Upsoaring wings: All the valley is dancing

The first writer from Latin America to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature was a Chilean poet, Lucila de María del Perpetuo Socorro Godoy Alcayaga; nom de plume Gabriela Mistral. Mistral was also an educator and a diplomat, like her protégé and fellow Nobel Laureate, Pablo Neruda, and she was an outspoken feminist.

Although her own formal education ended when she was eleven, Mistral’s career in the field was long and distinguished; she was a driving force in reforming schools and libraries in Chile and represented Latin America on education and women’s issues at the League of Nations.

Mistral’s poetry covers a variety of topics; her themes include nature, love, betrayal, sorrow and Latin American identity. The poem for today invites us to overcome whatever limitations that might impede us from experiencing joy. I think we do well to follow her advice.

“Those Who Do Not Dance”

A crippled child

Said, “How shall I dance?”

Let your heart dance

We said.

Then the invalid said:

“How shall I sing?”

Let your heart sing

We said

Then spoke the poor dead thistle,

But I, how shall I dance?”

Let your heart fly to the wind

We said.

Then God spoke from above

“How shall I descend from the blue?”

Come dance for us here in the light

We said.

All the valley is dancing

Together under the sun,

And the heart of him who joins us not

Is turned to dust, to dust.

Upsoaring wings: A tattered coat upon a stick

William Butler Yeats wrote “Sailing to Byzantium” in 1928, when he was 60; he was exploring the experience of growing old. “An aged man is but a paltry thing.” Hard truth, to be sure. Yeats figuratively consults the sages of ancient Byzantium—the seat of the Eastern Church—on how to reconcile the old body/soul human dilemma.

These days men are more likely to turn to cosmetic surgeons and investment bankers than gold-mosaiced lords and ladies of a former empire when confronting their age, but this is still worth consideration.

“Sailing to Byzantium”

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another's arms, birds in the trees,

—Those dying generations—at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Upsoaring wings: Swinging in the southern breeze

When I heard the story on NPR yesterday about how James Byrd, Jr., was brutally murdered 20 years ago in Jasper, Tex., I immediately recognized an episode of Law & Order.

Byrd was walking home from work in the early hours of 7 June 1998, when he was picked up by three white men—all white nationalists, as it turns out, and looking for trouble—with the offer of a ride home. Instead, they took him to a remote place, beat him with a baseball bat, urinated on him, and chained him to the back of their pickup truck and dragged him for more than three miles on an asphalt road. He died somewhere on that ride when he struck a culvert, severing his head and an arm.

His murderers dumped his body on the grounds of an African-American church, where they were discovered later that Sunday morning. They were all arrested fairly soon after. One cooperated with authorities and is serving a life sentence (eligible for parole in 2038); one was executed in 2011 (proud to the last moment of what they’d done); and one was executed yesterday. One of the many tattoos on his body was of a black man hanging from a tree.

I’m not naming them, because those names do not deserve to be repeated.

In the October 1998 L&O episode, titled “DWB” (Driving While Black), the three murderers pull their victim out of his car, take him to a remote place, beat him with a baseball bat and drag him to death behind their Pontiac. The twist is that they’re all white cops. And as I listened yesterday to NPR’s Wade Goodwyn—who covered the story from the original crime—recount the history of Byrd’s death, I considered how prescient L&O was with making cops the killers.

Since 1998, cops have been killing black men and boys without any serious consequences at a pretty good clip. We outside the African American community are probably just becoming more aware of it because it’s being spread on social media. Goodwyn’s report yesterday included the fact that, while the killers of James Byrd, Jr., were convicted, the community of Jasper has spent a good deal of the intervening 20 years in denying that there’s any kind of race issue.

Consider Jasper a microcosm for America these days.

So for our National Poetry Month entry today, I’m giving you a poem written in 1937 by the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Abel Meeropol, AKA Lewis Allan. He called it “Bitter Fruit”, but he set it to music and we know it better as “Strange Fruit”. And the version I’m giving you is sung by Billie Holiday.

It seems appropriate somehow.

Upsoaring wings: All the solar joys

I’m partial to the surrealists; in cinema, painting, photography, fashion, poetry—they demand that you detach yourself from the banalities of reality and float in the zero gravity of the unconscious. I should find them tedious, but I don’t.

And I swear my job is stuck in a Dalì painting.

Anyhow, today we’ll have a poem from the Frenchman Paul Éluard, whose first wife actually ran off with Dalì (after having sparked a long-term ménage-à-troi with Max Ernst). Dadist, surrealist, communist—Éluard was passionate about all the powerful movements of the 20^th Century. (Sadly, he was completely taken in by Stalin, remaining a fervent admirer until his own death in 1952.) He was a soldier in both world wars and spent time in sanatoriums because of tuberculosis.

I don’t quite know what to make of “The Earth Is Blue”—but that’s the whole surreal ethos. I just love the notion of something being “blue like an orange”.

“La Terre Est Bleue”

La terre est bleue comme une orange

Jamais une erreur les mots ne mentent pas

Ils ne vous donnent plus à chanter

Au tour des baisers de s'entendre

Les fous et les amours

Elle sa bouche d'alliance

Tous les secrets tous les sourires

Et quels vêtements d'indulgence

À la croire toute nue.

Les guêpes fleurissent vert

L'aube se passe autour du cou

Un collier de fenêtres

Des ailes couvrent les feuilles

Tu as toutes les joies solaires

Tout le soleil sur la terre

Sur les chemins de ta beauté.

And in English:

“The World Is Blue”

The world is blue like an orange

No error the words do not lie

They no longer allow you to sing

In the tower of kisses agreement

The madness the love

She her mouth of alliance

All the secrets all the smiles

Or what dress of indulgence

To believe in quite naked.

The wasps flourish greenly

Dawn goes by round her neck

A necklace of windows

You are all the solar joys

All the sun of this earth

On the roads of your beauty.

Upsoaring wings: In favour with the stars

We’re honoring Will Shakespeare today—since it’s presumed that this was his birthday in 1564. (We don’t know for certain, but he was baptized on the 26^th, and as he died on 23 April 1616, why not just split the difference and call it a thing?)

I have to say that Will spends right much time in his sonnets talking about the ravages of age; after a while a body can get a little tired of it. So I’ve chosen “Sonnet XXV”, which takes a different approach to life. The toffs, he says, may have the blessings of fortune (both luck and riches), but what they hold is more mutable than the wealth of love.

“Sonnet XXV”

Let those who are in favour with their stars

Of public honour and proud titles boast,

Whilst I, whom fortune of such triumph bars

Unlook'd for joy in that I honour most.

Great princes' favourites their fair leaves spread

But as the marigold at the sun's eye,

And in themselves their pride lies buried,

For at a frown they in their glory die.

The painful warrior famoused for fight,

After a thousand victories once foiled,

Is from the book of honour razed quite,

And all the rest forgot for which he toiled:

Then happy I, that love and am beloved,

  Where I may not remove nor be removed.

Upsoaring wings: the ears of my ears awake

We’ve not had anything from e.e. cummings yet in this National Poetry Month. So here’s something suitable for Gratitude Monday.

i thank You God for most this amazing

day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,

and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth

day of life and love and wings and of the gay

great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing

breathing any-lifted from the no

of all nothing-human merely being

doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

Gratitude Monday: sudden storm

A tornado touched down in the People’s Republic Friday night. Trees were tossed around like matchsticks and there was what looked like serious property damage, but no reports of injuries or worse.

It was maybe about a mile and a half from my place, but I didn’t find out about it until I saw the story in WaPo the next day. We got a lot of twigs and some branches down, but no power outage and no roads blocked. So for me the weekend was walking over to the first farmers market of the season and laying in a stock of the only decent bread I’ve been able to find in Northern Virginia. (I also bought a bunch of radishes, which I worked out cost $0.35 apiece.)

Here’s a clip I shot on my way home earlier in the week; not a tornado, but still pretty brisk:

Today I’m grateful that the only aftermath to Friday’s winds for me was picking up smallish branches and sweeping my patio.

Upsoaring wings: All people

In addition to co-founding (with Martin Niemoeller and Karl Barth) the German Confessing Church, pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a passionate anti-Nazi, who worked tirelessly against the Hitler regime from its ascension to power in 1933 until his execution in April 1945. His protests against the euthanasia program and against antisemitism as state policy provoked the Nazis to ban his church, and he basically went underground to operate “seminaries on the run”, training the ministers of the future; he believed wholeheartedly that the post-war world would need Christians to rebuild.

Even after he was arrested in 1943 for his work helping Jews escape, Bonhoeffer continued his ministry in prison. He was linked to the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler and was moved to Buchenwald and then Flossenbürg to be executed by hanging.

Here are a few things Bonhoeffer believed, which I’m pretty sure will not be echoed in evangelical churches these days:

“Silence in the face of evil is evil. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

“The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.”

“Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.”

“The first service one owes in a community involves listening to them. Just as our love for God begins with listening to God’s word, the beginning of love for others is listening to them…We do God’s work for our brothers and sisters when we learn to listen to them.”

Today being Easter, my National Poetry Month entry is Bonhoeffer’s “Christians and Pagans”, which he wrote in July 1944, when he’d been in prison for more than a year. Its point—that God serves all, not just those calling themselves Christians—is also not something you’ll hear in evangelical churches these days.

“Christians and Pagans”

People turn to God when they’re in need,

plead for help, contentment, and for bread,

for rescue from their sickness, guilt, and death.

They all do so, both Christian and pagan.

People turn to God in God’s own need,

and find God poor, degraded, without roof or bread,

see God devoured by sin, weakness, and death.

Christians stand with God to share God’s pain.

God turns to all people in their need,

nourishes body and soul with God’s own bread,

takes up the cross for Christians and pagans, both,

and in forgiving both, is slain.