Poetry Blog: "A Work Day in Hard Times"

A postscript to today’s post:  Veterans day in the UK where searing memories of The Great War (we call it World War I) remain part of the national identity.

Poppies surrounding The Tower of London

jssj

This morning’s post[s] stirred several compelling responses. Here they are:
1) One of our readers from the Law School wrote to ask why I had not included John McCrae’s flint-hard voice coming out of the brutal violences of World War I, especially, he observed, since 2014 is the 100th anniversary of that many with long memories call “The Great War.”

2) Another reader, this one a close friend, sent me a YouTube clip of a 1942 BBC recording “Nightingale Sings as RAF Bombers Fly” You have to listen in a couple minutes before the bombers enter the sound field.

Thank you to both readers.

john sj

Today’s 3rd Post

by John McCrae, May 1915

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Monday November 10  — “working together in common cause to produce the miraculous”

I’ve been fussing with today’s post, “A Work Day in a Hard Time,”   all morning.  Too much to take in, too many implications calling for rumination.  I thought of David Whyte’s The House of Belonging (1998) and found a poem he wrote “for the presentation of The Collier Trophy to The Boeing Company marking the introduction of the new 777 passenger jet.”   Passenger jets require immense, collective engineering capacity for complexity.  And every complex sub-system must work in harmony with all the others or that big device is likely to fall out of the sky without help from its landing gear.

The 777 is hardly perfection; no complicated and interactive technological system ever is.  But it is designed to work, to get itself off the ground and back down again without crashing, to manage storms and turbulence and passenger safety.

Not a bad metaphor for the Detroit settlement formally approved last Friday by Judge Stephen Rhodes.  Lots of moving parts have to work together; it is manifestly imperfect; lots of sweat and frustration ahead.   Still I cannot deny that this Detroiter sees in The Grand Bargain, a realistic shot at urban rebirth.  Lots of courage and lots of negotiating and lots of creativity has been happening here.  Lots more needed.

Blessings on your day.

john sj

Today’s Post

“Working Together”

We shape our self
to fit this world

and by the world
are shaped again.

The visible
and the invisible

working together
in common cause,

to produce
the miraculous.

I am thinking of the way
the intangible air

passed at speed
round a shaped wing

easily
holds our weight.

So may we, in this life
trust

to those elements
we have yet to see

or imagine,
and look for the true

shape of our own self,
by forming it well

to the great
intanbibles about us.

David Whyte

Friday, November 7 —  “The good traveler cares for weary companions, grieves when we lose heart,  takes us where she finds us,  listens to us.”

Today I’ll be more brief than usual.  Bankruptcy Judge Stephen Rhodes should announce his decision about the come-out-of-bankruptcy plan early this afternoon.  I expect it will continue the rolling wave of good news that promises the city a fresh start.   The two articles I’m linking here both call their readers’ attention to the amazing array of human beings who chose to risk working together and appear to have pulled off a major urban miracle in a time when very complex negotiations requiring give from all players are in short supply.  All the key players took risks by getting into the game,  without their conviction that Detroit matters, that its 700,000 citizens matter,  that the crises have been real,  this plan could not have happened.

http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20141107/NEWS01/141109895/judge-to-decide-detroit-bankruptcy-today

http://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/columnists/daniel-howes/2014/10/17/tough-detroit-creditor-turns-downtown-investor-speed-end-bankruptcy/17394713/

I looked for a poem to say all this and settled on one of my heroes, Dom Helder Camera.  Dom Helder was bishop of an extreme rich/poor corner in Northeastern Brazil (Recife) and a demanding prophet against the violence of too much wealth at the cost of too much poverty.  Prophetic, and lyrical.  I propose it as blessing prayer for Detroit today.

Sun is shining,  a few hundred of my historian of technology friends are gathered just outside Detroit to listen to one another,  Judge Rhodes will be talking to all of us.  Amen.

Have a great weekend,

john sj

Today’s Post

It is possible to travel alone, but we know the journey is human life
and life needs company.
Companion is the one who eats the same bread.

The good traveler cares for weary companions, grieves when we lose heart,
takes us where she finds us, listens to us.
Intelligently, gently, above all lovingly, we encourage each other to go on
and recover our joy
On the journey.

Dom Helder Camera

Wednesday November 5 –  Scholars rarely sin by commission, by deliberate cheating the evidence

Lots going on these days in Motown.   For the country, mid-term elections playing out as the half-century  after Cold War’s simplicities is only half over; a country roiled and contentious about changes that defy simple answers.  For the city — and my university in it — what looks to be the conclusion of a most improbable Detroit bankruptcy exit plan fresh with innovation and hope in the teeth of a half century of wounds inflicted by technological changes with its array of innovators, profit takers, an sometimes ruthless banging on the bottom 80%.

For me these days bring a lifetime of history-of-technology soul friends — some age peers, some way younger —  gathering for this year’s Annual Meeting of The Society for the History of Technology.  That begins tomorrow.  I’ve offered a 6 hour drive-around tour  which we are calling “Detroit Ruins Clichés and Detroit Rebirth.”   I’ve promised places in bad trouble, where some of the city’s c. 75,000 decayed buildings are, and places of rebirth.  We will pick up lunch at the Russell Street Deli in Eastern Market and eat it on Belle Isle.  Things like that.

Then we have Friday afternoon’s public announcement of Judge Stephen Rhode’s verdict on Detroit’s exit plan.  That looks more important for the US in the long haul than this morning’s US election results.  One hears tales of other cities under water with pension debts — Chicago, Philadelphia, the State of California . . . .  “How did Detroit pull this off?”    If you haven’t seen Columnist Dan Howes Oct 17 one-page read on what’s happened here, you maybe should, to help understand the significance of Judge Rhodes announcement this Friday.

http://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/columnists/daniel-howes/2014/10/17/tough-detroit-creditor-turns-downtown-investor-speed-end-bankruptcy/17394713/

Finally, for us historians of technology,  this is also the first annual meeting ever when Tom Hughes — mentor to me and many of us — no longer walks the earth.

Too much to encompass here.   I will just celebrate the beauty of what scholars do when they ask demanding questions of the human condition, the beauty of thousands of women and men who have imagined and negotiated Detroit’s shocking, creative plan for rebirth,  the beauty of students on campus facing the challenges that their teachers, beautiful too,  place in front of them;  the beauty of Tom Hughes who did that for me.

Have a good day.  Supposed to be rainy during my 6 hour tour tomorrow so I’m making the best of the sunshine now.

Today’s Post 

“When you listen to someone and it is evident that your listening is helping them at a deep level;
you have an immediately satisfying experience. It is a good thing you do when you listen to one person. However,
scholarship is not like that;
you work a long time not knowing whether what you are working on will be any good or very important, not until long after.

***************

Historians do not ordinarily sin by commission,
by using fraudulent evidence or shoddy arguments.
Mostly historians sin by omission,
by the questions they do not explore and the evidence they do not look for.”

Tom Hughes
to me as a graduate student, c. 1976,
arguing that I might choose to invest myself in the history of technology as a profession

Monday November 3  “bowed low beneath the weight of loss.”

A friend of mine told me over the weekend that s/he doesn’t much like Halloween as a national holiday.  “How did fake scary stuff get to be so big a deal?”   That conversation stirred a 60 year old memory of another kind of horror story about the dead.  When we were in grade school, we were taught that on All Souls’ Day (Nov 2, aka “Day of the Dead”) every time you went into a church and said six Our Fathers, six Hail Marys, and six Glory Be’s you were guaranteed to get one soul out of Purgatory . . . a wacky bit of theology that turned that day, which should have opened out into stillness, beauty, and grief, into a torture chamber. Those 3 sets of sixes were long and then after you left church you would hear a relentless voice say:  “But you can get another one out if you go back and do it all over again.”  I don’t think kids are introduced to that sort of pious torture any more in RC teaching.

This year All Souls’ Day fell on a Sunday, so with thoughts of scary costumes and the magic 3 six-time prayers (btw, I don’t remember ever being taught who selected which soul in purgatory I was rescuing each time), I began to pray about Sunday’s homily.  “What might be a helpful thing to say on this day that, sillinesses aside, calls attention to one of our lives most powerful experiences?”  When we say goodbye to someone sacred to us, when we grieve and allow the stillness and weight of loss to come close, spooky can become a vast tenderness.  Still, the homily did not turn toward into bashing Halloween ghost costumes or the Christian teaching about Purgatory.  “Trick ‘r Treat” is great parent and child play, the stuff of memories, and the ancient teaching about Purgatory evokes a place where people who have died can live a yearning for healing the wounds of their lives;  a place, in the teaching, where we humans do not just walk away from the ambiguities with which we lived;  a teaching suggesting that the living can have a connection with those who have died, that we can send blessings out into a place that remains silent to us but need not remain absent of love and connection.

All this moved me to open one of my niece Terri’s series of poems about her grandmother.   My mom died when she was 102, and had lived the diminishments of her aging with a lot of grace and receptivity.   I love the poem and bet you will too.

As has become custom in these posts, I recommend reading “The Living” out loud with pauses.  Myself?  When I read aloud the last lines make me cry.

Have a good day,

john sj

Today’s Post “The Living”

It’s strange the things people say
after a death, crooked attempts
to comfort. Things like, “Oh,

well she was old. She had a long life.”
or “She was ready to go.” One woman
even said, her hand resting on my shoulder

“Her death was easy; that
should make you happy.”
Happy. Easy. Words I never

put together with death, words I still
can’t quite get my arms around
no matter my wingspan.

And I think, Oh, this stumbling
over language as if it were new,
despite a familiarity with time,

the exhaustion and experience
of years, despite consideration of death,
having greeted that recognizable face before.

It is easy to forget, tangled
in words of comfort,
that the dead

are dead; they do not feel
the pain of departing,
do not need to be consoled.

It is those who are left
who know the burden of sad and hard,
bowed low beneath the weight of loss.

My son will never know her. He will never
understand why when he glares, shoulders
angled back and jaw thrust out

stubborn like her, belligerent and
ready for a fight, I, a fighter too,
can only cry and hold him close.

Terri Breeden

Friday, October 31 –  “Trust that your hands will know the right thing to do even when you do not.”

End of the work week,  end of October,  still autumn but heading in winter’s direction.   Today’s post comes  from the health care tradition of the Sisters of Mercy — if I’ve counted accurately, it’s the 169th since #1 appeared in late September 2013 and The “Blessing of Hand’s” third time on the Work Day list.  It’s worth repeating.  Reading it out loud, with pauses for breathing, makes for good prayer.

It’s Halloween too;  an evolved form of “The Eve of All Hallows” (i.e., the night before the Feast of All Saints on Nov 1).  In the Christian faith tradition tomorrow is a day to praise the sacredness of every human being, those walking around on the earth now and those who have gone before.  Maybe that’s why The Blessing of Hands came to mind this morning.

Weather.com says it will rain a good bit today in Detroit with wind gusts up into the 24 mph range. We should see leaves flying all over the place.  Clouds and more strong wind tomorrow.   Sun all day Sunday should rinse the air and maybe begin to show off the delicate traceries of tiny tree branches without their summer leaves.

Have a good weekend.

john sj

Today’s Post: Blessing of Hands

Hold up your hands and look at them
See your hands as God sees them.
Recognize the source of their power.

Imagine your life in and beyond the classroom. See the work of your hands in kitchens and corridors, on tennis and basketball courts, in dorms and dining rooms, at planning tables and parties and in gatherings of every kind. Choose to use your hands this year for good. Trust that your hands will know the right thing to do even when you do not; and know that, in every act, small or large, the work of your hands makes a difference.

Bless the work of our hands.

Bless the hands that build lasting things.
– hands of architects, engineers and chemists;
– of stone masons and day laborers;
– of writers and printers; of inventors and computer programmers;.
– of teachers and parents, negotiators and peacemakers, poets and musicians.
Bless the hands that build, we pray.

Bless the hands that heal.
– hands that skillfully clean and mend and comfort those in pain;.
– that create beauty in art and song, in homes, parks and gardens;
– that touch with strength, with compassion and tenderness, with healing power.
– that are lifted up in prayer asking for the transformation of difficult situations.
Bless the hands that heal, we pray.

Bless the hands that reach into the future
– hands that open with invitation and hope,
– that reach out to new possibilities
– that hold strong to what is just,
– that extend their passion for doing good toward a world in need.
Bless the hands that reach into the future, we pray.

Madonna from Mercy College Campus to UDM Campus

College of Health Professions  –  entrance

Wednesday – October 28  –  Denise Levertov  “Greyhaired, I have not grown wiser, unless to perceive absurdity is wisdom.” 

Work week’s middle;  Autumn’s about 1/3 finished (if you count from the equinox in September to the winter solstice in December);  lots of leaves still around but more of them are blowing around our feet.  Weather.com says there will be brisk clean winds coming out of the West/Southwest at a good clip (12-14 mph); mostly cloudy with peeks of sun; no rain.  Yesterday afternoon’s surprise;  bright sunshine as I walked back from a meeting c. 5:15.  I stopped out in front of Lansing Reilly, struck by wind gusts playing with the taller trees behind the chapel’s tile roof.    The chapel blocked my view of their bottom 2/3rds and made it seem as if the tall trees were great sailboats surging across the skies.  I stood still a little while, taking what the earth and trees and chapel roof had on offer.   Someone who knows me came up behind me:  “looking at those leaves I bet.”   “You bet,” I answered.

Why does all this mid-work-week beauty remind me of Denise Levertov’s poem about falling in love as an elderly woman?   The poem is as improbably playful as the leaves riding the wind gusts.  Maybe that’s why I stopped; or maybe it was that bright sun.

These are busier than usual days;  it’s good to stop and breathe a little.

Have a good day.

john sj

today’s post

Ancient Airs and Dances

I

I knew too well
what had befallen me
when, one night, I put my lips to his wineglass
after he left–an impulse I thought was locked away with a smile
into memory’s museum.

When he took me to visit friends and the sea, he lay
asleep in the next room’s dark where the fire
rustled all night; and I, from a warm bed, sleepless,
watched through the open door
that glowing hearth, and heard,
drumming the roof, the rain’s
insistent heartbeat.

Greyhaired, I have not grown wiser,
unless to perceive absurdity
is wisdom. A powerless wisdom.

II

Shameless heart! Did you not vow to learn
stillness from the heron
quiet from the mists of fall,
and from the mountain–what was it?
Pride? Remoteness?
You have forgotten already!
And now you clamor again
like an obstinate child demanding attention,
interrupting study and contemplation.
You try my patience. Bound as we are
together for life, must you now,
so late in the day, go bounding sideways,
trying to drag me with you?

Denise Levertov – Evening Train

Monday  October 27

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

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

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

Stillness and beauty, the blessings of autumn.

Have a good day.

john sj

today’s post

I wrote this poem during grad school in Southwest Philly when another tree woke stillness in me for a while.

For the dogwood in our yard, middle of October c. 1977
Autumn’s russet colors
Age without solemnity
Earthy and simple, they linger
Linger,
Not for grandeur
Nor from fear of the dust they will become
Their affection for this place
These ripening moments
Even me the beholder
Slows the pace of changing.
Let me be won by this warmth
To slow my chosen pace
To ripen affectionately.

ps. Art’s tree yesterday

Wednesday,  October 22  “Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity”

Carl Sandburg paints autumn’s stunning, passing beauty in a few blunt words.  To which I am inclined to add, “Nothing wrong with grief over the passing of exquisite beauty.”   Further down, Qoheleth (in Ecclesiastes) joins Sandburg in singing an old lament – one worth repeating.  Good reading now and then to respect the human capacity for gloom on hard days.

Have a great weekend.  Regular posts begin Monday.

john sj

Carl Sandburg: “Autumn Movement”
Posted by Phyllis Cole-Dai on Oct 15, 2014 12:00 am

I cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing
lasts.

The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the
copper sunburned woman, the mother of the year, the
taker of seeds.

The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of
holes, new beautiful things come in the first spit of
snow on the northwest wind, and the old things go,
not one lasts.

“Autumn Movement” by Carl Sandburg. Published in Poetry (October, 1918).  

Art credit: “Yellow Cornflowers,” photograph taken at Brisbane City Botanic Garden, Australia, November 7, 2010, by Hopeisland.