota where Kathleen had inherited the family home of her grandmother.  They stayed a long time.

In 1993 her Dakota: A Spiritual Geography took the literary world by storm.  Took me by storm too.  If a short book of micro essays, some only half a page, ever approaches the taught, lean focus of strong poetry, for me this is the book.  In those South Dakota years she also formed a deep friendship with the Benedictine Monastery at St. Johns in Minnesota and wrote several memoirs about the intersection of her secularity with deepening roots in Benedictine prayer and wisdom.

Why, I wonder, did she come to mind in the middle of last night?  This sort of question refreshes the imagination because it has no tidy answer.   Anyway, I am glad she visited me today.  Think of these short quotes from Dakota as poems, try reading them out loud.

Have a blest day.

john sj

Today’s Post  four texts from Dakota

“Once, when I was describing to a friend from Syracuse, New York, a place on the plains that I love, a ridge above a glacial moraine with a view of almost fifty miles, she asked, “But what is there to see?” The answer, of course, is nothing. Land, sky, and the ever-changing light.”

“Maybe the desert wisdom of the Dakotas can teach us to love anyway, to love what is dying, in the face of death, and not pretend that things are other than they are. The irony and wonder of all of this is that it is the desert’s grimness, its stillness and isolation, that brings us back to love.”

“To be an American is to move on, as if we could outrun change. To attach oneself to place is to surrender to it, and suffer with it.”

“For me, walking in a hard Dakota wind can be like staring at the ocean: humbled before its immensity, I also have a sense of being at home on this planet, my blood so like the sea in chemical composition, my every cell partaking of air. I live about as far from the sea as is possible in North America, yet I walk in a turbulent ocean. Maybe that child was right when he told me that the world is upside-down here, and this is where angels drown.”

Kathleen Norris (born in Washington, D.C. on July 27, 1947) is a best-selling poet and essayist. Her parents, John Norris and Lois Totten, took her as a child to Hawaii, where she graduated from Punahou Preparatory School in 1965. After graduating from Bennington College in Vermont in 1969, Norris became arts administrator of the Academy of American Poets, and published her first book of poetry two years later.^[1] In 1974 she inherited her grandparents’ farm in Lemmon, South Dakota, moved there with her husband David Dwyer, joined Spencer Memorial Presbyterian church, and discovered the spirituality of the Great Plains.^[2] She entered a new, non-fictional phase in her literary career after becoming a Benedictine oblate at Assumption Abbey   ND in 1986, and spending extended periods at Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota.^[3] Since the death of her husband in 2003, Norris has transferred her place of residence to Hawaii, though continuing to do lecture tours on the mainland.

Monday,  September 14   —  “The three strange angels”

Monday, still early in this academic term, future-oriented Monday, home for as yet unknown challenges.   September is like that when your university begins classes late in August as we do here.

D. H. Lawrence ends his short poem, “Song for the Man Who Has Come Through” with five lines that speak to uncertainty and to the courage that goes with it; a September blessing song for students and the women and men who work with them.

It shouldn’t take long to read these five lines out loud twice or thrice.

Blessings on the week.

john sj

Today’s Post  –  D H Lawrence’s poetry and Carl Milles sculpture

What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.

No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them

D. H. Lawrence  September 1885 to March 1930

The playing angels of Philadelphia

Swedish sculptor Car  l Milles created many angels over his creative life time, including these 3 playing angels now permanently displayed in Fairmount Park, along Philadelphia’s Kelly Drive.  When I studied in Philly during the 1970s, I would sometimes walk to the three angels and lie on my back looking up to watch them dance against the sky.  They were my favorite place in a city I came to love.  Still are.

For an explanation of the Philadelphia angels with multiple perspectives see  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yCAQ-WuhMc

Carl Milles  June 1875 to September 1955

Friday, September 11  – bending toward the weekend

This early in the academic year, hustle scrambling seems everywhere.  Solid working relationships that build around a semester’s new slate of courses take time to work out, let alone become a steady work rhythm.   Usually the pace settles in, but here in September, it feels a lot like scrambling.

Pablo Neruda’s “Keeping Quiet” is new to me this morning.  I had to read it slowly, several times to let it welcome me into its imagery — which is true for almost every poem.

A blessing as the work week winds down into the weekend.

john sj

Today’s Post
Keeping Quiet
by Pablo Neruda

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves,
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

~ Pablo Neruda
Translation from Spanish

p.s.              Mission Micro Grant (MMG): Year 7:  Yesterday 20 women and men came together in the Jesuit Residence about 3:00 and listened to each other’s stories about micro grants created in the past year.   Dr. Rosemary Weatherston suggested the MMG idea at a faculty gathering in 2010 and now she directs the program  (i.e., tiny grants ($50—>$250) for proposals  that connect an applicant’s job and work place, with some aspect of UDM’s Mission and Identity).   The process of writing a proposal for so small an amount, and the simplicity of the writing and evaluating processes, works to stimulate remarkable creativity — ordinarily compassionate and playful.  Many proposals come from teams; nearly all generate lots of talk at the work place level.

My favorite single proposal asked for $95.00 to outfit 4 pedicure kits used by nursing students as part of course requirements when they served stints in a homeless women’s shelter.  Students learned how to give pedicures to homeless women.  The grant was awarded in MMG’s year 1 2008, long before Pope Francis made washing the feet of men and women in an Italian prison an world-wide icon.  It fits UDM’s self understanding pretty well.

(http://www.udmercy.edu/mission/microgrant/index.htm)

Pope Francis with prisoners –
washing of feet, Holy Thursday 2011

“God never made an ugly landscape.
All that the sun shines on is beautiful, so long as it is wild.”
~John Muir

Wednesday, September 9

Classes are no longer just beginning.  Students and faculty have begun to settle, be glad for successes, put up with failures.  Sometimes the rhythm of ordinary work looks to be mostly routine.   Only occasionally does a student, or a teacher, recognize the power of what they try to do each day.  When I taught lots of students, there would be moments, rare, when all the little sounds of random body movements all stop at the same time.  When that kind of stillness occurred, better said: when I noticed that kind of stillness, I would be filled with awe.  An entire group in a class room all stopped random noise to listen intently.

Sometimes I would understand what we were discussing that opened the stillness collectively; sometimes I would not understand.   Either way, the sheer beauty of that group of human beings took my breath away.

That’s what Tom Hennen’s provocative “Love for other things” stirs in my memories.  What can surprise and quiet me?  There’s a good question for the middle of an ordinary work week, no?

Have a good day.   Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses.

john st sj

Today’s Post:   Tom Hennen: “Love for Other Things”

It’s easy to love a deer
But try to care about bugs and scrawny trees
Love the puddle of lukewarm water
From last week’s rain.
Leave the mountains alone for now.
Also the clear lakes surrounded by pines.
People are lined up to admire them.
Get close to the things that slide away in the dark.
Be grateful even for the boredom
That sometimes seems to involve the whole world.
Think of the frost
That will crack our bones eventually.

Tom Hennen’s short bio (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Hennen) makes this poem look like a perfect poem for Labor Day week. Even though I hadn’t read the wiki article until after I wrote the post.

Tom Hennen (born 1942, Morris, Minnesota) is an American poet. He grew up on a farm and began work in 1965 as a letterpress and offset printer. Switching careers, he then worked for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources wildlife section in the 1970s and later as a wildlife technician at the Sand Lake National Wildlife Refuge in South Dakota. He is now retired.

In 1972 he helped found the Minnesota Writers’ Publishing House (MWPH), a publishing cooperative, backed by Robert and Carol Bly, established to highlight Midwestern literature. For many years, Hennen operated the MWPH press in his garage.

“Love for Other Things” by Tom Hennen. Text as published in Darkness Sticks to Everything: Collected and New Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2013).

Sept 7 — “Open your hands, if you want to be held. . . . “

I seem to keep meeting Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi lately. This poem is part of the weekly 7 poem selection edited by “A Year of Being Here” http://www.ayearofbeinghere.com/. Labor Day should be lazy time so I’ll just send another Rumi poem, originally written in Farsi.

Have a lovely day off.

john sj

p.s. In the kinship of our families probably all of us can remember women and men who worked with hand and muscle skills that helped us to be born and to live. This Labor Day I remember Grandma Clara who managed the family dairy farm about 10 miles from my house. There, as a kid, I learned not to be afraid of large animals like cows or sudden animals like guinea hens. Only many years later did I perceive that she also knew how to welcome this little town boy to play among the tools, the manure, the pastures and the animals with the freedom of knowing that I was not only welcome but also safe. Safe to explore and run little kid risks. Grandma Clara did all that when I didn’t yet know enough to notice. But I must have noticed; here I am still remembering that great woman.

Image result for guinea hens

a guinea hen;

Today’s Post: “A Community of the Spirit” by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi.

There is a community of the spirit.
Join it, and feel the delight
of walking in the noisy street
and being the noise.

Drink all your passion,
and be a disgrace.

Close both eyes
to see with the other eye.

Open your hands,
if you want to be held.

Sit down in this circle.

Quit acting like a wolf, and feel
the shepherd’s love filling you.

At night, your beloved wanders.
Don’t accept consolations.

Close your mouth against food.
Taste the lover’s mouth in yours.

You moan, “She left me.” “He left me.”
Twenty more will come.

Be empty of worrying.
Think of who created thought!

Why do you stay in prison
when the door is so wide open?

Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.
Live in silence.

Flow down and down in always
widening rings of being.

Text as published in The Essential Rumi, translated from the original Farsi by Coleman Barks with John Moyne (HarperCollins Publishers, 1995). An online version of the original Farsi text couldn’t be located.

Friday September 4  —  “. . . the voice of your eyes . . . “

e e cummings would have objected to my world view on just about every count, as I would his.  Which demonstrates to me that   great poetry connects people through its sheer ability to bring some place in the human condition to life.  Here’s my all time favorite love poem, posted here before on March 17, 2014.

I notice that my context note that March morning could have been written today, at the end of the swirl and hammer of early semester work week here in September of 2015.

“I don’t know why e e cummings love poem caught my attention over the weekend;  perhaps because I ended last week worn out and have been loving time to sleep in,  work out,  take another nap, get some shopping done, after a week of slamming work. But it really doesn’t matter why.  “Somewhere” is always worth another reading.

Try it out loud and leave some time when you’ve finished for stillness and breathing.

Have a good work week.

john sj

Somewhere

Somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

e e cummings

e e cummings 1953

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._E._Cummings

p.s.       A reader of Wednesday’s poem wrote this story from last  Sunday.

Sunday, long line at CVS and a woman got in line behind me. Her clothes were shabby; she had two black eyes and a banged up face. She looked angry – perhaps in pain. I don’t know if she fell off her bike or her paramour had beat her up. I offered her my place in line –said I forgot something that I wanted elsewhere in the store.  She responded rather sharply. “You don’t need to do nuthin for me!”  Me: “OK, I’ll leave the cart here, but if you feel like you want to go around it, no problem .”  I walked to the freezer to get my Skinny Cow ice cream bars…brought them back, the line hadn’t moved, and she was still there.  She looked at the box and mumbled, “What are those?” and I told her how chocolaty and sweet they were for 100 calories but it didn’t matter because I’d probably consume 300 of the calories before day’s end. And she snickered a little and started talking – girl talk – and we chatted about our useless coupons, and where the best deals are on makeup, and how much our pills cost us, and rolled our eyes and looked at each other when a couple people had only a 4 cent co-pay and we knew ours were going to be higher.  We parted smiling like long-time buddies.

My point is that the poem you posted reminded me of the constant presence of the Holy Spirit always in us, silently walking in us, bringing us to love and life…In a visible way the Holy Spirit filled that bedraggled lady and brought her to delight in life if only for a few  minutes with “girl talk.”  OK, we were chatty, unlike the poem’s message, but the unspoken shouted “You are not alone. You have value. You have dignity. You are loved.” My prayer is that the Spirit continues to manifest itself within her.

Wednesday, September 2 “There is nothing worse than to walk out along the street
without you.”

Sometimes we bend into the strange work of study and teaching at the begining of full-time school after time away. Sometimes it takes days, , , and days . . . before the harness of work settles on my shoulders. “Why do this?” Maybe, I sometimes mutter, just to prove that I’ve still got game, just to keep my reputation, maybe just to win some advantage[s]. I call those gloomy, dogged, determined days.

Sometimes, though, I get the more in my life, not proving, not winning, not muttering. Sometimes just loving. When that happens the time of work comes alive in me and I want to go dancing.

Rumi’s “In the Arc of Your Mallet” says a time for dancing. A love song for sure.

Have a blest day. Read the poem out loud, if you can, with pauses.

john sj

In The Arc Of Your Mallet

Don’t go anywhere without me.
Let nothing happen in the sky apart from me,
or on the ground, in this world or that world,
without my being in its happening.
Vision, see nothing I don’t see.
Language, say nothing.
The way the night knows itself with the moon,
be that with me. Be the rose
nearest to the thorn that I am.
I want to feel myself in you when you taste food,
in the arc of your mallet when you work,
when you visit friends, when you go
up on the roof by yourself at night.
There’s nothing worse than to walk out along the street
without you. I don’t know where I’m going.
You’re the road, and the knower of roads,
more than maps, more than love

Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi

Rumi’s tomb in Konya, Turkey.

Monday, August 31  –  “  . . .  How big is my heart, I wonder?”

I’d looked at two or three poems before this one ran into me.  Bam!  So precise, so demanding.   When this poem met me, it was 5:41 on Sunday evening.  At times, when looking for a Monday poem, some poet I’d never met just flattens me.

Perhaps Dan Gerber will flatten you too, as you turn into the first teaching week of this new academic year.    Today, like every day, the university welcomes us into what we do.   Perhaps it strikes us more on the McNichols campus when classes begin for another year.    Like the poet today, the university calls out students to pay attention to horrors and to improbable, graceful beauty.  Calls out everyone who works here.  Stretches to send its collective voice out into the city and even into the wide world.

Dan Gerber is a hard read.  Best to read “Seventieth Birthday” out loud, with pauses.   Or perhaps even better to click on the link below the poem and listen to the poet read it to you.   Or both.

Have a blest week.

john sj

Today’s post:  “ON MY SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY”  Dan Gerber

Let everything happen to you:
beauty and terror.
Only press on: no feeling is final.
—Rilke

I read that tens of thousands of people
have drowned in Bangladesh
and that a million more
may die from isolation, hunger, cholera,
and its sisters, thirst and loneliness.

*****

This morning in our lime tree,
I noticed a bee
dusting a single new bud,
just now beginning to bloom,
while all the other branches were sagging
with heavy green fruit.

*****

I read that in Moscow
every man, woman, child, and dog
is inhaling eight packs of cigarettes a day—
or its equivalent in smoke—
from the fires raging over the steppes.

*****

I saw the god of storms
take the shape of a tree,
bowing to the desert
with her back to the sea.

*****

I saw on television,
a woman in Iran buried up to her breasts,
then wrapped in light gauze
(to protect the spectators),
weeping in terror and pleading for her life
while someone at the edge of the circle
of men dressed in black
picked up the first baseball-sized rock
from the hayrick-sized pile,
to hurl at her eyes, nose, mouth,
ears, throat, breasts, and shoulders.

*****

How big is my heart, I wonder?
How will it encompass these men dressed in black?

*****

Now the fog drifts in over the passes,
screening the peaks into half-tones.
And then into no tones at all.

*****

These goats with names,
with eyes that make you wonder,
these goats
who will be slaughtered today.
Why these goats?

*****

There are reasons,
but they are human reasons.

*****

I listened while my friend
spoke through his grief for his son,
shot to death in a pizza shop he managed
in Nashville
after emptying the safe
for a desperate young man with a gun—
who my friend told me he’d forgiven—
spoke of consolation through his tears,
the spirit of his son still with him, he said.
The spirit of his son still with him.

*****

Oak tree,
joy of my eye
that reaches in so many directions—
Are the birds that fly from your branches
closer to heaven?

*****

The moon
shimmering on the surface of the pond,
its rippling reflected in your eyes,
of which you are no more aware
than the wind, just passing through this oak,
of the acorns still bobbing.

*****

The mountains, resolute now
in fading light.
With her nose deep in the late-summer grass,
my dog calls up a new story.

“On My Seventieth Birthday” by Dan Gerber. Text as published in Sailing Through Cassiopeia (Copper Canyon Press, 2013).

Hear the poet read his poem here.

Gerber received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Michigan State University in 1962. He was the co-founder, with Jim Harrison, of the literary magazine Sumac.^[2] As part of his journalist profession, Gerber made extensive travels, primarily to Africa. He has served as writer-in-residence at Michigan State University and Grand Valley State University.^[3] Gerber currently lives in Santa Ynez Valley, California with his wife.^[4]

Gerber’s literary works have been recognized and highlighted at Michigan State University in their Michigan Writers Series.^[5]His work has appeared in Narrative Magazine.^[6] His most recent book of poetry, Sailing through Cassiopeia^[7] was published in 2012 by Copper Canyon Press.

Thursday,  August 27 –    “Observing all things  —  With dispassion  —  But remembering well”

Sometimes it happens that browsing new poetry changes you.  This morning’s browsing did that.   I am preparing tomorrow’s post today;  tomorrow, I will be driving home from Guelph where Bill Clarke, sj lives, my spiritual director for three decades.  The 4+ hour drive refreshes me with little rituals — buying coffee at the same I-94 exit just south of Port Huron;  singing “O Canada” to Lake Huron while crossing The Blue Water Bridge;  standing still by a country church, empty of people on weekdays, and remembering the last months of my life.   Not a time to work with my laptop writing Friday’s post.

This morning, browsing “A Week of Being Here,” Kenji Miyazawa met me for the first time.  I’d never heard of him.  This poem was found in his trunk after he died in his early thirties,  It stops me just like Lake Huron and the country church do.    I think this Buddhist poet will meet readers of the list again.

Even more than most poems, “Be Not Defeated” should reward reading aloud with pauses.   Have a good weekend.

john sj

{Kenji Miyazawa (宮沢 賢治 Miyazawa Kenji^?, 27 August 1896 – 21 September 1933) was a Japanese poet and author of children’s literature from Hanamaki, Iwate in the late Taishō and early Shōwa periods. He was also known as an agricultural science teacher, a vegetarian, cellist, devout Buddhist, and utopian social activist.^[1]}

Today’s Post  —  Kenji Miyazawa: “Be Not Defeated by the Rain”

Unbeaten by the rain
Unbeaten by the wind
Bested by neither snow nor summer heat
Strong of body
Free of desire
Never angry
Always smiling quietly
Dining daily on four cups of brown rice
Some miso and a few vegetables
Observing all things
With dispassion
But remembering well
Living in a small, thatched-roof house
In the meadow beneath a canopy of pines
Going east to nurse the sick child
Going west to bear sheaves of rice for the weary mother
Going south to tell the dying man there is no cause for fear
Going north to tell those who fight to put aside their trifles
Shedding tears in time of drought
Wandering at a loss during the cold summer
Called useless by all
Neither praised
Nor a bother
Such is the person
I wish to be

“Be Not Defeated by the Rain” by Kenji Miyazawa. Translated from the original Japanese by Hart Larrabee. Text as posted on Tomo 友(08/05/2012).

Curator’s note: After the poet’s death, a black notebook containing this text was found in his trunk. The poem appears in bold strokes amidst his repetitious copying of a Buddhist mantra. According to its date (November 3, 1931), he had composed it while on his deathbed. He was only in his thirties. Visit this link to view a photograph of the poem in the notebook, the original Japanese text, two very different translations (including Larrabee’s, which I prefer), and interviews with the interpreters.

Posted by Phyllis Cole-Dai on Aug 19, 2015 12:00 am

Art credit: “Girl in the rain,” Giclée print by Pavlo Tereshin.