Poetry | dual personalities

May 25, 2017

“So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”*

by chuckofish

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Yesterday was Bob Dylan’s 76th birthday. I hope you celebrated appropriately.

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’
For the loser now will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’

© 1963, 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991, 1992 by Special Rider Music

Yesterday was also Aldersgate Day which is a commemorative day celebrated by Methodists. It recalls the day in 1738 when Anglican priest John Wesley attended a group meeting in Aldersgate, London, where he received an experience of assurance of his salvation.

This was the pivotal event in Wesley’s life that ultimately led to the development of the Methodist movement in Britain and America. According to his journal, Wesley found that his enthusiastic gospel message had been rejected by his Anglican brothers. Heavy-hearted, he reluctantly attended a group meeting that evening in a Moravian chapel. It was there, while someone was reading from Martin Luther’s Preface to the Epistle to the Romans, that he felt that his heart was “strangely warmed”.

I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.

The following hymn was written by Shirley Murray to commemorate the event on the 250th anniversary in 1988.

How small a spark has lit a living fire!
       how small a flame has warmed a bitter world!
how great a heart was moved to hope, to dare
       and bring the faith out in the open air!

No boundary sign will stand against this faith,
       no wall restrain this preaching of the Word:
the Good News travels on, it rides the road
       and draws to unity the realm of God.

The single note becomes a song of praise,
       the single voice grows to a swelling choir
and born in song, new stories now are sung
       of freedom, chains unbound and loosened tongue.

Thank God for all who listened and believed,
       who still are by the Spirit set on fire --
our hearts be warmed again, for Christ will wait
       on beach, in upper room, or Aldersgate.

The Good News travels on…

*Matthew 20:16

5 Comments

May 18, 2017

My mother remembers the day as a girl

by chuckofish

Our last connection with the mythic.
My mother remembers the day as a girl
she jumped across a little spruce
that now overtops the sandstone house
where still she lives; her face delights
at the thought of her years translated
into wood so tall, into so mighty
a peer of the birds and the wind.

Too, the old farmer still stout of step
treads through the orchard he has outlasted
but for some hollow-trunked much-lopped
apples and Bartlett pears. The dogwood
planted to mark my birth flowers each April,
a soundless explosion. We tell its story
time after time: the drizzling day,
the fragile sapling that had to be staked.

At the back of our acre here, my wife and I,
freshly moved in, freshly together,
transplanted two hemlocks that guarded our door
gloomily, green gnomes a meter high.
One died, gray as sagebrush next spring.
The other lives on and some day will dominate
this view no longer mine, its great
lazy feathery hemlock limbs down-drooping,
its tent-shaped caverns resinous and deep.
Then may I return, an old man, a trespasser,
and remember and marvel to see
our small deed, that hurried day,
so amplified, like a story through layers of air
told over and over, spreading.

–John Updike, born on this day in 1932

2 Comments

April 26, 2017

“Who thinks the all-encircling sun Rises and sets in his back yard?”

by chuckofish

Today is the birthday of the artist John James Audubon (1785 – 1851). Audubon came to America in 1803 to avoid conscription in the Napoleonic Wars. He became an ornithologist, naturalist, and painter, notable for his extensive studies documenting all types of American birds and for his detailed illustrations that depicted the birds in their natural habitats

Here are a few examples of his great avian art, courtesy of the John James Audubon Center at Mill Grove in Audubon, Pennsylvania, and the Montgomery County Audubon Collection.

American Robin

Burrowing Owl

Osprey

Wood ducks

What an amazing life full of travel, science and art!

By the way, Audubon is buried in the graveyard at the Episcopal Church of the Intercession in the Trinity Church Cemetery and Mausoleum at 155th Street and Broadway near his home, Minnie’s Land. He spent the last nine years of his life on this thirty-five acre property, which is now upper Manhattan, facing the Hudson River.

Trinity Cemetery

Detail of Trinity monument

There are statues of Audubon all over the country!

Covington, Kentucky

Henderson, Kentucky

Audubon Zoo in New Orleans, Louisiana

Audubon, Iowa

Museum of Natural History, NYC

You could make quite an interesting road trip following the path leading to all of the John James Audubon statues!

“All praise and honor! I confess
That bread and ale, home-baked, home-brewed
Are wholesome and nutritious food,
But not enough for all our needs;
Poets-the best of them-are birds
Of passage; where their instinct leads
They range abroad for thoughts and words
And from all climes bring home the seeds
That germinate in flowers or weeds.
They are not fowls in barnyards born
To cackle o’er a grain of corn;
And, if you shut the horizon down
To the small limits of their town,
What do you but degrade your bard
Till he at last becomes as one
Who thinks the all-encircling sun
Rises and sets in his back yard?”

–Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

5 Comments

April 25, 2017

“Tell them I came, and no one answered, That I kept my word”

by chuckofish

The Listeners

by Walter de la Mare

“Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grass
Of the forest’s ferny floor;
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
“Is there anybody there?” he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
‘Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:—
“Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,” he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Remember this poem? It was written by Walter de la Mare (April 25, 1873 – June 22, 1956), English poet, short story writer and novelist, and today is his birthday.

Let’s toast him tonight, along with Sandy Gallin who died over the weekend. He was one of those wildly successful agents/managers in Hollywood, but one who never seemed to have cheated or stolen from anyone. The fact that he was a great friend and partner of Dolly Parton–who does not suffer fools gladly–says a lot.

They co-produced Buffy the Vampire Slayer you know. Anyway, his obit in the New York Times is pretty interesting, albeit terribly written. Into paradise may the angels lead thee, Sandy.

5 Comments

April 14, 2017

Make My Heart a House of Prayer*

by chuckofish

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Henry Thomas Bosdet, Jesus Before his Crucifixion

Good Friday. It should be a day of reflection, but I have to work, as usual.

Here are a few poems and images to help us stay focused.

Good Friday
Christina Rossetti

Am I a stone, and not a sheep,
That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross,
To number drop by drop Thy blood’s slow loss,
And yet not weep?

Not so those women loved
Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;
Not so fallen Peter weeping bitterly;
Not so the thief was moved;

Not so the Sun and Moon
Which hid their faces in a starless sky,
A horror of great darkness at broad noon –
I, only I.

Yet give not o’er,
But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;
Greater than Moses, turn and look once more
And smite a rock.

John Singer Sargent, 1903, Boston Public Library

Good Friday
George Herbert

Oh my chief good,
How shall I measure out thy blood?
How shall I count what thee befell,
And each grief tell?

Shall I thy woes
Number according to thy foes?
Or, since one star show’d thy first breath,
Shall all thy death?

Or shall each leaf,
Which falls in Autumn, score a grief?
Or cannot leaves, but fruit, be sign,
Of the true vine?

Then let each hour
Of my whole life one grief devour;
That thy distress through all may run,
And be my sun.

Or rather let
My several sins their sorrows get;
That, as each beast his cure doth know,
Each sin may so.

Since blood is fittest, Lord, to write
Thy sorrows in, and bloody fight;
My heart hath store; write there, where in
One box doth lie both ink and sin:

That when Sin spies so many foes,
Thy whips, thy nails, thy wounds, thy woes,
All come to lodge there, Sin may say,
No room for me, and fly away.

Sin being gone, O fill the place,
And keep possession with thy grace;
Lest sin take courage and return,
And all the writings blot or burn.

The Crucifixion, from the Life of Our Lord, published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, London, 1880

So whatever you do today, keep in mind that it is Good Friday.

The Robe (1953)

But far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. (Galatians 6:14)

*Charles Wesley

3 Comments

March 30, 2017

Did they know?

by chuckofish

Last week there was a great Q&A interview with Bob Dylan on his website. He was asked which of his songs he thought did not get the attention it deserved. He answered “In the Garden”. Here it is:

When they came for Him in the garden, did they know?
When they came for Him in the garden, did they know?
Did they know He was the Son of God, did they know that He was Lord?
Did they hear when He told Peter, “Peter, put up your sword”?
When they came for Him in the garden, did they know?
When they came for Him in the garden, did they know?

When He spoke to them in the city, did they hear?
When He spoke to them in the city, did they hear?
Nicodemus came at night so he wouldn’t be seen by men
Saying, “Master, tell me why a man must be born again”
When He spoke to them in the city, did they hear?
When He spoke to them in the city, did they hear?

When He healed the blind and crippled, did they see?
When He healed the blind and crippled, did they see?
When He said, “Pick up your bed and walk, why must you criticize?
Same thing My Father do, I can do likewise”
When He healed the blind and crippled, did they see?
When He healed the blind and crippled, did they see?

Did they speak out against Him, did they dare?
Did they speak out against Him, did they dare?
The multitude wanted to make Him king, put a crown upon His head
Why did He slip away to a quiet place instead?
Did they speak out against Him, did they dare?
Did they speak out against Him, did they dare?

When He rose from the dead, did they believe?
When He rose from the dead, did they believe?
He said, “All power is given to Me in heaven and on earth”
Did they know right then and there what the power was worth?
When He rose from the dead, did they believe?
When He rose from the dead, did they believe?

Very appropriate for Lent, don’t you think? God bless Bob Dylan forever and ever amen.

3 Comments

March 29, 2017

You’ll never walk alone

by chuckofish

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Well, we have a few weeks to go in Lent and I’m afraid I have (per usual) been distracted by many things. Mea culpa.

“If you could do it, I suppose, it would be a good idea to live your life in a straight line – starting, say, in the Dark Wood of Error, and proceeding by logical steps through Hell and Purgatory and into Heaven. Or you could take the King’s Highway past the appropriately named dangers, toils, and snares, and finally cross the River of Death and enter the Celestial City. But that is not the way I have done it, so far. I am a pilgrim, but my pilgrimage has been wandering and unmarked. Often what has looked like a straight line to me has been a circling or a doubling back. I have been in the Dark Wood of Error any number of times. I have known something of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, but not always in that order. The names of many snares and dangers have been made known to me, but I have seen them only in looking back. Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led – make of that what you will.”
―Wendell Berry, Jaybar Crow

Indeed, sometimes I do feel like an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. But then…

“I tramp the perpetual journey
My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the
woods,
No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,
I have no chair, no philosophy,
I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange,
But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
My left hand hooking you round the waist,
My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public
road.

Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself.

It is not far, it is within reach,
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know,
Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land.

Shoulder your duds dear son, and I will mine, and let us hasten
forth,
Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go.

If you tire, give me both burdens, and rest the chuff of your hand
on my hip,
And in due time you shall repay the same service to me,
For after we start we never lie by again.

This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look’d at the crowded
heaven,
And I said to my spirit When we become the enfolders of those orbs,
and the pleasure and knowledge of every thing in them, shall we
be fill’d and satisfied then?
And my spirit said No, we but level that lift to pass and continue
beyond.

You are also asking me questions and I hear you,
I answer that I cannot answer, you must find out for yourself.

Sit a while dear son,
Here are biscuits to eat and here is milk to drink,
But as soon as you sleep and renew yourself in sweet clothes, I kiss
you with a good-by kiss and open the gate for your egress
hence.

Long enough have you dream’d contemptible dreams,
Now I wash the gum from your eyes,
You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every
moment of your life.

Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore,
Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,
To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout,
and laughingly dash with your hair.”

…Walt Whitman reminds me about timidly holding a plank by the shore…

Discuss among yourselves.

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1 Comment

March 21, 2017

“Such rock-ribb’d hills our own New-England gave To mould her sons as rugged and as brave”*

by chuckofish

Did you know that today is World Poetry Day? Me neither.

“Poetry reaffirms our common humanity by revealing to us that individuals, everywhere in the world, share the same questions and feelings. Poetry is the mainstay of oral tradition and, over centuries, can communicate the innermost values of diverse cultures.”

Thanks, UNESCO, for reminding us all.

Of course, the world could not totally agree on when to hold Poetry Day. It is celebrated in October in the UK. Also, FYI, April is National Poetry Month in the U.S. and Canada.

So why don’t we all just agree that every day is poetry day! Here’s a good one for today (“Monadnock Through the Trees” by Edward Arlington Robinson):

Before there was in Egypt any sound
Of those who reared a more prodigious means
For the self-heavy sleep of kings and queens
Than hitherto had mocked the most renowned,—
Unvisioned here and waiting to be found,
Alone, amid remote and older scenes,
You loomed above ancestral evergreens
Before there were the first of us around.

And when the last of us, if we know how,
See farther from ourselves than we do now,
Assured with other sight than heretofore
That we have done our mortal best and worst,—
Your calm will be the same as when the first
Assyrians went howling south to war.

I like the image of old Monadnock as a pyramid. And the last two line are great, don’t you agree? Enjoy your Tuesday!

*H.P. Lovecraft wrote poetry too–who knew? Check out “To Templeton and Monadnock”. The painting of Monadnock is by Dave Dodge.

1 Comment

January 31, 2017

Last day in January

by chuckofish

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The splendor falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story:
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going!
O sweet and far from cliff and scar
The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying:
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O love, they die in yon rich sky,
They faint on hill or field or river:
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow for ever and for ever.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.

–from The Princess (Part 3) by Alfred Lord Tennyson

Read the whole thing here.

3 Comments

January 27, 2017

The powerful play goes on

by chuckofish

Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,

Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,

Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)

Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,

Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,

Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,

The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.

That you are here—that life exists and identity,

That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

When in doubt, folks, go back to Walt Whitman for a punch of optimism.

D’ailleurs, it is Friday and I am ready for the weekend. I have stuff to do per usual and the “Elegant Italian Dinner” to attend at church. This fundraiser for the youth mission trip is always a fun event, even if the menu never varies from the lasagna and bag salad of yesteryear. That is part of its charm I guess.

Weather-wise it is going to be a typical cold, gray flyover January weekend,

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but we’ll go see our two little rays of sunshine in the NICU unit.

They look so much bigger with their preemie clothes, don’t they?

I should also note that Sunday–January 29–is the birthday of our great-great uncle John Wesley Prowers (1838–1884), the Colorado cattleman.

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In honor of JWP, I think I will watch Lonesome Dove this weekend. JWP was a friend and business partner of Charles Goodnight, upon whom the character Captain Call (Tommy Lee Jones) is based. I meant to watch it a week or so ago in honor of Robert Duvall, but I could not find it, because, as it turned out, I had lent it to the boy! Life is complicated!

Other possibilities on the cattle drive theme would be Red River (1948) or The Cowboys (1972) or episodes from the old TV show Rawhide (1959–1965) starring a dreamy young Clint Eastwood.

So many choices. And, hello, here’s something I found while perusing the internet:

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The world is more than we know. Have a great weekend.

The painting is by Fairfield Porter, Broadway South of Union Square, oil on canvas 1974-1975

5 Comments

Category: Poetry

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