THE SOUNDS OF MORNING

I begin my mornings by meditating on our three season porch.  With a blanket and a warmer on my neck and back, it has become and three and a half season porch.  I doubt I will sit there next Sunday morning, when it’s forecasted to hit 16 below.  But today, at a balmy 24, it was quite nice.

 

I usually bring a mug of hot tea, light a candle, arrange the blanket and try to just listen.  It isn’t always easy; my mind often seems to be sitting on a lake of liquid hot magma that throws fears, questions, doubts and random thoughts up into my consciousness.  Maybe you have all experienced that at some point.  When it gets real bad, I tell myself that my “job” is to just sit there and not worry about what my mind throws up. Just sit there and listen: to God, to my body, to the world around me.

 

This morning, there was a train whistle, quickly departing. A single sparrow, chirping.  The crows started coming in, returning from their night in community.  They seem louder in the morning, even though there are fewer of them.  Near sunset, when they all begin to gather, there are so many of them, their raucous caws turn into something like a giant OM: a multitude of crows keeping festival.  Yes, I know that a group of crows is a murder.  But murder doesn’t seem what they do in the early evening.  Rather, family, communion, solidarity.

 

When the crows return after dawn, their individual greetings stand out, sharp and somewhat harsh. I imagine they are greeting each other with words like Blessed morning.  Good fortune on the hunt.

 

I had mostly tuned out the crows this morning, when I heard a pleasant bird song.  I was pretty relaxed into meditation at the time, and my semi-conscious mind thought that’s a pretty song.  And then it hit me: it was a cardinal singing—the first one I’ve heard this winter!  The cardinals usually begin singing in our south Minneapolis neighborhood sometime in February, but I don’t remember ever hearing them sing on the first day of this shortest month.

 

It seems quite likely the groundhog will see its shadow here tomorrow, and the high for Super Bowl Sunday is forecasted to be 3 below.  But with the change in administration, the arrival of vaccines, and especially this solitary cardinal singing this morning, I can hear spring. I can listen for it, even when it is far from coming.

 

Here’s a poem with a cardinal in it, part of my book “Quitting Time”.  It officially launches February 18 at 7 pm CST.  Here’s a link to register for the webinar:

 

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Bha30g3AR6S-9eKL81PDVg

 

 

YOU ARE IN NEARLY EVERY DAWN

 

You would love these cardinals

in late winter, courting from

the highest branch, the rabbits

that race the backyard snow,

sparrows who never abandon.

I sit on the porch and imagine

your face, a child I have never seen.

I have no photos of you as a boy,

no First Communion, no lost

teeth or family picnic, and yet

I see your smile as clear as wind:

a breeze that arises in the east,

messenger in a cloudless sky.

 

Be beauty. Be justice.  Be kind in listening.

 

Patrick

MEMORIALS

 On the first day of 2021, I went for a walk around sunset.  It is a favorite time of the day for me, especially in the winter, with the sun so low in the horizon.  The light is delicate and enchanting. As light leaves and darkness comes on, it is one of those liminal times.  The border between the past and present, the living and the dead, becomes more of a membrane. We can be fed with what we don’t comprehend.

 

A short walk from our house is Matt’s Bar at 35^th and Cedar, where the Jucy Lucy was born (sorry, 5-8 Club, but it was here). On the semaphore pole are the remains of a memorial to three people, killed by an 18-year old driver who had stolen a car.  The three people were coming from a family gathering; they had no knowledge of the young man, nor of how their lives would connect in that one awful moment.

 

I walked down one block to the Holiday Gas Station, where a small memorial sits in the snow. A 23-year old man was killed by police on the last day of 2020. The police released footage that seems to show he fired first at the officers who had pulled them over.  The young man had had some knowledge of law enforcement, with a few “run-ins” with the law. But none of his family and friends saw this coming.  I don’t know if he knew the officer who shot and killed him.  The gas station is less than a mile from where George Floyd was murdered by police on Memorial Day.

 

I walked a block west, watching the sky, then turned back north on 18^th Ave, the street we live on.  At 35^th and 18^th is the parking lot of the Hope Temple Foursquare Church.  The low sign on the corner of the lot has been fully repaired since a hit and run driver struck it. The same driver, a young man drunk and going close to 70 miles an hour, hit a car at that intersection, killing a young man.  The victim was a scientist, and a musician who played in a local band.  He lived with his wife one block as the crow flies from our house.  There was a memorial for him for a long while, but now that has gone away.  The house he lived in has gone away as well, made unfit by a huge tree that was felled during a storm a year after his death.

 

On the second day of 2021,  I thought about these memorials, and I thought about the places where happenstance or fate or a terrible coincidence brought the lost lives to their end.

 

At Matt’s, a Jucy Lucy is a concoction where cheese is sealed between two thin hamburger patties and then fried.  It comes with a warning to watch the first bite, because the cheese is so hot.  It’s been a neighborhood cornerstone for years.  I remember back in the 70’s, it was so smoky you couldn’t see to the end of the bar.  Since Minnesota outlawed smoking in indoor establishments, it has become a place where families as well as young adults hang out.

 

The gas station has a long pit to the north of the car wash; I assume it is to eliminate stormwater runoff from entering the storm sewers and then onto the river. We’ve bought gas there many times; our Cub Foods reward card gives us 10, 20, 30 cents off per gallon, depending on how much food we buy.

 

The sign on the Foursquare Church parking lot has a logo with white silhouettes on different color squares: a cross on red, chalice on blue, crown on purple, dove on yellow.  I assume they represent the four core beliefs of every Foursquare Church: Jesus is our savior, healer, baptizer and soon coming king.  The members of the church have planted several trees in the boulevard on both sides of 35^th Street..

 

One square block, three memorials to needless death, at three random places. 

 

Our soon to be departing president vetoed the defense bill, not because he wants to limit our death-making machine, but because he didn’t want the part that eliminated the name of traitor racist generals from military bases.  Those memorials of Confederate generals are not outpourings of sorrow, or rage at injustice, or the hope of keeping a loved one’s memory alive.  They are about glorifying terrorism.

 

This is not the blog post I anticipated writing in this new New Year.  But there is still grieving in my soul, for what we’ve lost this past year, and during the life of our city and country.  It is serenity we need to accept our losses; it is courage we need to work to change the things we can, it is the wisdom hidden in the evening winter sky that gives me hope.

 

Be beauty. Be justice.  Be memory.

 

Patrick

DON’T BUY THIS

 

There is an impactful commercial that plays rather often on the TV stations we watch. It shows a person standing at an empty refrigerator, looking for what is not there.  The person’s feature changes, to reveal different people from different cultures, as words flash above telling us that 1 out of 8 Minnesotans are hungry, including 1 out of 5 children.  It’s an effective ad for Second Harvest Heartland, one they hope helps people make a donation to their effort.  An especially effective commercial during holiday times.

 

Today, the commercial came up again: I watched the faces change, I read the sobering statistics. We’ve been giving to groups that feed the hungry since the pandemic started, and it reminded me how important that is.

 

The next commercial was for “your Twin Cities Jaguar dealer”. No faces changing into others, just shots of the car, and words about how much you can “save”. The purpose, as with the prior commercial, is to move people to give money—in this case, a lot of it, to purchase what they want.  An especially effective commercial during holiday times.

 

It struck me that we will never make real progress in ending hunger until we see the connection between those two ads.  The first one asks you to make a difference in another person’s life, by giving $25 or $50 or $100.  The second one asks you to let Jaguar make a difference in your life, by giving them tens of thousands of dollars.

 

Both commercials, ultimately, are geared to making us feel good about ourselves.  The first may lead us into guilt first, but our donation can alleviate that into a feeling that we are good because we did something good.  The second one skips the guilt entirely, just leads us into feeling good because we can afford a Jaguar, and therefore, at some level, deserve one.

 

I have nothing against helping the hungry.  I have a hell of a lot against “helping the hungry” without taking a hard look at our consumption, and the structures that support and enable grow inequality.  If we don’t make those connections—personally and on a national and global scale—we are going to see the same commercials next year.  We will be able to give to help feed the hungry, and we will be able to buy, or fantasize about buying, the sexy power car.

 

I don’t want to feel good about that.  I want it to chafe.

 

 

Be justice. Be beauty.  Be as critical as the times demand.

 

 

Patrick

ANNIVERSARIES

October 5 would have been the 71^st anniversary of my parents, Walt and Monica.  It was also the 16^th anniversary of my mother’s death.  She died on the date she and her beloved were married, which seems fitting.  (October 5, 2004 was also the last day my hometown Minnesota Twins won a playoff game!  That’s a whole ‘nother story.)

 

Although I never thought about it exactly this way, I realize both of my parents were anti-fascists.  Both served in World War II. Mom was a WAC, and among other things helped in the training of French pilots, who were then sent to bomb their own country to free it from the Nazis.  I imagine some of those young men died doing that.  Dad was in the Army Air Corps in the Aleutian Islands on December 7, 1941, closer to Japan than Pearl Harbor was. He served in combat in France and Germany, and in the occupation of Germany after the war.  Then his German came in handy for his country, unlike in 1917, when he went to kindergarten speaking only German, and was told that children who spoke “the enemy’s language” would be hit.

 

I wish I could call them up and talk about our current political situation.  They voted in every election, and my mom worked for over 10 years as an administrative assistant for the county.  Dad was a barber and as I note in my poem “Cutting Away”:

 

You can learn a lot by holding

a man’s head in one hand

and a razor in another. 

 

I’m pretty sure there aren’t elections in the next life.  But if you can hear me, mom and dad, I want you to know that we are still fighting the good fight!

 

Here is a poem from my upcoming book that celebrates how my parentage came to be:

 

 

AUSTIN MINNESOTA

 

Austin, Hog-Town,

city of bent shoulders.

Maybe the hair of the men on the kill

grow more quickly over their ears,

so that you made a killing

with your scissors and clippers

and the fine hand broom that whisked

the dead hair off their shoulders.

You roomed at Maw Daly’s on Main

Street, where husband Bill left each

morning to work in the plant, and

daughter Monica checked the accounts

at Kresge’s and came home to work

for the house, cleaning the roomers’ rooms,

stuffing the laundry through the wringer

into galvanized pots.  I wonder how

often she washed your sheets, and how

much she wondered.  Mom said she thought

you were ugly and stuck up when she

first met you, but something must

have caught her heart—your mustache,

the scent of pomade and powder

on your hands, your fervency at Mass.

Somehow you ended up talking, then

dancing, then walking down the aisle

at Queen of Angels, Mom’s brothers

still alive, Grandpa Bill delighted to see

his daughter finally married, Grandma

Daly wondering who would clean the sheets.

 

 

Be justice.  Be beauty.  Be anti-fascist, as effectively and peacefully as you can.

 

Patrick

GREETINGS POETRY LOVERS

For those of you who remember Rocky and Bullwinkle, you may remember that greeting from the Moose: “Greetings, Poetry Lovers!” It was meant to carry a lot of irony (as did the whole show), but I have loved that line ever since I was a kid.  Now that I’m retired, I love it even more.

 

One of the joys of retirement is that I not only have more time to write poetry, I have more time to READ poetry! Which, of course, helps writing immensely! Especially reading one volume by an author from start to finish.  In the last part of July and the first part of August, I read these works:

 

“Straight Out of View” by Joyce Sutphen

 

“Between Us”, by Margaret Hasse

 

“I” by Toi Derricotte (still working on that big one!)

 

The past week or so, I’ve been reading:

 

“What Falls Away is Always” by Richard Terrill

 

“Idanre and Other Poems” by Wole Soyinka

 

“The Essential Rumi” by Rumi (still working on that one, too!)

 

I didn’t set out to read all women writers at first, nor switch to all men writers later.  I just picked up their books—either because I saw it on my shelf (we’re trying to declutter and organize—still working on that one, too!) or because their book came out, or because I found their book in one of the many little free libraries I pass on my daily walks.

 

Each of these poets has their own style, of course, but each touches on one part of poetry that is essential: mystery.  I won’t try to explain each of their approaches, only to say that each of them take delight in words, take delight in putting them together, and take delight in the mysterious communication between solitary writer and unknown reader.  So I commend them all to you.

 

For those of you who are struggling with writing during this pandemic—or any other times—I leave these words of wisdom from Rumi:

 

“This is how it always is

when I finish a poem.

 

A great silence overcomes me,

and I wonder why I ever thought

to use language.”

 

Be beauty. Be justice. Be poetry. Be silence.

 

Patrick

HOW LONELY SITS OUR CITY…

How lonely sits our city…

That was all I wrote on my Face Book page this morning.  It follows after the first verse of Lamentations: “How lonely sits the city that was once full of people”.

Our city of Minneapolis is full of rage, violence, fear, anger, hatred and deep, deep sorrow.  At some moments, it doesn’t feel as if the city can hold it all.

I want to reach out my arms and hug, but we are physical distancing.

I want to reach out my hands and heal, but we still haven’t completely opened the wound.

If you want moral clarity, this is what I got:

George Floyd was murdered by the police.

George Floyd was murdered by the police.

One policeman knelt on his neck while three policemen watched and did nothing while George Floyd was gasping for breath and crying out for help.

The anger and frustration of the African American community, and other people of color is not going away, it is justified and it demands justice and compassion.  Those who have endured the lynching of its people over decades, over centuries—by a system that devalues people of color, in order to maintain a system that privileges white people (and not all of them) and the rich—they deserve justice.  Reconciliation and healing are not possible without it.

That’s what I have for moral clarity right now.

Other things are not so black and white (forgive the play on words)

The neighborhood that was so severely damaged last night is my neighborhood.  It is the most diverse neighborhood in the city, one that has suffered under police brutality and poverty, and now have been slapped in the face by destruction of its food supply, economic base and safety.

I understand that frustration can lead to rage and desperation can lead to violence.  All violence leads to more violence.  That doesn’t mean that all violence is equal.  The spark for this terrible fire was the police murder, in plain daylight of a man who allegedly tried to pass a forged $20 bill.  We may never be able to pinpoint the exact moment that the violence began in the street; but the police department made a decision before a PEACEFUL march that they were going to engage it with riot gear, chemical weapons and rubber bullets.  As far as I can tell, no attempt was made by the police to negotiate or deescalate. As usual, the people our police are called to serve and protect were seen simply as a threat.

But the looting, torching of buildings, gunshots and acts of physical violence against others is not justified.

Some will say—and have said already, “but you can’t equate torching of a store or looting as the same as the murder of an unarmed black man.”  I am not equating them.  But one can be horrified and enraged at police murder and be horrified and enraged at looting and arson.

“But they only torched big corporations’ stores,” some say.  Not true.  Many of the stores that were damaged were minority owned, many built by immigrants, some of whom do not have enough insurance to cover the loss. And who worked at the Wendy’s, the Target, the Cub Foods?  Mostly people of color, who have lost their jobs.  Many of them do not qualify for unemployment or any government help.  How does that help the cause of justice?

“People should obey the police.”  But the police are the ones who take an oath to protect and serve the people, not the other way around.  We taught our children to obey and respect civil authorities, partly so they would survive and because it is right to do so.  But we also taught them to question civil authorities when they are destructive of human beings.

One irony of last night was that the police shot rubber bullets from the rooftops on mostly peaceful protestors and did nothing to stop the looting and arson.

Another irony is that it’s becoming clear that some of the instigators of violence came prepared to do that, and had nothing to do with the protest.

A third irony: we’ve fought for years to combat gang and individual graffiti in our neighborhood, one of the hardest hit by vandalism.  It started to creep back this last year.  On building after building today, you can see “Fuck the Cops” alongside newly painted gang tags.  Put that in your progressive or conservative pipe and smoke it.

I will protest today and tomorrow.  I helped clean up broken glass and looted goods this morning.  I will pray for justice and I will work for it, but I must confess I am tired and sad and angry and feeling a loneliness though I am surrounded by people who love and who are putting their lives on the line.

This is a portion of a post this morning from a friend, Kari Slade:

“I wish for us all the ability to light up like the skies of Minneapolis last night.

With a fire for justice and the ability to see that this

was the trauma and pain of Racism ignored for far too long.”

Kari leads the Health Careers Program at Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis, where both our daughters graduated.  We have been working with her and her students on a public art project that was suspended by the pandemic.  A major theme of that work was using art as a way to understand and heal from trauma—individual, communal, generational.  It saddens me that we won’t be able to complete this project this school year.  It saddens me more that the students in her program have a lot more trauma to work with going forward.

Be justice.  Be beauty.  Be lonely, but be lonely together.

Patrick

TIME FOR A CHANGE

I went to our church building yesterday to set up some things for “virtual worship” (whatever the hell that means!).  I happened to look at, not just glance at, the bulletin board by the front door.  It still had the Lenten flyer with the schedule and the list of Sunday Gospels.  I had written it in late January, in order to send it out ahead of time, and had forgotten our theme of Lent. It is: “A Big Change Is Coming!”  I guess so!  I was referring to the wonderful stories of liberation: the Samaritan woman, the man born blind, Lazarus raised from the dead.  I did NOT anticipate thousands dying, the economy ground to a halt, physical isolation of our flock.

I’ve seen memes on social media that say something like:  “Look out for a bush of babies born nine months from now!”  Maybe.  But maybe, also we need to look out for a rush of divorces in two or three months.  Sharing space all day has it’s blessings; it also uncovers some of our defects of character and lack of real communication gifts.

For me, it has also opened me up to reflecting more on the world view, or cosmovision of how we live together.  Let me start by sharing some reflections on this old, battered book that I’ve been reading during Lent:

If you can see, the book has been with me a long time. The price tag says $1.45, but I think I may even have bought it for less at a used book store, back in the 1970’s.  Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander was published in 1966. It was written by Thomas Merton, who was a Cistercian monk, part of an order that maintains a strict silence.  And yet, Merton was one of the most astute commentators on social issues of the day, from civil rights to the war in Viet Nam to the environment.

Merton writes about the “disease” of the U.S. involves seeing ourselves through lenses of innocence.  That way of seeing (which is really a way of blindness) imagines our country as being liberated from history: we are the New World.  We’ve started fresh, without the old evil of the places we left (meaning Europe).  Because of that core belief, our ideology refuses to see evil as something in us.  Rather, evil, decay, sin are located “outside of us”.  In other cultures and ways of thinking.  In the sixties, Merton sees how the prevailing ideology locates evil in communism, “outside agitators” and “uncivilized peoples” and how our collective memory celebrates only our unique goodness.  Even the evil we have done—for example, slavery—is celebrated as something we ended.  We took care of it with a terrible war, and then moved on.

Of course, that is not the experience of those who were enslaved—before and after legal slavery. Nor the genocide experience of Native Americans, nor the experience of Vietnamese and Central Americans, where the US “fought for democracy”, and for many other people.  In “seeing for innocence”, we make even the victims of our oppression and violence into the guilty ones.

I can’t find the exact quote from him, but the essence is that when we locate evil as something outside of us, we always end up being violent.

Merton also reflects on the great Myth of the American State, which flows from our supposed Innocence: a fervent belief in Progress.  It is so hard for me not to fall under the spell of that power.  I so want the world to be better, and I have seen advances we have made.  But faith in Progress is a shaky faith.

I’ve heard over and over during these past weeks the phrase: “we will get through this”.  I’ve said it to others, usually adding the word “together” at the end.  On the one hand, it is a message of hope, and hope is so needed right now.

But clinging to the idea that “we will get through this” can keep us from doing the hard work of grieving that this terrible crisis is causing.

The truth of it is that we will not be all right.  Not all of us will be all right.  Our Lt. Governor’s brother has died of Covid-19. A Latino owned  restaurant was destroyed by fire, and four other businesses adjacent were heavily damaged.  Five people living in an apartment above the restaurant are now homeless.  Many of our members work in the service industry and have been laid off.  Those who are undocumented will get nothing from the government programs.

Not all of us will be all right.  And in profound ways, all of us will not be all right.           

We may not get through this as we imagine.  We may never “return to normal”. We don’t know what is coming, but we do know that what is happening now is horrible. 

Hope has an answer for that, but true hope—as opposed to optimism—is born out of suffering (see Romans 5:1-5). In order to get to hope in this time, I think we need to lament first.  So much of what is presented to us by the news—and what we ourselves share on social media—are ways to distract us while we are sequestered.  Read books, do home repair projects, binge watch TV series and movies.

Some of those coping mechanisms may be necessary.  But what if we took time to actually feel our grief, experience our loneliness, accept the fact that we are going to die—not in this epidemic necessarily, but some day—and mourn all the daily losses we suffer.  Grief is hard to bear alone, but we do have means of communicating when we can’t be in person.

Many people around the world—Palestinians in eternal lockdown, Yemenis starving in the midst of war, families separated at our border—have learned how to live in the midst of grief and uncertainty that things will get better.  Maybe they can be our teachers.  What better time to do that but Holy Week.

I encourage you to read Merton.  Another good book I’m reading is “Glimpsing Resurrection” by

Deanna Thompson, who writes about living with the trauma of incurable cancer.

The poem “Lament” I include here is first of all, a call to me to not run away from my sorrow and the sorrow of my family and my flock.  It doesn’t offer answers, but I hope that it can help us to journey through our grief together.

Be beauty. Be justice.  Be lament.

Patrick

LAMENT

God is the straw within the straw.

                                                Edith Sitwell

God is the straw within the straw.

The quota of bricks not lessened.

The lash across the slaves’ backs.

God is the straw within the straw.

The family shamed to give birth with the animals.

The baby barely born laid in a feed trough.

The body hunted like a plague.                      

God is the grass within the grass.

The withering, the scythe,

The roaring oven,

The word that does not end.

God is the flesh within each battered flesh.

Bones ground like wheat,

Wind ripened and let loose,

A goblet of sweet and bitter wine passed around the table.

God is the stone within the stone.

Lapis angularis shattered with iron rods.

The rock struck and then struck again,

The pool stirred by the angel.

God is the water within the water.

Leviathan hung by a hook.

A coin in a carp’s mouth.

Rain that refuses to wash away the blood.

God is the wood within the wood.

The seed dead and sprouting green.

Limbs sheltering birds and their songs.

A box shaped like a no.

God is the night within the night.

Moon full, stars strung like teeth,

Comet slung across the horizon,                    

Silence hounding silence.

God is the cry within the cry.

Nipples cracked and bleeding,

The war child’s mouth rippled with sores.

The storehouse locked, horses ready to ride.

God is the question within the question.

How long?

Why me?

Where are you?

God is the pain within the pain.

God is the prayer within the prayer.

God is the doubt within the doubt.

God is the hope within the …