Gratitude Monday: her own lives

Today’s entry for National Poetry Month comes from the pen of the 39^th President of the United States, who announced last month that he was returning to his home in Plains, Ga., accepting only palliative care as he awaits death. Because today I’m grateful for the life of Jimmy Carter.

Carter will probably go down in history more for his humanitarian work after he left the White House, but his entire life was a consistent journey of following his faith, which called on him primarily to be a decent human being. He is certainly that. (That decency may have set him up for the ratfuckery of Republicans who played with the lives of American hostages held in Iran in order to win the 1980 election for Ronald Reagan—not much has changed in the past 40 years, eh?)

It would be difficult to find another president who displayed the grace, humility and kindness of Jimmy Carter. I rather suspect that these days, if you have those qualities, you don’t go into politics. So I’m grateful to have had him as an example.

“A Motorcycling Sister” is about his actual sister, Gloria Carter Spann. Spann died in 1990 from pancreatic cancer, and her headstone reads as Carter limns it, so I’m assuming the rest of the poem is true, too.

“A Motorcycling Sister”

Her lives were always, simply said, her own,
So no one ever knew which one we’d come
To find—a charming southern lady who
was dressed for tea, or one who made her home

A pad for biker gangs, Daytona bound,
Who’d stop and sometimes stay a week, as though
They’d found a mother—one who rode with them
on many trips. Once, down in Mexico,

She broke her leg, which kept her home awhile
But gave her extra time to freeze and can
Her garden’s harvest for the crowds that came,
And ate, and slept on floors, then rode again.

Her final illness filled our town with men,
Leather-jacketed, with beards, who stayed
In shifts, uneasy, in her darkened room.
Telegrams were sent. The hears was led

To graveside by those friends, two by two,
With one ahead: in all by thirty-seven
large and noisy bikes. And on her tomb
They had inscribed SHE RIDES IN HARLEY HEAVEN.

 

 

O let me rise

Our National Poetry Month poem for Easter is George Herbert’s “Easter Wings”. Herbert was a 17^th-Century poet, politician and churchman, who produced a wealth of poems in his relatively short life. Much of his focus was on religion—he considered the Church of England was imperiled on two sides by Puritanism and Roman Catholicism.

“Easter Wings” focuses on the atonement that Christ brings to the world; Herbert spent a lot of his life grappling with the juxtaposition of spirituality in a physical world, so writing a poem in the shape of wings may lend the weight of imagery to his thoughts.

“Easter Wings”

Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,
      Though foolishly he lost the same,
            Decaying more and more,
                  Till he became
                        Most poore:
                        With thee
                   O let me rise
            As larks, harmoniously,
      And sing this day thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

My tender age in sorrow did beginner
      And still with sicknesses and shame.
            Thou didst so punish sinne,
                  That I became
                       Most thinne.
                        With thee
                  Let me combine,
            And feel thy victorie:
        For, if I imp my wing on thine,
Affliction shall advance the flight in me.

 

I can't get no

Okay, let’s get with the 21^st Century. Everybody's hyped up about AI taking over the universe. And, while I understand the attraction of intelligence (even artificial), given the state of things, I'm a little skeptical.

So, I asked Google’s Bard AI generator to write a haiku about Spring for today’s National Poetry Month entry. Here’s what I got:

Winter’s cold grip fades
As the first spring flowers bloom
A new season begins

Meh—kinda sophomoric.

So I asked for a poem about Spring in the style of Allen Ginsburg:

Oh, Springtime, you sweet, sweet season of rebirth
When all the world is filled with new life and mirth
The flowers bloom and the birds sing
And the trees bud with new leaves that are green and spring

The days are longer and the nights are shorter
And the sun shines brighter than ever before
The air is fresh and the sky is blue
And the world seems full of hope and new

Oh, Springtime, you are a welcome sight
After the long, cold winter of our discontent
You bring with you joy and happiness
And a sense of hope for the future that is yet to come

So let us all welcome Springtime with open arms
And celebrate the rebirth of the world
For Springtime is a time for new beginnings
And a time for hope and love

Oh, hon—no.

Then I asked for a poem about Spring by Keith Richards:

The snow is melting, the birds are singing,
The flowers are blooming, the days are getting longer.
It's springtime, a time for new beginnings,
A time to start fresh, to let go of the past.

The winter was long and cold,
But now the sun is shining,
And the world is waking up.
It's time to get outside,
To roll up your sleeves,
And get to work.

There's so much to do,
So much to see,
So much to explore.
So go out and enjoy it,
Make the most of it,
And live your life to the fullest.

It's springtime,
A time for joy,
A time for love,
A time for peace.
So go out and embrace it,
And let the good times roll.

I decided that Bard is not, in fact, bardic yet, so I cut my losses and went back to work.

 

 

Guess my race is run

To mark the historic event Tuesday in the Manhattan courthouse, today’s National Poetry Day offering is The Clash's cover of that classic, “I Fought the Law”.

Because the law won.

Suck it up, Donnie. There are more arrests coming.

 

 

watersmooth-silver

TBH, I wanted to give you e.e. cummings’s “Plato told”, as a tip of the poetic hat to Vladimir Putin for National Poetry Month, but I shared that one just last year, so no.

Well, let’s have “Buffalo Bill’s” then. Whole lotta blue-eyed boys in the arms of Mister Death over there in Ukraine.

How do you like that, Vlad?

“Buffalo Bill’s”

Buffalo Bill ’s
defunct
               who used to
               ride a watersmooth-silver
                                                                  stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
                                                                                                     Jesus

he was a handsome man 
                                                  and what i want to know is
how do you like your blue-eyed boy
Mister Death

 

 

Reverential mirth

Tonight at sundown, Jews around the world will mark the first of seven days of Pesach, celebrating the liberation of the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt. Families and friends will gather around tables, eat foods free from any leaven and repeat questions and answers that have been said for millennia.

So our poem for National Poetry Month today is by Israel Zangwill, born in London in 1864 of Latvian and Polish immigrants. Zangwill was active in the Zionist movement, although he was not wedded to the notion of Palestine as the only destination for Jews fleeing pogroms in Europe. He was actually instrumental in bringing 10,000 Jews to Texas around the turn of the Twentieth Century.

In addition to poetry, Zangwill wrote plays, including one called The Melting Pot, about the promise of the United States. Teddy Roosevelt was a big fan of this one.

Our poem is “Seder Night”, and it is as true today as it was in every year since Moses led the Children across the Red Sea.

“Seder Night”

Prosaic miles of streets stretch all round,
    Astir with restless, hurried life and spanned
By arches that with thund’rous trains resound,
    And throbbing wires that galvanize the land;
    Gin-palaces in tawdry splendor stand;
The newsboys shriek of mangled bodies found;
    The last burlesque is playing in the Strand—
In modern prose all poetry seems drowned.
Yet in ten thousand homes this April night
    An ancient People celebrates its birth
    To Freedom, with a reverential mirth,
With customs quaint and many a hoary rite,
Waiting until, its tarnished glories bright,
    Its God shall be the God of all the earth.

 

 

Keith is a giant crab

We’re going to take a bit of a diversion today for National Poetry Month. No famous poet or poem, but more of an illustration of how poetry is deeply integrated with other branches of the arts.

Here we have a performance of several British actors demonstrating the verbal versions of various schools of pictorial art. Each one is spot on.

You’re welcome.

 

 

 

Rings of being

As you know, I’m struggling with a lot of emotions related to my work situation; viz: I’m going to be laid off mid-May. Since I was given the six-month fixed-term offer back in November, I was knocked out for a month by surgery/recovery, and my company as well as every other one in tech has downsized by thousands, so there’s a lot to worry about.

Which is something I’m good at.

So for today’s National Poetry Month and Gratitude Monday entry, I’m going to try to draw strength from gratitude and share something by the Thirteenth-Century Persian Sufi mystic, Rumi.

“Be empty of worrying”

Be empty of worrying
Think of who created thought
Why do you stay in prison
When the door is so wide open
Move outside the tangle of fear thinking
Live in silence
Flow down and down
Into always widening
Rings of being

I do confess it’s hard for me to let go of the fear, to look through the wide-open door; especially now. OTOH, I have done that in the past, and the result was what I refer to as playing to win. In recent months, I’ve drifted into playing not to lose, and it’s difficult to correct course, especially when you’re full of worrying.

Well—here’s a first step: I’ve scheduled total knee replacement surgery on my left knee for 1 June. There’s so little I feel I can control about my life right now, but I can get this taken care of. It’ll be after I’m separated from my employer, but I’ll take COBRA coverage, so in terms of the physical, emotional and insurance components, I have a good idea what to expect.

I’m marshalling my support system, getting my posse to help me through What Comes Next. To the extent possible, I’m choosing joy over fear thinking and gratitude for what I have over worry about what may or may not come.

 

 

 

Two festering sores

Every sentient person in the country—well, in the world, TBH—knows that there are two justice systems in the United States; one for the (White, Christian) rich and one for everyone who doesn’t fit into that category. If you’re White enough, you may not even need to be rich or particularly Christian; cf. Rittenhouse. You can look at news reports, statistics, academic papers, cartoons—every possible perspective gives you the same result.

That’s one of the reasons why a career criminal like Donald Trump has skated for decades and even got elected to the highest office in the land, on which he shat every waking hour. Every time in his life he crossed a legal, ethical or moral line without (negative) consequences just emboldened him to push the envelope farther the next time he wanted instant gratification. In the White House, that translated to wielding the Executive Branch to funnel money into his business purse; swanning around the international stage like a puffed-up popinjay in badly-tailored suits; waving his willie and pissing on our policies and allies with smug disdain; encouraging violent racism, misogyny and antisemitism in his followers; violating the Hatch Act; installing his spawn and other grossly-unqualified toadies in high government positions where they enriched themselves; killing hundreds of thousands of Americans by his disregard of a global pandemic; bullying foreign and domestic governments to further his political career; mishandling and stealing classified materials; and—eventually—inciting a violent coup to retain power.

All without so much as a bleat from the Republican party, a query from the IRS or a knock on the door from the Department of Justice.

Just like he did his entire life.

So I admit to schadenfreuding a bit right now that Cadet Bonespurs is finally being indicted by a grand jury in Manhattan in connection with alleged hush money payments to a porn star in 2016 to stop her telling the world about her first-hand (uh) experience with his tiny dick 10 years earlier (while his third wife was recovering from childbirth). I realize this case has issues and may not end up with a conviction (or, even, a court trial). However, there are much stronger criminal cases being developed even as Captain Caps Lock smashes plates of ketchup on the walls of Mar-a-Lago, cases to do with insurrection and the Presidential Records Act on the federal level, as well as a potential prosecution in the Fulton County, Georgia, court for election interference. And this indictment pierces the perceived barrier to criminally charging a former president, therefore removing that obstacle to them.

True to form, he’s inciting his followers to defend him like they did at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Which is to say—show up (somewhere) armed and insane to overturn the rule of law and prove once again that his “justice” does not involve actual legal consequences. We’re in for an interesting time.

Still, there is that other justice system, and the poet Langston Hughes wrote eloquently about it. So that’s today’s National Poetry Month entry.

“Justice”

That Justice is a blind goddess
Is a thing to which we black are wise:
Her bandage hides two festering sores
That once perhaps were eyes

 

Long and lovely and lush

Hokey smokes—here we are in April. So you know it's time for National Poetry Month! Let’s kick it off with “Spring”, by one of my all-time favorite poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins.

It’s possible his short life (1844-1889) perhaps contributed to the intensity of his works. He converted to Roman Catholicism while at Oxford and spent his adult years as a Jesuit priest. He wrote some poems while at university, but almost nothing was known of his poetry until after his death. Had he not sent some to his friend Robert Bridges (eventually Poet Laureate of Britain), I shudder to consider what we might have lost.

Hopkins used assonance, onomatopoeia and alliteration as well as rhyme. He had no fears about pushing the limits of form to make his point. His “Pied Beauty” is one of the most beautiful I’ve ever heard, and I dare you to read it without your face wanting to smile and your heart wanting to lift. It is joy captured like a butterfly resting momentarily in your cupped hands.

Let’s just lean into the month like Hopkins leans into the season.

“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.