Poetry Friday: Wimbledon

I have been enjoying watching the World Cup this year. Usually I would be at home in Haiti and we don't have television, so I would likely not be watching. It has been a lot of fun to keep up on the games.

The only other sporting event besides the World Cup that I care about is Wimbledon, which I rarely get to watch. When I was at school in England we all followed it very closely and watching the men's final was always a huge deal to us. One year I got to go to Wimbledon myself.

If I enjoy a sporting event, you can be pretty sure it's not about the sports. With the World Cup, it's about the international competition; I also love how egalitarian the sport is. You don't need a lot of special equipment; poor children around the world play soccer with whatever they can find to kick. And this year, the World Cup is providing trauma therapy in Haiti.

With Wimbledon, similarly, it's not that I'm so into tennis, though I used to umpire some when I was in high school. I was never very good at it, and if the games had had any importance, I would have been vilified worse than a World Cup referee. It's about the memories I have from watching it with friends and from going there myself. It's about the tradition and the beautiful green courts and the strawberries and cream.

This year I haven't watched much of the coverage, but I was amused to read that for the first time ever, there is an official Poet in Residence for the tournament, Matt Harvey. You can follow his poems here, at the official Wimblewords site. I particularly enjoyed "Mrs. K. with Strawberries," which begins like this:

Mrs K with Strawberries

they're ordinary strawberries
it's ordinary cream
from a commonplace cow
nothing special - like me

and they're served as you'd hope
in a bowl, with a spoon
with a sprinkle of sugar
just like at home

and I'm eating them now
in the Wingfield Café
and Jeremy's here
with his clever new phone

and he's taking my picture just typical me
with my ordinary strawberries
and ordinary cream

Here's the rest of it.

Today's Poetry Friday roundup is at The Poem Farm.

This Brief Summer

"Come live with me and be my love
'Midst valleys, woods and fields
And we will all the pleasures prove
That this brief summer yields."

from "Red, Red Rose," sung by Garrison Keillor on the CD English Majors: A Comedy Collection for the Highly Literate

Our time in the States is winding down, and we have been enjoying so many summer pleasures, from beach days, to precious time with family and friends, to Shakespeare in the Park last night (Richard III, which my son proclaimed "awesome," the same adjective he used to describe The Karate Kid), to a riverboat ride today.

Usually there is a twinge of guilt in my summer pleasures, because I constantly compare what I am privileged to experience with the deprivation others must suffer. This year I have even more reason for comparison, as hundreds of thousands of people swelter under tents in Port-au-Prince, and yet somehow I haven't been feeling that way. I'm not sure why, entirely, except that perhaps it seems a waste of energy to feel guilty. Instead I am using my energy to enjoy each moment as much as I can. I am deeply grateful for the blessings God has given me, and also deeply conscious that they can all be gone in a second. So while I do think of those people in Haiti, pray for them, plan our return and think about what we can possibly do to help, I don't feel guilty, just incredibly thankful.

The Story from Haiti, part sixteen

This is a whole episode all about Haiti. Dick Gordon talks to Sandra Amilcar, who lives under a tarp with six other people, including her two children. She talks about how each day is about finding food for her family to eat. (She perceives the breastmilk she is forced to give her baby as inferior to the formula she isn't able to find.) She describes what her days are like.

Gordon also talks briefly to Roody Joseph, with whom he's spoken several times on previous episodes.

In the second segment he talks to Hilda Alcindor, the director of the nursing school in Leogane. (This town had some of the worst damage in the earthquake; some estimates say 90% of the buildings there were destroyed.) She calls what her students are suffering "concrete-phobia." They don't want to be inside under concrete because they fear it will collapse. They feel movement even when there is none. (There's also a brief clip of my friend Maggie Boyer talking about visiting the national nursing school in Port-au-Prince a few days after the earthquake - this is from an earlier show. It hurt me once again to hear the grief and despair in her voice. One hundred and nine nursing students died in that school.)

Here's my index of the Haiti-related episodes.

The Story from Haiti, part fifteen

In this episode from June 14th, Dick Gordon talks to Sandro Linden, who moved from New York to help out his family before the earthquake, and who now is living in a tent and selling whatever he can on the street. Gordon makes the point that most of the stories in the media now are about Americans going to Haiti and the work they are doing and their reactions. While those stories are of course valid and draw attention to Haiti (a good thing), it is important to keep listening to the voices of Haitians themselves and what they are going through. This is why I love The Story so much, because of their inclusion of many voices.

Here's my index to the Haiti-related stories from this radio show.

Joy is in Our Hearts

by Sara Groves

we were pressed on every side
full of fear and troubled thoughts
for good reason we carried heavy hearts

it is good to come together
in our friendship to remember
all the reasons hope is in our hearts

hallelujah hallelujah
Christ our joy and strength
hallelujah hallelujah
Christ our joy and strength

now with patience in our suffering
perseverance in our prayers
with good reason this hope is in our hearts

hallelujah hallelujah
Christ our joy and strength
hallelujah hallelujah
Christ our joy and strength

oh we saw the face of Angels
many good things well secured
for good reason this joy is in our hearts

hallelujah hallelujah
Christ our joy and strength
hallelujah hallelujah
Christ our joy and strength

hallelujah hallelujah
Christ our joy and strength
hallelujah hallelujah
Christ our joy and strength

for good reason joy is in our hearts

Wanting the Wisdom Without the Walk

Jon's Serious Wednesday post at Stuff Christians Like is especially good today.

Christian YA Fiction

This is an interesting article on the Christian version of YA fiction.

Getting Ready

Today I bought some books for my classroom, including some potential read-alouds, for the first time in months. I am starting to get excited about teaching again. For a long time, every time I have thought about my classroom or my work I have pushed the thought away. Now it seems to be close enough that it might actually happen.

One of my eighth graders sent me a message a couple of months ago saying that she really missed me, and adding that, to her great surprise, she missed my class, too. In her new school she didn't get to express herself in writing, the way she did in my Writer's Workshop classroom.

I am so looking forward to reading my students' writing again. Remind me of that, would you, when I start complaining about how much grading I have to do?

Memorial Service

This morning my family and I attended the worship service that always marks the end of the Reunion Weekend at the local university. This is where we attended, but this wasn't our reunion year - last year was. However, my husband had been asked to speak for a few minutes about Haiti. One of the traditions in this service is to honor those who have died since the last reunion. For the reunion classes, names and photos are shown of everyone who died in the past five years; for other classes, they only show those who died in the past twelve months.

This year I was more struck by this than I usually am. I saw two faces that I recognized, both of people younger than I am, and one of them had been one of my students. But I also kept thinking that our pictures could have been up there this year; we could so easily have died in the earthquake. And I also thought, Some day our pictures WILL be up there.

Every day is a gift; we know this well. But these days I am constantly aware of it. I am grateful for every moment of life and I want to live well in the moments that I have, to honor God and love the people around me.

I Have Finished the Race

This morning my daughter and I walked the local 5K. It's a run, but I walk almost every year. I missed it last year but blogged about it two years ago. It was fun to do it with my daughter - last time she was in it, I was pushing her in her stroller and she was two years old. That year she enjoyed it a lot more - as we came to the end she said, "That was easy!" This time she complained most of the way and kept announcing her imminent death. She finished, though!

Once again, the T-shirt this year was made in Haiti. I'm praying for people in Haiti whose race is so much harder than mine and who are running it with discipline and courage.

I Love to Tell the Story

On Thursday I got to spend some time with a dear friend who lost his wife in the earthquake in Haiti. It was wonderful and terrible to talk to him. One of the things J. said was that while he was under the rubble of the building, waiting to be rescued, not knowing if he ever would be, there were two songs that kept coming to his mind. One was "I Love to Tell the Story." (Here's a link to the lyrics; the link plays the music as well.)

In the evening, we attended a camp meeting service. We sang a hymn, and it was "I Love to Tell the Story." I couldn't even sing most of it.

These days when I talk to people I haven't seen in a while, the story I am telling is about the earthquake. Everyone wants to know where we were, and how it was. As those around me sang, I thought about that. Am I telling the right story?

Yes, I think I am. Because as J. and I told and retold our stories to each other - the parts we love to tell and the parts that make us cry - we were telling the story in the hymn. It is "the story of unseen things above,/ Of Jesus and His glory, of Jesus and His love." Even for J. it is, even though he lost the love of his life.

We talked about how we don't understand, about how it is all too confusing to fit into our theology. But about how we know that no matter how terrible it is, that God will bring good from it, and is bringing good from it.

Here on my blog, I have told and retold the story of what happened to us, and I don't want my story to be that I was in an earthquake and that it ruined my life. That's not a story I love to tell. But through all the wretchedness and misery that we've already seen and that we will see in the future, the story is that Jesus has met us, and loved us through His people, and that He will keep walking with us as the story continues.

P.S. I met a reader at the service, too! She said, "Are you the Ruth from Haiti that has a blog? I read your blog!" Hi, Hope! Thanks for reading!

Poetry Friday: Going Back

In some of our travels this summer, we went past a town where my husband lived for a year as a child. We got off the highway and drove through the town until he located the house, which apparently had changed little in the nearly forty years since he lived there. We drove by his school, which is now an apartment complex for senior citizens. We went by his uncle's house, where, on the day when his little brother was born, my husband was passed through the window because in all the confusion, nobody had the key. My husband (or rather, the small boy who became my husband many years later) unlocked the door and let everyone in, and saved the Thanksgiving turkey.

Such memories! And all of this made me think of the following Gregory Djanikian poem, "Going Back." (I love Djanikian's work and have posted a couple of his poems before here and here.)

Going Back

by Gregory Djanikian


We have been cruising, half a block
at a time, my wife, my two children,
all morning, and I have been pointing out
unhurriedly and with some feeling
places of consequence, sacred places,
backyards, lush fields, garages, alleyways.
“There,” I say, “by this big cottonwood,
That’s where I dropped the fly ball, 1959.”
“And in 1961,” I say, “at this very corner,
Barry Sapolsky tripped me up with his gym bag.”
My son has fallen asleep, my daughter
has been nodding “yes” indiscriminately
for the last half hour, and my wife
has the frozen, wide-eyed look of the undead.
“Maybe lunch,” I say, though I’m making now
my fourth approach to Curtin Jr. High School,
yellow-bricked, large-windowed, gothic,
where Frank Marone preyed on our terror once
and Janice Lehman walked in beauty.
“Salute, everyone,” I say, “salute,”
bringing my hand up to my brow as we pass
the gilded entrance, “This is where things
of importance happened,” and I am pulling out
from under the car seat a photo album
of old school pictures, “Page 8,” I say,
“Fred Decker, John Carlson by the bike rack,
Mr. Burkett … ,” and driving on, following
the invisible map before my eyes.
Now we are drifting toward my boyhood house
and I am showing my wife trellised porches,
bike routes, more than she’d care to see;
“Why this longing?” she says, “What about now,
the kids, our lives together, lunch, me?”

Here's the whole thing.

And here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Pictures of Egypt

My son came home from school on the last day and said, "What I don't understand is why I really want to go back to Haiti but I also don't want to leave my friends. I mean, when I first came here I thought I would hate it here. And I do, but..." and he teared up.

The whole time we were here, he resisted feeling at home because it seemed he felt that liking being here would be somehow disloyal to his home in Haiti. And now that we are getting ready to go back, we are learning once again that there is always somewhere to miss; there are always people to miss. Life is a continual series of goodbyes.

I can't decide how appropriate this Sara Groves song is to our situation. We're not going from slavery to freedom, just from one place of uncertainty to another one. And where is Egypt? The way Haiti used to be? Our temporary home here in the US? Or just the past...our strong desire to be somewhere comfortable, where everything is figured out, instead of stepping out into something new and strange, where we have to trust God to lead us?

Today in Haiti

A friend posted this on Facebook. Reposted here with permission.

Paul and I went around Callebasse this morning documenting the homes that have been built and recording the GPS coordinates. We only were able to do a few homes, as we took time to hear stories and see the needs of others who lost their homes. The needs and stories are heart-wrenching. It was very hard to hear a mother share about losing her only child when their home caved in and to embrace her as she cried. As she took out a small cellphone box, she removed some photos of her precious child and sobbed. We prayed with her and we went on down the mountain. When we came back by her home, she was waiting for us with a gift of lemon grass and some peppers. In the midst of such sorrow, she wanted us to have this gift. I just wanted to sit down and cry. My heart is heavy for the people here. We walked the whole way home in the rain with a few others carrying two pumpkins and some leeks. We didn't really have to say much...humbled.

Leaving the Beach

It's the end of a glorious beach vacation, a gift from one of our earthquake refugees. I told a little bit of their story here. Soon after we got to the States, J. started mentioning the beach house and telling us we would be welcome to spend a week or so there in the summer. Back then it was winter and it felt to me as though summer would never come, but it did, and here we are.

Of course, we didn't realize that the house would look as though Martha Stewart had decorated it, or be filled with everything we could possibly need, including an endless supply of thick white towels, and another endless supply of beach towels. And, especially enjoyed by someone from Haiti, a laundry room with washer and dryer (I wrote here about how much fun it is to do laundry in the USA). We were a block from the beach, and we went there every day, but we also spent a lot of time watching World Cup action and playing games and reading and being a family. One night we went to see some live theater and came back after midnight.

It was wonderful.

Now we're cleaning up and getting ready to go. I am washing sheets and towels, sweeping up sand, packing. Each of these small domestic tasks, such as remaking a bed with sheets fresh from the dryer, cleaning a toilet, putting away bathing suits, is bittersweet for more than one reason. Yesterday was the solstice, so the days are getting shorter already, even as summer, according to the calendar, has just begun. Our time here is over. But also, each job inevitably makes me think of tent cities, of mothers making homes with what they have, which isn't much. When do they get their break from the harshness of their lives?

Reading Update

Book #33 was The Wordy Shipmates, by Sarah Vowell. The author is a frequent contributor to the radio show This American Life, and the book has something of the style of that show - irreverent, discursive. Improbably, Vowell has written a history of the Puritans in North America, and it's highly entertaining. I liked this parenthetical remark, for obvious reasons:

(After an earthquake shook Boston in 1755 and prompted the usual religious flipouts about the wrath of God, Professor Winthrop delivered an influential lecture at Harvard proposing the earthquake might have been caused by heat and pressure below the surface of the earth. With God's help, of course, but God comes off as an engineer instead of a hothead vigilante.)

Book #34 was The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, by William Goldman. It's almost exactly like the movie, for which Goldman wrote the screenplay. Lots of fun.

Meg Wolitzer's book The Ten-Year Nap was #35. I liked this book and found the characters convincing. Four main characters are stay-at-home mothers in post-9/11 New York City (though one has recently moved to the suburbs), with varying attitudes towards what that means for them and for the way they had imagined their lives. A blurb from Salon on the back of the book begins, "Everyone has an opinion about stay-at-home mothers." Really? How annoying of "everyone." Meg Wolitzer at least seems to understand that there is not one monolithic type of stay-at-home mother to have an opinion about. When it comes to wondering in middle age if everything you had hoped to become was just a great big illusion, I think stay-at-home mothers don't have a monopoly, and this book may be more about being a human being than being a woman taking care of children. But human beings are wonderfully various, and so are the characters here.

I don't know quite what to think about book #36, The Great Lover, by Jill Dawson. It's a historical novel about the poet Rupert Brooke, who died in World War I. When I was fifteen or so, a teacher handed out a mimeographed copy of Brooke's poem "The Great Lover." (Here's the poem.) I remember the giggles as we read the title, and I remember the teacher making a comment about how she knew it sounded like Cassanova. Predictably, I loved the poem, which turned out to be about all the things that Brooke loved, including "White plates and cups, clean-gleaming,/Ringed with blue lines; and feathery fairy dust;/ Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light, the strong crust/Of friendly bread, and many-tasting food." Later, another teacher gave me a copy of a collection of Brooke's poetry, inscribed with these words from one of his poems: "Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given." In college, I wrote a paper about one of his sonnets, and for the first time, read some criticism about his work. One author called him a "perpetual adolescent," which seems a bit unfair since he died at the age of 28, but which made me reread his poems a bit less rapturously and fall a little bit out of love with him. Well! Reading this book would have accomplished the same feat, since Brooke comes across as a spoiled, selfish, obnoxiously entitled young man, cursed by beauty that makes everyone - male and female - chase after him. Dawson portrays Brooke as an amazingly alive character, using lines from his own letters and notebooks and others' writing about him. We witness him trying to choose among his many admirers, fretting over the messy details of birth control, and musing, after writing to a girlfriend, "Sometimes I write well. Better than almost anybody in England!" We read a painfully detailed account of an encounter with another young man (one of the parts of the book quoted directly from his own writing). Fortunately my literary crush had been over for many years already, but I still love many of his poems and I wonder how he would have turned out if he had survived the war. And I do think this book is a remarkable achievement, making a far-off adolescence feel urgent and real.

This post is linked to the June 19th Saturday Review of Books.

Poetry Friday: Beach Glass

This poem is appropriate for several reasons. We're at the beach, spending some time reconnecting as a family - precious time. All of us Americans are being reminded right now of the value and fragility of beaches and the ocean, and of the temporary nature of all that we love. And every day we, like the ocean, turn the same things over and over, over and over, and contemplate how to make a life out of what we have been given, which is enough - of course it is, and how blessed we are - but which is also, sometimes, so painful that all we can do is look for what is beautiful, and pick that up.



Beach Glass

by Amy Clampitt

While you walk the water’s edge,
turning over concepts
I can’t envision, the honking buoy
serves notice that at any time
the wind may change
the reef-bell clatters
its treble monotone, deaf as Cassandra
to any note but warning. The ocean,
cumbered by no business more urgent
than keeping open old accounts
that never balanced,
goes on shuffling its millenniums
of quartz, granite, and basalt.
It behaves
toward the permutations of novelty
driftwood and shipwreck, last night’s
beer cans, spilt oil, the coughed-up
residue of plastic—with random
impartiality, playing catch or tag
or touch-last like a terrier,
turning the same thing over and over,
over and over. For the ocean, nothing
is beneath consideration.

Here's the rest.

And here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Something to Get Excited About

World Cup fever in Haiti.

Talking About It

This morning my husband spoke about the earthquake in the church we attended. Although he had shared briefly in a couple of services we've attended together, this was the first time I had heard him make a full presentation on the subject. While I didn't learn anything really new about his perceptions, it was very emotional for me to listen. I cried profusely and was glad for the (southern?) custom of having boxes of tissues available in church pews.

In the evening, I gave my presentation. I have done the talk many times now but this was the first time my husband had heard it (though he had read the text). I noticed that his eyes weren't dry either.

We asked the kids what they thought afterwards, and our son said that he didn't mind listening to it, since the earthquake was all over now.

Well, maybe it's not completely over yet. Not for us, and not for Haiti.

Five Months

Five months after the earthquake, this article says the world has forgotten Haiti.

What is there to say about Haiti? We're frustrated with how bad the conditions still are. And yet, life goes on. In the camps people try to forget by watching the World Cup. And some remember Joe Gaetjens, the Haitian who actually scored that goal we've been hearing so much about today, the one 60 years ago that allowed the US to beat England. (Altidore, also of Haitian descent, almost scored today - wouldn't that have been great?)