President Joe Biden speaks during the 59th Presidential Inauguration at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2021. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, Pool)
The Cure of Troy
by Seamus Heaney (1939 – 2013)
Human beings suffer. They torture one another. They get hurt and get hard. No poem or play or song Can fully right a wrong Inflicted and endured.
History says, Don’t hope On the side of the grave,’ But then, once in a lifetime The longed for tidal wave Of justice can rise up And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea- change On the far side of revenge. Believe that a further shore Is reachable from here. Believe in miracles. And cures and healing wells.
Call miracle self-healing, The utter self revealing Double-take of feeling. If there’s fire on the mountain And lightening and storm And a god speaks from the sky
That means someone is hearing The outcry and the birth-cry Of new life at its term. It means once in a lifetime That justice can rise up And hope and history rhyme.
It is the 21rst day, of the 21st year of the 21st Century. I feel better already….
Sonnet 21
by William Shakespeare
So is it not with me as with that Muse, Stirr’d by a painted beauty to his verse; Who heaven itself for ornament doth use, And every fair with his fair doth rehearse; Making a couplement of proud compare, With sun and moon, with earth and sea’s rich gems, With April’s first-born flowers, and all things rare That heaven’s air in this huge rondure hems. O’ let me, true in love, but truly write, And then believe me, my love is as fair As any mother’s child, though not so bright As those gold candles fix’d in heaven’s air: Let them say more than like of hearsay well; I will not praise, that purpose not to sell
Ten thousand Fords are idle here in search
Of a tradition. Over these dry sticks—
The Minute Man, the Irish Catholics,
The ruined bridge and Walden’s fished out perch—
The belfry of the Unitarian Church
Rings out the hanging Jesus. Crucifix,
How can your whited spindling arms transfix
Mammon’s unbridled industry, the lurch
For forms to harness Heraclitus stream!
This Church is Concord—Concord where Thoreau
Named all the birds without a gun to probe
Through darkness to the painted man and bow:
The death-dance of King Philip and his scream
Whose echo girdled this imperfect globe.
There are a couple of things to take into consideration if spending a month pondering the depths of Robert Lowell. He was not a healthy man. He was a bully as a child and early teenager who enjoyed blood sport, taking great pride in besting older and stronger boys in fist fights. He was described by a headmaster in a letter to his mother as (paraphrasing); wild, slovenly and ill mannered. As a young man he had a reputation for being rude, unkept and accident prone. He was diagnosed by Carl Jung personally as a schizophrenic and treated by the psychiatrist and poet Merrill Moore for many years beginning in childhood and into adulthood for depression. Robert Lowell was bi-polar/maniac depressive. He had multiple nervous breakdowns requiring hospitalization, but to his credit would recover into fantastic periods of creativity. He was medicated by the drugs of early psychiatry and self medicated in the usual ways poets self medicate. He was volatile, anxiety prone and generally depressed. But all these things by themselves do not define him, it merely proves he was human.
Lowell was also a loyal friend, a generous colleague, a romantic and incredibly intelligent. He was driven to be a successful artist and poet. Driven to the point that most successful artists are driven; it was the only thing he wanted to achieve. By all accounts he was an interesting and challenging professor who taught students, willing to put in the work, with a fierceness of mentorship that goes beyond the connections most professors are willing to allow. The body of work that Lowell left behind at age 60, having died of a heart attack in a cab in New York City on the way to visit his ex-wife, is incredibly impressive. To understand Lowell’s poetry, we must accept his complexity, not just in the exactness of its construction but also in the chaos of its creation.
Lowell firmly established himself in literary history because he pushed the concept of confessional poetry to a new level, beyond Eliot, beyond Pound and the New Critics. His poetry, informed by his own crisis and resilience, swirled in his imagination, reflecting the times in which he lived. When he was celebrated on the cover of Time magazine in 1967, it was not just because of his poetry, it was also for his personal convictions. Lowell had spent a year in jail (1942 -1943) as a conscientious objector during World War II and his voice and opposition only was strengthened during the Vietnam War. Lowell was celebrated because he was a survivor.
The two sonnets today are from his first book of poetry, Lord Weary’s Castle, published in 1946. I do not get the impression reading Ian Hamilton’s biography that Lowell was overtly religious, but he was raised in a family with a long lineage of priests and poets, so the concept that poetry and art must be grounded in spiritual ideals beyond the human realm was integral to his thinking from the very beginning. The title comes from a folk ballad about Lord Weary’s refusal to pay his stonemason on its construction and the subsequent murder of Weary’s wife and child in revenge. In John Berryman’s review, he remarked, the “castle is a house of ingratitude, failure of obligation, crime and punishment.” Such comes the inspiration for what would be the start of Lowell’s career.
France
(From the Gibbet)
by Robert Lowell
My human brothers who live after me,
See how I hang. My bones eat through the skin
And flesh they carried here upon the chin
And lipping clutch of their cupidity;
Now here, now there, the starling and the sea
Gull splinter the groined eyeballs of my sin,
Brothers, more beaks of birds than needles in
The fathoms of the Bayeux Tapestry:
“God wills it, wills it, wills it: it is blood.”
My brothers, if I call you brothers, see:
The blood of Abel crying form the dead
Sticks to my blackened skull and eyes. What good
Are lebensraum and brad to Abel dead
And rotten on the cross-beams of the tree?
“If we see light at the end of the tunnel, it’s the light of the oncoming train.”
Robert Lowell
Epilogue
by Robert Lowell
Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme— why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled? I hear the noise of my own voice: The painter’s vision is not a lens, it trembles to caress the light. But sometimes everything I write with the threadbare art of my eye seems a snapshot, lurid, rapid, garish, grouped, heightened from life, yet paralyzed by fact. All’s misalliance. Yet why not say what happened? Pray for the grace of accuracy Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination stealing like the tide across a map to his girl solid with yearning. We are poor passing facts, warned by that to give each figure in the photograph his living name
Happy New Years. My intention has been to spend the month of January doing a deeper dive into Robert Lowell, the last white male poet to be on the cover of Time Magazine. It is said we all foreshadow our own destruction, but in the case of Lowell, he foreshadowed not only his own, but also nearly the down fall of poetry itself in America.
In my mind Lowell epitomizes where the politics of poetry went wrong in the 20th Century. For an artform that is irreparably bound to breaking all the conventions in its creation, there is still politics in the way that new poets are vetted and published and paid. Something happened as Lowell reached the zenith of his career in the 1960’s that nearly broke poetry. The business of poetry, which was and still is in some ways, largely controlled by an elitist insulated establishment, committed the gravest of sins in my mind, it became boring. Lowell is the demarcation point where poetry hit the proverbial white male wall. And although there have been many fine white male poets who have carried on since, the sun has set on that regime to have the type of influence, readership and popular appeal that was possible in the first half of the 20th century.
The 1970’s, 1980’s and beyond have seen the rise of greater diversity, different perspectives, different expressionism and the full ascension of free verse, to the point that many poets have forgotten, that poetry at its essence should go beyond the page and live in our mouths as well as our minds. It should read well aloud. The past 40 years have carved out a niche for nearly ever type of poetry, but along with it a smaller and smaller readership, at least published, even for the most successful, such that it is harder and harder for a poet to make a living as a poet. Poetry has become what it always was, a way of thinking, a life style, but it is only for a very talented few, who can actually make a living at it without subsidizing their passion through teaching or another line of work or an acceptance of poverty. You don’t have to be wealthy to be a poet, but it certainly doesn’t hurt if it is your desire for it to be your vocation. And such as it has been since Homer and Browning.
Lowell wrote 100’s of sonnets in his lifetime and translated nearly that many as well from other poets. Yet, there is not a single sonnet of Lowell’s that I can point to that anyone is likely to be familiar or that I would give a resounding, thumbs up. The problem with celebrating Lowell is he is hard to like because his poetry is so overtly academic, it is not accessible. Lowell’s poems are inside jokes of arcane knowledge written for the critics and his other academic friends to decipher. And because Lowell won nearly every award a poet can win, and was heaped with praise and success, other’s followed mistakenly down his rather drab path, creating a self-compounding problem of scaring off more and more readers. Poetry became up and through the 1990’s more and more incestuous in the process of what is published. In my opinion, the only thing that saved poetry from extinction was the internet. The internet over the last 20 years made it possible for writers to self publish in ways that harken back to Dicken’s selling single page periodicals in the streets. Anyone willing to set up a blog and willing to write could access the world.
I honestly believe more people on the planet are reading poetry than ever before, though you wouldn’t know it to look at the poetry section in your local bookstore, that is if your local book store has survived the ravages of the past 20 years and the pandemic. The fact that local book stores have closed in droves across the United States is further evidence of the challenges that writers face in finding their audience in the traditional printed sense. And yet, I am blown away by the level of talent that emerges year after year. There are more good writers of poetry than ever before, even if book sales continue to decline.
The internet has made it possible for people to create, find and share poetry like never before. So why spend a month diving into someone I so dislike and worse disdain? Life is too short to read bad poetry. My mantra about reading poetry is the same as it is for food, consume what you enjoy! The reason is I have decided I would like to figure out maybe where poetry took the wrong road less traveled, particularly classical poetry and why it hit a dead end. And to do so, I thought it might be interesting to follow that trail back and look about. If the sonnet is a vehicle of artistic endeavor rusting in the scrap yard in most readers minds, then let’s spend a little time with one of the writers who helped run it off the road into some trees. Lowell was connected to so many poets, first as a student, then through his social network as friends, and then as a professor and the writers he mentored as students, that he is one of those literary figures that sits at the center of an incredible spider web of authors from the 20th century. I will do my best over the next 30 days, to spend the majority of the time on writers other than Lowell, to which Lowell was connected, and to actually find a poem or two of Lowell’s in his vast collected works, that I enjoy. Wish me luck.
Happy New Years! And if Lowell and his cronies are not to your liking. I will see you in February.
Bringing A Turtle Home
by Robert Lowell
On the road to Bangor, we spotted a domed stone, a painted turtle petrified by fear. I picked it up. The turtle had come a long walk, 200 millennia understudy to dinosaurs, then their survivor. A god for the out-of-power…. Faster gods come to Castine, flush yachtsman who see hell as a city very much like New York, these gods gave a bad past and worse future to men who never bother to set a spinnaker; culture without cash isn’t worth their spit. The laughter on Mount Olympus was always breezy…. Goodnight, little Boy, little Soldier, live, a toy to your friend, a stone of stumbling to God —- sandpaper Turtle, scratching your pail for water.
Childhood Creche purchased at the Ben Franklin store on main street in North St. Paul in the early 1960s.
Sonnet in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree
by George Starbuck
* O fury- bedecked! O glitter-torn! Let the wild wind erect bonbonbonanzas; junipers affect frostyfreeze turbans; iciclestuff adorn all cuckolded creation in a madcap crown of horn! It’s a new day; no scapegrace of a sect tidying up the ashtrays playing Daughter-in-Law Elect; bells! bibelots! popsicle cigars! shatter the glassware! a son born now now while ox and ass and infant lie together as poor creatures will and tears of her exertion still cling in the spent girl’s eye and a great firework in the sky drifts to the western hill.
Heading into the final days before Christmas I am trying to be upbeat. I have much to be grateful for this year. And yet, even a vastly toned down version of my normal Christmas cheer feels a bit overdone. 2020 is going to take some time to process. How are you processing all that has happened in 2020? Has your creativity been fueled or stunted by the dislocation of the pandemic? For me it has been a year of getting up everyday and trying to move forward with little energy for creativity. I am grateful for whatever small bit survived along the way.
I wrote A Christmas Sonnet over Thanksgiving weekend. It is not a great poem, but it feels genuine. I think there are good things that have come out of 2020’s toughest moments. It feels like we took a tiny faltering step forward as a nation of recognizing systemic racism for what it is, despite the failure of our leadership in our federal government. It feels like change is coming as an organic outgrowth of individuals and organizations searching their conscience and trying to do not necessarily “the” right thing but something better than silence or ignorance. The fact that multiple sports teams changed their names from something blatantly disrespectful and racist is a tangible example, even if they haven’t figured out what the new name is going to be. The fact that monuments to a racist, slave owning past are being taken down and towns are acknowledging their part in that history in ways that do not glorify it, because there never had been glory in those institutions that warranted memorializing it in bronze, is a start to a conversation around actual reparations. The fact that state flags are being changed to forge a new symbol away from the cultural identity of hate is a good thing. Change is hard. It’s painful. Not everyone is going to peacefully join in. But the herd has moved in a direction away from status quo and there is no stopping it now, no matter how much white privilege objects. These birth pangs of moving towards a more equitable future is worth it even if its still in its infancy and screaming its head off because its hungry.
I do not believe poetry has one interpretation. Poems have as many different meanings as people who read them, which is why I find literary criticism an inherently suspect enterprise. I believe poetry by its very nature is a personal language of an individual that by its public sharing creates a thread of common humanity regardless of what other readers take from it.
I chose the words of A Christmas Sonnet carefully. They represent as best as words can how I feel right now. I generally enjoy Christmas. But I have been wresting with how I reconcile the pleasant traditions and memories of my past with the reality of the things that are completely broken in our society today and have been for hundreds of years? How do I allow those two things to live peacefully in my mind side by side? I haven’t figured that out yet. For now I have decided the best I can do is to not create an emotional moat around the memorabilia of Christmas past and pretend it is above the pain of Christmas present. Instead I will welcome that pain and confusion into the emotional mix and stir it up in the holiday pot and let the two co-exist, hoping that it brings a clearer ownership on my part in moving forward in the right direction next year. And if nothing else, it feels authentic to seek redemption from things that represent the good of what was in the past, even when in some ways it represents the white blindness of my suburban childhood experience.
A Christmas Sonnet
By T. A. Fry
I would like to think I am not too old For magic. This year’s endless tragedies, Hunger, Fire, Floods, Injustice, Death, Disease, Ran rough-shod o’er my nostalgic soul. Will New Year’s bells ring as clear? Will hanging Stockings, trimming trees, blot out blatant lies? Fascists mocking humility, raging At democracy in their bright red ties.
My grateful Christmas spirit’s still alive. Despite the horrors; George Floyd’s death, A pandemic stalking loved one’s breath, Our compact frayed, but for now, survives. I’ll honor the flesh of “I Can’t Breathe,” Redeeming childhood crèche and Christmas wreath.
Now the seasons are closing their files on each of us, the heavy drawers full of certificates rolling back into the tree trunks, a few old papers flocking away. Someone we loved has fallen from our thoughts, making a little, glittering splash like a bicycle pushed by a breeze. Otherwise, not much has happened; we fell in love again, finding that one red feather on the wind.
The past few years I have taken the month of January to do a deeper dive into one poet, an attempt to go beyond an understanding of a few poems and to read not only their broader canon of work, but also their circle of influencers. This coming January I have been planning showcasing Robert Lowell, but the closer I get to January and the more I read of Lowell the more ambivalent I become. Lowell is a little too slick, too academic, too privileged. As much as I try to find things I like about Lowell, given the vast amount of sonnets the man wrote, in the end I just don’t like his poetry very much. Poetry is supposed to be enjoyable for the reader, not a beat down drubbing that leaves you bored and mystified.
Kooser, in my mind, is the anti-Lowell as a poet in some ways, but if Lowell hadn’t existed would Kooser as a poet exist? The same could be said of Pound and others. What I like about Kooser is his poems give me energy, whereas too many Lowell’s seems to take energy out. Kooser, for me, embodies the best of mid-western poetry, a relatively straight forward poetic vision that lets the reader inside his world, a world that is recognizable, not mamby-pamby, but not so stark as to scare us off. Kooser, like his poetry, has aged well.
Sonnet
by Karen Volkman
Say sad. Say sun’s a semblance of a bled blanched intransigence, collecting rue in ray-stains. Smirching pages. Takes its cue from sateless stamens, flanging. Florid head
got no worries, waitless. Say you do. Say photosynthesis. Light, water, airy bread. What eats its source, its orbit? Something bad: some plural petal that will not root or ray.
Sow stray. Salt night for saving, dreaming clay for heap, for hefting. Originary ash for stall and stilling. Say it will, it said.
Corolla corona, bliss-bane—delay surge and sediment. Say instrument and gash and ruminant remnant. Rex the ruse. Be dead.
Not because beauty is as thin and bright In you as the white outline of a tree In winter, but because I find delight In the curved sadness of your lips. (I see Pleasanter things each day, each day recall Happy faces, laughter that knew a way To spin senses to oblivion.) . . . All Your words are swift upon your lips and grey As swallows, yet I stay to listen, yet I cannot tear myself away from you: For in a little while you may forget Your sadness. O no matter what I do You may forget your sadness — O my dear And even smile, and make the mystery clear
Marion Strobel was an associate editor of Poetry Magazine from 1920 to 1925. She obviously was beloved at that institution, because over her lifetime Poetry Magazine published 137 of her poems. Contrast that with Robert Frost’s mere 57 and it makes you realize how deeply connected she was in the publishing world during her career. Strobel was associated with Poetry Magazine in some way for 45 years, accounting for her impressive achievement. She was a novelist as well as poet and part of the voices that would go on to establish what would be called confessional poetry. Due in part to her editorial duties, Strobel had personal relationships with numerous writers and literary figures, including Sylvia Beach, Louise Bogan, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Carl Sandberg. I have enjoyed diving into Strobel’s poetry and look forward to exploring more.
We cut our Christmas tree at a tree farm that is run by a family for more than 50 years north of Elk River, MN yesterday. Despite several of the usual activities being disrupted by COVID restrictions, like caroling in a horse drawn carriage, it felt like a way of touching traditions of the past. A fresh cut tree brings the smell of a balsam fir into the house like no other. We’ll decorate it properly in the next couple of nights, but for one day, RBG presided over it as a guiding angel from her perch at the top.
Two Sonnets
II
by Marion Strobel
How can I offer you the dull, frayed song Of love I know? Each word would stumble on A memory; and I should see a long Blurred line of faces grimacing upon A musty curtain of the past . . . . Ah, no . . . . Let me be silent . . . . Words would only sound A monotone: a toxic, cloying flow Of echoes would sift through, and eddy round My voice, and all the rapture that I feel Would turn into a harlequin and steal Away beneath the vivid, measured hum Of mockery. Ah, dearest, may there come An ecstasy of stillness in each day, That you may sense the thoughts I dare not say!
Above the quiet dock in mid night,
Tangled in the tall mast’s corded
Hangs the moon. What seemed so far away
Is but a child’s balloon, forgotten after play.
This December we began the month with a full moon (Dec. 1) and we will end it on a full moon (Dec. 30). A little lunar cheer to ring in the New Year for any holiday revelers trying to find their way home.
I was on an explore out at the farm last weekend, trying to find the beaver dam that has been transforming the landscape of the east end of the property the past couple of years. it wasn’t hard to find, a massive structure nearly 3 feet high and over 75 feet long. They have been busy. From their perspective (the beavers), it couldn’t be a more perfect placement, right on a fence line between a public wildlife reserve and private property, its unclear who if anyone but the beavers have jurisdiction over these change in events. Talking to a neighbor whose back third of his property is now underwater, he said, “One the one hand I’ve lost a big chunk of the land I used to bow hunt, on the other, the beavers have done more in 2 years than Ducks Unlimited did in 30 in creating wood duck habitat.” My intuition says the beavers and the wood ducks have won and we’ll all have to just get used to water being where it never was before.
Silver
By Walter de la Mare
Slowly, silently, now the moon
Walks the night in her silver shoon;
This way, and that, she peers, and sees
Silver fruit upon silver trees;
One by one the casements catch
Her beams beneath the silvery thatch;
Couched in his kennel, like a log,
With paws of silver sleeps the dog;
From their shadowy cote the white breasts peep
Of doves in a silver-feathered sleep;
A harvest mouse goes scampering by,
With silver claws, and silver eye;
And moveless fish in the water gleam,
By silver reeds in a silver stream.
There may be chaos still around the world, This little world that in my thinking lies; For mine own bosom is the paradise Where all my life’s fair visions are unfurled. Within my nature’s shell I slumber curled, Unmindful of the changing outer skies, Where now, perchance, some new-born Eros flies, Or some old Cronos from his throne is hurled. I heed them not; or if the subtle night Haunt me with deities I never saw, I soon mine eyelid’s drowsy curtain draw To hide their myriad faces from my sight. They threat in vain; the whirlwind cannot awe A happy snow-flake dancing in the flaw.
Sonnet XXV
by George Santayana
As in the midst of battle there is room For thoughts of love, and in foul sin for mirth; As gossips whisper of a trinket’s worth Spied by the death-bed’s flickering candle-gloom; As in the crevices of Caesar’s tomb The sweet herbs flourish on a little earth: So in this great disaster of our birth We can be happy, and forget our doom. For morning, with a ray of tenderest joy Gilding the iron heaven, hides the truth, And evening gently woos us to employ Our grief in idle catches. Such is youth; Till from that summer’s trance we wake, to find Despair before us, vanity behind.
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. For by it our elders obtained a good report.
Bible – King James Version.
Through Faith
by T. A. Fry
Through faith, we understand the worlds were framed By God’s words; that things are not made solely Of which they appear. Without faith, it is Impossible to please or be wholly pleased. Faith is a reward unto itself. And those That state plainly; “we’re earthly strangers, pilgrims, Seeking a country from whence we came,” May have the opportunity to return.
But what if we desire something better? A heavenly country; where God is not Ashamed to be called our God. Is there more? Our elders, having obtained a good report, Through faith, received not the promise; God provided something better;
They, without us, should not be made perfect.
The end of the American experiment, may well come in part, out of the fictional character from which it was partially fashioned; the idea of American independence and rugged individualism. We have fashioned a cloak for ourselves and our politicians out of this idea of American exceptionalism. The idea that as American’s we are innately superior by our very founders declaring independence and then fighting for our freedom. These noble words and ideas may yet fashion the heroic myth that will be our undoing; the idea that you can make it in this country by yourself, if you just apply yourself and work hard and don’t let the government or anyone else get in your way. What that myth ignores, is that the reason that all of us have things to be grateful for this Thanksgiving is because of others’ contributions, small and large, to our successes and our failures. The Plymouth plantation survived, the reason the revolution succeeded, when so many others prior to it did not, was because groups worked together, communally, with the belief that they could build something better together, build it through self sacrifice for the betterment of others, where alone, they would fail.
It is ironic then, the heroic myth of American exceptionalism and independence is partially responsible for bringing us to the brink of fracturing, has created a divide that is growing through a proclamation of self service, when the need to work cooperatively could not be more beneficial for all. This failing should not be a surprise. It is because we suffer as human’s from the same challenges of being human that William Bradford and his fellow colonists on the Mayflower did nearly 400 years ago, our egos get in the way of our better selves.
Bradford penned a journal of his voyage and establishment of the Plymouth colony, that was published by his sons after his death. A devout Christian, a man of faith and also realism, he believed that his faith in God, could help guide the providence of his community and his family if they worked together with the idea of a common good. He observed:
“The settlers, too, began to grow in prosperity, through the influx of many people to the country, especially to the Bay of Massachusetts. Thereby corn and cattle rose to a high price, and many were enriched, and commodities grew plentiful. But in other regards this benefit turned to their harm, and this accession of strength to weakness. For as their stocks increased and became more saleable, there was no longer any holding them together; they must of necessity obtain bigger holdings, otherwise they could not keep their cattle; and having oxen they must have land for ploughing. So in time no one thought he could live unless he had cattle and a great deal of land to keep them, all striving to increase their stocks.”
William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation
Bradford was a poet as well. Most of his poetry is religious in nature or what we would now call patriotic. Bradford wanted for his sons and their families to have something better than what his opportunities had been in England. I found humorous that Bradford wrote poetry complaining about various things he considered sinful, including – Ranters, proving not much has changed in 400 years, only the technology with which the Ranters rant.
On The Various Heresies In Old And New England, With An Appeal To The Presbyterians (Excerpt)
By William Bradford
Nor need you fear sin to commit, For Christ hath satisfied for it. But these doctrines make men profane, And bring dishonor to Christ’s name. Now faith is made, hereby, to be A dead body, as you may see; And these are but a wretched race, That they abuse God’s holy grace.
Ranters Next unto these we may bring in The filthy Ranters, near of kin. Where had they first their rise or name? I know not from the devil they came. The Adamites they are most like, But more against public shame do strike. Cynic-like, as vile as dogs, Carry themselves as filthy hogs, Yea worse than brutes, they know no end; But all their strength in lusts they spend. They shame the nature of mankind, And blot out reason in their mind. Professed atheists some of them are, Who openly revile God dare, And horridly blaspheme His name, And publicly avow the same, Which makes my heart quake and tremble. Nor may I herein dissemble; Methinks such wretches should not live In any land offense to give, Of this high nature, against the most high, And men it hear, and pass it by. I might say more of their vileness, How in contempt they will profess Their fellow creatures to adore, That God’s dishonor may be more. But let them pass; they are too vile My fingers for to defile. I hope the Lord’s help will come in To cleanse the land of such vermin.
I feel compelled to leave a footnote about the poem Through Faith. I thought carefully whether to attach my name to this poem, as it feels a bit like hubris to do so. I recognize that many people take scripture as literal, the literal word of God. I do not. I see it as a creation of many minds over time, written in languages other than my own and passed down. I see the connection between poetry and scripture and the poetry in scripture.
I found this text the first time I read it incredibly confusing. I could not wrap my head around it. If you read Hebrews 11 in it’s entirety it is a lengthy list of prophets in the Old Testament and their trials of faith. It feels impersonal and antiquated. But there was an element in it, that the more time that I spent with it felt relevant. And its relevance is in being a father and a son. The process of deconstructing and then reconstructing the text into a poem made it viable as something meaningful to me. And I hope might open the door for others to look at it through their own spiritual or poetic lens.
If the only prayer you ever say in your life is Thank You, it will be enough.
Master Eckhart
We Eat Out Together
by Bernadette Mayer
My heart is a fancy place Where giant reddish-purple cauliflowers & white ones in French & English are outside Waiting to welcome you to a boat Over the low black river for a big dinner There’s alot of choice among the foods Even a tortured lamb served in pieces En croute on a plate so hot as a rack Of clouds blown over the cold filthy river We are entitled to see anytime while we Use the tablecovers to love each other Publicly dishing out imitative luxuries To show off poetry’s extreme generosity Then home in the heart of a big limousine
Where ever you are in this world, whatever your traditions, or beliefs, we share our humanness through gratitude. So much of poetry is tied to this quality, the ability to express thankfulness, that I don’t think poetry would exist without this innate ability.
I don’t think however it is only a human trait. If you live around animals they often express their gratitude for your touch, for your presence, for feeding them or grooming them, or petting them. Gratitude is a trait that goes beyond our species.
As I celebrate Thanksgiving today, separated because of COVID from the loved ones I would normally get together, I will say the same prayer of Gratefulness that I have said many times over the years. I am maybe more grateful than previous years as strange as it sounds. I am grateful they are healthy and capable of marshalling through these challenging times. I am grateful for their self reliance, their perseverance, their ability to make their own fun, and keep a positive attitude. I am thankful for all my blessings, – the greatest of which is their love.
I feel compelled to be original writing this blog, to have every poem on every post be new, for the first time on Fourteen Lines. But that’s not the way I read poetry. I go back to the same poems over and over. If you are needing a Thanksgiving Prayer, either to read aloud at your table or to say silently, here’s my go to favorite for Thanksgiving. I shared it on the first Thanksgiving of Fourteen Lines in 2017, and it warrants sharing again, as I plan on reading it again, and again.
Gratefulness
Thou that has given so much to me Give me one thing more, – a grateful heart, See how Thy beggar works on Thee by art.
Not Thankful when it pleaseth me, – As if they blessings had spare days. But such a heart, whose pulse may be Thy praise.
George Herbert
Amuse-Bouche
by Max Ritvo
It is rare that I have to stop eating anything because I have run out of it.
We, in the West, eat until we want to eat something else, or want to stop eating altogether.
The chef of a great kitchen uses only small plates.
He puts a small plate in front of me, knowing I will hunger on for it even as the next plate is being placed in front of me.
But each plate obliterates the last until I no longer mourn the destroyed plate,
but only mewl for the next, my voice flat with comfort and faith.
And the chef is God, whose faithful want only the destruction of His prior miracles to make way for new ones.
