November 2019 – Fourteen Lines

So Much Sweet Beauty

“ The poet is a lifer. Anyone who gets into the game will soon start wishing that there was a version of it with lower stakes, but there isn’t. “

Clive James

Japanese Maple

by Clive James

Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.
So slow a fading out brings no real pain.
Breath growing short
Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain
Of energy, but thought and sight remain:

Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see
So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls
On that small tree
And saturates your brick back garden walls,
So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?

Ever more lavish as the dusk descends
This glistening illuminates the air.
It never ends.
Whenever the rain comes it will be there,
Beyond my time, but now I take my share.

My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.
What I must do
Is live to see that.That will end the game
For me, though life continues all the same:

Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,
A final flood of colors will live on
As my mind dies,
Burned by my vision of a world that shone
So brightly at the last, and then was gone

If you were busy shoveling snow or fighting with flight or travel delays or generally caught up in the business of Thanksgiving, you may have missed that Clive James passed away on November 24. There are lots of eloquent memorials to his life and genius. Poke around on google and you’ll find great interviews with him. James in his own words claimed to be nothing more than a writer and a most fortunate one at that. He managed to make a living through his love affair with words. As a critic he had a way of dissembling another writers work that offered you insights beyond your own understanding. It would have been easy for me to include two of his poems, or a translation, but instead I choose to share a poem he admired. Both poems deal with death and passing and remembrance. Time is short on this planet, 80 years comes at your pretty quickly. May we all be as fortunate as Clive James to be able to look death in the eye and write distinctly about our human experience of mortality.

Spring and Fall

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

to a young child

Márgarét, áre you gríeving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leáves like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! ás the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you wíll weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It ís the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

Thy Blessings

fry004-R2-E038 — Thanksgiving Day in St. Paul, Minnesota 1966

Missed Time

by Ha Jin

My notebook has remained blank for months
thanks to the light you shower
around me. I have no use
for my pen, which lies
languorously without grief.

Nothing is better than to live
a storyless life that needs
no writing for meaning—
when I am gone, let others say
they lost a happy man,
though no one can tell how happy I was.

I wrote Thy Blessings as my prayer of Thanksgiving about 5 years ago. It had been many years since a prayer had been said at my families Thanksgiving table, and I had yet to create a new tradition rooted in poetry and so it was shared in the living room, prior to the meal with everyone standing.

It took people a little by surprise. I am not sure they knew what to make of it. It was short enough that people’s attention didn’t waver. Poetry was still something relatively new in my life and it was many years before Fourteen lines became a reality. It’s never too early, it’s never too late to start a new tradition of thankfulness in your family. Do you have a favorite prayer of thanks? Do you have a poem that you read at Thanksgiving? Please share it in the comments section, I would love to read it.

Happy Thanksgiving

Thy Blessings

by T. A. Fry

If its by my fruit that you shall know me,
than look to the least of what I’ve done
For my best comes from many,
My worst from only one.

My blessings are overflowing,
More than I deserve.
My bounty is ever growing
My fruits are thy preserves.

I Like Magic Made By Cooks

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Thanksgiving Magic

by Rowena Bastin Bennett

Thanksgiving Day I like to see

Our cook perform her witchery.

She turns a pumpkin into pie

As easily as you or I

Can wave a hand or wink an eye.

She takes leftover bread and muffin

And changes them to turkey stuffin’.

She changes cranberries to sauce

And meats to stews and stews to broths;

And when she mixes gingerbread

It turns into a man instead

With frosting collar ’round his throat

And raisin buttons down his coat.

Oh, some like magic made by wands,

And some read magic out of books,

And some like fairy spells and charms

But I like magic made by cooks!

Two Who Are Mostly Good

Potato

by Jane Kenyon

In haste one evening while making dinner
I threw away a potato that was spoiled
on one end. The rest would have been

redeemable. In the yellow garbage pail
it became the consort of coffee grounds,
banana skins, carrot peelings.
I pitched it onto the compost
where steaming scraps and leaves
return, like bodies over time, to earth.

When I flipped the fetid layers with a hay
fork to air the pile, the potato turned up
unfailingly, as if to revile me—

looking plumper, firmer, resurrected
instead of disassembling. It seemed to grow
until I might have made shepherd’s pie
for a whole hamlet, people who pass the day
dropping trees, pumping gas, pinning
hand-me-down clothes on the line.

Happy Thanksgiving. I hope this Thanksgiving finds you surrounded by friends and family bound together by gratitude, sharing food and fellowship. Will you say a prayer of thanksgiving as you sit down together to eat? Aloud or silently? What are you grateful for and to whom do you want to bestow a prayer gratitude? Gratefulness and thankfulness are founded on awareness. Without being aware of how we are connected to our communities, our families, our co-workers our friends, we can’t be thankful.

Is not prayer also a study of truth,–a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed heartily, without learning something. But when a faithful thinker, resolute to detach every object from personal relations, and see it in the light of thought, shall, at the same time, kindle science with the fire of the holiest affections, then will god go forth anew into creation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In an increasingly secular world, where talk of God and gratitude make some at our tables uncomfortable, invite everyone to speak their truth on what they are thankful for, regardless if the only divinity is desert and your personal prayer of thanksgiving is said in silence with eyes wide open smiling at each of the people present at your table.

Take the time this holiday weekend to give thanks. Pick up the phone and call an old friend. Touch base with the elderly family member that might be feeling isolated. Commune with nature and talk a walk of thanksgiving – thinking about all you have to be grateful for in your life.

Happy Thanksgiving.

The Bean Eaters

by Gwendolyn Brooks

They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware.

Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep on putting on their clothes
And putting things away.

And remembering . . .
Remembering, with twinklings and twinges,
As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that
is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths,
tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.

Defend The Bad Against The Worse

“And my last words shall be these – that it is only from the inmost silences of the heart that we know the world for what it is, and ourselves for what the world has made us.”

Siegfried Sassoon

Where Are The War Poets?

by Cecil Day Lewis

They who in folly or mere greed
Enslaved religion, markets, laws,
Borrow our language now and bid
Us to speak up in freedom’s cause.

It is the logic of our times,
No subject for immortal verse –
That we who lived by honest dreams
Defend the bad against the worse.

Siegfried Sassoon was one of the great poet’s of World War I. He was a decorated soldier who had the courage to speak up and was ultimately removed from service for his act of bravery in declaring the war unjust. I have reprinted his Soldiers Declaration in its entirety. He was dissented from the army for his brave stance that politicians and generals had fanned the flames of patriotism to prolong a war that became unjust. Sassoon stood by his convictions, and his poetry and writings reflect his equal stances of bravery, humanity, fear in wartime and his commitment to peace that made him stand up and say – STOP!

Sassoon’s protest, “A Soldier’s Declaration,” written on June 15, 1917:

I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe this War, upon which I entered as a war of defense and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow-soldiers entered upon this War should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible for them to be changed without our knowledge, and that, has this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.

I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolonging those sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.

I am not protesting against the military conduct of the War, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.

On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced on them. Also I believe that it may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those as home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize.

Read before the House of Commons, July 30, 1917, printed in The London Times, on July 31, 1917 (ironically — perhaps appropriately — the first day of the Third Battle of Ypres, Passchendaele).

The glorification of war is both a way to entice generation after generation of recruits and draftees to fight, but it also a way for families of loved ones to heal, who have suffered the ultimate sacrifice. The poetry of war both immortalizes the nobility of bravery and selflessness that can occurs during conflict as well as lay bare the scars of wars casualties and atrocities. I have included the video of Non nobis, Domine, which is part of the sound track from Henry V, Shakespeare’s play that celebrates King Henry V’s victory at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 during the Hundred Years Wars. Badly outnumbered, Henry V’s army is victorious. Non nobis, Domine is a latin Christian hymn often used as a prayer of Thanksgiving. It comes from Psalm 115 and translates the open lines as:

Not to us, Lord, not to us
but to your name be the glory,
because of your love and faithfulness.

Psalm 115:1

Trench Duty

by Siegfried Sassoon (1886 – 1967)

Shaken from sleep, and numbed and scarce awake,
Out in the trench with three hours’ watch to take,
I blunder through the splashing mirk; and then
Hear the gruff muttering voices of the men
Crouching in cabins candle-chinked with light.
Hark! There’s the big bombardment on our right
Rumbling and bumping; and the dark’s a glare
Of flickering horror in the sectors where
We raid the Boche; men waiting, stiff and chilled,
Or crawling on their bellies through the wire.
“What? Stretcher-bearers wanted? Some one killed?”
Five minutes ago I heard a sniper fire:
Why did he do it?… Starlight overhead—
Blank stars. I’m wide-awake; and some chap’s dead

The Floors Are Slippery With Blood

edith sitwell — Edith Sitwell (1887 – 1964)

“The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth.”

Edith Sitwell

The Dancers

by Edith Sitwell

(During a Great Battle, 1916)

The floors are slippery with blood:
The world gyrates too. God is good
That while His wind blows out the light
For those who hourly die for us –
We still can dance, each night.

The music has grown numb with death –
But we will suck their dying breath,
The whispered name they breathed to chance,
To swell our music, make it loud
That we may dance, – may dance.

We are the dull blind carrion-fly
That dance and batten. Though God die
Mad from the horror of the light –
The light is mad, too, flecked with blood, –
We dance, we dance, each night.

The story of Abraham – Sarah and Isaac is a story of belief, so powerful that fathers are willing to sacrifice their beloved sons in devotion to their gods. But the part in Genesis that is equally important, is that God interceded on Isaac’s behalf and sent an angel and saved Isaac from his Father’s zealousness. Peaceful intervention is the moral of that story, not blind obedience. Who are the angels in your midst interceding on behalf of peace?

Sonnet

by W. S. Merwin (1927 – 1919)

Brave comrade, answer! When you joined the war,

What left you? “Wife and children, wealth and friends,

A storied home whose ancient roof-tree bends

Above such thoughts as love tells o’er and o’er.”

Had you no pang or struggle? “Yes; I bore

Such pain on parting as at hell’s gate rends

The entering soul, when from its grasp ascends

The last faint virtue which on earth it wore.”

You loved your home, your kindred, children, wife;

You loathed yet plunged into war’s bloody whirl!—

What urged you? “Duty! Something more than life.

That which made Abraham bare the priestly knife,

And Isaac kneel, or that young Hebrew girl

Who sought her father coming from the strife.”

If Insufficient Grace

T Mcgrath — Thomas McGrath (1916 – 1990)

War Resisters Song

by Thomas McGrath

Come live with me and be my love
And we will all the pleasures prove—
Or such as presidents may spare
Within the decorum of Total War.
By bosky glades, by babbling streams
(Babbling of Fission, His remains)
We discover happiness’ isotope
And live the half-life of our hope.

While Geiger counters sweetly click
In concentration camps we’ll ****.
Called traitors? That’s but sticks and stones
We’ve Strontium 90 in our bones!

And thus, adjusted to our lot,
Our kisses will be doubly hot—
Fornicating (like good machines)
We’ll try the chances of our genes.

So (if Insufficient Grace
Hath not fouled thy secret place
Nor fall-out burnt my balls away)
Who knows? but we may get a boy—

Some paragon with but one head
And no more brains than is allowed;
And between his legs, where once was love,
Monsters to pack the future with.

Have we lost the moral compass of peaceful resistance somewhere? Possibly the worst thing that ever happened to the peace movement was elimination of the draft. It gave permission to politicians, the Pentagon and the entire industrial war complex to move forward endlessly without question, without the questioning resistance brings. When you have an all volunteer fighting force, it becomes a matter of choice, except for when it isn’t. For many, the GI bill offers the only path to being able to afford a college education. But it is a mighty tuition that still is paid by the young men and women who sign up for something that might change them forever, for good or for bad.

We now fight wars that go on and on and on, without any proper declarations and no sense of purpose to bring them to a close. No resistance, no moral outrage, there is only this overly patriotic fervor that allows us to ignore the impossibility of the situation. Every Presidential candidate promises to end the things begun by their predecessors while campaigning and then if successful finds that their hands are tied with the same tethers to stupidity as the President before thm.

Is there such a thing as a just and honorable war? I was in San Antonio this week. I walked over and went through the Alamo museum. I was struck with tge thought as I read the timelines that led up to the crushing defeat with somewhere upwards of 250 killed at the Alamo; “Is death the only way men inspire others?” Would the names Bowie, Crockett, Houston be known as heroes if they had negotiated a truce? Would they be held in equally high regard if they had saved the lives of the civilians and their own men rather than lead them to a proud but certain death for a piece of ground that would change hands many times again before it become the state of Texas? The myth of American independence is tied to the myths we create of the nobility of self sacrifice with a gun in men’s hands, rather than the nobility of a pen or a poem or retreat.

Thomas McGrath was one of the writers investigated by the FBI for being a communist and forced to testify at the McCarthy hearings. A long commitment to resistance, McGrath was a prolific writer and though his appreciation is vast among academics and other writers, he labored in many other jobs to support his habit of writing. Primarily a poet as a writer, he wrote screenplays and novels as well, his left leaning politics took him out of the mainstream in literature, not that I think it mattered to him. MacGrath was a proud North Dakotan. He wrote with a sense of purpose informed by his beliefs. The documentary below a good overview of his life and writing.

All The Dead Soldiers

by Thomas McGrath

In the chill rains of the early winter I hear something—
A puling anger, a cold wind stiffened by flying bone—
Out of the north …
and remember, then, what’s up there:
That ghost-bank: home: Amchitka: boot hill ….

They must be very tired, those ghosts; no flesh sustains them
And the bones rust in the rain.
Reluctant to go into the earth
The skulls gleam: wet; the dog-tag forgets the name;
The statistics (wherein they were young) like their crosses, are weathering out,

They must be very tired.
But I see them riding home,
Nightly: crying weak lust and rage: to stand in the dark,
Forlorn in known rooms, unheard near familiar beds:
Where lie the aging women: who were so lovely: once

Never Such Innocence Again

Go Now

By Edward Thomas

Like the touch of rain she was
On a man’s flesh and hair and eyes
When the joy of walking thus
Has taken him by surprise:

With the love of the storm he burns,
He sings, he laughs, well I know how,
But forgets when he returns
As I shall not forget her ‘Go now’.

Those two words shut a door
Between me and the blessed rain
That was never shut before
And will not open again.

MCMXIV (1964)

by Philip Larkin

Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;

And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day;

And the countryside not caring:
The place-names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheat’s restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word – the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again

There Is Nothing Like The Sun

The Sorrow Of True Love

by Edward Thomas

The sorrow of true love is a great sorrow

And true love parting blackens a bright morrow:

Yet almost they equal joys, since their despair

Is but hope blinded by its tears, and clear

Above the storm the heavens wait to be seen.

But greater sorrow from less love has been

That can mistake lack of despair for hope

And knows not tempest and the perfect scope

Of summer, but a frozen drizzle perpetual

Of drops that from remorse and pity fall

And cannot ever shine in the sun or thaw,

Removed eternally from the sun’s law

There’s Nothing Like The Sun

by Edward Thoma

There’s nothing like the sun as the year dies,
Kind as can be, this world being made so,
To stones and men and birds and beasts and flies,
To all things that it touches except snow,
Whether on mountainside or street of town.
The south wall warms me: November has begun,
Yet never shone the sun as fair as now
While the sweet last-left damsons from the bough
With spangles of the morning’s storm drop down
Because the starling shakes it, whistling what
Once swallows sang. But I have not forgot
That there is nothing, too, like March’s sun,
Like April’s, or July’s, or June’s, or May’s,
Or January’s, or February’s, great days:
August, September, October, and December
Have equal days, all different from November.
No day of any month but I have said—
Or, if I could live long enough, should say—
“There’s nothing like the sun that shines today.”
There’s nothing like the sun till we are dead.

Loved, And Were Loved

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In Flanders Fields

by John McCrae

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
. .That mark our place; and in the sky
. .The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
. Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
. . . .In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
.The torch; be yours to hold it high.
.If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
. . . In Flanders fields.

We Shall Keep the Faith

by Moina Michael (1869–1944)

Oh! You who sleep in “Flanders Fields,”
Sleep sweet—to rise anew!
We caught the Torch you threw
And, holding high, we keep the Faith
With All who died.

We cherish, too, the poppy red
That grows on fields where valor led;
It seems to signal to the skies
That blood of heroes never dies,
But lends a lustre to the red
Of the flower that blooms above the dead
In Flanders Fields.

And now the Torch and Poppy Red
We wear in honor of our dead.
Fear not that ye have died for naught;
We’ll teach the lesson that ye wrought
In Flanders Fields.