Poem: Spring again, and Bill Evans' "Peace Piece"

-

-

Can it be a year since the Japanese tsunami, and the flowering of the Arab Spring? These, as well as horrors in other places, and Bill Evans' "Peace Piece" were on my mind all morning while this small poem came together. Yesterday it was warm for Michigan, in the 60s (15-20°C); beds got raked out, revealing crocuses in bloom. After a while, listening to the songs and calls of the birds, I could hear them say things I wanted to say. Which led to the Bill Evans song, because it also gives me calm beauty when I need it. And then the poem, which only seems to offer a bit of a framework for far more that wants to be said, and you know, sometimes only improvised songs can do it. You can read this back story about Bill Evans' intoxicating song "Peace Piece," recorded in 1958, including how he did not much like performing it upon request, as it was an inspiration of the moment, not something that could be recreated. Thankfully it was recorded, so it can be listened to, with peace rising like spring again and again.

Spring again

Woodpeckers nail octaves
to limbs
in another delicate scaffold of spring

while the mourning dove
coos a bass ostinato
out of

the bottom line,
ever below
the laughing glissando

of the Northern Flicker
and the
tinkling dee-dee-dee

of the chickadee;
note by ceremonial note
their steady spirit

tinkers with my hammering heart
to build even just one season
of peace, peace.

March 2012

-

-

Poem: Blue hour

-

-

Blue hour

The tall spruce with wild
but silent upcurled arms
conducts the cool dark night
on a track of wind into morning’s
thinness; like God, and I lying still
under him; my moon-white face
a lit candle floating in the font
of the hot tub; the wind on my face
and arms as if prayers whispered
from a distant train; rumbling through
the entire outdoor room; the barn,
house, rocking bamboo, the hunters
asleep next door; nowhere is there
a smell of death, no deer hung,
no blood, no mouse in the mouth
of a snowy owl; this is God’s early
hour when lips are still closed, when
prayers for the dying are snored
through noses like praise out the back
door; when the doe rises on groggy
legs, believing the tender leaves
are still wet, still green.

 

We learned early Thanksgiving (Thursday) morning that my 83-year-old mother-in-law was suffering in a crisis of renal infection that had spread into her blood. It has been touch and go since then; Friday we thought we might lose her, but thanks to her medical team who made difficult decisions that saved her, and to her strength of will, she is recovering steadily, though still in ICU. This poem comes out of my morning prayers for her. "Blue Hour" — in the French "l'Heure Bleue" — called Madrugada in Spanish and Portuguese; it is the twilight between the full dark of night and the light of day. For me it is a magic hour, when occasionally dark possibilities clutch from the night, but more often my thoughts lean toward brightness and hope, toward everyday miracles in the large and small cycles of life.  

-

-

Found poem: in the face of death, despair and fear

-

-

I took this [film] photo in the Scottish highlands

in 1980, when I was pregnant with Lesley

I heard Representative Gabby Giffords' halting voice on the radio, recorded for the audio version of her new book. She speaks, she thinks, she attaches sentences to one another (with great difficulty), though she was shot in the head only months ago in a shopping center parking lot. My friend Susie is presenting testimony before Ohio legislators today, asking them to consider, please, not allowing people to text or even use hands-free cell phones while driving, after her granddaughter was killed in August when the driver behind was on her cell phone. I am home this morning and I can't go for a walk for fear that hunters might shoot me. There are dangers all around. How to live, without fear?

As I was thinking about these things, bits of poems surfaced, as if, like whitecaps on a stormy lake, they wanted to be scooped up by the wind, and tossed together in the air. So I have strung together the bits of poems in a found poem. Please see the list of references below, which gives the titles of the poems they are from. By the way, the top lines were posted at the Rilke blog a few days ago, from a poem elegy Rilke wrote to Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva, a poet who committed suicide. (Her backstory in the Russian revolution is here.)

When I get to the last lines, by William Carlos Williams, I think of life, and death, in one whole poem of his existence. This is all a mystery, how to live . . .


in the face of death, despair and fear

Waves, Marina, we are the ocean! Depths, Marina, we are the sky!

Earth, Marina, we are earth, a thousand times spring.

We are larks whose outbursts of song

fling them to the heavens.

When the ocean comes to you as a lover,

marry, at once, quickly,

for God's sake!

Tonight as it gets cold

tell yourself

what you know which is nothing

but the tune your bones play

as you keep going. And you will be able

for once to lie down under the small fire

of winter stars.

How can you aim a fire?

The golden sheep are feeding, and

Their mouths harbour contentment;

Gladly my tongue praises

This hour scourged of dissension

By weight of their joyous fleeces.

Practical to the end,

               it is the poem

                                  of his existence

that triumphed

              finally.

(from "Elegy to Marina Tsvetayeva-Efrom (II)" by Rainer Maria Rilke)

(from "No Better Gift" by Rumi) 

(from "Lines of Winter" by Mark Strand)

(from "blue" by Cara Benson)

(from "To a Very Slow Air" by Philip Larkin) 

(from "The Sparrow" by William Carlos Williams)

-

-

Poem: The earth's economy

-

-

The earth's economy

Just when I thought the day
had nothing left to give,
when heat was ladled across
the shallow dry plate

of the nation, working or not, alive
or not, my country
road home from work
an affair of sour radio news and roadkill —

the furred skunk, possum, cat,
squirrel, raccoon, in the
special economy of the outward-
facing nose, lost in final scent,

the surrendered open mouth,
forehead pressed back in frozen
tragedy, tension gone, time done,
appetite dissolving into skull —

I find myself at the kitchen counter
in a different Americana, tearing
kale ruffles from their spines
for a chilled supper of greens with lemon

and oil, Dijon, garlic, cucumber —
live, wet and impossibly cool from the
earth garden just outside the door,
where the farmer’s wife one hundred

years ago also opened her apron
like a cradle, gingerly receiving
into thin billowing cotton pockets
as much as she could carry

as much as she could carry

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

-

-

My response to the killing of Osama bin Laden

-

-

What color is prayer?

In December we saw an installation by visual artist Jitish Kallat at The Art Institute of Chicago called Public Notice 3. (The Art Institute's page about it is here.)

In thousands of LED lights, Kallat spells out words on the risers of the stairs in the Woman's Board Grand Staircase — an open, radiant space. The brightly lit words were intentionally designed in the five colors of the United States Department of Homeland Security alert system. At first, seeing the neon-like letters mounted on the Beaux-Arts stairs felt jarring. The Art Institute is my favorite museum, and the multi-directional staircase under a skylight has always been a magnetic center of the million-square-foot building where I love to sit and watch people, listening to the echo of voices and footsteps. Once I learned the content of the words illuminating the risers, I read up and down and watched people climb, descend, sit, stand, and snap pictures. We were surrounded by words like stock exchange tickers (though not in motion, and not driven by commerce).

Kallat said,  "Treating the museum’s Grand Staircase almost like a notepad, the 118 step-risers receive the refracted text of the speech. I see Public Notice 3 as an experiential and contemplative transit space; the text of the speech is doubled at the two entry points on the lower levels of the staircase and quadrupled at the four exit points at the top, multiplying like a visual echo."

 This photo from the Art Institute of Chicago web site;

more photos here

What speech? The words Kallat mounted on the stairs were spoken by Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda to 7,000 delegates more than 100 years ago, in the first attempt to address religious tolerance worldwide: the First World Parliament of Religions, held in conjunction with the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. (Detailed synopsis of the Parliament at Boston University's Encyclopedia of Western Theology's site here.) This art installation was opened last year on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attack, September 11, 2010. Part of what captured Jitish Kallat's imagination was the fact that the gathering of delegates of different faiths in 1893 in the museum's Fullerton Hall happened also to be on September 11 that year. Below is Vivekananda's speech, words that light the steps of the grand staircase like prayers rising and falling, adjacent to the hall where he addressed the hopeful delegates. (The building of the Art Institute was built for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair — officially the World's Fair: Columbian Exposition — with the agreement that it would house the Art Institute thereafter).

When you get to the last sentence of his speech, what do you feel?

Swami Vivekananda's speech to the First World Parliament of Religions, September 11, 1893 in the Art Institute of Chicago's Fullerton Hall:

Sisters and Brothers of America,

It fills my heart with joy unspeakable to rise in response to the warm and cordial welcome which you have given us. I thank you in the name of the most ancient order of monks in the world; I thank you in the name of the mother of religions, and I thank you in the name of millions and millions of Hindu people of all classes and sects.

My thanks, also, to some of the speakers on this platform who, referring to the delegates from the Orient, have told you that these men from far-off nations may well claim the honor of bearing to different lands the idea of toleration. I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true. I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth. I am proud to tell you that we have gathered in our bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to Southern India and took refuge with us in the very year in which their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny. I am proud to belong to the religion which has sheltered and is still fostering the remnant of the grand Zoroastrian nation. I will quote to you, brethren, a few lines from a hymn which I remember to have repeated from my earliest boyhood, which is every day repeated by millions of human beings: "As the different streams having their sources in different paths which men take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee."

The present convention, which is one of the most august assemblies ever held, is in itself a vindication, a declaration to the world of the wonderful doctrine preached in the Gita: "Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to me." Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now. But their time is come; and I fervently hope that the bell that tolled this morning in honor of this convention may be the death-knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons wending their way to the same goal.

After reading this speech, I feel as I did when I woke up early Monday morning, before Don, to his hand written note from the night before after he'd heard the news and I was in bed. I feel: empty. Not joyful. Not sad exactly. Not hopeful, not hopeless. I'm somewhere floating in a noxious ether of mystery. How have we come to this? How did we get even further away from Vivekananda's closing wishes in these decades since he spoke them?

To watch and listen to an 8-minute video of artist Jitish Kallat's interview with the museum curator about his installation, go here.

-

-

Pearl Square and Everywhere

-
-

Pearl Square and Everywhere

How does light sweep
a room, from a tallow candle,
and the room remain cold?

the worn marble floor,
beneath muted statuary

O powerless
the body, in its bone and fat

in this wind
where winter meets spring

on a concrete square
in the center of town

where we sleep!
and dreams are swept

up by the nightwatchman
into his black hole

just as the lights
are beginning to be lit

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

Horrors transcended

-

Happy Halloween! I love how this day gives us a chance to play with fright and pretend we're someone else (and eat Reese's peanut butter cups).

Just before our mid-term elections here in the U.S., while politicians flood the air waves with last ditch efforts to get voters out Tuesday, Comedy Central's Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert held a Rally to Restore Sanity on Washington DC's mall, which brought out well over 200,000 people. Was the rally to support a political party or candidate? No. In his comments at the end of the comedic and musically entertaining event, Stewart asks, What exactly was this? What was the point? His point was to pull back from 24-hour media pundit craziness-inducing overreactions of the Left and Right and remind us that we are not made up of those caricature-warped portrayals of us Americans. I take great hope from the success of this rally that called out hate and reminded us not to let ourselves be driven by the media's polarizing takes on reality.

I'd like to use this moment when politics are all we're hearing on the TV and radio, on Halloween's day of pretend horrors, to talk about three of our human species who truly suffered under another kind of horror, the political kind. While I complain about the faulty systems of my country and the inefficacy of politicians to fix the mess, and while I feel myself getting more cynical and disengaged (but I will force myself to stop at City Hall on the way to work Tuesday to exercise my right to vote), there are far worse political nightmares in the history of the world. The three people I'm spotlighting lived through some of the most terrifying realities of the 20th century. Yesterday, October 30, was not only the day of the Rally to Restore Sanity, it was Miguel Hernández's centenary birthday. He is the third person in my spotlight, below. In the poem of his I share, he says something like Jon Stewart said yesterday:

You are the body of water

that I am— we, together,

are the river

which as it grows deeper

is seen to run slower, clearer.

Besides perspective-taking in today's context of political lunacy, this is also about the power of language and poetry to not only express the inexpressible, but to sustain us, even when life is at its most dire. Whether in the reading of it, or in writing it, these three show that poetry can transcend the worst that mankind offers and lift us on powerful and delicate wings into the shining sun at the core of ourselves.

For further biographical information on each of these three, please click on their names.

Nelson Mandela, Prisoner 466/64, born 1918

After spending more than twenty years working for equal rights for Blacks in apartheid-heavy South Africa, Nelson Mandela was arrested for sabotage and sentenced to life in prison. He served almost 27 years in three prisons – Robben Island, Pollsmoor Prison and Victor Verster Prison, until his release in 1990. He was elected President of the African National Congress in 1991, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, and was elected the first black President of South Africa in 1994. He said, “In my country we go to prison first and then become President.”

Nelson Mandela said the poem Invictus sustained him through his nearly 27 years in prison.

Invictus

by William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll.

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

Anna Akhmatova, 1889 - 1966
"Before this sorrow mountains bow . . ."

Poet Anna Akhmatova lived during the most turbulent time of Russian history, and though she was not herself imprisoned by the Bolsheviks, her first husband, after their divorce, was executed, and her son imprisoned for seventeen months. Most of those closest to her were exiled, imprisoned or executed for their political leanings. Her poetry was banned, she lived under surveillance. Her masterpiece about the horrors and sorrows of Stalin's death camps, Requiem, was written and dedicated to the women she met standing outside Leningrad's Kresty Prison while her son was imprisoned there. The poem was not published until after her death. Please do read the entire poem in the link above. Here is one stanza from Requiem, followed by a poem called Solitude that speaks to her own lack of freedom and the writing that sustained her.

from Requiem

by Anna Akhmatova

5

Seventeen months I’ve pleaded

for you to come home.

Flung myself at the hangman’s feet,

my terror, oh my son.

And I can’t understand,

now all’s eternal confusion,

who’s beast, and who’s man,

how long till execution.

And only flowers of dust,

ringing of censers, tracks just

running somewhere, nowhere, far.

And deep in my eyes gazing,

swift, fatal, threatening,

one enormous star.

(Translated by Yevgeny Bonver)

Solitude

by Anna Akhmatova

So many stones are thrown at me

that I no longer cower,

the turret’s cage is shapely,

high among high towers.

My thanks, to its builders,

may they escape pain and woe,

here, I see suns rise earlier,

here, their last splendours glow.

And often winds from northern seas

fill the windows of my sanctuary,

and a dove eats corn from my palm…

and divinely light and calm,

the Muse’s sunburnt hand’s at play,

finishing my unfinished page.

(I'm sorry, but I don't know who translated this version of "Solitude") 

Miguel Hernández, 1910 (October 30) - 1942

Yesterday was Miguel Hernández' centenary birthday. I didn't know about Hernández until my dear friend Lorenzo of The Alchemist's Pillow offered a beautiful look at him in his post called Cicada Dirge. This special birthday was hugely celebrated in Spain and around the Spanish-speaking world this weekend. Coming out of poverty and his father's adamant rejections of his literary and poetic interests, Hernández beat incredible odds to become one of the most admired Spanish poets. As a supporter and soldier of the anti-fascist Republican forces against Franco's Nationalists in the Spanish Civil war, he was arrested and sentenced first to death, and then life in prison when Franco took power. He didn't survive long in prison, as the terrible conditions led to his death by tuberculosis at the age of 31.

Post script: Lorenzo at The Alchemist's Pillow has posted a new commemorative essay called Milking a goat and a dream, tenderly showing more intimate details of Miguel Hernández's story. He plans to continue his series on Hernández in future posts as well.

The world is as it appears

by Miguel Hernández

The world is as it appears

before my five senses,

and before yours, which are

the borders of my own.

The others' world

is not ours: not the same.

You are the body of water

that I am— we, together,

are the river

which as it grows deeper

is seen to run slower, clearer.

Images of life—

as soon as we receive them,

they receive us, delivered

jointly, in one rhythm.

But things form themselves

in our own delirium.

The air has the hugeness

of the heart I breathe,

and the sun is like the light

with which I challenge it.

Blind to the others,

dark, always remiss,

we always look inside,

we see from the most intimate places.

It takes work and love

to see these things with you;

to appear, like water

with sand, always one.

No one will see me completely.

Nor is anyone the way I see him.

We are something more than we see,

something less than we look into.

Some parts of the whole

pass unnoticed.

No one has seen us. We have seen

no one, blind as we are from seeing.

(translated by Don Share)

To love life

--

Inge and me after walking in the Making Strides event

This is my best friend, Inge. She is a breast cancer survivor. Today we walked a 5K from our state capitol for Making Strides Against Breast Cancer.

Inge. (Please say it in your mind's voice with a soft g, as in flying.) Inge is faithful, and disciplined; she loves language and reads voraciously when she isn't working too hard; she also loves numbers and being organized. She is fascinated by memory and why we remember some things, and not others. She has artistic, intelligent hand writing. Inge is a poet; she is German, with a steel-trap mind; her English is more proficient than many Americans I know. She has beautiful, dewy skin; she adores her 16-year-old son Piet; she is golden, with a golden heart. When we sit together, it's as if we are one person, with two sets of eyes. At lunch today after the walk Inge shared David Brooks' recent column "The Flock Comedies" describing friendship, saying that this passage quoting C.S. Lewis is how she sees ours. I agree:

Most essayistic celebrations of friendship have also been about the deep and total commitment that can exist between one person and another. In his book, “The Four Loves,” C.S. Lewis paints a wonderful picture of such an ideal: “It seems no wonder if our ancestors regarded Friendship as something that raised us almost above humanity. This love, free from instinct, free from all duties but those which love has freely assumed, almost wholly free from jealousy, and free without qualification from the need to be needed, is eminently spiritual. It is the sort of love one can imagine between angels.”

Warning: Mixed metaphors follow.

Seven years ago, Inge told me she had a malignant tumor. That "cosmic two-by-four," as she calls it, smacked her into an intense journey of chemo, radiation, and exploration of the soul. Shortly after the diagnosis, over lunch out of Bento boxes, she described her session that morning with an esoteric healer who was helping her go beyond medical treatment, toward inner wholeness. Hearing about it I practically jumped over the table into her lap with excitement. The moment was full, and I was eager, recognizing instantly that we would be doing this work together. I could feel an unseen world of mystery and beauty ready to flood us with its light, if we could just get the curtains open. For a couple of years we devoured every book that leapt off the shelf at us, starting with Eckhart Tolle's Power of Now, and on into meticulous inner excavations with Don Miguel Ruiz, Michael Brown, Osho, Krishnamurti, Rumi, Thomas Moore, John Hillman, Ken Wilber, Carl Jung, G. I. Gurdjieff, Rainer Maria Rilke, Mary Oliver, and others in snippets, poems and synchronicities. Even a mother beech tree in Ireland and a Scotch pine in a back yard were our teachers. We dug, scraped, chipped, whittled and brushed off caked-on layers of bad habits we'd accumulated, such as resentment, fear, judgment, dependence and jealousy. No matter where we looked, everything in every direction was vibrating: . . . Life! . . . Love! All seemed simultaneously more . . . and less important. An apple, a leaf or a bird were the center of the universe. The present moment was the only one, and it was eternal. Our conversations flowed with enthusiasm, discovery, and hunger for more. As frightening as Inge's cancer was (thank God I didn't lose her), I am grateful that it was the wrecking ball that knocked down my shabby, haphazard scaffolding, revealing a spare, quiet sunlit meadow of peace at the center of myself. The ugly scaffolding isn't gone completely, but the work isn't as aggressive now. It seems to happen on its own, like a hummingbird whose wings are moving, but almost imperceptibly, as if on a different plane.

Life keeps happening. We are healthy (I too, survived melanoma), but death hovers all around, through distant stories, and sometimes close to home. A couple of weeks ago, there was a terrible car wreck here. In one car three teenagers, and in the second car two grandparents lost their lives. One of the teenagers was a friend of Inge's son's and a former 4th grade student in my husband's class. There isn't much to say about such unthinkable sorrows. But a few days later, a rare morning when I failed to read my Writer's Almanac poem, Inge emailed it to me and said, Read this. Sometimes poems transcend the inadequacy of words, cutting right to your core. Love and life become a choice. This was the poem that day:

The Thing Is

by Ellen Bass

to love life, to love it even

when you have no stomach for it

and everything you've held dear

crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,

your throat filled with the silt of it.

When grief sits with you, its tropical heat

thickening the air, heavy as water

more fit for gills than lungs;

when grief weights you like your own flesh

only more of it, an obesity of grief,

you think, How can a body withstand this?

Then you hold life like a face

between your palms, a plain face,

no charming smile, no violet eyes,

and you say, yes, I will take you

I will love you, again.

"The Thing Is" by Ellen Bass, from Mules of Love. © BOA Editions, Ltd., 2002.

-
- 

Corolla Gyres

-

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world . . . 

~ W. B. Yeats ~

from the poem  

"The Second Coming"

And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

~ Jesus ~
Matthew 6:29

a Friday poem

-

-

Cradle your son, Mary.

He is gone a while.

Sunlight, refrigerated in earth.

Stored up, like breath

held - until we gasp

and catch it again -

Held in an egg, in a wing, 

in a black eye, darting

- shiny and alert.

Held in the waiting

of thirst and hunger.

Held in a gliding flight

up a hill of wind that slopes

up, then down again,

the flyer floating

back down, silent as a blade of sun

that pierces a seed

and spills life into the ground.

Cradle your son, Mary.

He is gone a while.

~ Ruth M.

-

-

Esperanza

-
-
Our pockets and shoes are stuffed with snow, our eyes red from reports of ailing loved ones, world news and Michigan wind. Monthly retirement fund statements are piling up in unopened envelopes with gaping windows, teasing our fears. Dreams sputter above our night beds like deflated balloons. Though we're fortunate to even have jobs, before the first Monday morning meeting at work we heaved sighs along with the water dispenser as it released an air bubble. We are doing more work with fewer resources. The whole state feels it.

The drive home was brutal, and I almost got stuck in someone's driveway turning the car around to go back and shoot our neighbor's horses at feeding time. This is the same field as the photo at the bottom of my blog page CLOUDS ARE MY MOUNTAINS. I know you are tired of snow. I still love it, but I'm tired nonetheless.

This is another farm on the way home, shot exactly two years ago, but it looks just like this today.

After a week of busy work and unending snow, what can we do? Where can we turn to fill up again at the end of the week?

Chicks ready to hatch! Don brought home ten eggs in the incubator he had taken to school for the kids to watch. Two of them began pipping Friday, and one broke a tiny hole in the shell before the kids left. Last night here at home I heard the same chicks peeping through cracking shells, and when I got up to look, one was out, making a lot of noise and running around. But later, when I woke up again, I heard nothing, and I was too fearful to check and see if it was still alive. But there it was this morning, and the second ready to hatch. Now at 10:33am we have three hatched, with seven more working hard to break through.

I named this one Esperanza, which means hope. The name may change to Esperanzo if she turns out to be a he.

-

In this photo you can see Esperanza's egg tooth, the part of the beak that helps chicks break through the shell - the tiny point on its beak. It will fall off in a few days.

Nature -Life - comes through again.

-
-

"They've messed with the wrong one now!"

-
-

To read more about the Montgomery Bus Boycott, go here.
To read more about Rosa Parks, go here, or read her autobiography, Rosa Parks, My Story.
To see the story of the restoration of the bus, go here.
-
-