April soft and cold: My first look at the sea

I was introduced to the American poet Sara Teasdale via Ray Bradbury when I was in high school. I must have been in the 11^th grade when we read his short story “There Will Come Soft Rains”, which is about the Internet of Things (IoT). And Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).

Of course Bradbury didn’t know we’d be calling it IoT when he set it in the year 2026, but that’s our term now in 2015 for when everything in your life runs just fine though the intercession of computers, whether you’re there or not. Ever again.

The title comes from Teasdale’s poem of the same name:

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools, singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

Here’s another of hers, not nearly as fraught for me by association with anything like post-apocalyptic machine-based serenity. In fact, this one is much more up my street.

“Gray Eyes”

It was April when you came
The first time to me,
And my first look in your eyes
Was like my first look at the sea.

We have been together
Four Aprils now
Watching for the green
On the swaying willow bough;

Yet whenever I turn
To your gray eyes over me,
It is as though I looked
For the first time at the sea.

April soft and cold: All the pleasures prove

Okay, let’s move forward in time from Petrarch, and north from Italy for today’s National Poetry Month entry. In short, let’s have a little some-some from Christopher Marlowe.

There was a time when dinosaurs ran all over the earth, and all we had by way of connectivity were landlines, and you found people and researched products and services by riffling through a huge softcover tome called a “telephone directory”, rather than telling Siri, “Call Delilah” or “Ecuadorean restaurant”.

Back in those dark times, that “telephone directory” would list your name, address and telephone number. (There was an “online” version of this—you called the Information Operator on 411, and s/he [but mostly she] would read it out for you. That call was free, and as many as you wanted, BTW. A lot of Ma Bell’s, er, bells and whistles were free then.)

If you were female, you didn’t always want all that data out there for just everyone to find. So, often a woman would be listed by just her initial(s) and surname. E.g., “B. Bleu”. But as a safety precaution that didn’t last long, since whackjobs of all description twigged to the ploy and still found you with relative ease.

You could always go “non-published” (listing didn’t appear in the directory, but was available via 411) or “unlisted” (not in the directory and not given out), but you paid extra for that service.

I didn’t want my contact details out there for the world and his wife, but I also objected to paying extra for saving them the trouble of printing and updating my information. (There was a time when I moved right often.) And I knew that initials-wheeze was completely useless. So I just had my number listed, no address, under the name of Christopher Marlowe. People who really knew me would be able to find me; and anyone calling for “Mr. Marlowe” got the toss pretty quickly.

I chose Marlowe because he was such a rakish, intense, grab-life-wherever-you-can-get-it, over-the-top kind of guy. Even for the Elizabethan Age, noted for its flamboyant characters who lit up the sky with their brilliance. On the artistic front, he was a poet, playwright and translator, who was considered the top tragedian of his day. He had a strong influence on his contemporary, William Shakespeare, who took over the title after Marlowe’s early and mysterious death in 1593.

His plays, frankly, are not for the faint-at-heart, although his Doctor Faustus is somewhat less black than some of the others.

In addition to his day job, however, our man Marlowe was also reportedly a spy, possibly for Sir Francis Walsingham (Elizabeth I’s spymaster). This is unconfirmed, but there are indicators, and it is my opinion that he was exactly the sort of man who’d take on such assignments just to prove to himself that he could do the job so well that no one would know. Also, because it would be something else to cram into his life.

Marlowe did die young, knifed in what might have been a bar brawl, or perhaps a contract killing, since he’d been under arrest for proclaiming atheism just prior to the incident. (That was a capital offense back then. As was being a Roman Catholic. And other things.) Plus, he might have crossed Walsingham, which wasn’t good for one’s health.

He was 29, but he’d certainly lived a full life in those few years. So I’m giving you one of his persuasion poems. If someone ever quotes to you from this one, you’re in for quite a ride.

“The Passionate Shepherd to his Love”

Come live with me and be my love,

And we will all the pleasures prove,

That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,

Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the Rocks,

Seeing the Shepherds feed their flocks,

By shallow Rivers to whose falls

Melodious birds sing Madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of Roses

And a thousand fragrant posies,

A cap of flowers, and a kirtle

Embroidered all with leaves of Myrtle;

A gown made of the finest wool

Which from our pretty Lambs we pull;

Fair lined slippers for the cold,

With buckles of the purest gold;

A belt of straw and Ivy buds,

With Coral clasps and Amber studs:

And if these pleasures may thee move,

Come live with me, and be my love.

The Shepherds’ Swains shall dance and sing

For thy delight each May-morning:

If these delights thy mind may move,

Then live with me, and be my love.

April soft and cold: Ashes and a shadow

I was first introduced to Petrarch in a humanities class in college. The humanities core curriculum was my primary consideration in choosing my school, and the value of that choice has been validated again and again.

Petrarch, a Renaissance Italian poet and classical scholar, was a humanist, which of course makes him kind of critical to the, you know, humanities. In fact, he’s known in some circles as the Father of Humanism.  He followed on Dante, both chronologically and linguistically, and was a contemporary of Bocaccio.

His use of language was foundational to the building of modern Italian. And he developed the poetic form we know as the sonnet: two stanzas, an octave and a sestet. The Petrarchan sonnet poses a question, an observation or an argument in the octave, and then turns it around or answers it in the sestet.

Many of his poems revolve around his unrequited and idealized love for the woman he refers to as Laura. I’ll give you a sampling. And since you know I love the sound of Italian, I’ll give them to you in the original as well as translation.

No. 186

Se Virgilio et Homero avessin visto

quel sole il qual vegg'io con gli occhi miei,

tutte lor forze in dar fama a costei

avrian posto, et l'un stil coll'altro misto:

di che sarebbe Enea turbato et tristo,

Achille, Ulixe et gli altri semidei,

et quel che resse anni cinquantasei

sí bene il mondo et quel ch'ancise Egisto.

Quel fior anticho di vertuti et d'arme

come sembiante stella ebbe con questo

novo fior d'onestate et di bellezze!

Ennio di quel cantò ruvido carme,

di quest'altro io: et oh pur non molesto

gli sia il mio ingegno, e 'l mio lodar non sprezze!

If Virgil and Homer had seen that sun

that I can see with my eyes,

all their power would have been given

to praising her, blending both styles in one:

making Aeneas troubled and sad,

Achilles, Ulysses and the other demi-gods,

and him who ruled the Empire so well

for fifty years, and him whom Aegisthus killed.

That ancient flower of arms and virtue, Scipio,

suffered a similar fate to this new flower

of chastity and of every beauty!

Ennius sang of him in rough metres

as I do her: and oh may my art

not annoy her, and she not scorn my praise!

No. 275 (one of my favorites)

Occhi miei, oscurato è 'l nostro sole;

anzi è salito al cielo, et ivi splende:

ivi il vedremo anchora, ivi n'attende,

et di nostro tardar forse li dole.

Orecchie mie, l'angeliche parole

sonano in parte ove è chi meglio intende.

Pie' miei, vostra ragion là non si stende

ov'è colei ch'esercitar vi sòle.

Dunque perché mi date questa guerra?

Già di perdere a voi cagion non fui

vederla, udirla et ritrovarla in terra:

Morte biasmate; anzi laudate Lui

che lega et scioglie, e 'n un punto apre et serra.

e dopo 'l pianto sa far lieto altrui.

My eyes, that sun of ours is darkened:

or rather climbed to heaven, and shines there:

there I'll see her again, there she waits,

and grieves perhaps that we're so late.

My ears, her angelic words resound there,

where there are those who understand them better.

My feet, your power does not extend there,

where she is who set you in motion.

Then why do you fight this war with me?

Already every reason's lost to you,

for seeing, hearing, walking the earth:

Blame Death: or rather give praise to Him

who binds and frees, opens and shuts again,

and, after the tears, makes known another joy

And one more, but I’ll stop here.

No. 294

Soleasi nel mio cor star bella et viva,

com'altra donna in loco humile et basso:

or son fatto io per l'ultimo suo passo

non pur mortal, ma morto, et ella è diva.

L'alma d'ogni suo ben spogliata et priva,

Amor de la sua luce ignudo et casso

devrian de la pietà romper un sasso,

ma non è chi lor duol riconti o scriva:

ché piangon dentro, ov'ogni orecchia è sorda,

se non la mia, cui tanta doglia ingombra,

ch'altro che sospirar nulla m'avanza.

Veramente siam noi polvere et ombra,

veramente la voglia cieca e 'ngorda,

veramente fallace è la speranza.

She used to be lovely and living in my heart,

like a noble lady in a humble, lowly place:

now by her ultimate passing I am

not only mortal, but dead, and she divine.

My soul despoiled, deprived of all its good,

Love stripped and denuded of her light,

are pitiful enough to shatter stone,

but there’s no one can tell or write the pain:

they weep inside, where all ears are deaf,

but mine, who so much grief encumbers,

that I have nothing left but sighs.

Truly we are ashes and a shadow,

truly the blind will’s full of greed,

truly all our hopes deceive us.

Collateral damage

Seventy years ago today, the 11^th Armoured Division of the British army was pushing through northern Germany (in the general vicinity of Hanover) when they came across something they must have thought was unimaginable. Even given what they’d already seen in nearly six years of total war.

They entered the cluster of prison camps known as Bergen-Belsen, which over the years had housed Jews, POWs, political prisoners, Roma, “asocials” (which covered a wide range of behaviors the Nazis didn’t like), criminals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and homosexuals. Starting in the last months of 1944, it became a collection camp for thousands of Jewish prisoners evacuated from camps ahead of the advancing Red Army in the East. (And by “evacuated” I mean “forced marches in winter without food or shelter or adequate clothing.")

So what the soldiers of the 11^th found on 15 April 1945 was 60,000 gaunt, sick humans (men, women, children) in ragged, filthy tatters of clothing. There was a typhus outbreak, and the prisoners were dying at a rate of 500 per day. And more than 13,000 corpses in various stages of decomposition, were scattered around the grounds.

Imagine, if you can, what it would be like—even being a soldier—to come across this kind of horror; cruelty and killing on an industrial scale. You’ve never seen anything like this, never heard of it. Nothing in text books, no tales on the radio or in the newsreels. You’re just marching through the fields of Germany, and you start to smell something really, really bad. And then you walk into a compound that is so nightmarish that you have no vocabulary to describe it, even to yourself. You have no point of reference, so it’s as though you just walked into a nightmare world where nothing connects properly.

And yet, there it is, all around you. The sights, the stench, the sounds; tens of thousands of human shells, who also find the sight of you unbelievable.

Sadly—these days, were we to stumble upon, for example, mass graves in Bosnia, we would be able to say, “Oh, yes. Genocide. Mass rape and torture. I know what this is. It’s revolting, but I know what this is.” In 1945—not so much.

One member of an official film unit described the jumbles of corpses:

“The bodies were a ghastly sight. Some were green. They looked like skeletons covered with skin—the flesh had all gone. There were bodies of small children among the grown ups. In other parts of the camp there were hundreds of bodies lying around, in many cases piled five or six high.”

Perhaps the most famous description of what these soldiers encountered was by the BBC’s Richard Dimbleby, which I share with you here.

However, the voice I recall is of a British medical officer in a permanent exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, which recorded his account of working with the prisoners. He spoke of being completely overwhelmed by the numbers of patients—not one of the 60,000 was healthy. They had typhus, they had dysentery, they had all manner of diseases and injuries, all compounded by malnutrition, exhaustion, exposure and beatings.

This MO spoke of having to make choices of whom to treat and whom to let die, on the basis of who was most likely to benefit from treatment and survive. He couldn’t treat everyone; not everyone would recover. The one that I recall (and I heard this in 1996) was choosing between two sisters, both of whom were very sick, but one more so than the other. He had to treat the slightly healthier one and let the weaker one die. The anguish in this man’s voice was palpable, all those decades later.

It tore my heart into pieces to think of a physician having to make those kinds of choices. I wondered if, in the remaining years of his life, he was able to take solace in the lives he’d saved, or whether the only faces he saw were the ones he’d turned away from.

To me, this is part of the cost of letting evil like Nazism take hold, of giving it space, of providing it weapons and not standing up to it until it’s barging through your door. Collateral damage, I suppose you’d call it—the nightmares carried by the soldiers of the 11^th Armoured, and other units that discovered other camps—for the rest of their lives.

April soft and cold: A long always

Yom HaShoah begins tonight at sundown, and runs through sundown tomorrow. It’s the day set aside to remember the millions of victims of the Holocaust, when the Nazis and their accomplices murdered around six million European Jews through a variety of methods. (Their industrialized death capabilities also exterminated another five million non-combatants, in addition to the millions of civilians killed in various acts of actual war. And the other millions of military deaths.)

So today I’ve got a couple of poems from the Holocaust. In the past I’ve given you some that take up the horror of the scope of this policy of genocide. Today I’m taking it down to the individual level, with two poems about the power of love in even the worst that human hell can create.

Jerzy Ficowski is a Polish poet, translator and literary critic. He fought in the Polish home army during WWII, was imprisoned for a while and took part in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.

Following the war, Polish army veterans and ghetto combatants were suspect to the Soviet-backed Communist regime. While such efforts served the purpose of Stalin in the war against Hitler, clearly anyone who’d had the cojones to fight for Polish freedom from one totalitarian regime was capable of doing the same against another. Ficowski spent a few years traveling with Polish gypsies, and much of his work focuses on the sufferings of the Roma and Holocaust victims in Poland. Throughout his life he spoke up against censorship and for freedom of expression, which was not an easy or a simple thing during the Communist rule.

I’ve read a few of Ficowski’s poems. They all strike me with their spare, sparse power. Not one extra word. Here I give you “Both your Mothers”, which is so moving. Bieta is his wife, who was smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto at birth and brought up by a foster mother. Her birth mother died in the war.

“Both Your Mothers”

                                    for Bieta

Under a futile Torah

under an imprisoned star

your mother gave birth to you

you have proof of her

beyond doubt and death

the scar of the navel

the sign of parting for ever

which had no time to hurt you

this you know

Later you slept in a bundle

carried out of the ghetto

someone said in a chest

knocked together somewhere in Nowolipie street

with a hole to let in air

but not fear

hidden in a cartload of bricks

You slipped out in this little coffin

redeemed by stealth

from that world to this world

all the way to the aryan side

and fire took over

the corner you left vacant

So you did not cry

Crying could have meant death

luminal hummed you

its lullaby

And you nearly were not

so that you could be

But the mother

who was saved in you

could now step into crowded death

happily incomplete

could instead of memory give you for a parting gift

her own likeness

and a data and a name

So much

And at once a chance

someone hastily

bustled about your sleep

and then stayed for a long always

and washed you of orphanhood

and swaddled you in love

and became the answer

to your first word

That was how

both your mothers taught you

not to be surprised at all

when you say

I am

And here’s a different turn of the kaleidoscope of love and survival, from Lily Brett. Brett, a poet and novelist, was born in a displaced-persons camp in Germany after the war and emigrated to Australia with her parents when she was two. This poem’s tale reminds me of so many survivors’ stories, the embodiment of the dictum that the evil that men do lives long after them.

“My Mother’s Friend”

My mother

had a schoolfriend

she shared the war with

my mother

looked after her friend

in the ghetto

she laid her out

as though she was dead

and the Gestapo overlooked her

in Auschwitz

she fed her friend snow

when she was burning with typhoid

and when

the Nazis

emptied Stuthof

they threw

the inmates

onto boats in the Baltic

and tried

to drown

as many as they could

my mother

and her friend

survived

in

Bayreuth

after the war

my mother’s friend

patted my cheeks

and curled my curls

and hurled herself

from the top

of a bank

April soft and cold: The sisters Death and Night

To mark the 150^th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, let’s hear from one of the most American poets of all time, Walt Whitman.

Already in his forties when the War Between the States broke out, Whitman hadn’t intended to join the army, although he was a firm supporter of the Union cause. But after searching for his wounded brother at the end of 1862 (he found him), he took a part-time job with the Paymaster General in Washington, and volunteered as a nurse in army hospitals.

Whitman’s most famous poem about Lincoln’s death, “When Lilacs Last in the Courtyard Bloom’d” is longer than I like to post. And I want to go a different route anyhow. So here’s “Cavalry Crossing a Ford”, which I find highly evocative. I’ve not given you any poetry from this period (because I find so much of it awful), so let’s run with this one for a bit.

“Cavalry Crossing a Ford”

A LINE in long array, where they wind betwixt green islands;

 They take a serpentine course—their arms flash in the sun—Hark to the musical clank;

 Behold the silvery river—in it the splashing horses, loitering, stop to drink;

 Behold the brown-faced men—each group, each person, a picture—the negligent rest on the saddles;

Some emerge on the opposite bank—others are just entering the ford—while,

Scarlet, and blue, and snowy white,

The guidon flags flutter gaily in the wind.

And, closer to the mark for the end of the war and the loss of Lincoln:

“Reconciliation”

WORD over all, beautiful as the sky!

Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost;

That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil’d world:

... For my enemy is dead—a man divine as myself is dead;

I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin—I draw near;

I bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

The cost of a night at the theatre

Five days after Robert E. Lee surrendered his armies to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, President Abraham Lincoln was feeling a little like he could take a break from the onerous duties of being not only a wartime president, but a president trying to reclaim rebellious states as well as to rein in some of the most fractious mad dogs ever accumulated in an American administration.

So going to the theatre to see a farce might have seemed like a welcome night out, seeing as to how it looked like the war was winding down, and he could now get on with the work of re-integrating the people of the South back into the Union. It was Good Friday.

If you want to get a feel for the kinds of strain he had borne up under, take a look at two photographs.

1861, when he took office:

Final photo taken, just before his death:

Well, you know the story: an unemployed actor got past the one sleepy guard into Lincoln’s box, shot him and escaped, broken leg and all. Lincoln lingered through the night but died early the next morning at a house across the street from Ford’s Theatre.

It’s kind of pointless to speculate on how Reconstruction might have been different had Lincoln still been in office, instead of his truly ineffectual successor, Andrew Johnson. (We lucked out way better when Harry S. Truman replaced Franklin D. Roosevelt at the end of World War II, instead of any of Roosevelt’s previous vice presidents.) He would have had his hands full, for sure, but he already had four years of experience dealing with the likes of Stanton, Chase, Stevens and other Radical Republicans.

Plus—unlike Johnson, Lincoln had a charisma and strength of character that won him a lot of popular support, which probably would have added weight to his decisions, as well as to contests with the Radicals.

And with a different Reconstruction, what might our national history have looked like?

Oh, well, dunno. But it was truly a loss to the country then and since that Abraham Lincoln went to the theatre 150 years ago today.

April soft and cold: My soul continually at war

It’s Monday in National Poetry Week, so time for another poem on World War I. This time we’ll get a Francophone view. Guillaume Apollinaire was born in Rome to a Polish noblewoman (father unknown); he moved to France in his teens and became a major figure in several artistic movements, including cubism and surrealism. (He actually coined that term in program notes for a ballet by Satie and Cocteau.) He experimented in a number of genres, including novels (some pornographic), theatre and criticism, besides poetry.

He was in his mid-30s when the war began. He received a severe shrapnel wound to the head in 1916, from which he never fully recovered. He died in the influenza pandemic in 1918.

I love the way Apollinaire used forms as well as words to make his point. He called them “calligrammes”. One of his most famous is “Du coton dans les oreilles”, “Cotton in your ears”. It’s about the experience of artillery fire, and it looks like what it describes.

In English it’s:

“Ombre” is something a little more straightforward in terms of construction.

“Ombre”

Vous voilà de nouveau près de moi
Souvenirs de mes compagnons morts à la guerre
L'olive du temps
Souvenirs qui n'en faites plus qu'un
Comme cent fourrures ne font qu'un manteau
Comme ces milliers de blessures ne font qu'un article de journal
Apparence impalpable et sombre qui avez pris
La forme changeante de mon ombre
Un Indien à l'affût pendant l'éternité
Ombre vous rampez près de moi
Mais vous ne m'entendez plus
Vous ne connaîtrez plus les poèmes divins que je chante
Tandis que moi je vous entends je vous vois encore
Destinées
Ombre multiple que le soleil vous garde
Vous qui m'aimez assez pour ne jamais me quitter
Et qui dansez au soleil sans faire de poussière
Ombre encre du soleil
Ecriture de ma lumière
Caisson de regrets
Un dieu qui s'humilie

Here it is in English:

“Shadow”

Here you are beside me again

Memories of my companions killed in the war

The olive-branch of time

Memories that make only a single memory

As a hundred skins make only a single coat

As these thousands of wounds make only a single

newspaper article

Impalpable and ark presence who have assumed

the changing shape of my shadow

an Indian on the watch through all Eternity

shadow you creep beside me

but you do not hear me any more

you will not know any more the divine poems I sing

but I hear you still and see you still

Destinies

Multiple shadows may the sun preserve you

You who love me so much that you will never leave me

And who dance in the sun without stirring the dust

Shadow ink of the sun

Signature of my light

Holder of sorrows

A god that condescends.

Gratitude Monday: Saving the world, and stickers

Saturday and yesterday were Compassion Weekend around the Valley They Call Silicon—that’s when a number of local charitable organizations engage in outreach to engage people (individuals, families, groups) in specific projects for a few hours. Habitat for Humanity, shelters, school support groups—it’s a whole range, as are the projects.

Initially I was going to spend half of Saturday helping set up libraries in schools in East Palo Alto, but the web interface for sign-up wasn’t working, and I got no response from my email to the person who was supposed to provide information. So instead I signed on to help pack Ebola caregiver kits that are going to West Africa. The overseeing charity was World Vision.

Here’s the challenge: healthcare facilities in areas hit by the epidemic are just overwhelmed, and they’re turning away Ebola victims, telling them to go home. But the deal is that the disease is so communicable that even touching a patient puts you in high danger of contracting it yourself.

(A couple of months ago I listened to a story on NPR about the shattering experience of nurses treating infants and small children who were dying of Ebola; and they could not pick them up and hold them to comfort them. Now picture any family member charged with tending a loved one, unable even to hold a hand or caress a cheek. Picture yourself in this position—either the caregiver or the patient. Yes.)

So here’s what we packed on Saturday morning:

One box of latex gloves

One box of face masks

One face shield (plastic over the eyes to protect against spewing bodily fluids)

Three small boxes of powdered chlorine bleach

Five small bars of soap

One bottle of acetaminophen

One plastic biohazard waste bag

Five packets of oral rehydration salts

A protective gown for wearing over the caregiver’s clothes

A spray bottle for applying diluted bleach over the protective gown to disinfect it (as well as other surfaces)

An instruction sheet for how to use all the materials

A prayer card—printed with the logo of the particular church where this happened, and “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” Matthew 25:40

And we were told to write our own thoughts/prayers onto these cards and include one with each kit. In fact, if the carton-packers came across a kit without a prayer card, they held it out until someone brought one for it.

There were tables set up with stacks of cards, a couple of Bibles, colored pens, pencils and crayons, and stickers.

Well—I had not come prepared for this prayer-writing thing. Yes, the instructional email had said there’d be cards, but I thought the adding of a personal note was optional, not mandatory. I mean:

“A very important part of the kit build is each prayer card that goes into each kit, and there will be plenty of time for you and your family to send a personal note of encouragement and prayer to them. They do keep these cards with them over a lifetime.”

Well, I was wrong. And there I was, at a round table with cards, stickers and crayons. What to do? I considered bribing one or more of the kids to give me some of their output, but they all seemed to be accompanied by some sort of responsible adult. So in the end, I fell back on the one part of the Bible to which I can claim any kind of acquaintance, Psalm 121.

I reckon that—whether or not the recipient has Christian beliefs (and I hope to God that World Vision does not make that the price of admission)—the hope and promise of that particular Psalm are pretty much applicable to us all. So I alternatively wrote two of the verses on each of the eight cards I ended up making.

“The Lord watches over you—

  the Lord is your shade at your right hand;

the sun will not harm you by day,

  nor the moon by night.”

“The Lord will keep you from all harm—

  he will watch over your life;

the Lord will watch over your coming and going

  both now and forevermore.”

And I slapped stickers on them.

As an aside, why has no one ever told me about stickers? They were wonderful—butterflies, hearts, flowers, animals; glittery ones, plain ones, delicate and robust ones. I’d have put nothing but stickers all over my cards, except I thought I might look a little greedy to all those little kids.

(I mentioned this to one of the supply volunteers as I was going through the line packing one of the kits. “You should have hit more heavily on those stickers in your publicity; you’d get way more volunteers.”  The young girl in line next to me—maybe 11-12—immediately came up with just the right tagline: “You get to save the world; and use stickers.”)

Anyhow—I thought about the eight people who’d receive my kits, hoping that indeed the Lord will watch over their lives, and the lives of those for whom they’re caring. That the protective gear will allow them to hold their loved-ones in comfort and support. That the knowledge that a bunch of mostly middle-class people in an exceptionally privileged area of this country are sending tangible and intangible support gives them strength and hope.

And I’m very grateful for the opportunity to be part of that.  

April soft and cold: End where I begun

Today we’re back to one of the titans of English poetry, John Donne. We haven’t seen him for a couple of years, so he’d a bit overdue.

This one, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”, speaks of separation, as did yesterday’s poems by Du Fu. Kind of cool how some subjects are natural fodder for poems, huh? In this instance, the poet is taking leave of his beloved with reassurances that—with a love as pure and refined as theirs—the distance between them is merely physical, and they can withstand the separation.

I love it.

“A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”

As virtuous men pass mildly away,

   And whisper to their souls to go,

Whilst some of their sad friends do say,

   “The breath goes now," and some say, “No,"

So let us melt, and make no noise,

   No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;

‘Twere profanation of our joys

   To tell the laity our love.

Moving of the earth brings harms and fears,

   Men reckon what it did and meant;

But trepidation of the spheres,

   Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers’ love

   (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit

Absence, because it doth remove

   Those things which elemented it.

But we, by a love so much refined

   That our selves know not what it is,

Inter-assured of the mind,

   Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,

   Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion.

   Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so

   As stiff twin compasses are two:

Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show

   To move, but doth, if the other do;

And though it in the center sit,

   Yet when the other far doth roam,

It leans, and hearkens after it,

   And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,

   Like the other foot, obliquely run;

Thy firmness makes my circle just,

   And makes me end where I begun.