Poetry Blog: "A Work Day in Hard Times"

Wednesday, October 21

“Summer ends now, now
     barbarous in beauty the stooks arise around”

Getting ready for a rainy day — 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 northeast 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 survey mapping project). All that makes it easier to locate this campus against the majestic march of sunrise all through the year, and can remind us, too, 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 and, maybe, enjoy the sky?

p.s. for a working definition of  “stooks”  see the caption below the harvest field after Hopkins’ poem.

Have a blest day,

john sj

Today’s post — “Hurrahing in The 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.

“ .  .  . now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise
Around . . .”

“stooks”  = “a group of sheaves of grain stood on end in a field.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins
28 July 1844 – 8 June, 1889

“But how can they believe me?
When sometimes I don’t even believe myself.
Maybe it’s time to be loud.”

No strong poem is ordinary;  Maria’s surely is not ordinary either.  I am proud that the “Work Day in Hard Times” list has made a home for her voice among our poets and readers.    Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses.

Have a blest day,

john sj

Today’s Post –  “Being Catholic”

I wear my faith quietly,
like a pebble in your pocket
Smooth and cold,
Comforting when you hold it tight in your hand.
But to be more honest,
I wear my faith secretly, cautious of who
to tell the truth because
I’m not sure how my circle
of liberal, leftists, almost
socialists would take it.
How could I, a feminist who uses reason,
logic, and kindness, follow a church
that doesn’t let women be leaders?
Follow a God
who believes LGBTQ loved ones will rot in hell?
follow an institution
that rapes children?
Stop.
I want to tell them that
that isn’t my church, isn’t my God.
My God lives in jails and detention centers,
in water bottles left in the desert,
and school teachers who work too much for too little.
My God is in parents who love their gay
and trans kids as reflections
of God’s own image.
My faith is the holiness of women, the life
in service for others.

My God is liberation.
She is the power of the storm
and the stillness of it when it’s over.
She is Brown laborers
rebuilding a city,
and the sweat of their foreheads
feeding their families.
But how can they believe me? When
sometimes I don’t even believe myself.
Maybe it’s time to be loud.
As loud as the annoying (and wrong) fetus
fanatics who are pro-life without
really being pro-living.
Maybe it’s time to let my faith breathe. Take
my pebble and let throw it
in the water.
Let it make ripples.
No.
Let it make a fucking tsunami.

Maria Ibarra-Frayre
Writer, feminist, unapologetically undocumented

Friday, October 16 –   “And no
his neighborhood is not like a war zone”

We, who live and work in Detroit – 8 Mile Road down to the River – live with many perceptions of Detroit.  Jamaal May’s “There are Birds Here” was new to me before a friend sent it, suggesting if for the “Work Day/Hard Time” poetry list.

Every poem does best when read out loud, with pauses – today’s, perhaps, especially so by the 3rd or 4th reading.  Detroit alive with vitality while carrying wounds as well.

Have a blest weekend,

john sj

Today’s Post    “There Are Birds Here”
For Detroit

There are birds here,
so many birds here
is what I was trying to say
when they said those birds were metaphors
for what is trapped
between buildings
and buildings. No.

The birds are here
to root around for bread
the girl’s hands tear
and toss like confetti. No,

I don’t mean the bread is torn like cotton,
I said confetti, and no
not the confetti
a tank can make of a building.

I mean the confetti
a boy can’t stop smiling about
and no his smile isn’t much
like a skeleton at all. And no
his neighborhood is not like a war zone.

I am trying to say
his neighborhood
is as tattered and feathered
as anything else,

as shadow pierced by sun
and light parted
by shadow-dance as anything else,
but they won’t stop saying
how lovely the ruins,
how ruined the lovely
children must be in that birdless city.

1982-

Jamaal May, “There Are Birds Here” from The Big Book of Exit Strategies.
Copyright © 2016 by Jamaal May. Reprinted by permission of Alice James Books.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26196185-the-big-book-of-exit-strategies

Monday, Oct 12, 2020  –  “a mutual commitment to noticing”

Over 4 decades of kinship, Connie de Biase and I lived our way into a mutual commitment to noticing. She died in Brentwood Long Island 3 years ago.  Since she left us,  I miss her most on Saturday mornings when driving into center city to buy loaves of fresh-baked bread.   I would call Connie after I’d placed my shopping bag on the passenger side.  As I drove home, we talked about the condition of our inner lives.  Through Connie’s last months, our talk became more brave and sad as she recognized her growing diminishment, her grief at losing the life in Madison, CT that she loved and lived so gracefully.  Ignatius calls conversations like this a way of paying attention to “inner disturbances, both consolations and desolations.”

first written and posted January 23, 2017 (c. 2 weeks before she died)
“Perhaps today’s Denise Levertov poem came to mind because of what happened in me as I flew into JFK Saturday and braved the Long Island’s expressway with its too-tight turns matched by slightly-too-narrow lanes.  I’d come to spend time with my dying soul friend, Sr. Consuela de Biase, csj.   Connie has become frail, like the ancient poet in today’s poem.  She misses nothing, I came to realize, but you have to lean in close to hear;  worn with fatigue, she whispers, and pauses to breathe.  We visited three times  (c. 90 minutes, c. 25 minutes, and 4 or 5  minutes early the next morning when we said goodbye before I headed back to JFK).  I love it that the 40 mile drive on the parkway was wearing;  it reminds me that those miles and our 3 conversations are of a piece with decades of mutual listening, the fabric of Connie’s life.”

Denise Levertov writes of an ancient poet whose frail strengths remind me of my friend.   This Monday morning, chilly and gray but still alive with the promises with which February can surprise us.  Who knows?  The poet and the morning might tempt you to open your window or step outside so you can read “In Love” while bathed in its beauty, and breathe a little too.

Have a blest week,

john sj

Today’s Post   “In Love”

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
Connie laughing,  smiling,  contemplative  August 2006

Wednesday, October 13 – “My city is that cup of sunshine. . .”

Professor Fatemeh Keshavarz, University of Maryland’s Roshan Chair of Persian Studies, is a poet and a scholar. In September 2014, she welcomed us into our academic year by reading a poem she wrote a few days before September 11, 2001 — before she or we knew about the 9-11 attacks on New York, Washington DC and a field in western Pennsylvania. This first Monday of October, national news led with a story of a violent mass shooting in Las Vegas. It is hard not to go numb with what feels like a relentless rush of hatred carried out with precise killing weapons. Fatemeh locates that same violence in a vast universe of creative intensity and serenity. If you were not there in 2014, and even if you were, it’s worth reading again (http://danmurano.com/poetry/fatemeh-keshavarz).

Here is another of Fatemeh Keshavarz’s poems. She celebrates “Shiraz,” her home city in Iran, which has lived as a center for art and beauty for c. 4000 years. Wikipedia tells me that “The oldest sample of wine in the world, dating to approximately 7,000 years ago, was discovered on clay jars recovered outside of Shiraz.”

Detroit is only 318 years old, but I am using the poem to celebrate Motown today. The beauty of taste and the pause that good wine inspires, can help put terror in its much larger context of the human condition over centuries. Lift a glass when you get off work.

Best read “Shiraz” out loud several times, with some pauses. Have a blest day.

john sj

“Shiraz”

Held up to gods
In the palm of a giant’s hands
A rare handcrafted marble cup
Brimming with sunshine
Defined at the outer edges
With tall cypress trees
That line up at dawn reverently
To interpret the horizons
In their meticulous green thoughts
***

My city is
That cup of sunshine
I can drink to the last drop
And be thirsty for more.

Shiraz, Dec. 21, 2000

Wednesday, September 30
“It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.”

This demanding Hopkins poem speaks of the power and beauty of ordinary human sadness.  Pretty much every work day in the year invites our attention to work-pressure but also to what we notice when we pause, breathe, and invite stillness into the pace of living.

“Have you breathed yet today”?  This has been a question many women and men, soul friends, plant lightly in the hustle of my life, and I plant the same question in their lives too.   This afternoon, that question brings me back to Len Waters, sj.  Len taught me and other college age young adults in his classes.  He challenged us to believe that our lives are alive with beauty, that sadness opens us to beauty as freshly as playfulness does.   Len taught us to keep what he called a “Commonplace Book,”  small enough to fit in a shirt pocket.   When some extraordinary sound or sight or memory or piece of poetry catches our attention, we could stop right where we are, take out our battered little book, find words that want our attention precisely then and there.  Thus, a commonplace moment can come alive in our imaginations with remembering, again and again.

The “Work Day in a Hard Time,” now in the list’s seventh year, comes from Fr. Waters’ teachings when he taught me in my early twenties.   I miss him still.   Reading this Hopkins poem slowly, with pauses, reminds me of what I owe to his mentoring.  Let me tip my hat to Len and to a host of great teachers who have anointed generations of students here at Six Mile and Livernois.

Have a blest week as we catch a hint of autumn.

john st sj

Spring and Fall
By Gerard Manley Hopkins
   to a young child

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Near the Jesuit cemetery, Colombiere Center November 28, 2006

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”

Last year about this time, one of the list’s readers responded to an all-time favorite autumn poem from Gerard Manley Hopkins – – who pretty regularly knocks me flat with wonder. The email contained John Keats’ early 19th-century romantic poem without comment.  That reader reminded me, as list readers often do, of a poet I had not noticed for a while.  No scolding either; as in “how can you have overlooked Keats!”  Since then, Keats works on my imagination this time of year.  I’m in his debt for this near-perfect evocation of mid-autumn blustering East/North East winds and rain.

During this year,  with its avalanches of relentless news stories, I am hearing — in conversations with generous-hearted companions who find the courage, again and again, to pay attention to the wounds of the world and call out powerful and stark images of the state of the present world.  One soul friend, when I asked, “tell me how you are these weeks,” told me: “my cough has been very tough, mostly because of the clouds of smoke from the raging fires around us.”  She said, “sometimes this feels like the end of the world. . .”  But then we tell each other stories of tenderness and hope in and for this same hard world.

Telling each other stories restores and refreshes our hopes and imaginations:  we rise from our fears and begin again to embrace our world.

Best to read “to autumn” several times out loud with pauses.

Have a blest week.

john sj

Today’s Post “To Autumn” John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821

Today’s Post – – Wendell Berry
Fellowship of Southern Writers

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled
is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Wendell Berry b. August 5, 1934
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendell_Berry

Friday, September 18 — “you had better get / your eyes checked / or, better, still, / your diminished spirit”

How many encounters could I remember if I worked at it, when someone took the trouble to tell me, bluntly and lovingly, to pay attention to the way I was not paying attention? — An old Lakota grandmother when I was just 24, her eyes alight with humor, knowing that I was just young. An older Jesuit telling me that I’d pushed too hard, this new priest daunting the congregation unnecessarily. An atheist scholar friend observing that when I spoke the first time at MIT, “the authority from which you spoke did not include the people in the room.”

This list is long and deeply refreshing, the people who took the trouble to be allies to me. Their voices run as deep as those of people who worked to be precise when telling me I was beautiful. Mary Oliver writes of clouds to remind us of our allies, when scolding or celebrating, our pilgrim selves.

These utterly a-typical weeks of fear and anger, of anger and fear, of face masks and handwashing rituals, a close friend observed a week or two ago, create a context for work and ordinary life that she describes as “haphazard.”

Nevertheless, every now and then Mary Oliver just smacks me . . . . to get my attention and helps me pay attention to the depths in my life.  Yours too, perhaps.

Have a blest weekend,

john sj

 
The Monument to Joe Louis, aka “The Fist”

Today’s Post – Mary Oliver: “The Fist”

There are days
when the sun goes down
like a fist,
though of course

if you see anything
in the heavens
in this way
you had better get

your eyes checked
or, better, still,
your diminished spirit.
The heavens

have no fist,
or wouldn’t they have been
shaking it
for a thousand years now,

and even
longer than that,
at the dull, brutish
ways of mankind—

heaven’s own
creation?
Instead: such patience!
Such willingness

to let us continue!
To hear,
little by little,
the voices—

only, so far, in
pockets of the world—
suggesting
the possibilities

of peace?
Keep looking.
Behold, how the fist opens
with invitation.

Mary Oliver
1935-2019
“The Fist” by Mary Oliver.
Text as published in Thirst: Poems (Beacon Press, 2007)

Hildegarde von Bingham
Feast Day: September 17
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hildegard_of_Bingen

Marjory McNichols Wilson
Fine Art & Design Studio
https://marjorywilson.com

Every so often, a poet taps on the window of my imagination and catches my attention.  I had not encountered Mary Karr before (b. January 16, 1955); now I am wondering why.

Have a blest September Monday,

john sj

Today’s Post  “The Voice of God”

Ninety percent of what’s wrong with you
could be cured with a hot bath,
says God from the bowels of the subway.
but we want magic, to win
the lottery we never bought a ticket for.
(Tenderly, the monks chant, embrace
the suffering.) The voice of God does not pander,
offers no five-year plan, no long-term
solution, nary an edict. It is small & fond & local.
Don’t look for your initials in the geese
honking overhead or to see thru the glass even
darkly. It says the most obvious crap—
put down that gun, you need a sandwich.

Mary Karr
1955-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Karr