You won't find it so hot

National Poetry Month is gone for this first year of pandemic, but it’s Friday, and May Day, when we turn to thoughts of the working class and revolution. This—despite all efforts of Cadet Bonespurs and his kleptocratic administration—is the United States of America, so there is no military hardware parade.

I’m feeling kind of Woodie Guthrie, and specifically his anthem for the migrants of the 1930s, who tried to find a better life outside the Dust bowl. This influx to California and the rough welcome they were given was documented in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, but no one reads that any more. However, in my childhood and youth, you could still hear that flat midwestern accent around Bakersfield and Fresno. And I recall sharply my mother dismissing those migrants as “Okies”.

Sadly, Guthrie’s point is still valid—if you don’t have the dough-re-mi, just keep on movin’, son.

This version is by John Mellencamp.

For the love of God, people—get out to the polls and vote in November.

The ghost of life: Slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men

Well, we made it to the end of National Poetry Month in Year 1 of covid19. Let’s go out with one of the Greats.

Yes, I’m talking John Donne, one of the Elizabethans who spanned poetry, soldiering, politics and sundry. In his case, the church as well; he was Dean of Saint Paul’s Cathedral from 1621 until his death ten years later. Donne wrote some really juicy stuff in his early days; after entering the clergy, he turned his thoughts to divine love. Today’s entry is one of those holy sonnets, “Death Be Not Proud”.

Let me preface this by saying that another piece by Donne is especially pertinent at this time, when we see the head of our government trying to turn a pandemic to personal and political profit, with the side benefit of squandering about a century of global goodwill and admiration in his quest to bully and belittle, even as he ignores thousand of deaths around him. I speak, of course, of this:

No man is an island entire of itself; every man

is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;

if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe

is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as

well as any manner of thy friends or of thine

own were; any man's death diminishes me,

because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom

the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Well, some folks are so stupid and so frightened, they’ll never learn that. I’m sick to the back teeth of them, but that’s where we are.

As a Catholic (first Roman and then Anglican), Donne believed that death was rather puffed up in the fear index. It’s a passage, not a wall. So he takes it on here.

“Death, Be Not Proud”

Death, be not proud, though some have callèd thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

The ghost of life: The storms of life

You know who speaks to me during this particular time? The Beat poets. And particularly Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who at 101 is still a fixture of the San Francisco cultural scene.

Okay, Ferlinghetti doesn’t think of himself as a Beat; he prefers philosophical anarchist. And at his core he is anti-totalitarian, which is a recommendation at any time, but particularly now.

For National Poetry Month, we’re having “I Am Waiting”. It’s long, but it goes so fast.

“I Am Waiting”

I am waiting for my case to come up   

and I am waiting

for a rebirth of wonder

and I am waiting for someone

to really discover America

and wail

and I am waiting   

for the discovery

of a new symbolic western frontier   

and I am waiting   

for the American Eagle

to really spread its wings

and straighten up and fly right

and I am waiting

for the Age of Anxiety

to drop dead

and I am waiting

for the war to be fought

which will make the world safe

for anarchy

and I am waiting

for the final withering away

of all governments

and I am perpetually awaiting

a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Second Coming   

and I am waiting

for a religious revival

to sweep thru the state of Arizona   

and I am waiting

for the Grapes of Wrath to be stored   

and I am waiting

for them to prove

that God is really American

and I am waiting

to see God on television

piped onto church altars

if only they can find   

the right channel   

to tune in on

and I am waiting

for the Last Supper to be served again

with a strange new appetizer

and I am perpetually awaiting

a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for my number to be called

and I am waiting

for the Salvation Army to take over

and I am waiting

for the meek to be blessed

and inherit the earth   

without taxes

and I am waiting

for forests and animals

to reclaim the earth as theirs

and I am waiting

for a way to be devised

to destroy all nationalisms

without killing anybody

and I am waiting

for linnets and planets to fall like rain

and I am waiting for lovers and weepers

to lie down together again

in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Great Divide to be crossed   

and I am anxiously waiting

for the secret of eternal life to be discovered   

by an obscure general practitioner

and I am waiting

for the storms of life

to be over

and I am waiting

to set sail for happiness

and I am waiting

for a reconstructed Mayflower

to reach America

with its picture story and tv rights

sold in advance to the natives

and I am waiting

for the lost music to sound again

in the Lost Continent

in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the day

that maketh all things clear

and I am awaiting retribution

for what America did   

to Tom Sawyer   

and I am waiting

for Alice in Wonderland

to retransmit to me

her total dream of innocence

and I am waiting

for Childe Roland to come

to the final darkest tower

and I am waiting   

for Aphrodite

to grow live arms

at a final disarmament conference

in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting

to get some intimations

of immortality

by recollecting my early childhood

and I am waiting

for the green mornings to come again   

youth’s dumb green fields come back again

and I am waiting

for some strains of unpremeditated art

to shake my typewriter

and I am waiting to write

the great indelible poem

and I am waiting

for the last long careless rapture

and I am perpetually waiting

for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn   

to catch each other up at last

and embrace

and I am awaiting   

perpetually and forever

a renaissance of wonder

The ghost of life: Every heart to love will come

I was introduced to Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem” via one of my favorite Inspector Gamache novels by Louise Penny. That series is about a Québecois inspecteur du Sûreté and it’s centered around a Brigadoon-ish village some kilometers from Montréal. The villagers are a little on the fey side, and I do wish Penny had not given her protagonist a name that is so very close to the chocolate coating that goes on cakes and truffles, but the plots are generally quite good, and I do love police procedurals.

How the Light Gets In is one of the most powerful in the series, and Penny described Cohen’s generosity when she or her publishers wrote to ask him for permission to use part of the chorus as an epigraph. He gave it to her, without asking any fee.

Well, I’ve been thinking rather a lot about the notion that things (and people and nations) can be more beautiful—stronger, more valuable—for having been broken. I want to believe it, but I know there’s a difference between a crack and utter destruction. I hope we can stop the damage before we get to that place.

I'm also thinking about the Japanese art of kintsugi—repairing cracks in pottery with gold. In a visual sense, that's surely letting the light in, isn't it? Viz:

I’m giving you today’s National Poetry Month entry as a poem, because I’ve always thought of Cohen as a poet rather than a songwriter. Also, I’m not that wild about the melody of this one. I’ve also cut the chorus until the last one.

“Anthem”

The birds they sang

At the break of day

Start again

I heard them say

Don't dwell on what

Has passed away

Or what is yet to be

Yeah the wars they will

Be fought again

The holy dove

She will be caught again

Bought and sold

And bought again

The dove is never free

We asked for signs

The signs were sent

The birth betrayed

The marriage spent

Yeah the widowhood

Of every government

Signs for all to see

I can't run no more

With that lawless crowd

While the killers in high places

Say their prayers out loud

But they've summoned, they've summoned up

A thundercloud

And they're going to hear from me

  

You can add up the parts

You won't have the sum

You can strike up the march

There is no drum

Every heart, every heart to love will come

But like a refugee

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything (there is a crack in everything)

That's how the light gets in
Ring the bells that still can ring (ring the bells that still can ring)

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything (there is a crack in everything)

That's how the light gets in

That's how the light gets in
That's how the light gets in

Can we be kintsugi? Can we let the lights in through the cracks? Can we try? 

The ghost of life/Gratitude Monday: All trades

It’s Gratitude Monday, and I can’t tell you how grateful I am particularly now that my trash and recycling are still being picked up. Every Monday, Tuesday and Friday, those guys are out there, doing their jobs, no matter how crappy the weather is. Same with the letter carrier—I’m expecting prescription refills, and they’re going to be in my mailbox in a day or two.

When almost everything is shut down around us, it is an extraordinary mitzvah that these services continue just as though there’s not a pandemic throttling the world.

While I’m talking graces, have you noticed what pleasure there is just getting out and walking around your neighborhood? The other day I was just strolling around my cluster. I was trying to shoot through a cloud of white dogwood blossoms into the cobalt blue sky in someone’s front yard, which is a total crapshoot when your camera has only a screen, not a viewfinder, and a woman came out to see what I was doing.

(Badly, as you can see:)

Well, I told her and she replied that I was welcome to take all the pix I fancied, and we got to talking. It turns out that the HOA had wanted her to cut down the dogwood, because HOA, and she shut them up by reminding them that dogwood is the Old Dominion’s state flower. Turns out that many decades ago she originally had a pink dogwood, which died from something. And then a year or so after they pulled it out, this little sapling started up. Lo—it was a white dogwood. Carolyn (that’s her name) thinks a bird carried a seed from one of the other dogwood trees in the cluster.

I love that story, and I love the joy I feel when I get out and notice the little beauties around me.

So today my entry for National Poetry Month is Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty”. Just the first line opens me up for the joy and the loveliness that’s all around us, in both nature and the work people do to make our lives easier.

“Pied Beauty”

Glory be to God for dappled things –

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                Praise him.

The ghost of life: Trouble in the wind

A lot of people in the Anglophone world are all of a sudden so appreciative of health care workers—doctors, nurses, first responders; even janitors. They are literally tweeting and flapping their hands in appreciation.

I mean, they’re going outside at specific, SoMe-organized times and applauding for the UK’s National Health Service, and for NYC’s hospitals.

Well, that’s swell, but…no, no—it’s not. It totally burns my bacon.

Guys—if you really appreciated these people, you’d force your elected officials to adequately fund the NHS, hospitals, public health agencies, the WHO. You’d haul out pitchforks and talk about guillotines until the pols fucking did something. You’d fucking vote them out of office. Clapping is the cheapest possible way you can assuage your lame-ass conscience for letting your fellow humans bear this unbearable burden on your behalf.

And, BTW, you’d keep forcing those useless besuited scumbags or their replacements to fund these organizations even after this pandemic is over. QfuckingED. Jesus.

What the fuck is wrong with you?

But this clap-of-belated-support reminded me of Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “Tommy”. The old white-man’s-burden imperialist was talking about exactly this kind of self-serving appreciation, in this case of the ordinary British soldier.

Dunno exactly when the term Tommy Atkins became code for the enlisted guys (“other ranks”) in the army. In Nineteenth Century training manuals, “Thomas Atkins” was the designator for soldiers, so maybe that’s it. But at least in the two world wars of the last century, they were known as Tommies, the way US soldiers were doughboys (I don't even knnow) in the first war and GIs (for “government issue”) in the second.

At any rate, Kipling here clearly demonstrates the hate-love that the British public felt for the army that we’re seeing now: when there’s no perceived need for their services, get the hell out of here; when there is, as Kipling says, “trouble in the wind”, well—can’t applaud too much, can we?

Burns

My

Bacon

“Tommy”

I WENT into a public 'ouse to get a pint o'beer,

The publican 'e up an' sez, ``We serve no red-coats here.''

The girls be'ind the bar they laughed an' giggled fit to die,

I outs into the street again an' to myself sez I:

O it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' ``Tommy, go away'';

But it's ``Thank you, Mister Atkins,'' when the band begins to play,

The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,

O it's ``Thank you, Mr. Atkins,'' when the band begins to play.

I went into a theatre as sober as could be,

They gave a drunk civilian room, but 'adn't none for me;

They sent me to the gallery or round the music 'alls,

But when it comes to fightin', Lord! they'll shove me in the stalls!

For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' ``Tommy, wait outside'';

But it's ``Special train for Atkins'' when the trooper's on the tide,

The troopship's on the tide, my boys, the troopship's on the tide,

O it's ``Special train for Atkins'' when the trooper's on the tide.

Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep

Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap;

An' hustlin' drunken soldiers when they're goin' large a bit

Is five times better business than paradin' in full kit.

Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' ``Tommy how's yer soul?''

But it's ``Thin red line of 'eroes'' when the drums begin to roll,

The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,

O it's ``Thin red line of 'eroes'' when the drums begin to roll.

We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too,

But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;

An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints:

Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints;

While it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an ``Tommy, fall be'ind,''

But it's ``Please to walk in front, sir,'' when there's trouble in the wind,

There's trouble in the wind, my boys, there's trouble in the wind,

O it's ``Please to walk in front, sir,'' when there's trouble in the wind.

You talk o' better food for us, an'schools, an' fires an' all:

We'll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.

Don't mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face

The Widow's Uniform is not the soldier-man's disgrace.

For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' ``Chuck him out, the brute!''

But it's ``Saviour of 'is country,'' when the guns begin to shoot;

Yes it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please;

But Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool—you bet that Tommy sees!

Fund them, you soulless, self-serving bastards. Pay them salaries commensurate with their value. Kit them out with PPE. Provide the equipment they need. Fuck your applause—fork over the dosh.