Resistance moon: Treat each guest honorably

Let’s step back from Ken Saro-Wiwa today. Yes, this is a National Poetry Month of resistance, but it also encompasses persistence and resilience. All three of these things are long plays. As much as we’d like to see our oppressors turned to dust with the flick of a wrist, the reality is that they didn’t arrive here suddenly, and it’s going to take time and considerable effort to boot them out and clean up after them.

So we need to refresh ourselves from time to time. Meditate, be mindful; rest and recuperate.

Ergo: let’s have something from the 13^th Century Persian poet we know as Rumi. “The Guest House” is very frequently quoted during mindfulness retreats, so it seems appropriate for today. It reminds us to invite into our lives and souls dark things as well as light, because everything—every thing—has something to teach us. And—I hope—to make us stronger for the necessary.

“The Guest House”

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.

meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

Resistance moon: The meat of dictators

The first time I heard of Ken Saro-Wiwa was in the last week of his life, when Peter Jennings announced that the Nigerian environmental activist, writer and television producer had been hanged by his government for his protests against the multinational petroleum corporations that were destroying the resources of his homeland.

Saro-Wiwa was an articulate and unflagging advocate for the basic human right to a safe environment, clean water, the sharing of natural resources—which made him dangerous to the conglomerates and the military dictatorship in Lagos they’d paid for. His voice and his pen struck more terror than any firearm he might have wielded—had he ever chosen to, which he did not.

Dictatorships and multinationals—the bigger they grow, the more enraged they are by anyone not falling into line.

Saro-Wiwa’s non-violent campaign led to his arrest on trumped-up charges of murder; he was tortured and executed in 1995 at age 54, along with eight other leaders of his Ogoni tribe.

Families of the nine filed suit against Royal Dutch Shell the following year for human rights violations in the matter of their deaths. In 2009, just as the case was about to go to trial in Manhattan, Shell settled out of court, paying out $15.5M. The company continues to deny any wrongdoing, issuing one of those statements you hear every fucking time some guilty-as-hell politician, businessman or corporation settles out of court solely “to put the matter behind all parties.”

In this case, one of Shell’s mouthpieces intoned, “While we were prepared to go to court to clear our name, we believe the right way forward is to focus on the future for Ogoni people.”

Man, these oleaginous scumbags only seem to have one songbook to sing from, and it’s the same, sour tune every time.

Saro-Wiwa wrote “The True Prison” in 1993, when he’d already been imprisoned twice without trial. He was arrested again in 1994 on charges of incitement to murder in the deaths of Ogoni chiefs. He was in prison for more than a year before his execution in 1995. There was outrage around the world at his hanging, but it didn’t seem to stop anyone from doing business there.

You remember about the oil, right?

There are so many lines in this poem that make me want to weep—for Saro-Wiwa and his people, and for me and my people, both then and now. Do these not resonate with you—cowardice masking as obedience, security agents running amok for such low wages, lies pounded into a generation’s ears? He has cut to the heart of the tragedy with not a single word too many.

“The True Prison”

It is not the leaking roof

Nor the singing mosquitoes

In the damp, wretched cell

It is not the clank of the key

As the warden locks you in

It is not the measly rations

Unfit for beast or man

Nor yet the emptiness of day

Dipping into the blankness of night

It is not

It is not

It is not

It is the lies that have been drummed

Into your ears for a generation

It is the security agent running amok

Executing callous calamitous orders

In exchange for a wretched meal a day

The magistrate writing into her book

A punishment she knows is undeserved

The moral decrepitude

The mental ineptitude

The meat of dictators

Cowardice masking as obedience

Lurking in our denigrated souls

It is fear damping trousers

That we dare not wash

It is this

It is this

It is this

Dear friend, turns our free world

Into a dreary prison

Resistance moon: the secret of life in your pants

In honor of the centenary of America’s entry into World War I, let’s have a poem about America, and that war; and about the kind of patriotic posturing and jingoism we’re seeing around us, from the top down.

And who better than to serve that up on a hard and harshly-lit platter than e.e. cummings? In 1917 Cummings enlisted in the Ambulance Corps, with John Dos Passos. The two enjoyed the company of French soldiers over American ambulance drivers, and their letters home expressed anti-war sentiments, including lack of hatred for Germans. He and another friend were arrested in September, on suspicion of espionage and “undesirable” activities. Cummings’ father appealed to President Wilson, who intervened; he was freed in December and returned to the US at the beginning of 1818.

(Cummings was drafted later in 1918 and served stateside until the war ended in November.)

Perhaps his most famous anti-war poem is “plato told”. It skewers those who will not heed the warnings of Greek philosophers, Jewish teachers or American generals that war is not anything to be sought. (It also nails the businessman who’s perfectly happy to profit by trading with the enemy, especially since neither he nor his sons will be headed in harm’s way.)

“next to of course god america” goes more directly after those who preach the gospel of glory; the ones who give the fieriest speeches in hoarse voices, urging someone else’s sons to go to war. The ones who—for one reason or another (could be draft deferments for bone spurs, or “critical” business interests)—never actually have to carry a carbine at the front. Looking at how cummings jams all the clichés of bloviating politicians together, you can just see the red-faced, over-fed politician standing at a podium, sweating copious amounts into his wrinkled suit as he makes his tired case.

The only thing missing is the chants of the audience.

“next to of course god america”

next to of course god america i

love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh

say can you see by the dawn's early my

country 'tis of centuries come and go

and are no more what of it we should worry

in every language even deafanddumb

thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry

by jingo by gee by gosh by gum

why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-

iful than these heroic happy dead

who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter

they did not stop to think they died instead

then shall the voice of liberty be mute?

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

*    *    *    *

The second poem for today isn’t related to the war, but it certainly speaks to the kind of disbelief experienced the majority of Americans in the past few months as we watched other Americans show up to political rallies waving swastikas and Confederate flags, screaming threats of violence to any who expressed anything less than complete agreement, and who in effect decided that a few racist, xenophobic and misogynistic slogans outweighed not only an actual political platform, but also basic human decency.

If you don’t see how last November’s election was blacking the boots of success without asking whose souls hang from its watch-chain, or pawning intelligence to buy a drink, I cannot help you.

(Look at how he’s structured the first two lines of each iteration of “humanity”, carefully changing the emphasis by where he places the words at the end of the first line.)

“Humanity i love you”

Humanity i love you

because you would rather black the boots of

success than enquire whose soul dangles from his

watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both

parties and because you

unflinchingly applaud all

songs containing the words country home and

mother when sung at the old howard

Humanity i love you because

when you’re hard up you pawn your

intelligence to buy a drink and when

you’re flush pride keeps

you from the pawn shop and

because you are continually committing

nuisances but more

especially in your own house

Humanity i love you because you

are perpetually putting the secret of

life in your pants and forgetting

it’s there and sitting down

on it

and because you are

forever making poems in the lap

of death Humanity

i hate you

Over there

By the time the United States formally entered the fight of World War I, one hundred years ago today, Europeans had already been slugging it out for more than two-and-a-half years. Both sides, represented by Germany and Britain, had tried to coax or coerce America into joining them, and I suppose we might never have made the move had Germany not been so arrogant and ham-handed.

Specifically, resumption in February 1917, after a two-year suspension, of unrestricted submarine warfare, which put at risk American goods (and American lives; but the merchandise was what got the real attention) on the Atlantic, was what pushed President Woodrow Wilson and Congress into taking the unprecedented step of taking the country into a war on another continent that did not seem to threaten us directly.

I mean, consider: in 1917, the United States had a strong immigrant community from both Germany and Ireland, and these people were not friends of Great Britain. (April 1917 was just a year after the Easter Rising in Ireland, which was brutally suppressed by British forces.) It was hard to see a distinction between the imperial interests of Russia and the United Kingdom as opposed to those of Germany and Austria. And as for Serbia, the powder keg that set it all off—meh.

We pretty much thought of ourselves as sui generis—whatever connection we’d once had with the Old World we’d long since outgrown. We reckoned we could manage on our own, no foreign entanglements, that sort of thing. But also, in 1916 the War Between the States was barely 50 years in the past. Men who’d fought in that still hobbled to reunions on battlefields between Richmond and Gettysburg, and along the Mississippi and Ohio; we had real and still bleeding wounds to tend to.

(We had, of course, had our little foreign adventure in Cuba, and acquired the Philippines, but you can’t really count those, can you?)

Well, anyhow: on 2 April Wilson asked a joint session of Congress to declare war against the Central Powers (remember when it was Congress that had to declare war?), speaking of it as a war to “make the world safe for democracy.” and the declaration was duly issued on 6 April. The vote in the Senate was 82 to six (eight Senators didn’t vote); the House confirmed it 373 to 50. (We officially declared war on Austria-Hungary in December.)

US naval forces arrived in British ports on 9 April, but it would take another two months before the first ground troops landed in France for combat training. You do not field a combat-ready army on a dime. For one thing, our historical predilection is against standing, professional armies, so we had to implement a draft. And it takes months to equip and train civilians to the point where they can actually fight cohesively in battle. American forces did not become a factor per se until mid-1918, although the fear of their addition to the British and French armies on the Western Front spurred the Germans to launch a last-gasp offensive in Spring 1918, hoping to knock out their exhausted enemies before we arrived.

There was another issue to be sorted—in one respect, kind of cheeky on our part. The French and Brits expected to integrate American troops into their own armies—effectively using them as replacements for their massive casualties—under the command of their own generals. But the American chief, John J. Pershing, was not having any of that. And he prevailed: the American Expeditionary Force fought, under his command, as a unit.

(Except for African-American regiments, who joined French divisions. Notably, the Harlem Hellfighters fought with the French 16^th Division, and achieved combat honors for their actions at Château-Thierry, Belleau Wood and Séchault.)

The declaration a hundred years ago marked a major step for America—not only as a national commitment to an international war, but as a player in the international community as a whole. Following what turned out to be the First World War, we attempted to retreat back into isolationism. That lasted two years into the Second World War.

I don’t know what to tell you about what’s ahead of us. I’ll just note that it would be really nice if we could learn the lessons of the past hundred years and not keep making the same damned mistakes again and again.

Resistance moon: Prize witlessness

It’s interesting, isn’t it, how a crude lecher somehow captured the support of the evangelical Taliban of the South and Midwest. I mean—a guy whose adulteries are legion and who has been married three times so far is the hero of Old Testament Bible thumpers who claim to be upholding Godly values.

Well, I suppose the commonality is that their collective values—Godly and otherwise—center around very narrowly-circumscribed roles for women in society. And none of those roles involves control over their own lives, their own bodies, their own finances or pretty much anything. Already in the short period from 20 January, the current administration, gleefully aided and abetted by the Repugnants in both Houses of Congress, has pulled funding for global women’s health services, repealed measures that ensured fair treatment for women in the workplace, attempted to enact a new healthcare bill that eliminates reproductive health coverage, and initiated exceptionally cruel immigration policies that rely on the separation of mothers from their children as a deterrent.

They are hell-bent on returning us all to the bad old days when [white] men were men, and everyone else shut up and made sandwiches.

So I thought that for today’s entry in National Poetry Month, we might have something that speaks to this. I cast about and found Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

I first met Sor Juana (“Sor” means “sister”, as in a religious sister) in a high school Spanish class. (Along with Maimónides, Carlos V and some others, but those would be another post.) Born near Mexico City in 1651, she was the illegitimate daughter of a Spaniard and a mestizo, a polymath who learned to read and write at age three, and who was teaching Latin to other children by age 13. She asked her mother’s permission to disguise herself as a boy so she could go to university, but was unsuccessful. Nonetheless, by age 17 she impressed a convocation of theologians, philosophers, poets and jurists with her intellectual capabilities.

In 1667 she entered a convent of Discalced Carmelites (a very strict order); two years later she joined the monastery of the Hieronymite nuns largely because it allowed her to pursue her studies. Sor Juana’s writings got her into trouble with the male establishment of the Church and the state. The Bishop of Puebla famously told her to shut up and make sandwiches (more or less), and she replied that “one can perfectly well philosophize while cooking supper.”

Well, she wasn’t going to win that one, and she was eventually forced into silence, selling all her considerable library and collection of scientific instruments and retreating into prayer. She died during a plague in 1694, but we are the better off for her body of work that she did leave us.

Viz.: “You Foolish Men”. In this poem, Sor Juana captures and skewers the male propensity to project their own base thoughts onto women, and to refuse to own up to their own actions. There is no mincing of words here; spades are not dressed up as garden implements. She’s got the acid of Dorothy Parker under her Hieronymite wimple, and she’s not afraid to use it to lay bare their outrageous and unjust sexual hypocrisy—“you whimper if you’re turned away, and sneer if you’ve been gratified.” Seriously: this is the GOP platform in a nutshell.

Is Sor Juana a Nasty Woman? I believe she might have turned this one over in her mind, probed the implications, explored the current environment, and given us a well-reasoned, thorough and stylish reply.

“You Foolish Men”

  You foolish men, so very adept
at wrongly faulting womankind,
not seeing you're alone to blame
for faults you plant in woman's mind.

    After you've won by urgent plea
the right to tarnish her good name,
you still expect her to behave--
you, that coaxed her into shame.

    You batter her resistance down
and then, all righteousness, proclaim
that feminine frivolity,
not your persistence, is to blame.

    When it comes to bravely posturing,
your witlessness must take the prize:
you're the child that makes a bogeyman,
and then recoils in fear and cries.

    Presumptuous beyond belief,
you'd have the woman you pursue
be Thais when you're courting her,
Lucretia once she falls to you.

    For plain default of common sense,
could any action be so queer
as oneself to cloud the mirror,
then complain that it's not clear?

    Whether you're favored or disdained,
nothing can leave you satisfied.
You whimper if you're turned away,
you sneer if you've been gratified.

    With you, no woman can hope to score;
whichever way, she's bound to lose;
spurning you, she's ungrateful--
succumbing, you call her lewd.

    Your folly is always the same:
you apply a single rule
to the one you accuse of looseness
and the one you brand as cruel.

    What happy mean could there be
for the woman who catches your eye,
if, unresponsive, she offends,
yet whose complaisance you decry?

    Still, whether it's torment or anger--
and both ways you've yourselves to blame--
God bless the woman who won't have you,
no matter how loud you complain.

    It's your persistent entreaties
that change her from timid to bold.
Having made her thereby naughty,
you would have her good as gold.

    So where does the greater guilt lie
for a passion that should not be:
with the man who pleads out of baseness
or the woman debased by his plea?

    Or which is more to be blamed--
though both will have cause for chagrin:
the woman who sins for money
or the man who pays money to sin?

    So why are you men all so stunned
at the thought you're all guilty alike?
Either like them for what you've made them
or make of them what you can like.

    If you'd give up pursuing them,
you'd discover, without a doubt,
you've a stronger case to make
against those who seek you out.

    I well know what powerful arms
you wield in pressing for evil:
your arrogance is allied
with the world, the flesh, and the devil!

Here it is in Spanish:

   Hombres necios que acusáis
a la mujer sin razón,
sin ver que sois la ocasión
de lo mismo que culpáis:

    si con ansia sin igual
solicitáis su desdén,
¿por qué quereis que obren bien
si las incitáis al mal?

    Combatís su resistencia
y luego, con gravedad,
decís que fue liviandad
lo que hizo la diligencia.

    Parecer quiere el denuedo
de vuestro parecer loco,
al niño que pone el coco
y luego le tiene miedo.

    Queréis, con presunción necia,
hallar a la que buscáis,
para pretendida, Thais,
y en la posesión, Lucrecia

    ¿Qué humor puede ser más raro
que el que, falto de consejo,
el mismo empaña el espejo
y siente que no esté claro?

    Con el favor y el desdén
tenéis condición igual,
quejándoos, si os tratan mal,
burlándoos, si os quieren bien.

    Opinión, ninguna gana:
pues la que más se recata,
si no os admite, es ingrata,
y si os admite, es liviana

    Siempre tan necios andáis
que, con desigual nivel,
a una culpáis por crüel
y a otra por fácil culpáis.

    ¿Pues cómo ha de estar templada
la que vuestro amor pretende,
si la que es ingrata, ofende,
y la que es fácil, enfada?

    Mas, entre el enfado y pena
que vuestro gusto refiere,
bien haya la que no os quiere
y quejaos en hora buena.

    Dan vuestras amantes penas
a sus libertades alas,
y después de hacerlas malas
las queréis hallar muy buenas.

    ¿Cuál mayor culpa ha tenido
en una pasión errada:
la que cae de rogada
o el que ruega de caído?

    ¿O cuál es más de culpar,
aunque cualquiera mal haga:
la que peca por la paga
o el que paga por pecar?

    Pues ¿para quée os espantáis
de la culpa que tenéis?
Queredlas cual las hacéis
o hacedlas cual las buscáis.

    Dejad de solicitar,
y después, con más razón,
acusaréis la afición
de la que os fuere a rogar.

    Bien con muchas armas fundo
que lidia vuestra arrogancia,
pues en promesa e instancia
juntáis diablo, carne y mundo.

Resistance moon: The slippery edge of lost faith

Ah, we lost a giant on Saturday. Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko died—in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he had been lecturing at the university—aged 84. He was my first example of a celebrity poet-activist.

Back in the day, Yevtushenko walked a careful path, writing poems about the world around him, painting pictures that were not apparatchik-approved, yet still hobnobbing with the Politburo. It was his ability to schmooze with Soviet rulers that gained him a measure of freedom—travel to the outside world, rock-star adulation at home, and shining poetic light on things the regime pretended didn’t exist—even in the era of anti-modernism of the 1960s.

So, without being an official “dissident”, Yevtushenko was a persistent voice for resistance from the mid-50s until the collapse of the Soviet Union. If some of the power faded in later years, I think he lived up to a goal he once stated, “I shall be happy if just one of my lines helps someone of later generations.” This is the essence of resistance; it’s about the end-game, no matter how long it takes to bring about.

A few years ago I gave you his “Babi Yar”, which was the poem that introduced me to him. It is harrowing, searing nightmare images into your cortex from beginning to end. Today I’ll share a couple more, “The Heirs of Stalin” and “The Torments of Conscience.”

I particularly like “The Heirs of Stalin”, because Yevtushenko uses the image of taking extraordinary measures to ensure that Uncle Joe stays well and truly bolted down in death—extra guards, double weights over the casket. While I personally think it might be entirely possible that Stalin might rise from the grave (I’d have cremated him, myself), it’s what the Soviet Tsar stood for that the poet wants securely buried forever.

Along with all his henchmen, who stand ready to take over the family business—they lament the empty prison camps and the audiences for poets instead of propaganda.

And as Yevtushenko knew, those heirs can wait a few generations, and franchise that business out to other locales.

“The Heirs of Stalin”

Mute was the marble. Mutely glimmered the glass.

Mute stood the sentries, bronzed by the breeze.

Thin wisps of smoke curled over the coffin.

And breath seeped through the chinks

as they bore him out the mausoleum doors.

Slowly the coffin floated, grazing the fixed bayonets.

He also was mute- his embalmed fists,

just pretending to be dead, he watched from inside.

He wished to fix each pallbearer in his memory:

young recruits from Ryazan and Kursk,

so that later he might collect enough strength for a sortie,

rise from the grave, and reach these unreflecting youths.

He was scheming. Had merely dozed off.

And I, appealing to our government, petition them

to double, and treble, the sentries guarding this slab,

and stop Stalin from ever rising again

and, with Stalin, the past.

I refer not to the past, so holy and glorious,

of Turksib, and Magnitka, and the flag raised over Berlin.

By the past, in this case, I mean the neglect

of the people’s good, false charges, the jailing of innocent men.

We sowed our crops honestly.

Honestly we smelted metal,

and honestly we marched, joining the ranks.

But he feared us. Believing in the great goal,

he judged all means justified to that great end.

He was far-sighted. Adept in the art of political warfare,

he left many heirs behind on this globe.

I fancy there’s a telephone in that coffin:

Stalin instructs Enver Hoxha.

From that coffin where else does the cable go!

No, Stalin has not given up. He thinks he can cheat death.

We carried him from the mausoleum.

But how remove Stalin’s heirs from Stalin!

Some of his heirs tend roses in retirement,

thinking in secret their enforced leisure will not last.

Others, from platforms, even heap abuse on Stalin

but, at night, yearn for the good old days.

No wonder Stalin’s heirs seem to suffer

these days from heart trouble. They, the former henchmen,

hate this era of emptied prison camps

and auditoriums full of people listening to poets.

The Party discourages me from being smug.

'Why care? ' some say, but I can’t remain inactive.

While Stalin’s heirs walk this earth,

Stalin, I fancy, still lurks in the mausoleum.

As for “Torments of Conscience”—well, it rather gives me hope. “Dying is not our business”, he says, and conscience stands guard in our behalf at every crossroad. It’s not exactly the Red Army, but conscience darts in to even the most corrupt beings.

It may well be conscience that keeps Stalin buried. I hope so.

“Torments of Conscience”

We live, dying is not our business,

shame is another lost episode,

but like an unseen madonna, conscience

is standing at every crossroad.

And her children and her grandchildren,

the torments of conscience-strange torments-

with vagrant’s crutch and bag are wandering

a world which is everywhere dishonest.

From one gate once more to the next gate,

once again from doorstep to doorstep,

chanting like old Russian beggars,

they travel with God for their heart’s help.

Surely it was they who always haunted

the serfs, tapping with one finger

secretly on their windows, and who pounded

with their fists in the palaces of the Tsars?

Surely they hurried off dead Pushkin

on a sledge in the snow from a black sky,

it was they who drove Dostoievsky to prison,

it was they who whispered to Tolstoy: 'Fly! '

The executioners understood it thus:

'He who torments himself is a troublemaker.

Torments of conscience-this is dangerous!

Conscience itself must be liquidated! '

But like the clanging of an alarm bell

rattling their houses at night time,

torments of conscience-terrible-

frightened the executioners with their crimes.

For even the guardians of injustice,

who abandoned all honor long ago,

may no longer know the meaning of conscience,

but the torments of conscience they do know.

And if in this wide world where no one,

no one is guiltless, someone has heard

within himself the cry 'What have I done? '

then something can be done with this world.

I do not believe in the prophets construing

the coming of the Second or the Thousandth Rome,

I believe in the words 'What are you doing? '

in 'What are we doing? ' bitterly spoken.

And on the slippery edge of lost faith

I am kissing your dark hands,

for you alone are my last faith,

torments of conscience-fierce torments!

Gratitude Monday Resistance moon: Nothing is so beautiful

Saturday a friend and I went to a nursery in Northern Virginia—she needed to buy a bag of dirt, and I just wanted inspiration for a future garden. The day was quite cold, windy and grey, but my soul came alive as we wandered up and down the aisles in the greenhouse and then outside.

Herbs! Ground cover! Indoor-outdoor dwarf lemon trees! Hedge material (“Get something with thorns”)! Oh, it was like going to the animal shelter—I just wanted to hug everything and bring it all home.

And, oddly, for the first time in weeks, I didn’t feel a lot of joint pain after all the walking. There’s just something about the beauty and resilience of plants that restores your equilibrium. Despite the best efforts of humans to destroy it with war, pollution, urban sprawl and just plain arrogant destruction, nature does her best to resist and persist, showing us every Spring that she’ll take whatever bit is available—even if it’s just a weak place in concrete—to push up life.

So today, in grateful recognition of the recuperative power of gardens (whether designed by mortals or immortals), I’ll share a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of my favorite poets. Convert to Catholicism, Jesuit priest, exceptional poet of any age.

In the past you’ve had some of his sonnets for Easter, and his “Pied Beauty”, which takes delight in the parti-colored elements of nature. But for Gratitude Monday today, here’s “Spring”. Just “Spring”.

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –         

   When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;         

   Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush         

Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring         

The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;

   The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush         

   The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush         

With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.         

What is all this juice and all this joy?         

   A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning

In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,         

   Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,         

Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,         

   Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.      

Resistance moon: Poplar tassels, willow tendrils

We’re in an ongoing struggle against fear these days. I believe it was fear more than anger that propelled the Kleptocrat into the Oval Office. At the very least, fear was the underpinning of the ugliness we saw at rallies as swastikas and Confederate flags flew proudly, journalists were physically and verbally threatened, and protestors were beaten.

It’s said that the opposite of fear is love, and I tend to agree with that. Love is certainly an evergreen focus of poetry. Every poet since the beginning of writing must have cut his or her teeth on some variant of I-love-my-love-but-my-love-loves-me-not. Either the first blush, the afterglow, or the bitter aftermath.

So let’s have something today from William Carlos Williams, whose day job was as a medical doctor, and who hung about with the likes of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. 

Williams focused on the small things of daily life, and sought to build up a thoroughly American take on poetry, in the face of others he thought were too Euro-centric. He influenced later poets like Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, as well as Denise Levertov.

Here’s his “Memory of April” to get us going.

You say love is this, love is that:

Poplar tassels, willow tendrils

the wind and the rain comb,

tinkle and drip, tinkle and drip—

branches drifting apart. Hagh!

Love has not even visited this country.