FAREWELL TO NATIONAL POETRY MONTH

A fellow poet Bao Phi posted on his Face Book page in early April how he was going to write a poem a day during April, National Poetry Month, and allow himself to experiment, fail and other stuff I can’t remember and can’t find!  I wasn’t going to do it this year, but I decided to write a poem a day for April.  April 30 and counting: I have started 33 new ones—who knows how many will make it to fruition fully.  But it also gave me the chance to experiment and not worry about failure.  Including immersing myself in other poets.  This one was written after reading Gerard Manley Hopkins, like me a priest and a poet.  It’s dedicated to the artists of In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater, who will bless Powderhorn Park and our community with the 40^th May Day Parade this coming Sunday.

THE GREAT BLUE HERON RETURNS TO POWDERHORN LAKE

Oh great, gangly grey-blue ghost of the shallows,

Stand still on back-bent legs along the lee of the island

Where the willow weeps wistfully to the water’s edge,

Her hair hanging hallowed on the holy love of hydrogen

And oxygen, who do not fret, fight or feud, but frolic

In full freedom, a resting place, a refuge for duck,

Goose, loon, gull, crappie, bullhead, sunnie, snapping turtle,

Bugs big and small and all manner of beasts that swim

Or crawl or fly through our imagination and our delight

In this city of waters, this chalice of homework, heartache

And hallelujahs we call Minneapolis.  Many men and women

March down to these shores, skating solemnly on the skin

Of ice when winter winds its wisdom and its woe, singing

Spring to the sun to strengthen our spirits, forcing

Fire on the 4^th, launching lanterns that long for an end

To war, a weary welcome to peace.  Over all, the long-legged,

Wing-spun, hook-necked fish-finding guardian of our souls

Stands like a “fifth season”, the unseen wind at the center

Of all flesh silent in its breast, its blood a river running

Rampant to the core of the earth, until some hand hidden

In the heart of God bids it rise, bids it fly, bids it circle

The island the lake the city the world the song.

Bao Phi reminded me that today is also the day of “The Fall of Saigon” in 1975.  It is also the day of the final lying down of my grandmother Florence Kelly Daly in 1979. I am so grateful that God has given us poetry—those events, and so many others in our lives can be held, cherished, challenged and transformed by the words we have been so graciously granted.

Be beauty.  Be justice.

Patrick

WHAT IS A HOLY SATURDAY?

It is perhaps an occupational hazard that pastors share: we are often so busy during Holy Week and Easter that we don’t have much time to reflect on the mystery.  My sermon is now done.  There are still preparations to complete, the most important of which is my making a raspberry white chocolate cheesecake for our Easter Dinner tomorrow.  With raspberries from our garden, lovingly kept in our freezer.

What is Holy Saturday?  I would guess for most pastors it is a day between focusing on death and its great power and mystery, and focusing on resurrection and its wonder and doubt. Many churches have Easter Vigils tonight (we do not), but that really is a resurrection service. I looked forward to Easter Vigil when I was a kid for two reasons:  lots of pagan stuff in the liturgy (fire, light, praising the bees) and because after it was over, we would eat everything we gave up for Lent.

What was that first Holy Saturday like?  At the risk of oversimplification, the men were hiding, and the women were waiting.  The men, almost all of whom had fled, were in their fear.  Maybe so far into their fear they could not truly mourn.  The women who had stuck with Jesus to the bitter end, found a way to prepare the spices to return on Sunday and anoint his hastily buried body.  Then, starting at sunset on Friday “they rested according to the commandment”.  They obeyed the Sabbath even though God had not obeyed their deepest desire.   They waited and suffered in the space between death and hope.

I have no doubt that the women mourned deeply that Sabbath.  There was no work to be done, and even though it was the Great Sabbath during the Passover, there was no rejoicing.  But that mourning was faith itself. Because it did not seek to escape from reality itself.  The men practiced escaping (hiding is but another form of escape).  The women practiced grief and mourning.  (I make the distinction, perhaps unwise, between grief, the state given to us by death, and mourning, the actions we take in our grief.)

Was their practice of mourning the reason that the women could continue to be faithful in the face of their hope devoured?  Faithful to go to the tomb without knowing who or what could take the huge stone away.  Faithful to bring spices to anoint the body, in accordance with the love we owe the dead.  And was their faith—a faith born out of a willingness to be in the very reality they would have loved to have avoided—that enabled them to see the risen Christ and believe him.  The men doubted—another form of escape.

(Sorry men—we do redeem ourselves come Pentecost, so hold on.)

I think we do not know how to mourn very well in our society.  At least not collectively.  I’ve done two funerals in the last two weeks and will do my cousin Joe’s next Wednesday.  The best mourning I encounter often includes a lot of laughter, as well as wrenching tears.  The best mourning I see speaks of hope rather than certainty, it acknowledges death as a real power that has robbed us and not a blessing.  It cries out.

I don’t think we mourned very well as a nation after September 11, 2001. That was a terrible death, but the emotions I saw portrayed by our media and our political leaders quickly turned from sorrow to anger and to pride.  There was surely reason to get angry, and there was pride at the sacrifices firefighters and police and others made.  But think about a death of a loved one?  Anger would be in the mix, but would pride be quick to follow?

I think we did not give ourselves time to mourn enough, to cry out to God, to wait in the space between death and hope.  I don’t know if we wept enough. If we had, maybe we wouldn’t have made so much mourning necessary for so many people in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Guantanamo. I’m not saying we should not have had a response.  It’s that when our response is based on anger and projection of our power, it tends to squeeze out compassion.  Compassion is not afraid of powerlessness.  And powerless is how we were when those planes hit.

I could write about other grief work we probably need to do as a nation, maybe even going quite far back.  The genocide of the nations who were here, our embrace of slavery, the loss upon loss of immigrants coming to a new land, whether that was from Sweden in 1887, or Mexico in 2014.

What do you think?

As I was writing today, I realize that it was 40 years ago this month that I started preparing to be a poet.  Or better, it was 40 years ago this month that I started being prepared to be a poet.  For it was more a gift than an effort.  I was in Chicago, on an urban studies term, and went through a lot of grief work, though I did not realize all of it at the time.  Loss of the career path I was sure I was meant to be on (becoming a lawyer), loss of a “true love”, loss of my fierce unbelief.  Jody Kretzmann and others helped me to start reading poets that spoke to that loss and to the hope planted in all pain.  I’m going to attach two poems that I read over and over that spring and summer in Chicago, two poems that continue to help me  with this holy waiting, and this wrestling with God.

Be justice.  Be beauty.  Be in “the wounding that precedes hope”.

Patrick

The Waking                                                          by Theodore Roethke

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.   

I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?   

I hear my being dance from ear to ear.   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?   

God bless the Ground!   I shall walk softly there,   

And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?   

The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do   

To you and me; so take the lively air,   

And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.   

What falls away is always. And is near.   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   

I learn by going where I have to go.

THE PREACHER RUMINATES BEHIND THE SERMON    Gwendolyn Brooks

I think it must be lonely to be God.
Nobody loves a master. No. Despite
The bright hosannas, bright dear-Lords, and bright
Determined reverence of Sunday eyes.

Picture Jehovah striding through the hall
Of his importance, creatures running out
From servant-corners to acclaim, to shout
Appreciation of His merit’s glare.

But who walks with Him?–dares to take His arm,
To slap Him on the shoulder, tweak His ear,
Buy Him a Coca-Cola or a beer,
Pooh-pooh His politics, call Him a fool?

Perhaps–who knows?–He tires of looking down.
Those eyes are never lifted. Never straight.
Perhaps sometimes He tires of being great
In solitude. Without a hand to hold.

IN MY STUDIO

I’m writing in a studio I rent at the Loft Literary Center today.  There are 7 studios, and you have to be careful to remember which door is yours when you walk down the two flights of stairs (Cheetos and Bugles for 85 cents in the vending machines in the basement).  You don’t want to walk in on someone else’s creative cave.

The studios are constructed from old doors, scavenged from buildings. I assume many of these buildings are “no longer with us”, as the euphemism goes.  Like the Metrodome sports arena, which I’ve had the honor of watching get knocked down right outside this window, in this studio.

The doors have little drawings or paintings on them, mostly of a biologic nature.  There is the “Twig” door, the “Flower” door, the “Bird” door and my current favorite, the “Bug” door.

When I go stretch my legs, I repeat to my brain over and over: the bug door, the bug door, so that when I return, I return by way of the insects, to my writing hive.

I like to write in the bugs.  The ones that pollinate us, and the ones that, well, bug us.  We think that pollinators just pollinate flowers (as if that is a minor undertaking), but they actually pollinate us as well.  They pollinate our eyes with wonder, our ears with swift music, our taste buds and stomachs with delight.  Without our friends the pollinators—hummingbirds, bees, butterflies, flies, moths, even bats—we wouldn’t get to eat tomatoes, almonds, oranges, peppers, onions, broccoli, beans, strawberries, avocados, mangos and a host of other nutritious, scrumptious fellow creatures.

And yet, we’re killing the pollinators.  Bees are dying.  The Monarch butterfly population is way, way down. A lot of that is caused by us.  Destruction of habitat, destruction of the plants that our friends the pollinators need to eat in order to help us to eat. 

Nionicotinoid herbicides that can damage bee colonies.  Genetically modified crops that withstand herbicides, so farmers can broadcast Round Up and other herbicides—it won’t kill the corn or soybeans, but it will kill all the milkweed, the monarch butterflies only food source.

Are we so afraid of weeds that we have to kill the pollinators that feed us?

I’m in the bug studio, right above where the recycling dumpster is now being lifted up by the giant blue bug called a garbage truck. The truck backs out slowly, and its metallic chirping assails my ear, as the rain begins to fall, as the rain turns to snow, as Minnesota turns reluctantly to spring. 

It reminds me that the beauty of language is that words, poems, stories, visions can be recycled. 

Today is my 61st birthday.  There are more and more old doors in my hinge-filled body. And more and more bugs.  I’ve lost some hearing—at high frequencies and low volume (in some gatherings, that’s a blessings). I’m looking at a hip replacement soon.  If I write a long time today, my carpal tunnel will flare up more fiercely.

But this is more wisdom in me, I trust.  And more comedy!

This is a poem I wrote a long time ago—in my twenties, no less.  It doesn’t bear directly on the subject of pollinators, but there is an old priest in it.

THE MASS

For Thomas Merton

A boy raises a match to twin candles,

Chanting baseball scores behind his prayers.

Bread and wine are ground into the stone,

The water is drawn, knife whetted,

Colors kissed and draped over shoulders.

The priest steps slowly to the altar,

Holding his years like stones coughed up by the sea.

He opens the book, lets the words slap his face,

Turns reddened to us, and weeps history.

It is a moment to say yes to failure.

The candles burn thick with darkness,

The music dances in the flames of a thousand circles.

Now the host is raised up to the beaks of night,

Now the words are shouted from the cross:

“This is my Body!” “This is my Blood!”

Walk now to the River, with hands open to receive the promise.

Like a tooth picked off a playground after a fight,

You put it in your pocket, wish on it,

Watch it grow into some terrible friend,

Some new and utterly lonely beast.

 Be beauty.  Be justice.  Be a bug.

Patrick