A terrible spat

I don’t know whether you have to be an American Lit major, or from the South, to recognize today’s National Poetry Month poem. And I can’t recall now which of my grandmothers was the one to recite it to me—the one from San Francisco or the one from Georgia. But Eugene Field’s “The Duel” has been part of my life for a long time.

The only adult I’ve met who not only recognized it, but could (and did) quote from it was a colleague of mine at the data networking company. She came from South Carolina, and had degrees in English from the USC that isn’t the one in LA. (Bruins rule, Trojans drool. Just sayin’…)

I’ve never been able to hear the words “gingham” or “calico” without picturing coming into the room and finding a blizzard of shreds and scraps. Gotta love pomes, folks.

“The Duel”

The gingham dog and the calico cat
Side by side on the table sat;
'T was half-past twelve, and (what do you think!)
Nor one nor t' other had slept a wink!
      The old Dutch clock and the Chinese plate
      Appeared to know as sure as fate
There was going to be a terrible spat.
            (I wasn't there; I simply state
            What was told to me by the Chinese plate!)

The gingham dog went "Bow-wow-wow!"
And the calico cat replied "Mee-ow!"
The air was littered, an hour or so,
With bits of gingham and calico,
      While the old Dutch clock in the chimney-place
      Up with its hands before its face,
For it always dreaded a family row!
            (Now mind: I 'm only telling you
            What the old Dutch clock declares is true!)

The Chinese plate looked very blue,
And wailed, "Oh, dear! what shall we do!"
But the gingham dog and the calico cat
Wallowed this way and tumbled that,
      Employing every tooth and claw
      In the awfullest way you ever saw---
And, oh! how the gingham and calico flew!
            (Don't fancy I exaggerate---
            I got my news from the Chinese plate!)

Next morning, where the two had sat
They found no trace of dog or cat;
And some folks think unto this day
That burglars stole that pair away!
      But the truth about the cat and pup
      Is this: they ate each other up!
Now what do you really think of that!
            (The old Dutch clock it told me so,
            And that is how I came to know.)

 

 

Gratitude Monday: spinning gyre

Today at sundown, Yom Hashoah begins. This is the day commemorating the Holocaust. And in a time where RWNJs around the world are attempting to enucleate anything and everything from the past that does not comport with what passes for their worldview, it’s more important than ever to remember history, lest we be doomed to repeat it.

It's also Gratitude Monday, and my selection for National Poetry Month is therefore Avrom Sutzkever’s “1980”. Sutzkever was born in what is now Belarus; raised first in Siberia, then in in Vilna, Lithuania, and began his literary career at the age of 17, in 1930. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, he and his family were moved to the Vilnius Ghetto; he and other writers hid works by Herzl, Chagall and others behind walls, saving them for the future. Following the Germans murdering his mother and his newborn son, Sultzkever and his wife escaped from the ghetto, and he fought as a partisan against the Nazis. After the war, he testified in Nuremberg at the trial of the man who murdered his mother and son; he and his wife lived for a while in Poland and then Paris, before moving to Palestine (as it was then).

Sultzkever wrote first in Hebrew but shifted to Yiddish.

During an Aktion in 1941, Sutzkever escaped to the countryside and was hidden by a peasant woman named Yanova Bertushevitz; she and her husband kept the poet in their cellar and managed to smuggle food into the ghetto to his family. Eventually his worry about the danger to his protectors and his family led him to return to Vilna, but he did not forget her gift to him.

“1980” expresses Sutzkever’s gratitude for her courage, kindness and humanity. It’s therefore the right poem for today—eve of Yom Hashoah and Gratitude Monday—and also for the times: we all need to be reminded that, even in a hateful and violent environment, we can choose to be human, kind and courageous.

Because whoever saves one life saves the world entire.

“1980” 

And when I go up as a pilgrim in winter, to recover
the place I was born, and the twin to self I am in my mind,
then I'll go in black snow as a pilgrim to find
the grave of my savior, Yanova.
She'll hear what I whisper, under my breath:
Thank you. You saved my tears from the flame.
Thank you. Children and grandchildren you rescued from death.
I planted a sapling (it doesn't suffice) in your name.
Time in its gyre spins back down the flue
faster than nightmares of nooses can ride,
quicker than nails. And you, my savior, in your cellar you'll hide
me, ascending in dreams as a pilgrim to you.
You'll come from the yard in your slippers, crunching the snow
so I'll know. Again I'm there in the cellar, degraded and low,
you're bringing me milk and bread sliced thick at the edge.
You're making the sign of the cross, I'm making my pencil its pledge.

                                                    Translated by Cynthia Ozick

 

Sail the dreams

Faced with a shooting war in Europe, inflation, rising rates of child poverty and mass shootings every week, Republicans at all levels are concentrating on the real problems: interfering with women getting healthcare, keeping non-cis White people from voting, investigating Hunter Biden’s laptop and banning any book containing so much as a whiff of any kind of sexuality you couldn’t discuss at the evangelical potluck picnic.

Yes, it’s not enough that they’re removing any book a single parent complains about in a school library (and sacking teachers who photograph the empty shelves) or defund public libraries that dare to defy their crackpot edicts; now they’re threatening to flat out close these dens of iniquity when banned books are ordered back to the shelves by a judge. (The county backed down. For now.)

These instances, BTW, are all south of the Mason-Dixon Line, unsurprisingly, but there are RWNJs all over and they all got a beef with the 21^st Century. They’re after any institution that could possibly encourage people to think for themselves and explore a world not circumscribed by racism, misogyny and religious bigotry. And—perhaps even more than public schools, public libraries are bulwarks of exploration and critical thinking. Generations of Americans have relied upon public libraries to expand their knowledge and their world—books, periodicals, music, videos, tools, training and more; it's all available at the library.

And that absolutely enrages Republicans. Talk about getting ideas above your station—libraries are the OG.

So today’s National Poetry Month selection is one of Nikki Giovanni’s several poems about these national treasures.

“A Library”
 (for Kelli Martin)

a Library Is:

a place to be free
to be in space
to be in cave times
to be a cook
to be a crook
to be in love
to be unhappy
to be quick and smart
to be contained and cautious
to surf the rainbow
to sail the dreams
to be blue
to be jazz
to be wonderful
to be you
a place to be
yeah… to be

 

 

Die of love

Today’s selection for National Poetry Month takes us to Chile. Or at least, it takes us to a Chilean poet.

Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto is better known to us as Pablo Neruda, a stunning cultural force of the 20^th Century. Taking his pen name from a Czech poet, Neruda served Chile as a politician and diplomat, all the while writing furiously. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971 and died two years later (very possibly murdered by agents of the Pinochet regime).

He was deeply affected by his time spent in Spain during the 1930s and wrote some very powerful poems about the Spanish Civil War, which are as important to understanding that incomprehensibly vicious time as any historical artifact.

Neruda felt that it was a poet’s job to be involved in everything. As he said in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, “A poet is at the same time a force for solidarity and for solitude.”

Well.

I’m sharing one of his sonnets with you.

Sonnet LXVI

I do not love you except because I love you;
I go from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you
My heart moves from cold to fire.

I love you only because it's you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you
Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.

Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel
Ray, stealing my key to true calm.

In this part of the story I am the one who
Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.

 

 

 

But I being young and foolish

Time for one of the heavy hitters in National Poetry Month—William Butler Yeats. But since it’s a Friday, we need something musical. So I’m giving you “Down by the Salley Gardens”, which was originally published in 1889.

I frankly don’t think kind of simplistic—especially for the guy who brought us “Easter 1916” and “The Second Coming”—but it’s an early effort and an attempt at “capturing” an old song, so I’m cutting him some slack.

This version is sung by Maura O’Connell and Karen Matheson.

His hanging face

The First World War is one of my research concentration areas as a military historian. It was a cataclysmic convergence of technological advances, imperial and nationalistic policies, and just plain unfuckingbelievable stupidity. What a way to usher in the 20^th Century, eh?

Rather oddly, a lot of poetry came out of those four years—at least amongst the British forces. Robert Graves, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon are a few of the best-known. My favorite, though, is Wilfred Owen, who was killed in action just seven days before the Armistice of 11 November 1918.

It’s hard to choose which of his poems to share; every one of them puts you through some horror that the Western Front vomited forth to everyone in the vicinity of the trenches. “Anthem for Doomed Youth” could be applied to any soldiers of any war

But the first poem of Owen's I ever read was “Dulce et Decorum est”, so that’s what I’m giving you.

One of the examples of monumental stupidity during that war was the use of lethal gas, either delivered via artillery or just released. It’s like the morons running the show never considered that they were surrounded by winds, which can shift and send your hot-shot latest chemical weapon…well, anywhere, including through your own lines. Chlorine, phosgene, mustard and other types were all deployed by armies on both sides. They caused serious damage to individual pulmonary systems without having any serious effect on strategy. The descriptions of poison gas victims are not for the faint of heart: imagine being blind and feeling your lungs being on fire even as they fill up with fluid and drown you.

The green referenced in the poem is chlorine gas. One of the effects of chlorine gas was to react with fluid in the lungs to form hydrochloric acid, which caused death, or (at a minimum) permanent scarring of the lung tissue. In smaller doses, it caused irritation of the eyes, coughing and vomiting. Chlorine's green clouds made it less effective over time because it could be seen; chemists quickly iterated to come up with something invisible.

But, hey, good news: there are still stockpiles of poison gas on hand in nations around the world, in case someone wants to start a war of territorial expansion. It's a mark of progress, I guess.

In this poem Owen describes the aftermath of such an attack. It, also, is not for the faint of heart.

“Dulce et Decorum est”

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

If you’re unfamiliar with the final line, it’s from an ode by the Roman poet Horace. It translates roughly to, “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country”.

 

 

My heart

I cannot believe that it’s 2023 and I had to go Googling for “poems about mass shootings”, because another fucking one this week. On top of the one last week, and the week before, and every bloody week in this lunatic asylum we call the United States.

You can’t go to a concert, hotel, church, dance hall, university, mosque, office, supermarket, synagogue, bank or garden shop without having to work out an escape strategy because God forbid the NRA-funded Republican Party should take even the most miniscule step toward reining in the free sales of military-grade weaponry.

When I was a child, we had duck-and-cover drills in school, because for sure crouching under a wooden desk was going to protect us from nuclear attack. It was fantastic, and we knew it was an exercise in pointlessness.

These days, children are regularly run through active-shooter drills. And they’re real because the threat is real. Republican congressmorons send out family gun-totin’-Christmas card photos and smirk to reporters that their kids aren’t in danger because “we homeschool”, so God’s in his heaven and all’s right with their world.

Know what? Instead of sending thoughts and prayers, get into those banks and synagogues and classrooms and supermarkets and churches and everyfuckingwhere else, get down with a bucket and rags and clean up all the blood, bits of bone, fecal matter and the rest of the aftermath of one of these weekly events. There's bound to be one in your district.

Today’s entry for National Poetry Month is appropriately “Thoughts and Prayers”, by Alissa Quart. The appropriateness is that the poem is composed entirely of the public statements of politicians and public websites.

Yay.

“Thoughts and Prayers”

Designed and executed. Us gun owners,
Our thoughts our team’s banner; our assault-
style thoughts and

#Prayfor

Praying impacted terrible
prayers on the scene
15 kids AR-15 pure evil
John 16:33 / horrific / my prayers / 1st responders

We continue to keep the victims

Kingdom of God. Columbine. Thoughts and prayers fireside basket.
The thoughts and prayers clear mount stamp

No child, teacher: There’s just no other way to describe it

Our hearts break for all the victims and families affected by today’s
terrible

satiation semantic civil religion common spiritual language shooting responders

The whole country stands

My heart is with Las Vegas we continue to keep the victims

My thoughts and prayers are with

$30 million in
donations. Thoughts
and prayers memes
Thoughts and Prayers: The Game,
Thoughts and Prayers tater
tots, A Thoughts and Prayers make-
up tutorial with invisible cosmetics.
Fantasy red blusher: “Blood of Our Children.”
Lifting up in prayer

all impacted by last night’s despicable

armed teachers

relatives affected

The thoughts and prayers stamp. The thoughts and prayers handcrafted
wood card.

The thoughts and prayers angel pin.

#Prayfor

“The science” of Thoughts and Prayers.
The ostensibly mixed
research about Thoughts
and Prayers.

My heart is with Parkland. My heart is

running down the hall

shooting
our prayers

 

 

High in the clean blue air

The American poet Mary Oliver focused on nature, not the human world. I suspect that she probably was happier for it.

I’ve chosen her “Wild Geese” for today’s National Poetry Month entry because of an event that happened yesterday morning. I got up around 0600 and reckoned I’d go out for a walk before heading into the office. Well, about a third of the way into the walk I heard geese honking overhead; I looked up to see them, but did not stop walking.

Until my left foot struck a curb and I went down. I scraped my left knee, but mostly broke the fall with my left hand.

I don’t think anything’s broken, but trying to work at a computer is…a slice.

Ugh.

Update: too swollen to get my watch on today.

Yay.

“Wild Geese”

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

 

 

 

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.