Poetry Blog: "A Work Day in Hard Times"

Wednesday April 30 —  the day before May        

A long time UDM friend reminded me that on Ash Wednesday I more or less promised leaves on trees by Easter.  “Where are they?” she demanded.  A little defensive, I look back at March 10, the Ash Wednesday post.   I didn’t exactly say leaves on trees by 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. Stopping and looking is a form of Lenten prayer and helps more than giving up candy or beer, 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 it’s 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.

Ash Wednesday =  11 hours & 28 minutes of daylight  ———>  Today =  14 hours & 00 minutes of daylight

A couple days ago, I encountered a Melinda Henneberger column in the Washington Post, “5 ways not to sell your school”   (http://m.washingtonpost.com/opinions/college-tour-de-farce-5-ways-not-to-sell-your-school/2014/04/25/58bf09c2-cbe3-11e3-93eb-6c0037dde2ad_story.html).  It’s hilarious and trenchant at the same time.  And it reminded me why I love living and working at UDM in the heart of Detroit.  I love it that we try to teach our students to engage the world the way it is;  to not whitewash the city’s wounds;  to learn to be street-smart and to love the city’s strengths at the same time; to risk exulting in signs of the city’s re-birth.  I felt that in my bones in December 1980 when I drove a U-Haul with my stuff from grad school in Philly to Six Mile and Livernois, a time when campus looked a lot more ratty than we do now.   Sometimes Detroit makes me tired (as in “sick and tired”).   Then someone reminds me of what a gritty, close-to-the-ground place we work in.  Here is where we teach chemistry and poetry, legal practice, nursing and engineering.  It is here that we will celebrate another Commencement, our 133rd  I think.   For me, Detroit rather than Bennington.

Enjoy the day and get ready to smile at May.

john sj

Today’s Post:  Melinda Henneberger, “5 Ways not to sell your school”

“Seeing so few humans, my daughter asked her to describe them for us. “What about diversity?” To her credit, the young woman leading the tour of a school known for its progressive leanings was honest: “Ideologically, there isn’t any.’’“Where is everyone?” my daughter asked as we walked through Bennington College, one of the finest liberal arts schools in the country. It was 11 a.m. on a weekday, but the campus in rural Vermont seemed almost entirely unpopulated. The students were still sleeping, our tour guide suggested.

Later, while visiting one of the dorms, we were shown the community condom cabinet and told that residents often huddle together for warmth, because, as good enviros, they keep the thermostat low in the winter. For $57,000, I kind of wanted heat to be included.

So when my daughter asked whether it would be rude to leave before lunch, I said, ‘Race ya to the car!’”

Tuesday April 29 — New UDM employees on this list

It took me 5 months to figure out that this list does not automatically include new UDM employees. It’s not hard to include people but I didn’t think to ask IT about it. This morning there are c. 120 new people receiving this post bringing the total number to 1576. Sorry for this lapse; hospitality is about including people. You are welcome on the list.
A couple thoughts come to mind about that welcome this late April morning alive with spring rain.

1) The way this list is designed, you will receive the work day posts most, but not all, work days (sometimes I don’t get time to write)
2) If you want to browse earlier posts, go to https://sites.udmercy.edu/poetry Every post lands at the top of the archive on the day it is posted and the first ever post {September 25, 2013} is at the bottom. You can browse a month at a time and you can search by any word (e.g., an author’s name).
3) A few UDM employees have asked to be removed from the list. It’s very easy to do that, email me if you don’t want to receive the posts.

These end of year days at the university remind me of how hard people work. End of term is a time of fatigue, a good time to pause and breathe a little while and allow ourselves to recognize our beauty. Rabindranath Tagore in #49 imagines God giving each of us “a flower for a prize.” Our fatigue is a mark of the beauty of our commitments.

Have a good day; enjoy spring rains.

john st sj

Today’s poem Rabindranath Tagore Gitanjali # 49

You came down from your throne
and stood at my cottage door.
I was singing all alone in a corner, and the melody caught your ear.
You came down
and stood at my cottage door.

Masters are many in your hall, and songs are sung there at all hours.
But the simple carol of this novice struck at your love.
One plaintive little strain mingled with the great music of the world,
and with a flower for a prize you came down
and stopped at my cottage door.

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. Here is # 1. The poems have no titles, only numbers.

Monday April 28 “The world’s otherness is antidote to confusion”

A Jesuit friend, Bill Pauly, who died young in 2006 (heart attack), gave me Mary Oliver’s New and Selected Poems, Vol 1 in 2004 when I drove to Santa Clara CA for sabbatical after 3 years as interim dean of Liberal Arts & Education. Knowing that I had not embraced Mary Oliver’s poetry despite his advising, he wrote on the title page: “This is your one required reading for your sabbatical. Enjoy.” Here I am, eight years later wanting a message board to where Bill is, telling him that I’ve finally gotten his point. Today is the 7th Mary O post to the list. I must like her.

It’s a good poem for the last day of final exams on the McNichols Campus: “. . . . I do not want anymore to be useful . . . to lead children . . . into the text of civility, to teach them that they are (they are not) better than the grass.” She reminds me of a prayer I learned 40 + years ago on the Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation. If I stand still, still enough and long enough, I can hear the sound a cottonwood makes, and a different sound of grass growing beneath my feet. The stillness and the listening help me to be where I stand and walk upon the earth.

It helps to read a poem out loud, several times.

Have a good day.

john st sj

Today’s post: “Early Morning, My Birthday”

The snails on the pink sleds of their bodies are moving
among the morning glories.
The spider is asleep among the red thumbs
of the raspberries.
What shall I do, what shall I do?

The rain is slow
The little birds are alive in it.
Even the beetles.
The green leaves lap it up.
What shall I do, what shall I do?

The wasp sits on the porch in her paper castle.
The blue heron floats out of the clouds.
The fish leaps, all rainbow and mouth, from the dark water.

This morning the water lilies are no less lovely, I think,
than the lilies of Monet.
And I do not want anymore to be useful, to be docile, to lead
children out of the fields into the text
of civility, to teach them that they are (they are not) better
than the grass.

Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Vol. 1 (1992)

“I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything – other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion – that standing within this otherness – the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books – can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.”

Friday April 25, 2014 — savoring

During my morning contemplation when I ordinarily write this post, I noticed a reminder I frequently repeat: “It helps to read a poem out loud. And more than once.” So I read Denise Levertov’s poem “Making Peace” again and then looked at the photo of Nurse Deborah Hughes. Paying attention to these moments in my recent past reminded me that the prayer taught by St Ignatius in The Spiritual Exercises is centered on paying attention to “some more important places in which I have experienced understanding, consolatioin or desolation” (Sp Ex 118). That got me reading back through the week’s posts (https://sites.udmercy.edu/poetry/). It feels like a helpful way to enter Friday morning. Here are some lines from the week that caught my attention.

“I massaged (Utash’s) neck, and got his circulation going.” (Thursday)

“ . . . an engineering feat as well as artistic creativity.
The process of shaping and stacking the stones into a simple oval shape is challenging and intense. “ (Tuesday)

“Delight at our moment’s kinship
freed us from fear
from strategy and burden.” (Wednesday)

“I don’t care whether we get some overnight frosts or another snow storm;
winter ended yesterday out there at the farm.”(Monday)

Have a good weekend. Just below, some pictures from the week as well.

john sj

Thursday April 24, 2014 Easter Thursday

“I massaged (Utash’s) neck, and got his circulation going.”
Deborah Hughes

“I looked out the window and saw that the boy had been hit, so I threw on my coat and ran out there,” said Hughes, who is retired from the St. James Nursing Center in Detroit. Hughes also made sure to pack her .38 caliber pistol. “You have to carry a gun around here,” she said. “This neighborhood is terrible. I don’t walk around without my gun. “I saw the boy all by himself, crying,” Hughes said. “His father was in the store. He came out, and I told him, ‘I’m a nurse; don’t touch him. Let him lay there.’ The baby was crying so hard, and I talked to him and tried to calm him down.

“About that time, I saw (Utash) get out of his truck; he came running up saying, ‘Oh, my God, tell me he’s all right. Please tell me he’s all right.’ He was hysterical.” The crowd that had gathered suddenly attacked Utash, Hughes said. “He was screaming, and they were beating him, and kicking him,” she said. “I said ‘Please don’t hit him anymore,’ and they backed up. Everybody cleared the way and gave me room to work on him. Nobody cussed me; they didn’t attack me. They just let me do what I needed to do.

“I massaged (Utash’s) neck, and got his circulation going. He woke up and started swinging and kicking. By this time, the EMS came, and me and the EMS driver tied him down and put him in the ambulance.”

Hughes shrugged off claims that she’s a hero. “You just have to do the right thing,” she said. {Detroit News April 8, 2014}

In this urban moment, the lives of Steven Utash, some angry young men, and a retired nurse who live on that street intersected. Two weeks later their intersection unfolds as larger than themselves; their moment has become a moment asking for the attention of the city and its metropolitan area. UDM, by our research and teacher-student conversations is about the business of paying attention to the human condition, and understanding events from a range of perspectives. The poet Denise Levertov offers one in her hard-edged poem, “Making Peace.” It helps to read a poem out loud. And more than once.

Weather.com says more clouds than sun today, April showers (that bring the flowers that bloom in May) much of Friday, peeks at the sun later in the day.

Blessings on us employees and on our students during finals week.

John st sj

Making Peace

A voice from the dark called out,
`The poets must give us
imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar
imagination of disaster. Peace, not only
the absence of war.’

But peace, like a poem
is not there ahead of itself,
can’t be imagined before it is made,
can’t be known except
in the words of its making,
grammar of justice
syntax of mutual aid.

A feeling towards it,
dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have
until we begin to utter its metaphors,
learning them as we speak.

A line of peace might appear
if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,
revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power
questioned our needs, allowed
long pauses . . .

A cadence of peace might balance its weight
on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,
an energy field more intense than war,
might pulse then,
stanza by stanza into the world,
each act of living
one of its words, each word
a vibration of light–facets
of the forming chrystal.

Denise Levertov “Breathing the Water”

“I massaged (Utash’s) neck, and got his circulation going.”
Deborah Hughes

Wednesday, April 23 – The Back Bay in April

During the 1980s and early 90s I was a visiting faculty member at MIT’s Science, Technology and Society Program 5 times. I lived in a down-at-the-heels Jesuit set of row houses on Newberry St in the back bay. Most of those years preceded the march of well-to-do young people to our end of the Back Bay but there were destination places around. One was Charlies, a fine Irish Pub at the end of our block. Winter in Boston can be as tough as winter has been here. So, when the ice on the Charles River breaks open and daffodils appear, you feel like dancing, like noticing simple things with eyes prepared for delight. “Trudging” isn’t the word for walking in the height of spring.

A simple thing happened at the end of the work day on April 20, 1983. On April 23, 2014, Weather.com predicts gusty winds, lots of sun and crisp air, a little on the chilly side . . . . like an April moment thirty one years ago, on a perfect Spring day..

Enjoy today. Maybe we should remind our students to be glad — in the press of exams — that they didn’t choose a party school for their college.

john sj

Meeting at Rush Hour

A gust of wind
sent the metal street sign for Charlie’s Tavern
skittering fifteen feet up Newbury Street,
an unlikely sailboat
escaped, perhaps, from the Charles.

The clatter and improbability
set us both free.

She looked twenty two,
blond and lovely,
going the other way
and no doubt equally homeward bound.

In our sudden bemusement
at the sign’s startled venture
our eyes touched.

Then, the wonder.
We grinned.

Delight at our moment’s kinship
freed us from fear
from strategy and burden.
She flashed fire at me
and I, no doubt, at her.

A moment’s celebration quickly passed–
rare and winsom beauty,
breathed through two human forms
filling us with awe.

We went our ways with no word spoken,
both journeys blessed.

April 20, 1983

UDM campus, April 27, 2006

Tuesday April 22 — Three Cairns – sculpture

This little boy exploring a large stone egg got me wondering the way art should.  Two artists here, the sculptor and the mom w camera.  So I emailed his mom back asking about the egg.  She’s a close friend living in La Jolla, CA:  “it’s a sculpture by Andy Goldsworthy, called “Three Cairns,” in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art; my son calls it the ’egg rock’.”

I found an explanation on the website of the Greater Des Moines Public Art Foundation (http://dsmpublicartfoundation.org/public-art/three-cairns/) .  Just below is their great picture of the central cairn  at the Des Moines Art Center.   “Cairns,”  Public Art tells us, are “stone structures [or markers] that identify a place of great importance. Their dry-stone construction represents an engineering feat as well as artistic creativity. The process of shaping and stacking the stones into a simple oval shape is challenging and intense. The form symbolizes fullness and ripeness, time and energy, loss and endurance.”   The Foundation also tells us that this is the largest project in the Western Hemisphere by British artist Andy Goldsworthy.

The photo, by Doug Millar, shows the central cairn at home among Iowa grass and trees.  Goldworthy’s placement of the two hollow-out stone frames isn’t random.  One points toward New York, a matching cairn outside the Neugerger Museum of Art; the other points west to the San  Diego Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla and the cairn my friend’s son showed off for us.   The limestone for each comes from long before its physical home was inhabited by people calling their place “Iowa.”

Lots going on here.   Not one place but three, not three places but a continent, not one time but millennia, all crafted with the precise skills of a contemporary worker of stone.  I like to imagine the work we do at the university like that.  These are exam days, demanding precise thinking and some memory.  But, our Mission Statement reminds our students, the point is not the exam or the grade; the point is a lifetime of their citizenship in a world that is vast and beloved of God.

Looks like spring rains today, encouraging grass and flowers and trees to do their thing.

john st sj

Monday April 21 — Spring’s a-game

Easter dinner 60 miles from campus on the farm of Professor Mark Paulik, his wife Helene, and their two children, plus another family (+ smaller children) with splendid food good drink, love and conversation. Six hours, in and out of the house, contemplating pastures where organically raised cows were doing their thing and the children ran and played around the farm yard. The air was beautiful; 74º and sun-soaked breezes. After a while I strolled around the outside of the house taking it all in. That’s the moment, for me, when winter ended. I don’t care whether we get some overnight frosts or another snow storm; winter ended yesterday out there at the farm.

One of many things I love about a serious winter, along with biting winds and swirling snow, and the shape of trees with each tiny leaf-less branch clear against the sky, is its ability to make me long for spring. For me, yesterday was the turning.

What might make a good short poem for today when we return to work? I found an 8 line poem by master poet Robert Frost.

Happy Spring to you.

john sj

Today’s post: “A Patch of Old Snow”

There’s a patch of old snow in a corner
That I should have guessed
Was a blow-away paper the rain
Had brought to rest.

It is speckled with grime as if
Small print overspread it,
The news of a day I’ve forgotten —
If I ever read it.

Thursday April 17 – The Last Supper

In the Christian tradition the Last Supper is celebrated on this day. It’s about a meal, and about the sacredness of hospitality. Last year Pope Francis shocked the Catholic world by celebrating Holy Thursday in a detention center and including non-Catholic prisoners in the ritual of the washing of the feet (including Muslims and women). For many Catholics this was a breath of fresh air; for many it was shocking. Challenging hospitality.

Is it harder to welcome or to allow myself to be welcomed? Being welcomed expands my world according to the people whom I allow to welcome me. A long favorite prayer poem, dating from the 17th century, says for me how important have been the women and men who have found ways to make me welcome when I doubted my place in their place and their lives. That’s what makes me life larger. For you too, I’d bet. Here’s the poem, by George Herbert.

Blessings today.

john sj

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

Wednesday of Holy Week – April 16 – “that I might know how to speak to the weary”

The days of Holy Week take the four mysterious Songs of the Servant of God from their places in Isaiah to give them a home in the heart of the liturgy for these days (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday). Today’s 3rd song reminds that our weariness appears where we live close to the ground and from our hearts. The days of Holy week take human violence and temper it into grief and weariness of heart, a profound resilience may be especially needed as this hard year winds toward final exams.

from The Third Servant Song:

“The Lord God has given me
a well-trained tongue,
That I might know how to wpeak to the weary
a word that will rouse them.
Morning after morning
he opens my ear that I might hear.” Isaiah 50:4-6

Have a blest day.

john st sj

Today’s post “Precious Lord”

Wikipedia tells us that Rev. Thomas A. Dorsey (1899-1993) wrote “Precious Lord” in response to his inconsolable grief at the death of his wife, Nettie Harper, in childbirth, and his infant son in August 1932.[4]” It was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s favorite song and he often invited Mahalia Jackson to sing it at civil rights rallies. At his request, she sang it at his funeral in April 1968.
Here is a five minute version sung by Jackson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as1rsZenwNc

“Precious Lord, take my hand,
Lead me on, let me stand.
I am tired, I am weak, I am worn.
Thru the storm, thru the night,
Lead me on to the light.
Take my hand, precious Lord, lead me home.

When my way grows drear, precious Lord, linger near,
When my life is almost gone, hear my cry, hear my call,
Hold my hand lest I fall;
Take my hand, precious Lord, Lead me home.”