Poetry Blog: "A Work Day in Hard Times"

Wednesday April 8 –  Color Blind Angel, “you laid your young life down”  (blues singer Robin Rogers – ✝ Dec 19.2010)

Today’s post is unusual.  Last Sunday’s Detroit Free Press article about Viola Liuzzo and the park named for her touched several months of conversations with Julie Hamilton (Personal Counseling/Wellness Coordinator UDM School of Dentistry) about the Park.  We talked again Monday and decided to dedicate today’s post to Viola and the park.  http://www.freep.com/story/life/2015/04/04/metro-detroiters-unite-honor-viola-liuzzo/25300385/

Viola Liuzzo’s park is a story close to the heart of Detroit, the city, and of the university.  As Detroiter Libbie Rutherford says:  “…when you have more eyes on a park and people are using it, the crime rate goes down.”  Parks matter.  Their names hold stories that tell the courage and grace of people who have lived here before us.

Detroit honors itself by setting aside some days this week to hold Viola, this amazing brave woman, up into the light.  I drove west on 7 Mile to Greenfield yesterday and found my way to the Viola Liuzzo park.  It’s small, as parks go, and can still could use some new equipment, but is cared about:  a place in its neighborhood.

We hope to tease you into reading the free press article from Sunday and listening to the blues singer Robin Rogers’ 5 minute ballad for Viola; Non-blues fans will probably be startled by RR’s classic grace and power.  By the end of her 5 minutes, you may grieve, as I do, that this citizen of Detroit died too young riddled with bullets a half century ago.  The song Rogers wrote and sings, “Color Blind Angel,” is just below and is our post.

I also asked Julie Hamilton to give us background about all this in a postscript.

john st sj

Today’s Post

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1f9H6C4cFU  (robin rogers:  5:24 minutes) 

Color Blind Angel

Viola, Viola, you laid your young life down.
From Selma to heaven, 3 Ks took you out.
Color blind angel battled bigotry.
Viola, Viola lives on in history.

Verse 1:
Left your home in the winterland, southbound with a dream.
Edmund Pettis bridge, violence on the screen.
Freedom summer of ’65 is where you had to be,
Stand up for your fellow man, erase hypocrisy.

(Chorus)

Verse 2:
March 25, Alabam, along a lonesome road,
Shots rang out on a hate-filled night, now the world would know:
Motor City mother, lily-white and sincere,
Gave her life for the civil rights, fought against the fear.

(Chorus)

Verse 3:
Walkin’ for the right to vote seems old-fashioned now,
Martin’s vision reigns supreme, all colors can be proud.
The legacy of all that fought goes on eternally.
Women and men from walks of life live on in history.

Historical Background for this week in northwest Detroit

Who was Viola: Viola Liuzzo was a 39 year old mother of five living on Detroit’s west side when in 1965 she watched news reports of attacks on civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama, as they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge.  Soon after, she heard the call from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to come to Selma and join the march. Something happened in Viola as she listened.  She answer Dr. King and went to Selma. As a member of the NAACP, she knew the risk.  She asked her best friend, Sarah Evans, a black woman, to watch over her children if something happened to her while in Selma.

Five hours after the successful March on Selma, Viola Liuzzo was killed by KKK members, one of whom was an FBI informant. She was shot to death while giving rides to other civil rights workers who had completed the historic march. Her family’s devastation was further traumatized when crosses began to be burned in their front yard, death threats arrived, and stories began to emerge in the press defaming their mother’s character and questioning her stability. They later learned these stories came from FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover’s office. For over two years they were forced to have armed guards at the front and back doors of their home. Viola was one white woman who died during the civil rights movement. No one was ever convicted in her murder.

Why we were moved by Viola: My friend, Colette Mezza, and I had both heard the story of Viola on WDET/NPR two years ago. We were touched by how deeply committed to her values she was, and how she was willing to risk everything for her fellow citizens.  The decision to leave her children and drive to Selma, has to this day triggered strong reactions, questioning why she would do such a thing. To hear her children today explain it…she wanted to make the world better for them. She ended up doing just that.  A few months after her ultimate sacrifice, the Voters Rights Act was passed.

The Viola Liuzzo Park: The Viola Liuzzo Park is located in the area of Greenfield and Eight Mile Road. It was named in honor of Viola in the early 1970’s. Over the years, it has become tired and dilapidated, like many residential areas of Detroit.  People living nearby have been taking care of the park and joined us, along with members of the Gospel Tabernacle Church on Greenfield (at Vassar), in developing plans to restore it.  We have been quietly meeting in the basement of the church, and over the months many people have stopped by to join the effort, including Dorothy Aldridge, a former member of SNCC. The miracle of this project is that it has become something much more than a park restoration…it has become the culmination of an amazing blend of citizens from many backgrounds and experiences, passionate about Viola’s legacy and the city of Detroit. The restoration of the park is also about healing… for the Liuzzo family, the neighborhood, the city, and, yes, even the people who have met each other working to restore this brave woman’s park.  We have used Viola’s values (unity, integrity, respect, compassion, equality, and lightheartedness) to guide us as we move forward.

VIOLA LIUZZO WEEK CALENDAR OF EVENTS

1. 4/10 1:30 p.m. – Honorary Doctorate award ceremony for Viola Liuzzo. Wayne State University
2. 4/11 1:00 p.m. – Prof. Michael Placco speaking: Viola Liuzzo: A Passionate Undertaking at Cultural Center at Macomb Community College 44575 Garfield Road (at Hall Road), Clinton Twp., MI  48038 (call 586.445.7348).
3. 4/11 4:00-6:00 p.m. – Celebration of Friends of Viola Liuzzo Park
   • Celebration of what would have been Viola Liuzzo’s 90^th birthday
   • Fitness activities and walk
   • Announcement of ground breaking for park renovations
4. 4/12 11:00 a.m. First Unitarian Church – Sermon; some of or all of the Liuzzo family will speak.
5. 4/12 2:00 p.m. – Dorothy Turkel/Frank Lloyd Wright House Fundraiser.  Tickets $60 – $1000. Dean Robb will speak at 3 p.m. 
6. 4/13 5:30 p.m. – WSU Morris Dees & Dean Robb presentation on Viola Liuzzo
7. 4/14 7:00 p.m. – Gospel Tabernacle Church Fundraiser sponsored by MCHR.  $5.00 donation at the door. 

Opening Day in Motown = Ernie Harwell and The Song of Solomon.

Can’t say how good it feels to listen to Ernie Harwell.  Here he is on a youtube clip and in print from The Song of Solomon.

[jwplayer mediaid=”1305″]

For, lo, the winter is past,
The rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth;
The time of the singing of birds is come,
And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.

Song of Solomon
Read on Tigers Opening Day for decades by Ernie Harwell

Ernie, lots of us miss you.  jstsj

Good Friday,  April 3  ” I have concluded that since it is beyond our comprehension, Jesus came not to explain suffering but to weep with us and to suffer with us.”  Francis

I hadn’t planned a post today;  I’ve been sifting emails that I saved but hadn’t the time to read.  This one, from January 23, changed my mind.  Tom Reese wrote about Pope Francis encountering a weeping 12 year old Filipino.  This is not a poem; it’s a column.  To me, it reads like a Good Friday contemplation.

Pope Francis: ‘If you don’t learn how to weep, you’re not a good Christian’ by Thomas Reese

Blessings,

john sj

Let him Easter in us,  be a day-spring to the dimness of us
be a crimson-cresseted east

G M Hopkins sj

My favorite Easter prayer.  Have a blest day.

john sj

Wednesday  April 1  –  “This being human is a guest house.”

Sometimes, one of the readers of this poetry blog steps into the editor’s role and suggests repeating a previous poem.  So yesterday afternoon.  “’The Guest House,’ my favorite poem so far in all these posts.”   “But,” I replied, we posted it late in January;  this runs pretty close in time.”  “So what?”  s/he replied.  “It’s beautiful.”  Good call.  I’ve read it 3 times since getting up and I think I am the better for it.    Perhaps you will be too.   Best to read the poem out loud, with some pauses; maybe more than once through the day.

Weather.com says sun by 10:30, good high pressure system, and 51% humidity by two.    Daffodils look more energetic by the day.

Have a blest day.

john sj

Today’s Post 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.

Monday, March 30  “Then you relax your hand, and all the skin relaxes, letting go the taut shine of youth . . . “

March30 — the second last day of March which, the saying goes, “comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb.”  Whoever thought the saying first must have lived somewhere where March weather is fickle and tentative.  Blustery.  Surely not Tucson or Miami.   Tentative weather months are the blessing of geographies where the tilt of the sun against the earth creates seasons rich with teasing, soft breezes swept away by 25 mph bluster.  The teasing sharpens the appetite for new flowers and fresh grass.  A great moment in the year for the Christian feast of Resurrection, thousands of tiny explosions of new life and improbable beauty.

Today’s post comes from a list that often expands my horizons (“A Year of being Here: mindfulness poetry by wordsmiths of the here & now”).  Susan Rooke is new to me and, perhaps, to you.  Today’s post, “A Marriage in the Hands,” can be read any day in any season of the year.  Understated love, so intimate.  It measures time in decades, not the rapid fire swirl of springtime energy only.

Have a blest day.

John sj

Today’s Post —  Susan Rooke: “A Marriage in the Hands”
Posted by Phyllis Cole-Dai on Mar 25, 2015 12:00 am

You make a fist, that I might see
your skin grow tight again,
smoothed across your hand.

Those big hands that you like
to joke are too heavy when carried
all day at the ends of your arms.

Then you relax your hand,
and all the skin relaxes, letting
go the taut shine of youth,

and I see your sacrifice,
the thirty years you’ve held
us close, held my strength

for me, and all your tenderness.
I put my own hand out, relaxed,
palm down, next to yours.

You are aging, so am I, and this
is something we have sworn
always to do as one. Undeniably

I see we have. Then you make
a fist again. I make my own.
As one we smooth the way ahead.

“A Marriage in the Hands” by Susan Rooke.

Susan Rooke lives in Austin, Texas.  Despite her normal façade, she’s always been interested in the mysterious and odd, and has completed the first novel of a fantasy series. Her work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in The Texas Poetry Calendar 2013, Pulse: voices from the heart of medicine, San Pedro River Review, and on Austin Capital Metro buses.  She and her husband of almost 30 years (who indulges her interests without subscribing to them himself), spend as much time in the mountains of West Texas as possible.

Friday, March 27 – “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things”

“In the late Middle Ages, as sermons began to be given in the vernacular instead of Latin, the English word lent was adopted. This word initially simply meant spring (as in the German language Lenz and Dutch lente) and derives from the Germanic root for long because in the spring the days visibly lengthen.”   Wikipedia   The English spoken in the United States is inherited from England, a blend of Anglo-Saxon (German roots) and French (from the Norman Conquest).  Our word “Lent” comes from German/Anglo-Saxon roots, an inheritance from northern Europe (Wikipedia could tell of other names in other climates for this season of 40 days leading to Easter).

In our climate, you might say that “Spring” means the season when trees and shrubs and flowers and grass look dead and very gradually tell the careful observer that they are coming back to life.  Very gradually.  For some years, I’ve followed a ritual to remind myself about how slowly this happens:  I look for a large shrub or a low-hanging tree branch somewhere along a pathway I walk.  I stop nearby, close enough that I can look at one twig on one branch from a distance of 6 to 8 inches and look at the twig for half a minute or so, paying attention to signs of rebirth.   I try to remember to stop there 3-4 times a week.   From day to day not much new appears.  Very gradual. Little by little this attention is rewarded by delicate hints of rebirth.

Stopping and looking is a form of Lenten prayer and helps more than giving up candy or beer, stopping and looking at a twig on a shrub can be a metaphor for close watching other parts of life and waiting there in hope: a  child growing up;  a city laboring through bankruptcy; a Congress waiting to learn civility again.  A university teeming with people trying to learn, trying to teach, trying to renew its day to day operations.  Beauty all around us.

The growing length of daylight during this year’s Lent comes to about 3 minutes more light each day.

Have a blest weekend.

john sj

Today’s Post:   Gerard Manley Hopkins, sj  “God’s Grandeur”

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Gerard Manley Hopkins  28 July 1844 – 8 June, 1889

Wednesday, March 25 – “Winds peak c. 23 mph about 3:00 pm, after spring rain, then a passing smile of sun,” so says Weather.com

Weather.com says this Wednesday is getting ready to be a classic spring day:  a system change passing through from the South, South-West — our gummy weather direction,  bringing some measurable rain and gusty winds, peaking c. 23 mph in mid afternoon.    The weather-wise will notice that we’ve been short of rain, nothing like suffering California, but still overdue.   Then, a little after 3:00 pm the wind changes direction, from SSW to WSW and brings in late afternoon sun and some more wind.  All this beauty waiting to be noticed while we carry along the day’s commitments:  Beauty and wonder; Beauty and sloppy puddles;  Beauty and deadlines.  We work and walk in mystery.

The Work Day blog hosts poets of many faiths and some who refrain from religious faith.  Denise Levertov celebrates a creator God whose attention is not easily distracted.  In this mode, she reminds me of Tagore.  Best read the poem out loud, with pauses.

Have a blest day.

john sj

p.s.       UDM’s neighbor high school, UD Jesuit, packed the McNichols campus’ parking lots for a quarterfinals hoop game with Clarkson,  Won at the buzzer with a daring layup.  A tip of my 6 Mile baseball cap to these disciplined 7 Milers who played their game here on our street.

Today’s Post  “Primary Wonder”

Days pass when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber
along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing
their colored clothes; caps and bells.
And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng’s clamor
recedes:  the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that, 0 Lord,
Creator, Hallowed one, You still,
hour by hour sustain it.

— Denise Levertov

p.s.       Bishop Bob Morneau, a family friend from Wisconsin, wrote a piece “Every month, I put a poet in my pocket.”  Sr. Gerry Finan, a New York friend emailed it to me this morning.  Bob called attention to this Denise Levetov  poem I had til now missed.   I owe both friends.

ncronline.org/blogs/soul-seeing/every-month-i-put-poet-my-pocket

Monday March 23  —  “ . . . a sudden, sweet, almost painful love for my students.”

On Monday mornings, I often begin looking for a post in “A Year of Being Here” which hits my inbox on Saturdays with a handful of poems.  Most of the poets I have not met before.  Some read to my ears like the poet missed something.  I re-read and, sadly, come to the same conclusion.  But not very often.  Some stranger opens my ears to the day and to the work week.  A few minutes ago, that happened again.

Who, I wonder, is Al Zolynas?  His poem, “Love in the Classroom” knocks me flat.  And invites me into a classroom in the middle of an assignment, into the fear of routine dulling his senses and blunting his bravery.  But then, the whole poem opens my ears; the courage of exploring the ordinary fears that are part of a teacher’s life.  Courage and fear will be at work all over this Monday campus at Six Mile and Livernois, on Jefferson at the Law School, on M L King Blvd at the Dental School.

A university is not only faculty, all around the place people begin to suck it up and focus on the tasks that will shape the day, committed to ordinary courage and ordinary fear.  But this Monday Al Zolynas pays tribute to teachers as they teach, and to their students.  Beauty all around while we wait for spring to open the daffodils.

Have a blest day.

john sj

p.s.      Sr. Bette Moslander, C.S.J, a giant of a woman, died yesterday in her Kansas home.  I think she was in her 90s.  I know, from my own experience and that of many others that her wisdom ran deep, its bite and edge softened by her kindness and her amazing wit.  A loss for many Sisters of St Joseph and an uncounted number of other women and men.

Today’s Post  “Love in the Classroom”

Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses.

Al Zolynas: “Love in the Classroom”

Posted by Phyllis Cole-Dai on Mar 18, 2015 12:00 am

—for my students

Afternoon. Across the garden, in Green Hall,
someone begins playing the old piano—
a spontaneous piece, amateurish and alive,
full of a simple, joyful melody.
The music floats among us in the classroom.

I stand in front of my students
telling them about sentence fragments.
I ask them to find the ten fragments
in the twenty-one-sentence paragraph on page forty-five.
They’ve come from all parts
of the world—Iran, Micronesia, Africa,
Japan, China, even Los Angeles—and they’re still
eager to please me. It’s less than half
way through the quarter.

They bend over their books and begin.
Hamid’s lips move as he follows
the tortuous labyrinth of English syntax.
Yoshie sits erect, perfect in her pale make-up,
legs crossed, quick pulse minutely jerking her right foot. Tony,
from an island in the South Pacific, sprawls
limp and relaxed in his desk.

The melody floats around and through us
in the room, broken here and there, fragmented,
re-started. It feels Mideastern, but
it could be jazz, or the blues—it could be
anything from anywhere.
I sit down on my desk to wait,
and it hits me from nowhere—a sudden,
sweet, almost painful love for my students.

“Nevermind,” I want to cry out.
“It doesn’t matter about fragments.
Finding them or not. Everything’s
a fragment and everything’s not a fragment.
Listen to the music, how fragmented,
how whole, how we can’t separate the music
from the sun falling on its knees on all the greenness,
from this moment, how this moment
contains all the fragments of yesterday
and everything we’ll ever know of tomorrow!”

Instead, I keep a coward’s silence.
The music stops abruptly;
they finish their work,
and we go through the right answers,
which is to say
we separate the fragments from the whole.

“Love in the Classroom” by Al Zolynas. Text as published in Under Ideal Conditions: Poems (Laterthanever Press, 1994; no bookseller link available). © Al Zolynas. Reprinted by permission of the poet.

Art credit: “Open Window,” acrylic on canvas, abstract painting by Filomena De Andrade Booth.

Friday,  March 20  —  “landed backwards!”

Spring does not promise an endless parade of sun drenched 72º days with puff-ball clouds and light breezes to stir new flowers.  A good thing it doesn’t promise all of that because spring never delivers an endless repetition of anything.  Some days stir the soul with playful, kind beauty.  It renews our spirits.  Some days deliver soft rain that brings in its wake deeper green colors.  Some days bluster and make us glad we brought change of weather jackets, or we shiver and scuttle across the outside if we didn’t.  Look out for mud too.

Put all the varieties of spring together?  How to name them as a season?  My favorite spring poem, from William Carlos Williams, suggests that spring catches our attention and renews our courage.

Best to read the poem out loud, with a pause.

Have a blest Spring.

john sj

Today’s Post  “I saw the two starlings coming in . . . “

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