{"id":1896,"date":"2016-06-15T00:00:57","date_gmt":"2016-06-15T04:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/mission-and-identity\/?p=1896"},"modified":"2019-09-18T16:47:43","modified_gmt":"2019-09-18T20:47:43","slug":"june-6-summer-break","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/2016\/06\/15\/june-6-summer-break\/","title":{"rendered":"June 6 – Summer break"},"content":{"rendered":"

Monday, \u00a0 June 6<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0 \u201c. . . amongst all natural things
\nI could live or not live; \u00a0it does not matter
\nto be one stone more . . . \u201c<\/p>\n

The last days of this year\u2019s time on Pine Ridge Reservation filled up with soul friends and familiar places waiting for me to come find them. \u00a0 So I could stand still and pay attention to five decades of beauty. \u00a0 I had planned to write the last poetry post out there, close to June 1, but here I am back home at Six Mile Road on June 6, savoring Pine Ridge days and tasting Detroit rebirth at the same time.<\/p>\n

A soul friend sent me Pablo Neruda\u2019s \u201cOh, Earth, Wait For Me\u201d a few months ago. a poem that a childhood friend hand-copied for her long ago. \u00a0 I\u2019d been waiting for a day that makes space for Neruda\u2019s grace: stillness and presence in the world. \u00a0 Today\u2019s pretty good for that, \u00a0an invitation to trust the pace of summer and risk breathing slowly. \u00a0 Best to read\u00a0out loud, \u00a0with pauses.<\/p>\n

Back in early August. \u00a0 \u00a0Have a blest summer.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

john sj<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s Post, \u00a0Pablo Neruda<\/strong><\/p>\n

Oh, Earth, Wait For Me
\nBy Pablo Neruda<\/p>\n

Return me, oh sun,
\nto my wild destiny,
\nrain of the ancient wood
\nbring me back the aroma and the swords
\nthat fall from the sky,
\nthe solitary peace of pasture and rock,
\nthe damp at the river-margins,
\nthe smell of the larch tree,
\nthe wind alive like a heart
\nbeating in the crowded restlessness
\nof the towering araucaria.<\/p>\n

Earth, give me back your pure gifts,
\nthe towers of silence which rose
\nfrom the solemnity of their roots.
\nI want to go back to being what I have not been,
\nand learn to go back from such deeps
\nthat amongst all natural things
\nI could live or not live; it does not matter
\nto be one stone more, the dark stone,
\nthe pure stone which the river bears away.<\/p>\n

~Pablo Neruda<\/p>\n

(Poem excerpted in \u201cThe Wood Wife\u201d by Terri Windling, pages 130, 131)<\/p>\n

\"PabloNeruda\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"PabloNeruda\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Wikipedia is not always eloquent. \u00a0These two paragraphs, though, from Neruda\u2019s short bio (https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Pablo_Neruda<\/a>) are well written.<\/p>\n

“Years later, Neruda was a close advisor to Chile’s\u00a0socialist<\/a>\u00a0President\u00a0Salvador Allende<\/a>. When Neruda returned to Chile after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Allende invited him to read at the\u00a0Estadio Nacional<\/a>\u00a0before 70,000 people.[5]<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Neruda was hospitalised with cancer at the time of the\u00a0coup d’\u00e9tat<\/a>\u00a0led by\u00a0Augusto Pinochet<\/a>\u00a0but returned home after 5 days when he suspected a doctor of injecting him in the stomach with an unknown substance for the purpose of murdering him at the order of Pinochet.[6]<\/a><\/sup>Neruda died in his house in Isla Negra on 23 September 1973 six and a half hours after that injection. Although it has always been reported that he died of prostate cancer\/heart failure, on November 5, 2015 the Interior Ministry of the Chilean government issued a statement acknowledging a Ministry document from March of that year indicating the government’s official position that \u201cit was clearly possible and highly likely\u201d that he was killed as a result of \u201cthe intervention of third parties\u201d.[7]<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0Pinochet, backed by elements of the armed forces, denied permission for Neruda’s funeral to be made a public event. However, thousands of grieving Chileans disobeyed the curfew and crowded the streets.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Monday, \u00a0 June 6\u00a0\u00a0 \u201c. . . amongst all natural things I could live or not live; \u00a0it does not matter to be one stone more . . . \u201c The last days of this year\u2019s time on Pine Ridge … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":139,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11641],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1896"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/139"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1896"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1896\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1899,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1896\/revisions\/1899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}