Poetry Friday: Happiness

Again this week I'm sharing a poem I got in one of the two daily poem emails I'm receiving for National Poetry Month. (You can find information on signing up for these in this post.) Tuesday's poem from Knopf was called "Happiness Writes White." The poet, Edward Hirsch, explained, “The French novelist Henry de Montherlant coined the maxim, ‘Happiness writes white,’ which suggests that happiness is a blank that can’t be described. It simply doesn’t show up on the page." This thought reminded me of Tolstoy's famous line: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Tolstoy finds unhappiness more individualized and therefore more interesting; Hirsch wanted to show that happiness can be written about.


Happiness Writes White
Edward Hirsch

I am a piece of chalk
scrawling words on an empty blackboard.

I am a banner of smoke
that crosses the blue air and doesn’t dissolve.

I don’t believe that only sorrow
and misery can be written.

You can see the rest of the poem here.

I thought a lot about this idea of happiness being hard to write about. Is it boring? Is it banal? Do I write more when I am miserable? My level of blogging lately would suggest that I do, since as life becomes more normal, I write less. I am writing a lot off-blog, though: more than I have in years. I think I tend to produce more when I am emotional, whether the emotions are positive or negative. I do sometimes choose topics that make me happy, and recently I did the following poem about a gift from a student.

Mangoes

My student brought me
a plastic grocery bag of mangoes
from the tree in his yard.
They were green and smooth
and curvaceous.
He told me not to keep them in the bag
because they don't like to be hot.
I took them home
and put them in a wooden bowl
and watched them disappear
as we cut them up into orange chunks
and ate them for breakfast.

Teachers everywhere plan and grade
and hold their audience
with not much more than their voices
and get the occasional mealy apple
deposited on their desks.
I get a bowl full of the tropics,
delicate (keep them cool),
beautiful (look at them nestled there,
and see if you can help touching them),
fragrant (sniff),
melt-in-your-mouth delicious
(want some?).
Life sure isn't fair sometimes.

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Thursday

When I start to write my Poetry Friday post on Thursday night and realize I haven't posted since the previous Poetry Friday, I wonder where the week went. I was going to write about the fifteen month anniversary of the earthquake on Tuesday, but there were too many electrical problems for me to have the time to do that. For the second week in a row, we had several days without city power, and our generator wasn't working. The battery backup we have didn't last long with no charging at all. Now the power seems to be fixed, but this evening when it came on, it stayed on only minutes before flashing off again.

Last week we went to the dentist, putting us in a part of town we rarely visit. I saw houses which have not apparently been touched at all since the earthquake. We saw tent cities which are becoming more and more permanent; in some cases, the tents have been reinforced with corrugated iron or plywood.

A year ago today I wrote this post, about how hard it was to be where I was, not constantly focused on Haiti.

Poetry Friday: The House Was Quiet on a Winter Afternoon

I have been enjoying getting two daily poems in my email (for information on how to sign up, you can see my Poetry Friday post for last week). I liked this one from Monday:

The House was Quiet on a Winter Afternoon
by David Young

Someone was reading in the back,
two travelers had gone somewhere,
maybe to Chicago,

a boy was out walking, muffled up,
alert on the frozen creek,
a sauce was simmering on the stove.

Birds outside at the feeder
threw themselves softly
from branch to branch.

Suddenly I did not want my life
to be any different.
I was where I needed to be.

You can read the rest of it here.

I love those moments when we know we are right where we need to be, and life feels just right. As you'll see later in the poem, the persona has not won this sense lightly.

Today's Poetry Friday roundup is here.

Teaching about Earthquakes

Not that I exactly want to do this, but the Miss Rumphius Effect has a great post on resources for teaching about earthquakes here.

(Bonus - J. Patrick Lewis left a poem in the comments!)

National Poetry Month

As anybody who reads this blog regularly knows, I read and love poetry year-round, but I do really enjoy National Poetry Month, and the extra attention that poetry gets. I put the NPM poster up in my classroom already, and gave my extra copy to a high school English teacher. I don't love it as much as I did the one two years ago (you can see that here). Last year's is here. You can see (and download) this year's and ones from previous years here.

Sunday Snippets

On Saturday we had lunch with a friend who lost his wife in the earthquake. In some ways he is doing amazingly well and in other ways he is struggling. That's probably a good description of all of us, nearly fifteen months after January 12th, 2010.

We had some tax people at school a couple of weeks ago doing an audit. They were offered a quiet, comfortable conference room, but instead chose a smaller, less comfortable, more cluttered space because it had better access to an exit. Hyper-vigilance is the new normal, especially when you're in a place you don't know well.

We're looking at Japan, or at least, those of us who can bear to. NPR produced this photo feature showing similarities between our earthquake and theirs.

Theme Day - Edges

Today's Daily Photo Blog theme was Edges. Here you can see thumbnails of the participants' photos.

Poetry Friday: April

I am writing this post on the Monday before it will be published, since I'm home sick today and have the time. (Oh, I do hope I'll be back in school by tomorrow, let alone by the time this appears.) While lying in bed I have been reading Emily Dickinson poems, and this one seemed particularly appropriate. In spite of earthquakes and tsunamis and radioactive contamination, the cherry blossoms are coming out, writes a Facebook friend in Tokyo, and this poem celebrates that reality.


April

Emily Dickinson

An altered look about the hills;
A Tyrian light the village fills;
A wider sunrise in the dawn;
A deeper twilight on the lawn;
A print of a vermilion foot;
A purple finger on the slope;
A flippant fly upon the pane;
A spider at his trade again;
An added strut in chanticleer;
An axe shrill singing in the woods;
Fern-odors on untravelled roads, -
All this, and more I cannot tell,
A furtive look you know as well,
And Nicodemus' mystery
Receives its annual reply.


Nicodemus' mystery? Nicodemus was the teacher who came to Jesus in the night and asked for an explanation of the concept of being "born again." "How can a man be born again when he is old?" he asked. Springtime every year really is a picture of how that can be, how God can bring new life out of deadness.

The video below, also about April, tells you how you can sign up for a daily poem this month from Knopf. Of course, you can always sign up for the Poets.org Poem-A-Day too, here.



Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

My Daughter, the Writer

Today I finished my fourteenth book of the year, but I can't link you to it because it isn't published (yet). I read the book my 13-year-old daughter wrote for Nanowrimo last year. I had already read an early version, but the book is now completely finished, edited, and ready to be enjoyed. Nanowrimo, short for National Novel Writing Month, is a yearly event in which writers challenge themselves to write a whole novel in the month of November. (Here's a FAQ with more details.) My daughter wrote 50,000 words in a month, and let me tell you, it took a lot of perseverance for her to do that. I was very proud of her for completing the challenge she had set herself, and I'm even more proud that she continued past the excitement of Nanowrimo and did the hard work of revision and completing the novel. And yes, I know I'm her mother, but I'm also a writing teacher and a reader, and I think the world is going to be hearing from this author in the future.

My Classroom

A year ago today, I posted this, which includes an excerpt from an email from a friend who was in Haiti and had been in my classroom. I missed my classroom so much while I was away from it.

I'm away from it again today, home in bed with something unpleasant and intestinal. I am lying here missing my classroom and my kids and wondering how the sub is managing.

A Year Ago Today

A year ago today I posted this about daffodils. Spring was coming where I was, in my place of exile from home. It made me smile. Other things made me smile on March 26th last year, too; I spent the day with family and friends, and it was the first day after the earthquake that I didn't cry at all. I thought about other things, talked about other things, enjoyed being with people I love, and started to feel that life could be good again, that I could be happy again.

I thank God for healing, for renewal, for springtime. Life is so hard, much harder than we are led to expect, those of us who have basically happy childhoods, where we are loved and cared for. And yet, after the worst setbacks, provided we survive, so often we can get up and keep going. And eventually, our "new normal" (people kept using this phrase with me this time last year) can be better than what we had before.

Yesterday we had parent conferences at school, and I spoke to several people specifically about the earthquake and how they and their children are coping. It's not over; we are still recovering, on a personal level and certainly as a country. We still cry about it; we still grieve. In many ways, we will never be the same. And yet, we can and do find healing.

I look at the news from Japan, and I have to look away. It is too much. A parent I talked to yesterday said the same. She said she feels guilty about not reading all about it, as though she is hiding from reality. It's just too much, more than she can bear. Another parent said that he can't look away; he is obsessed with every story and every article. He reads it all and suffers for what the Japanese people are going through. Whichever way we are, the situation in Japan brings back in full force the memories that have still never completely gone away. But we can also say to the people in Japan, Hang on. It won't always be as awful as it is now. There really will be a new life for you on the other side.

God is good; He can bring good out of the worst situations. I thank Him for the way He does that in my life. I thank Him for this day, a year ago, and for this day, today.

I Don't Know Why

On Thursday I was teaching a lesson to my seventh graders, and a fly was buzzing around. I was swatting vaguely but not paying too much attention to it. Suddenly, it wasn't there any more, because it had flown down my throat. I sputtered a little bit, coughed a few times, and then went on teaching.

Mostly I felt proud of myself, though slightly grossed out by thoughts of where that fly might have been. I swallowed a fly and kept right on with my lesson! How professional of me! The kids didn't even know it had happened!

Of course my colleagues and my Facebook friends made every possible joke, from calling me an old lady (thanks, folks) to suggesting that perhaps I would die, to prescribing all kinds of chasers for the fly ("You should swallow a spider next," wrote my brother. "It's the right thing to do."), though someone said I really shouldn't go as far as a horse.

I don't know why I swallowed a fly. I seem to be surviving the experience, though.

Poetry Friday: Sutra

I got this poem in my Poem-A-Day email from Poets.org last Friday. (You can sign up to receive that here.) I had to look up the word sutra: a sutra is "a distinct type of literary composition, based on short aphoristic statements, generally using various technical terms". Sutras are associated with Hinduism but this one seems to me perfectly compatible with my own faith, Christianity. Marilyn Krysl's words speak to me of a life lived too cautiously, out of fear instead of faith. I don't want to "hoard my days;" I want to live each one abundantly, as Jesus taught. In fact, this poem reminded me of a quote from Brennan Manning: "But Jesus says: if you will let the real God come into your life, then you will experience a huge freedom from the anxiety over survival; none of the usual concerns over livelihood will furrow your brow or weigh you down....Open yourself to my God whose passionate love is unreasonable and trust Him wholeheartedly."

Sutra
by Marilyn Krysl

Looking back now, I see
I was dispassionate too often,
dismissing the robin as common,
and now can't remember what
robin song sounds like. I hoarded
my days, as though to keep them
safe from depletion, and meantime
I kept busy being lonely. This
took up the bulk of my time,
and I did not speak to strangers
because they might be boring,
and there were those I feared

would ask me for money. I was
clumsy around the confident,
and the well bred, standing on
their parapets, enthralled me,
but when one approached, I
fled. I also feared the street's
down and outs, anxious lest
they look at me closely, and
afraid I would see their misery.

You can read the rest of the poem here.

And here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Reading Update

Book #10 of this year was Thoreau's Walking, a free download on my Kindle. While it had some interesting parts to it, and some nice aphoristic writing, I mostly found Thoreau a little irritating in the way he looked down on those who didn't have the opportunity he had of frittering his time away because they were obliged to earn a living. He spent four hours a day walking, and sniffs,

"When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and the shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them - as if the legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon - I think that they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago."

To be honest, I never really got over finding out that Thoreau, such an apologist for solitude, always took his laundry home to his mother.

Books #11 through #13 were a trilogy about Alexander the Great by Mary Renault, entitled Fire From Heaven, The Persian Boy and Funeral Games. This trilogy was a gift from my high school Latin teacher and I know I read it when I was 16, but I can't remember what I made of it then. Alexander emerges as a vivid, unforgettable character. The second book is told from the point of view of Bagoas, a eunuch Alexander inherited from Darius' court. The third book all happens after Alexander's death, as everyone fights for the right to be the successor to this charismatic leader who proves irreplaceable.

This post is linked to today's Saturday Review of Books.

Poetry Friday: About Suffering

I posted this poem back in February 2008, excited that I had just learned the word "ekphrastic." An ekphrastic poem is one that is about a work of art, as this one is. It refers to Breughel's painting "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," which you can see above.

I chose to post this poem again this week because it so perfectly describes what this week has been like, teaching and doing my regular things while all the time grieving over the situation in Japan. Suffering always happens in the middle of everything else, papers to grade and kids to feed and "somewhere to get to." If only we could just stop everything and grieve, but then I kind of did that last year when I was evacuated from Haiti after our own earthquake, and that was really no fun either. I don't know the answer, but I know that it's hard to find the balance between living and suffering. The Old Masters knew that too.


Musée des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Here's today's roundup.

Fourteen Months Later, Japan

Today marks fourteen months since the earthquake in Haiti. And for the second morning, I am immersed in coverage of the earthquake in Japan. This week's Tohoku Quake was seven hundred times more powerful than the one we experienced here in Haiti. I look at the photos and feel completely overwhelmed by the destruction and by the fact that these huge forces are so far beyond human control.

My husband grew up in Japan, and these images are, for him, images of home. In a sense he is experiencing some of what I went through last year when I was evacuated to the United States and was observing from a distance, that helpless feeling that he didn't go through during our disaster because he was actively involved from the first moment in helping to make things better.

Everything I have been thinking about for the past fourteen months feels even truer to me now: life is precious, people are precious, it could all be gone in an instant.

Poetry Friday: Reading and Writing Need My Help!

Last week I got a breathless email from the NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English). It was headed "Reading and Writing Need Your Help Now." It detailed how funding is being cut for the National Writing Project and for Striving Readers, and asked for "an outpouring of outrage" from NCTE members, of which I am one.

I don't want to mock this email. I think spending government money on literacy is an excellent thing to do. If we had literate citizens, we could have more thoughtful dialogue and that would have to be a good thing. And there's a very real sense in which Reading and Writing have my help, since I spend my days doing my dead-level best to teach my middle school students both. (Just to show my good faith, here's a link to the NCTE website where you can find out what you can do to help restore funding for these programs.)

This week, I got a robo-call from Michel Martelly, who is running for President of Haiti (where I live). Introducing himself as Tet Kale (shaved head), and addressing me as ti-cheri (little darling), Sweet Mickey (his stage name in his highly successful musical career) informed me that education in Haiti will be free if he is elected. Hmm. I believe that free education is one of the essential cornerstones of a developing democracy, but I have a hard time imagining that Martelly can bring this about. Reading and Writing Need Help in this country of below 50% literacy. So many children never even get to go to school at all.

So all of that preamble to say that I get it, I know that education needs to be funded, I know that many children can't read. But I was just fascinated by the title of the note, and I kept it in my in-box all week, looking at it every day. Reading and Writing Need My Help Now.

Finally I wrote this, using all true examples from my own classroom:



Reading and Writing Need My Help

Reading and Writing Need My Help Now!
Funding is going to be cut!
Literacy hangs in the balance!

A fourteen year old boy writes a Valentine poem.
He says she smells good and he loves her.

A girl grabs eagerly at a note passed by her neighbor.
What will it say?

"If I couldn't text you," writes a girl in the back row
In a poem to her boyfriend,
"My life would be empty."

"Tell my daughter to stop reading so much," a woman begs.
"She hardly sleeps!"

Two boys fight over an Alex Rider book.

There's a moment during Silent Reading
When I hardly want to breathe
As twenty-five brains focus on twenty-five different books
And turn the page to see
What happens next.

Reading and Writing don't need my help.

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Lenten Thoughts

This time last year, on Ash Wednesday, I remembered that I am dust.

This year I am still remembering, but I am also getting back to normal. I am dealing with the ordinary, everyday, beautiful frustrations of work and family and life. Sometimes I feel guilty for feeling any kind of negative emotions about my obligations, when I think about how desperately I missed my ordinary life when I was away from it.

It was in this frame of mind that I read this article, which reports on a new study that found that parents exaggerate how rewarding parenthood is. Apparently many studies show that non-parents are happier by most measures. And yet, parents talk about parenting as the best thing in their lives. In this study, parents who were given entirely negative information about parenting to read reported higher levels of satisfaction with their lives than those who read positive information. John Cloud writes:

"Why? For the same reason you keep spending money to fix up an old car when it just doesn't work — or keep investing in the same company when it's failing. Humans throw good money after bad all the time. When we have invested a lot in a choice that turns out to be bad, we're really inept at admitting that it didn't make rational sense. Other research has shown that we romanticize our relationships with spouses and partners significantly more when we believe we have sacrificed for them. We like TVs that we've spent a lot to buy even though our satisfaction is no lower when we watch a cheaper television set."

In other words, parents really are not as happy as non-parents, but they can't accept this; they have to pretend they are happy so that they won't feel bad about the foolish choice they have made to have children.

Cloud makes it quite obvious in the article how he feels about this, as does the title of the article: "Does Having Kids Make Parents Delusional?" But could it simply be that God has wired us to be happy when we are sacrificing ourselves? Since we are dust, and since the only lasting importance is found in God and in the human soul, is it possible that investing in our children, and our families, and our friends, and people in general, is the best way to be happy long-term? Even if in the process there is pain and irritation sometimes? Cloud says: "All parents know that having kids is a blessing — except when it's a nightmare of screaming fits, diapers, runny noses, wars over bedtimes and homework and clothes." Yes, I had a war with my son last night over bedtime, but I don't believe I am fooling myself when I say that having kids is a blessing. My life would be quieter, and cleaner, and less complicated, if I had no contact with other people, my children included, but it would also be infinitely poorer.

I am dust. Everything I have could be gone in a moment. All that matters is God and human beings.

Carnival

I stayed home today and read and napped and generally had a wonderful day off. Since I can't give any first-hand reports on how Carnival went, here are some articles.

From the LA Times: "Carnival Returns to Haiti, With Some Darker Themes."

From Time Magazine: "Amid Year-Old Ruins, Haiti Resumes its Carnival Celebrations."

Carnival is Coming

Last year, Carnival happened exactly a month after the earthquake. Instead of the usual celebration, the government called for three days of prayer and fasting.

This year, Carnival is on again. Not everyone is happy about it.

Poetry Friday: Dizzy in Your Eyes

For today's Poetry Friday, I have a book review. Except...it feels funny calling it a book. I haven't actually held this book; instead, I downloaded it onto the Kindle which I got for Christmas. I have enjoyed reading on my Kindle much more than I thought I would. I've already read two complete books on it. But reading poetry on it is just not the same experience.

I have two books of poetry on my Kindle. The first is the complete works of Emily Dickinson. This was one of the first things I downloaded, and I even paid for it. And I was a little disappointed. I wouldn't have expected that the appearance of the page would matter much to me; it's all about the words, I would have said. But I find the layout of the book annoying. I don't like it that one line of a poem is on one page, and then I have to turn the page (this is an expression which will soon be gone, I guess, or just persist in the way we still say "dial a phone number") to see the rest of the poem. The great Emily's words are still fabulous, and I love having all of them at my fingertips, but I think I'd rather see them on an actual page.

I can't resist sharing this Emily Dickinson poem, by the way, which I just read while looking at the Kindle and composing the above paragraph:


We play at paste,
Till qualified for pearl,
Then drop the paste,
And deem ourself a fool.
The shapes, though, were similar,
And our new hands
Learned gem-tactics
Practising sands.


Sigh. Isn't it wonderful? But it did annoy me that the last line was on the top of the next page.

So, anyway. The second book of poetry which I downloaded for my Kindle was one which I had seen reviewed on someone's blog and put on my wish list. I'm always looking for poems that my students will love and relate to. I give them lots of classic works, but it's always fun to introduce them to something a little more accessible. So when I got a gift certificate for my birthday recently, I used part of it for Dizzy in Your Eyes: Poems about Love, by Pat Mora.

As I said, I haven't held the actual book in my hands, and perhaps in the book the form descriptions actually are on the page preceding the poem itself. But I doubt the last line of the first page of the preface is on a page by itself. These things are small annoyances but they do affect my pleasure in the poems, even if only slightly.

However, I did find pleasure in the poems. They are all about love, but many different kinds of love. We see the boy hedging his bets by courting three girls at the same time, with disastrous results. We listen in on the self-doubts of adolescents struggling to figure out how life works and how to love themselves. A girl writes to her father, remembering dancing with him at her cousin's wedding. Another watches her brother's best friend from afar and muses:

I watch Billy's hands
hold the basketball, and I imagine
my hand in his, my eyes
floating in his brown eyes.

No one has felt like this. Ever.


That poem captures some of what I love about teaching middle schoolers; it's such a privilege to get glimpses of the experiences they are having for the first time, when it really does feel as though nobody, ever, has felt the way you do.

Other poems in the book talk about the loss of a friend, misunderstandings, breakups. And Mora plays with forms: a sonnet, a sestina, haiku, and more. These will be fun to share with students.

Ultimately, the poems are about the words, and I enjoyed these. I'll probably swallow my petty annoyance and keep downloading poetry to my Kindle.

Others are posting poetry on today's roundup here, at The Small Nouns. Take a look!

Aftershocks

This morning the seventh graders were full of the news that there was an aftershock this morning. I can't find it on the USGS website, but apparently Haitian radio news reported it. I didn't feel it this time.

I did feel an aftershock yesterday afternoon, though. I had an interview with my college alumni magazine and had the opportunity to retell the story of the earthquake and what happened to my family in its wake. This is a story I have told a hundred times, at least, and I didn't anticipate how I would feel this time. I teared up a few times during the story - that's normal - but when the Skype conversation was over, I was sitting at my computer and glanced at the time. It was 4:51. The earthquake happened at 4:53. The words "earthquake time" came into my head and I started to cry, hard. The rest of the evening, I felt shaky and extra-emotional. (I thank God for the people He sent me to talk to.)

Aftershocks. When will they end? Will I feel them forever? I laugh at myself when I read what I wrote last year (Here's what I wrote a year ago yesterday.), and how I seem to be congratulating myself sometimes on how much better I'm doing. Almost fourteen months after the 12th of January, 2010, I am still fragile, still shaken. Still suffering aftershocks.

Theme Day - My Favorite Part of Town

It's the first of the month - theme day. Take a look at the favorite parts of town of the Daily Photo bloggers.

Alive

A year ago today I posted this for Poetry Friday, talking about how grateful I was to be alive.

Poetry Friday: A Quiet Life

In times of crisis, I appreciate the ordinary. So now, when my life isn't particularly in crisis, I am trying to appreciate the ordinary, too, instead of waiting until it is gone. This week as I read about the earthquake in New Zealand and hurt for those people, as I understood exactly what they were going through, I thought of how grateful I am for a quiet life. Baron Wormser's take on that concept is to focus on a properly boiled egg. (I posted this poem once before, in June 2008.)

For the people of Christchurch, I wish a properly boiled egg, and other features of ordinary life, soon.


A Quiet Life

by Baron Wormser

What a person desires in life
is a properly boiled egg.
This isn't as easy as it seems.
There must be gas and a stove,
the gas requires pipelines, mastodon drills,
banks that dispense the lozenge of capital.
There must be a pot, the product of mines
and furnaces and factories,
of dim early mornings and night-owl shifts,
of women in kerchiefs and men with
sweat-soaked hair.
Then water, the stuff of clouds and skies
and God knows what causes it to happen.
There seems always too much or too little
of it and more pipelines, meters, pumping
stations, towers, tanks.
And salt-a miracle of the first order,
the ace in any argument for God.
Only God could have imagined from
nothingness the pang of salt.
Political peace too. It should be quiet
when one eats an egg. No political hoodlums
knocking down doors, no lieutenants who are
ticked off at their scheming girlfriends and
take it out on you, no dictators
posing as tribunes.
It should be quiet, so quiet you can hear
the chicken, a creature usually mocked as a type
of fool, a cluck chained to the chore of her body.
Listen, she is there, pecking at a bit of grain
that came from nowhere.

Today's Poetry Friday roundup is here, at Read Write Believe.

A Year Ago Today

I wrote this post a year ago today, about aftershocks. I'm reading about the ones they are experiencing in New Zealand. The most recent aftershock I know about here in Haiti was January 31st, 2011. The metaphorical ones continue.

Reading Update

Books #7 and #8 of this year were Confusion and Casting Off, by Elizabeth Jane Howard. These are the third and fourth books of the Cazalet Chronicle, an enormously entertaining and engrossing series about the Cazalet family in the years before, during, and immediately after the second World War. Howard's great strength is her characters, whom the reader comes to know. I also enjoyed her attention to the details of the historical period.

Book #9 was a YA title, Sarah Dessen's Someone Like You. Dessen's books are very popular among my middle school girls. Her characters are believable and motivated by the things that really do motivate teenagers. This book deals with friendship, the appeal of "bad boys," and teen pregnancy. I found myself groaning at the birth scene - it just screamed "teen movie." However, I cheered for Halley's growing awareness that "someone like her" is worth much more than she thought.

This post is linked to today's Saturday Review of Books.

Poetry Friday: Rain

I didn't post a poem last week, but I'm back today with a poem about rain. It's been raining every night here in Haiti - way too early for the rainy season. Everyone keeps saying, "Wow, isn't it good that it didn't rain like this last year?" There are still many people living in tents and in less than adequate shelter, but nothing like the millions who were sleeping outdoors last February. In French they use the expression à la belle étoile - under the beautiful stars - to talk about sleeping outside. Sounds lovely, doesn't it? The reality is somewhat different. Here's what I posted on February 11th, 2010, the first time it rained after the earthquake.

Today's rain poem has the perfect attitude towards the rain.



Before the Rain

by Lianne Spidel


Minutes before the rain begins
I always waken, listening
to the world hold its breath,
as if a phone had rung once in a far
room or a door had creaked
in the darkness.

Perhaps the genes of some forebear
startle in me, some tribal warrior
keeping watch on a crag beside a loch,
miserable in the cold...

Here's the rest of it.

And here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Hello, Ordinary

A year ago today I wrote this post, called "Ordinary." I was longing for ordinary, for my daily life as I had known it before the earthquake. I missed my husband and my students, my home and my routines.

Today is a blessedly ordinary day. I ate breakfast at home with my family (we are out of propane, so I didn't get a cup of tea), came to work where I taught and graded and interacted with students and generally did my job, ate beans and rice sitting at a picnic table in our snack shop area. How beautiful all of that is!

Was your day ordinary today? Did you appreciate what a blessing ordinary really is?

Valentine's Day in Middle School

I have to admit, this is a day that I am often quite glad to see the end of. The massive amounts of sugar, the rose deliveries during class, the teddy bears which say "I love you": none of these things are conducive to great academic progress. Today as I was teaching eighth grade, there were serenades going on right outside my window during high school lunch. Eighth grade is a little more trying on this day than seventh, anyway; my observation is that for the seventh graders the holiday is still mostly about candy, whereas for the eighth graders, hormones have become a part of the festivities.

As often happens, Valentine's Day coincides with Teacher Appreciation Week this year, so we started the morning with a Teacher Appreciation Breakfast that was fabulous. After school I went to a Valentine's party. And in between there were several surprises which ensured that I had a great day.

Anniversary

Yesterday it was thirteen months since the earthquake. I didn't write about it, on purpose. It was the first time since that day in January 2010 that the 12th came around without me obsessing about it for a few days before and thinking about it instantly the moment I woke up on the day itself. I thought about it early in the morning, but it wasn't my first thought. Is this progress?

Thirteen months. Everyone I talk to says both that it seems more recent than that, and that it seems a very long time ago. I can hardly imagine a time before the earthquake. What kind of a person was I back then? How did I see the world?

Every time we drive to church we pass many signs for a school called the Life Goes On Institute. I don't know how good the school is, but I know that its name speaks truth: Life Goes On. It doesn't stop just because everything falls apart. Life has gone on for the past thirteen months. We took a strange road today and my husband said he just wanted to try it; the last time he had been down that road it was impassable because it was full of rubble and tents. Now there was some rubble, but no tents; those people have moved on. Other places in the city are still crammed with tents. For those people, too, still living thirteen months later in a way that might be fun for a weekend but not at all for month after month, life goes on.

This time last year, Haiti was observing three days of prayer and fasting, replacing Carnival. This year, preparations are on track for Carnival. The theme this year is An'n Selebre Lavi: Let's Celebrate Life. (Carnival is much later this year than it was last, not until the beginning of March.) Let's Celebrate Life. I do, every day, because it does go on for us, though not for so many others.

Poetry Friday

It has been months and months -- I think more than a year -- since I missed a Poetry Friday, but somehow I'm just not feeling it today. Maybe I'll be able to get my poetic fervor back later in the day, but meanwhile, plenty of other people are posting. Here's the roundup.

Grumpy but Grateful

A year ago today, it was four weeks after the earthquake. I wrote this, reflecting on how I had changed. Of course, it was a little early to say that.

Today, I thought about those days a year ago, when I was so desperately missing my job and my students and my classroom. Today I yelled at my eighth graders (not just raising my voice to be heard above them, but yelling, which I do about once a semester and hate myself for immediately afterward). The other day I commented to my seventh graders that it seemed they were having a hard time listening, and one of them said, "We're behaving better than we usually do." Another one added, "Yeah, you're just in a bad mood."

I took a moment, while I was on lunch duty and policing the playground, to be thankful for meaningful work, for papers to grade, for reading and writing. (This time last year I could hardly read a book.) I also thanked God for my students, for who they are (noisy, maddening, lovable), and for who they are becoming. I wish I could say I won't ever yell at them again, or ever be in a bad mood again, but I know that's not realistic. The earthquake didn't turn me into a flawless teacher or a flawless human being. But I can promise that I will always be grateful; I will always remember, if not every moment, at least every day, to thank God for my life, for my work, and for the young people in my temporary care.

Life Goes On in Haiti

Every day when I ask my seventh graders for prayer requests in the morning, I hear, "The elections." These seem to be the most drawn-out elections in history. The first round took place in November. The second round is now officially to happen in March.

Emily Troutman wrote this very good article about the mood in Haiti right now. It begins:

"After exhaustive delays, Haiti's electoral council announced today that presidential candidates Mirlande Manigat and Michel Martelly will go forward into the next round. The candidate promoted by current President Rene Preval, Jude Celestin, was scrapped.

By now, though, many seem too tired, and too sad, to care."

If you're looking for political information, this blog is always great for that, as well as amazing photos.

I'm just going to work every day and trying to teach my middle schoolers some things about being literate citizens. I hope that makes a difference some day.

Poetry Friday: The Road Not Taken

What choices have "made all the difference?" Who knows? When I was choosing my path, "both that morning equally lay." I thought I might come back, but you never do.

The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Thursday, and Five Kids in Middle School

So we have more problems in Haiti. Yawn. What else is new? This time it's the announcement of the official election results. (Yes. The election was in November.)

The announcement was supposed to be at 8 last night, but it didn't happen until nearly 8 this morning. And it's as expected: Martelly and Manigat will be in the runoff in March. The question is whether Celestin will accept this gracefully or whether he will get his supporters out on the street. N'ap we. We'll see.

Meanwhile I have three seventh graders here and there are two eighth graders. The math teacher took them all for first period and I'll get them all second period. Time to break out the games.

And yeah, I haven't written about Baby Doc being back in Haiti, or rumors that Aristide is coming back too. Sometimes I just don't know what to say. The sheer craziness is too much to believe. So let's just play Taboo and not think about it.

If you want some actual political information, this blog is always very informative.

Why it Matters

I have been having difficulty blogging lately because of internet problems at home, but I wanted to link to a post by Jess responding to a book I recommended, Francis Chan's Crazy Love.

Jess wrote (in this post) about Chan's quote of his wife's grandmother, who went to see a play and then said, "Oh honey, I really don't want to be here right now. I just don't know if this is where I want to be when Christ returns. I'd rather be helping someone or on my knees praying. I don't want him to return and find me sitting in a theater."

Does life have to be virtue OR art, Jess asks? Can't it be both?

On this subject I love Sara Groves' song "Why it Matters," in which she describes her view of art, which she considers "small ramparts for the soul."

Why it Matters
by Sara Groves

Sit with me and tell me once again
Of the story that's been told us
Of the power that will hold us
Of the beauty, of the beauty
Why it matters.

Speak to me until I understand
Why our thinking and creating
And our efforts at narrating
About the beauty, of the beauty
And why it matters

Like the statue in the park
Of this war-torn town
And its protest of the darkness
And the chaos all around
With its beauty, how it matters
How it matters

Show me the love that never fails
The compassion and attention
Midst confusion and dissension
Like small ramparts for the soul
How it matters

Like a single cup of water
How it matters


Why does reading matter? Why does art matter? Why do drama and painting and all those efforts of narrating the beauty of God's world matter? God put some of His own creativity in us. We don't create ex nihilo like He does, but some of us do our best to fight against the chaos around us by writing, or drawing, or making something. When we exercise the talents God gave us, we honor Him. We bring "compassion and attention" to His world. And the art we produce really can be "small ramparts for the soul." For our own souls and, sometimes, for the souls of those who read, or listen, or look.

Poetry Friday: Ode to the Lizard

I finished reading The Dreamer this week. It's a fictionalized biography of Pablo Neruda, and at the end there are some of Neruda's poems. I loved the book (here's my review) and I love this poem:



Ode to the Lizard
Pablo Neruda (translated by Margaret Peden)

On the sand
a
lizard
with a sandy tail.
Beneath
a leaf,
a leaflike
head.

From what planet,
from what
cold green ember
did you fall?
From the moon?
From frozen space?
Or from
the emerald
did your color
climb the vine?

On a rotting
tree trunk
you are
a living
shoot,
arrow
of its foliage.
On a stone
you are a stone
with two small, ancient
eyes -
eyes of the stone.
By the
water
you are
silent, slippery
slime.
To
a fly
you are the dart
of an annihilating dragon.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

The Dreamer

I got a package the week before last from a blog friend (that is, we know each other only through reading each other's blogs and have never met). She sent me a book! (People keep giving me books to read lately - I love that!) The book was The Dreamer, by Pam Muñoz Ryan.

The dreamer of the title is Neftalí Reyes, a shy, misunderstood little boy who loves to read, to collect words and objects, and to notice what is beautiful around him. When Reyes grew up he took the pen name Pablo Neruda. Peter Sís did the wonderful pictures.

Muñoz Ryan read about an incident from Neruda's childhood in which a pair of hands from an unseen child next door passed the poet a toy sheep through a hole in the wall. From there, she researched his life and used her imagination to produce this book. Neruda grew up with a demanding father who thought his son was feeble and absent-minded and refused to consider that writing might be a profession worth pursuing. (Neruda's brother, Rodolfo, was a gifted singer and was equally discouraged by their railroad-worker father.) The book describes several events; my favorite was the Cyrano-like story of Neruda writing love letters to the girl of his dreams on behalf of a bigger, stronger, but less literate boy at his school.

I love Neruda's poetry and didn't know anything about his life, so I enjoyed reading this. Neruda found the encouragement and help he needed in spite of discouragement from his father, and was able to grow into, according to an Author's Note, "probably the most widely read poet in the world."

This was book #6 of the year.

Reading Update

Book #2 of 2011 was Night Over Water, by Ken Follett. This was my first book by this author. It's the story of an assortment of travelers on the Pan American Clipper, a combination airplane and boat that really existed, and a transatlantic flight in 1939. I had never heard of these planes and there are a lot of interesting details in the story about what they were like.

Book #3 was The Cellist of Sarajevo, by Steven Galloway. Set in Sarajevo in the early 90s, this book tells the story of four characters who are trying to survive the war. The cellist of the title sets out to play Albinoni's Adagio after a mortar attack on his neighborhood. "He'll do this every day for twenty-two days, a day for each person killed. Or at least he'll try. He won't be sure he will survive. He won't be sure he has enough Adagios left." The other characters are a man who works in a bakery, a father who spends large amounts of his time making sure his household has enough water, and a sniper, Arrow. Here is Arrow before the war: "She felt an enveloping happiness to be alive, a joy made stronger by the certainty that someday it would all come to an end. It overwhelmed her, made her pull the car to the side of the road. Afterward she felt a little foolish, and never spoke to anyone about it. Now, however, she knows she wasn't being foolish. She realizes that for no particular reason she stumbled into the core of what it is to be human. It's a rare gift to understand that your life is wondrous, and that it won't last forever." Arrow is assigned to protect the cellist as he plays his music. This was a horrifying book, describing as it does life in Sarajevo, where a sniper's bullet could hit you at any moment as you went about your business. However, it was also a beautiful one, showing how human beings can survive.

Book #4, Fire, by Kristin Cashore, was not really my kind of book, and yet I enjoyed it immensely. I don't read a lot of fantasy, and I found the plot had some big holes in it. But I loved the characters in this book. As in Graceling, to which this book is billed as a "companion," there is a lot of mind-reading, and Cashore does it expertly, with Fire, the main character, picking up feelings and impressions from people around her, even those who shield their minds, which in this world it is possible to learn to do. Fire is a "monster," meaning she has special abilities and irresistible beauty. The beauty is more of a liability than anything else, and Fire struggles to deal with the effect she has on others. The range of relationships Cashore describes is so much fun to read about, and there's romance, but not at all in a stereotypical way. The one concern I have about this book, as I did with the other one, is the attitude of the young women protagonists towards sexuality; both Katsa (in Graceling) and Fire are extremely resistant to marriage, though not to sex (which isn't described explicitly but is very obviously happening). This book is supposed to be for kids my students' age, but I'd give it to older teenagers. Cashore does such a beautiful job telling her story, and I'm not entirely sure why, but reading this book made me happy. (I'm expecting my literature degrees to be revoked immediately after that last sentence.)



Book #5 was Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way, by Shauna Niequist. Katie texted me Sunday night and said "I have a book for you!" She gave it to me in our staff meeting on Monday morning. She said she thought of me the whole time she was reading it. I'm not quite sure why she did (I'll ask her next time I see her), but she was right to think that I'd love this book. It reads like a blog between covers, and sure enough, the author blogs. (I added her to my Blog List yesterday.) Niequist tells, in short essays (posts, really), about a difficult time in her life, when she lost a job, had a baby, had a miscarriage, and lost friends who moved away. I enjoy her voice. Here's a sample, from her description of grace:

"If arithmetic is numbers, and if algebra is numbers and letters, then grace is numbers, letters, sounds, and tears, feelings, and dreams. Grace is smashing the calculator, and using all the broken buttons and pieces to make a mosaic.

Grace isn't about having a second chance; grace is having so many chances that you could use them through all eternity and never come up empty. It's when you finally realize that the other shoe isn't going to drop, ever. It's the moment you feel as precious and handmade as every star, when you feel, finally, at home for the very first time.

Grace is when you finally stop keeping score and when you realize that God never was, that his game is a different one entirely. Grace is when the silence is so complete that you can hear your own heartbeat, and right within your ribs, God's beating heart too."

This post is linked to today's Saturday Review of Books.

Poetry Friday: In the Elementary School Choir

I love Gregory Djanikian's poems, and have posted several before. (Here, here, and here.)

The poem I've chosen for today is about where home is, and about feeling at home in a place that isn't where your family originally came from. I know a lot about this subject from personal experience, having lived in several countries, and I have students who know all about it too. I love the way Djanikian describes himself in choir, singing the quintessentially American songs but conjuring up mental pictures for himself which are quite different from what the lyricists intended.

In the Elementary School Choir

by Gregory Djanikian

I had never seen a cornfield in my life,
I had never been to Oklahoma,
But I was singing as loud as anyone,
“Oh what a beautiful morning. . . . The corn
Is as high as an elephant’s eye,”
Though I knew something about elephants I thought,
Coming from the same continent as they did,
And they being more like camels than anything else.

And when we sang from Meet Me in St. Louis,
“Clang, clang, clang went the trolley,”
I remembered the ride from Ramleh Station
In the heart of Alexandria
All the way to Roushdy where my grandmother lived,
The autos on the roadway vying
With mule carts and bicycles,
The Mediterranean half a mile off on the left,
The air smelling sharply of diesel and salt.

Here's the rest of the poem.

And here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Links

Some good reading:

A friend sent me this blog post on the earthquake. It's a repost of what Tim Challies posted on January 14th, 2010, along with some updated thoughts on the anniversary.

"A year ago, two days after the devastating earthquake in Haiti, I took a stab at suggesting what the late Neil Postman, the author, media theorist and cultural critic, might have to say about it. I suggested that this earthquake was an example of the kind of news that surrounds us today—news that elicits emotion from us, but news we can really do nothing about. In the end, news like this is often barely distinguishable from entertainment to us."

He goes on to talk about what we can do about a disaster that we hear about on the news.

Here's Tara's beautiful post for BlogHer. An excerpt:

"The hours, days, and weeks that followed the earthquake felt entirely surreal to us. It reminded us of the movies where things that don't make any sense happen and where story lines don't always match up with reality. On one corner bodies, were being stacked by the dozens for mass removal, and on another people gathered to pray, sing, and thank God for sparing them even as multiple aftershocks shook the ground violently."

Dr. Jen has been doing "one year ago today" posts, based on her journals, photos, and memories of medical relief she did after the earthquake. (The link is to her whole blog, and I know I have already linked to individual posts, but Jen's calm, clear-eyed, compassionate descriptions are really something special.)

Normal

Life in Haiti is far from being back to normal. There are still tent cities everywhere you look, though there have been buyouts going on recently, where people are given a sum of cash to leave the tent city. There are still destroyed buildings, some of which look as though nothing at all has been done to them since January 12th.

And yet, there seems to be a new normal, the new normal everyone was talking to me about this time last year. They said that Haiti would find it, and that so would I.

Haiti's new normal isn't acceptable. People can't continue to live this way indefinitely, and yet that is exactly what I fear will happen.

But in my own life, I am definitely starting to see a new normal. I commented to a friend yesterday that I am getting annoyed with my students again, and that in a strange sort of way, this feels like progress. I'm getting back to normal.

Of course, getting back to normal is both a good thing and a bad thing. It's a good thing because nobody can live forever on the kind of intensity that I've been experiencing to varying degrees since January 12th, 2010. The deep pain, grief, and loss were devastating, and the deep love, joy, and gratitude were wonderful, but at both extremes, the strong emotions were exhausting. A couple of times I used the image of a sunburn - that's how it felt, that extra sensitivity to everything because your skin is burned.

And, of course, it's a bad thing - this getting back to normal - because I don't ever want to forget completely the huge appreciation for everyone and everything that I have experienced since the earthquake, the intense awareness of pain and suffering around me, the deepened love for the people God has put in my life. I want my new normal to include the lessons that the earthquake taught me, that life can be gone in a second, that we should let others know what they mean to us every chance we get, that God is very near.

Ordinary. I longed for it last winter. I appreciate it still. But it has to be a new normal. I can't ever forget that the earth can move, that life is heart-breakingly precious, that people are there to be loved.

Others on the Anniversary

There are so many wonderful people writing reflections about the anniversary of the earthquake. I can't link you to all of them, but here are some you have to read:

My dear friend Beth.
Super-blogger Tara.
Jillian and Frank, whom I don't know but who have both written such incredibly beautiful and perceptive posts.
Ben and Lexi.
Katie, new friend and prayer partner, and awesome teacher. And also someone who was there that night, on the soccer field.
Heather wrote about this year and last year too.
QCS alumna Chivricanna.
Another QCS alumna, Talie. (We are so proud of our alumni.)
Friend and former colleague Jess.
Dr. Jen.
Dear college friend Janet, who's never even been to Haiti but who stood in solidarity with us in prayer from the beginning.

Poetry Friday: Haiti

Haiti has been in the news this week because Wednesday was the one year anniversary of the earthquake. I've been posting about the anniversary all week. This was a year of anguish, a year of joy. A year of the most intense emotion of my life, at both extremes. And a year of poetry.

The Poetry Foundation website has video of Kwame Dawes, a Ghanaian-born poet who has been taking trips to Haiti, meeting people, and writing poems about their stories. The video is long (eleven minutes) but worth watching. It ends with one of Dawes' poems about Haiti, "Mother of Mothers." You can see it here.

Here's this week's Poetry Friday roundup.

A Year Ago

I continue to be in "a year ago today" mode. This morning I remembered coming home after that first night, which we spent sleeping outside, on the soccer field at school. I came home to find eleven people in my yard. (Here's what I wrote about this last January.) They wouldn't come inside, and they slept out there for weeks. Most of them were relatives of an employee, but one was someone from their neighborhood. He left that morning to walk to Jacmel, to see how his family was. I've since learned that he found everyone alive and safe.

Everyone is remembering what was happening a year ago. Those first days after the earthquake were terrifying. We wondered if buildings that looked safe perhaps actually weren't. We worried about an aftershock big enough to cause more severe damage. We continued to hear about people who had died or been injured. We told our stories, again and again, and couldn't believe what we were hearing ourselves say. Was this real?

We spent some time with a friend today. A year ago tomorrow, we learned that his wife had died when the building where they lived collapsed. He told us about his experience yesterday, and how he focused on the words that the angel spoke in the resurrection story in the gospels: "Why do you seek the living among the dead?" He knew his wife was not there, in her grave, but rejoicing in Heaven on the anniversary of the earthquake. That helped him get through the day.

I know that for a few days, at least until the anniversary of the day I left Haiti for the US, I will be thinking about what happened a year ago. A year ago, I was so frightened. But a year ago, God was with me.

Another Earthquake in a Children's Book

I was reading Ramona and Her Father to my son, and came across this passage:

"Her mother said she must not annoy her father, because he was worried about being out of work. Maybe she had made him so angry he did not love her anymore. Maybe he had gone away because he did not love her. She thought of all the scary things she had seen on television - houses that had fallen down in earthquakes, people shooting people, big hairy men on motorcycles - and knew she needed her father to keep her safe."

What is with all these earthquake references in children's books? Here are the others we've already found.

Day of Mourning

Ben got it right:

"Media outlets want to talk about what isn't being done and point blame all around. However, this is what real right now - sorrow and hurt so real. A tightness in your chest. An indescribable agony at the utter magnitude of loss. A slight comfort that you know that everyone in the room is feeling it too."

The churches are packed, overflowing; people spill out onto the stairs and down into the street. There is singing to be heard everwhere. In the streets there are processions; we saw one group of two to three hundred people, all dressed in white, on their hands and knees in the road.

Lots of people are just aimlessly wandering around, though, as if they want to do something to mark this day but aren't sure what. That's how I feel. I want the day to mean something, to give some kind of explanation: Oh yeah, so that's why 300,000 people had to lose their lives all at once.

We drove down Delmas and saw building after building still in the same shape they were the morning of January 13th, 2010. Each one slaps me in the face with its broken, crumbled concrete. It says: Nothing has changed.

Banners over the road announce that various companies mark the anniversary, remember the dead. Other banners encourage mothers to nurse their babies to protect them from cholera. Tent cities spread out in every direction.

I am so grateful to be alive, so grateful that my husband and children are alive. And so overwhelmed with grief.

One Year

Here is my story from January 12th, 2010.

Sad

I just wrote "January 13th" on my white board in my classroom, because tomorrow is a day of mourning to commemorate the earthquake of January 12th, 2010. On January 12th last year I wrote the same thing on the board right before I left the room. That date remained on the wall until the day that board was taken down. Writing "January 13th" was not easy today.

I feel desperately, desperately sad. I grieve the losses of life, property, and hope. Thirty-five seconds took so much from this country. Tomorrow we will remember that day, relive the memories, grieve for those we will not see again until Heaven.

We will never forget.

Your Heavenly Father Knows Your Needs

This week will mark one year since the earthquake. I don't know why anniversaries should be any more difficult than other days, but the twelfth of each month has been a struggle.

I have a perpetual calendar with a verse for each day. The verse for January 12th is

Your heavenly Father knows your needs. He will always give you all you need from day to day. Luke 12:30-31 TLB

I don't remember reading this on January 12th but I must have. When I got back to Haiti after my six months in the United States, the calendar was on January 16th, telling me two things. First, that I read the verse each day until I left Haiti, and second, that my husband left it the way it was the day I left the country.

Those days were the worst of my life, and yet God really did know my needs. That first night, when my kids were hungry, there was food for them. (Crackers, and some spaghetti.) When we needed a place to sleep, there was the soccer field. When I couldn't sleep, there were people to pray and cry with. When I was terrified by the constant aftershocks and the screaming, God was there. He was there for me, and my husband was there for me, and we were there for the kids, and I didn't fall apart.

The next night, when I couldn't sleep at all, God was with me. The next morning when I needed encouragement, the people in my yard read scripture with me and we sang and I felt comforted. On Thursday God brought more refugees to encourage and distract us. And the third night, I was on the internet with a friend in California who had been through earthquakes too, and who talked me down from a panic attack on Facebook chat.

We had water, and food, and when a doctor came and asked for medicine, I had that too, though I didn't know where most of it came from. He said my medicine cabinet was like a pharmacy.

I still can't talk about those days without crying, or the day when we went to the United States, and someone handed me boarding passes and warm clothes and someone else pressed money into my hands and before I knew it, there I was with my children and my parents and I was alive and I finally slept through the whole night. I'm crying now as I write this, overwhelmed by how afraid I was and yet by how much God blessed me.

He continued to bless me, to give me all I needed from day to day. He gave me friends and they called and emailed and took me to lunch at just the right time. He gave me work to do. He gave me just enough strength for each day - no more - so that I fell into bed each night exhausted, wondering if I could do it one more day. He gave me a church family that took me in. He gave my children safe schools to be in and friends. He gave me plenty to eat.

Why me, why us? So many died, and God loved them too. Why did all my family survive? I don't know; I can't explain it. It's too much, too hard for me to understand. Why did I have food and water and a place to sleep inside; why did I have a US passport? I don't know. I don't deserve any of those things, any more than any Haitian who still sleeps in a tent. I have to trust Him to meet their needs too, and in some cases, to use me to do it.

He knew my needs. And He still does. Each day, He knows. And I do my best to help others with their needs. But I am just muddling along; I don't know what I am doing. I don't think I'll ever trust myself again to know what to do in a crisis, but I do know that I can trust Him.

This week I will, inevitably, relive those days. I'm sure I will have many conversations with others who will be reliving them too. We will shed many tears. We don't understand any of this. We have no explanations. But we know that God knows our needs.

Poetry Friday: Something So Right

I've been writing poems this week but I almost forgot Poetry Friday! I've got nothing profound this week. I'm back at school, but I've been sick half the week, and so have been doing the minimum. My mind is focused on the big anniversary coming up next week but I can't really think about that today, because there's too much else to do. So here are some lyrics from Paul Simon. This song reminds me that there is much in my life that is so right. Even in the middle of all the confusion and pain of Haiti, one year after the earthquake, so much is right and I am grateful.


Something So Right
by Paul Simon

You've got the cool water
When the fever runs high
You've got the look of lovelight in your eyes
And I was in crazy motion
'til you calmed me down
It took a little time
But you calmed me down

When something goes wrong
I'm the first to admit it
I'm the first to admit it
And the last one to know

When something goes right
Well it's likely to lose me, mm
It's apt to confuse me
It's such an unusual sight
Oh, I can't, I can't get used to something so right
Something so right

They've got a wall in China
It's a thousand miles long
To keep out the foreigners they made it strong
And I've got a wall around me
That you can't even see
It took a little time
To get next to me

When something goes wrong
I'm the first to admit it
I'm the first to admit it
And the last one to know
when something goes right
Well it's likely to lose me, mm
It's apt to confuse me
because it's such an unusual sight
Oh, I swear, I can't get used to something so right
Something so right

Some people never say the words "I love you"
It's not their style
to be so bold
Some people never say those words "I love you"
But like a child they're longing to be told, mm

When something goes wrong
I'm the first to admit it
I'm the first to admit it
And the last one to know
when something goes right
Well it's likely to lose me, mm
It's apt to confuse me
because it's such an unusual sight
I swear, I can't, I can't get used to something so right
Something so right

hmmmmm, ooohhhhh,
Something so right

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

The Last Word (Love Was Here First)

by Carolyn Arends

Bad day in the garden, Eve fell for the lie
Now we just keep falling one lie at a time
It seems like forever we’ve been under this curse
But love was here first

Now everything’s broken and everything fails
We can’t quite imagine that love will prevail
We’ve got to remember when the bad goes to worse
Love was here first

‘Cause there will be a day
When the kingdom comes
When love has finished all that it’s begun
When we’re face to face
We will know for sure
Love’s gonna have the last word
Love’s gonna have the last word

Bad day on the hillside, or so it seemed
When love was surrendered and nailed to a tree
But the grave came up empty and death was reversed
‘Cause love was here first

A bad day in the garden could not erase
All that was started with original grace
And though we have wandered, we will find if we search
Love was here first

© 2009 Running Arends Music/ASCAP

A Year Later, Haiti Struggles Back

New York Times article.

Crazy Love

I just finished book #1 of 2011, Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God, by Francis Chan. Many people I know have read this book lately, and when a friend gave it to me for Christmas I was curious enough to start in on it right away. It's a quick read, though well worth reading again to ponder the points Francis Chan makes.

The "crazy love" of the title refers to God's love for us, but also our love for Him, and for others. I have written before that last year I felt I started to get a glimpse of how much God really loves me. It's an amazing thought.

"The very fact that a holy, eternal, all-knowing, all-powerful, merciful, fair and just God loves you and me is nothing short of astonishing. The wildest part is that Jesus doesn't have to love us. His being is utterly complete and perfect, apart from humanity. He doesn't need me or you. Yet He wants us, chooses us, even considers us His inheritance (Eph. 1:18). The greatest knowledge we can ever have is knowing God treasures us. . . . The irony is that while God doesn't need us but still wants us, we desperately need God but don't really want Him most of the time. He treasures us and anticipates our departure from this earth to be with Him - and we wonder, indifferently, how much we have to do for Him to get by."

Chan talks about how short life is; that's something the earthquake taught me very memorably. I hope others can come to the same realization without having to be in a natural disaster. He describes what life would be like if we were truly obsessed with God; not serving Him out of duty but out of pure love, crazy love. He even gives us a chapter full of examples, and how cool is it that each person he highlights is completely different from every other?

"Imagine if you opened up a drawer in your kitchen and found twenty cheese graters but no other utensils. Not very helpful when you're looking for something to eat your soup with. Just as there are different utensils in the kitchen that serve diverse functions, God has created unique people to accomplish a variety of purposes throughout the world."

This was a great book to start out the year and I highly recommend it to anyone who is serious about living for God, even if that ends up looking crazy to other people.

This book made me think of Steven Curtis Chapman's song "Something Crazy." Here it is:

Books Read in 2010

Books 1-3
Book 4
Books 5-8
Books 9-12
Books 13-17
Books 18 & 19
Books 20-22
Books 23-25
Books 26-28
Books 29-32
Books 33-36
Books 37-41
Book 42
Books 43-46
Book 47
Books 48-50
Books 51-53
Book 54
Books 55 & 56
Books 57 & 58
Books 59-61
Books 62 & 63
Book 64
Book 65
Book 66

Here are lists of what other people read last year.

Haiti Without Walls

New York Times opinion piece by Kettly Mars.

Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Movie Comments, with Spoilers)

Now it can be told. I am back home in Haiti, so I can reveal to my readers that I spent the last two weeks in the United States. Somehow I was too paranoid to tell you that until I was safely home.

While I was in the States, I went to see the new Narnia movie. Until I got the chance to do that, I was avoiding reviews, such as this one and this one. After seeing it I went and read those two reviews and basically agreed with what they had to say.

The movie, while visually beautiful, was not the same story as the book. I get it that movies are a different medium from books, and that changes have to be made. I don't even mind changes that make sense. (Here's what I had to say about the changes the movie-makers thought necessary in the Prince Caspian movie.) But I don't like changes that make no sense, and that turn the story into something completely different.

After the earthquake, when I couldn't focus long enough to read anything for several weeks, I chose The Voyage of the Dawn Treader as my first book. I remember reading it for the first time at the age of seven and have read it many, many times since. It was an important part of my childhood and the development of my imagination. So I wasn't at all neutral about the way I wanted the story portrayed. There were certain scenes I couldn't wait for: chiefly, Eustace being un-dragoned, the Dufflepuds, and the Dark Island.

First, what I loved. The opening scene, when the children go into the picture, was fabulous. Reepicheep was wonderful. The friendship between Reepicheep and Eustace, while already in the book, was expanded in the movie. Eustace was terrific. The Dawn Treader itself looked exactly right. I loved the house on the Dufflepuds' island. The final scene, where Reepicheep rises on the wave in his coracle, was perfect. And it was great to see the homage to Pauline Baynes during the credits.

Next, what I didn't love. Green miasma? Huh? Where did it come from? What did it mean? Why did it eat people in boats and then later those people reappeared after a sea monster who was really Edmund's fears got killed? (And again, huh? There's so much wrong with that, I don't even know where to start.) Why was Lord Bern cowering in prison? Why create a new character, Gail, and then give her nothing to do except hero-worship Lucy? (I get it that there are too few female characters in this book with any real significance, but how does this help?) Why was the whole Dufflepud scene glossed over so quickly, with most of the humor taken out of it? Why was Eustace just zapped back into being a boy? Why was the entire significance of the Dark Island ruined? Why did seven swords have to be collected and laid on the table?

What I've seen with my students is that once a book is made into a movie, it's ruined for them as a literary experience. I often read a book after I see the movie, fascinated to see the differences between the two. I don't read entirely for plot, so knowing what is going to happen is not a problem for me. But my students either assume they already know what's going to happen in the book if they have seen the movie, and therefore don't think reading it is worth their while at all, or they pretend they read it, and use what they saw in the movie to muddle their way through class discussions. So although I was looking forward to seeing the movie, I was already mourning the loss of a certain kind of reading experience for my students. But then when I saw the way the movie-makers changed the story, I felt even sadder. This is what a whole generation (or more) of kids will think this book is. And it's not.

Theme Day - Best of 2010

Being the first day of the month, today is also a Daily Photo Theme Day. Today's theme is the best photo of 2010. Here you can see thumbnails of the participants' photos.

Haiti's Year of Crisis

Article here.