This poem has only been open on my desktop for a few days, because my daughter sent it to me just recently. It was quoted by Lauren Winner in her book Wearing God.
I'm just going to give you the first couple of stanzas, but the real punch of this poem is right at the end, so be sure to click through and read the whole thing.
Staying Power
by Jeanne Murray Walker
Like Gorky, I sometimes follow my doubts
outside to the yard and question the sky,
longing to have the fight settled, thinking
I can't go on like this, and finally I say
all right, it is improbable, all right, there
is no God. And then as if I'm focusing
a magnifying glass on dry leaves, God blazes up.
This poem reminds me of the time when a lot of Jesus' followers were leaving because of difficult times, and He asked His disciples if they would leave too, and Peter answered, "Lord, to whom would we go? You have the words of eternal life" (John 6:68).
Do you ever have imaginary conversations with people? I do, all the time, especially people with whom I don't get to talk in real life as much as I'd like to. After I found this poem by Linda Pastan (I'm not sure when that was, but it's been open on my desktop for a while), I wrote a poem called "Imaginary Conversation," which I won't be sharing. And since then I have written a lot of conversations that didn't really happen. Sometimes imaginary conversations are better than the real thing, because you can make the person say what you want, and you don't run the risk of painful misunderstandings. But I'd always prefer the real thing.
Imaginary Conversation
by Linda Pastan
You tell me to live each day
as if it were my last. This is in the kitchen
where before coffee I complain
of the day ahead - that obstacle race
of minutes and hours,
grocery stores and doctors.
This poem has a resonance that it didn't have the last time I read it; thinking about death is something we've all been doing a lot of lately. I wonder if the person with whom Pastan is imagining this conversation has already died. That's a question that didn't occur to me when I read it before.
Having conversations is challenging these days, just in general. We're hearing a lot about all the technology we can use, but it's just not the same as face-to-face connection without any intervening devices. I'm thinking mostly now of my classroom, where, admittedly, my middle schoolers aren't always paying full attention to what I say. But I can always walk over to an individual and get eye contact and speak directly to him or her. On Google Classroom I send comments and suggestions and emails, and all of those are pretty easy to ignore. I miss talking to my kids, and laughing with them, and collecting funny stories about what happens in Real Classroom.
I'd always prefer the real thing.
But enough of those sad reflections; let's look at today's line for the Progressive Poem! You can read the two options here.
Oh, my teacher friends, remember taking attendance? Remember your classroom? Remember all those names that you learned to pronounce and spell at the beginning of the year, and now you only see on Google Classroom or whatever online platform you are learning to use?
This poem has been open on my desktop since January. I heard it on Tracy K. Smith's podcast The Slowdown.
The Traveling Onion
by Naomi Shihab Nye
"It is believed that the onion originally came from India. In Egypt it was an object of worship - why I haven't been able to find out. From Egypt the onion entered Greece and on to Italy, thence into all of Europe." - Better Living Cookbook
When I think how far the onion has traveled
just to enter my stew today, I could kneel and praise
all small forgotten miracles.
crackly paper peeling on the drainboard,
pearly layers in smooth agreement,
the way the knife enters onion
and onion falls apart on the chopping block,
a history revealed.
Yesterday I said I'd post something more positive today. I'm not sure I'm going to accomplish that, but you be the judge.
Today is Palm Sunday, and it's always a fun day to go to church. Little children wave palm branches in commemoration of the crowds lining the road as Jesus rode a donkey into Jerusalem at the beginning of the week that led to the cross. We don't really have little children in our house church group, so even if we were meeting together, we wouldn't have the cuteness factor. This morning, instead of displaying palms in our living room and getting the Communion elements ready, my husband went on a foraging expedition to the grocery store, wearing a mask. I like the regular traditions better, and would not recommend repeating this year's.
It felt as though I was sending him into battle, and sure enough, a few minutes after he left, I heard several gunshots way too close for comfort. I immediately called him, and he was fine, but the unwanted sound effects were a reminder that COVID-19 isn't the only bad thing in our city right now.
I made myself a cup of tea and sat on the front porch with my binoculars, but I was stressed and distracted. Soon the birds started helping me feel better. Most of what I saw this morning was in the doves and pigeons category; there are so many of them that I tend to disregard them. They aren't very interesting, because they're so common, but also, I'm learning that I can't tell them apart. This week I'm going to get serious about learning which of the possible four types of doves in our region, or three types of pigeons, I'm looking at. But I'm pretty sure it was a white-winged dove (Zenaida asiatica) that kept whooshing by me as I sat on the porch. I never see any bird going back and forth so close to me as I sit in my chair. Usually they keep their distance. But this one kept coming and going, carrying small twigs in its mouth. I guess nest-building was going on. I couldn't help smiling, thinking of the dove's connection to the Holy Spirit, and also of the dove Noah sent out from the Ark to check and see if the whole world as they knew it was still underwater.
The next smile came from a black-and-white warbler (Mniotilta varia), one of my favorite little birds. I hadn't seen any since my pandemic birding began, and I was starting to think they had all flown north, but no, there it was on the tree right in front of me. It didn't stay long, and didn't come back.
A few minutes later, I heard a distinctive long cry. That sounds like a Hispaniolan lizard cuckoo, I thought, but then I told myself I was definitely wrong, because I can't tell one bird sound from another. Nevertheless I trained my binoculars on the tree the sound was coming from, and a minute later I was thrilled to see, sure enough, my very favorite bird, the Hispaniolan lizard cuckoo (Coccyzus longirostris) with its fabulous long tail. (I picked this video because you can hear the sound and see the tail, but it misspells Hispaniolan, so just ignore that part.)
My heart leapt like Wordsworth's when he saw the rainbow. For a few minutes I forgot completely about my husband at the grocery store braving people breathing on him. I just reveled in that beautiful bird.
Later, after my husband was home and sanitized and the groceries were put away, we met with our church family over Zoom. We are spread all around the place now, some of us still here in Haiti, some not, some in complete isolation due to quarantine after travel, and some isolating with family. We talked about our different situations. Someone demonstrated how to make a mask out of a large handkerchief and some elastic bands. Someone else talked fabric for making filters to go inside the mask. As of Monday, it's going to be the law here in Haiti to wear a mask when you're in public. We shared what we'd heard, and what we knew, and we talked about the Biblical concept of lament, and how to process what's going on, and how to keep going in spite of what's difficult. And as we met together, the news started to come in about our first death here in Haiti caused by the virus.
We prayed, made our plans for Holy Week, talked about last year's wonderful celebrations, and then said goodbye.
"Hosanna," the people shouted as they waved palm branches while Jesus rode by. It means "Save us." And that's what we need.
John Donne wrote a lot about sickness, and as I think about this first person to die here from this modern plague, I want to share his poem thumbing his nose at death. I share it every year in October with my eighth graders, commemorating the death several years ago of one of our teachers, who was 25 and apparently healthy when she went to sleep one night, and who didn't wake up the next day. This year I didn't get to, because we were on lockdown and distance learning, so here it is, along with the paraphrase I wrote to help my kids understand it better.
Death, be not proud (Holy Sonnet 10)
by John Donne
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou'art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy'or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
Death,
don't think you're all that, even though some have said you're mighty
and dreadful - you aren't. You think you're defeating those who die, but
that's not the way it is, and you can't kill me, either. We get
pleasure from rest and sleep, which are just imitations of you - won't
we get even more pleasure when we die? As soon as good people die, they
get rest for their bodies and freedom for their souls. You, Death, are a
slave to many things - fate, chance, rulers, criminals. You hang out
with poison, war, and sickness. If we want to sleep, we can always take
Tylenol PM and get a better rest than you can give us, so what do you
have to be proud about? After a short sleep, we'll wake to eternal life,
and you, Death, won't even exist any more. Death: you're going to die!
Is that more cheerful than yesterday? Not really, and I'd better not promise anything about tomorrow. We'll just see.
Something cheerful, though, is the Progressive Poem, so much fun each year. Today's line is here, at Buffy Silverman's blog.
I had a little bit of a breakdown this morning, crying tears into my cup of tea, brought by my long-suffering husband, for whom I'm so grateful. He's been soothing my breakdowns for many years now, the poor guy.
A few minutes after our conversation, said long-suffering husband posted a poem in the #PoeticQuarantine on Facebook. It's by William Shakespeare, no stranger to quarantine himself. I decided to share that same poem here.
I went back and looked on this blog at all the times I've shared this particular Shakespeare sonnet - three, I believe. There was this time, back in 2011, when I was happily reflecting on the abundance of love in my life. There was this time, in 2015, when I was about to take my daughter to college in another country and leave here there and come back home without her. And there was this time, in 2018, when I paired Shakespeare's sonnet with one of my own (the hubris of it!) as I thought about the evil in the world.
I'm thankful that I am not "all alone" as Shakespeare was, but I can relate to some of the other feelings he expresses here. Eventually I'll work my way to the conclusion he comes to in his final couplet. I know I will. Just give me a minute to beweep and bewail and bemoan. I'll have something more cheerful to share tomorrow.
Sonnet XXIX
William Shakespeare
When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possest,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising -
Haply I think on thee: and then my state,
Like to the Lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at Heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love rememb'red such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with Kings.
Speaking of something more cheerful, the Progressive Poem is well underway, and today Liz Steinglass has the fourth line, in fact two lines, as everyone has been doing this year. It's up to the next person to pick which one of the two lines to choose. I like what's happening so far! Looking forward to whatever comes next!
You know how you always wished you could be home all day every day during National Poetry Month so you could savor all the poems? Your wish is granted! Hope you are enjoying NPM, the Coronavirus Edition. Or at least surviving it.
I'm attempting daily posts again this year, and I managed day one and day two, so I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself so far. (I'm also posting and reading many poems on Facebook during the #PoeticQuarantine.) My plan for my daily blog posts is to share tabs that are open on my desktop, so that, in a yearly act of spring cleaning, I can close them. (I explained it a little more in my post on the first day.)
I'm not sure how long this one has been open, but I know I referred to it in a post back in July 2018. At that point I was traveling away from home, so thinking about home more. Now I'm locked in my home, so thinking about home more. Home: it's a constant preoccupation, I guess.
In this poem, Maggie Smith begins with a line from Wisława Szymborska's wonderful poem The Joy of Writing. My idea was to take a line from Maggie Smith's poem and write my own, and I actually started the attempt yesterday, but didn't get far enough to have anything to post. Maybe next week? Meanwhile, here's Maggie Smith's meditation on home.
Written Deer
by Maggie Smith
Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
- Wisława Szymborska
My handwriting is all over these woods.
No, my handwriting is these woods,
each tree a half-print, half-cursive scrawl,
each loop a limb. My house is somewhere
here, & I have scribbled myself inside it.
What is home but a book we write, then
read again & again, each time dog-earing
One of the NPM activities I always look forward to is the progressive poem. Jone has today's line, offering two options for the next poet again. Raising the bar this year!
Heidi has the roundup today, and she's sharing sheltering poems. I can't wait to read them, and to see what everyone else has today! Stay safe and healthy, everybody!
I've had this poem on my desktop since October. It caught my attention because it's about photography, but in a time before everyone was constantly taking photos with their phones. These photos were taken with a Polaroid camera. (It's so fascinating to me that a couple of my students have Polaroid cameras, that those are a thing again.)
Polaroid Ode
by Cori Winrock
O four cornered room
in which we tuck the ever-
developing light of our warm
bodies.
My favorite part is the ending, which imagines the person behind the camera:
Tell me who was in our living room
to capture this instant, whose hand
was shaking us into existence.
I heard this poem on the Slowdown podcast, hosted by Tracy K. Smith, the last Poet Laureate of the United States. I highly recommend these five minute episodes; they come out every weekday.
Here's another post from 2017 about poetry and photography. I shared Billy Collins' poem "Strange Lands" and then updated it with a poem of my own for the age of social media.
This month we were supposed to write about renewal. That makes perfect sense; it's April, springtime, Eastertide (in ten days). But this year, though the weather is cooperating (at least here in my Caribbean island paradise), the air feels heavy. We're learning new words: social distancing, superspreader, zoonotic. We're reading words we've only seen in fiction or history in the news: pandemic, quarantine.
As I've shared here before, this has already been a difficult school year in Haiti. Children have missed many weeks of school due to political unrest and peyi-lok, Kreyol for locked country. Everything shut down, and we went to distance learning. Then we had the glorious third quarter, when we met at school every day and life was bright. And now, back home again: it's not peyi-lok this time, my son pointed out, but mond-lok, locked world. There's nowhere to run from it.
Today's host, Donna, suggested a topic change. She wrote that we should "go ahead and connect to whatever is topmost on your mind and how you are
dealing with everything. What’s getting you through or what have you
seen/ witnessed that has been uplifting? What’s something positive
you’ve heard of or witnessed?"
At first glance, what I'm sharing, lament, doesn't seem very positive, but I think it is positive in the sense that God wants us to bring our true selves to Him. In a podcast I listened to, Aaron Niequist shared that a third of the Psalms are about lament, while zero percent of modern worship songs are. The Psalmists expressed what they felt, even if it was despair, grief, a sense of being abandoned. And Jesus quoted Psalm 22 on the cross, when He asked His Father why He had gone away. I recommend this podcast for its step-by-step ideas on lament.
In this article, which is all very much worth reading, N.T. Wright says, "Lament is what happens when people ask, 'Why?' and don’t get an answer.
It’s where we get to when we move beyond our self-centered worry about
our sins and failings and look more broadly at the suffering of the
world. It’s bad enough facing a pandemic in New York City or London.
What about a crowded refugee camp on a Greek island? What about Gaza? Or South Sudan?" I would add, or Haiti? I can't even fully think about what it will be like if/when this virus takes hold in this country where I live. I can only approach it sideways, and pray about it with my eyes screwed shut, not looking around me. The largest number of ICU beds I've heard is 200 (for 12 million people), and 70 ventilators.
I wish I had some happy way to wrap up this post, but I really don't. Just that we can bring it to God. We can rail and rage and beg to know why. The ancients did, and so can we. And then we can pick ourselves up and go on, facing reality day by day, or as much of it as we can bear.
Honestly, this podcast was more encouraging to me than just about anything else I've read or listened to so far. It's from the London Review of Books, and it's a discussion between a man in Italy and a plague historian living in England. The historian comments on how strange it is to write about something (the plague) and then experience it. She draws many parallels between the quarantine in Florence in 1629 and the current quarantines/lockdowns being experienced around the world. Why does this encourage me? Well, people have been through this before. Not only that, but they went through it at a time when they knew way less about disease and medicine than we know now. And they got through it. Day by day, they got through it. They sang on their balconies (yes!), were isolated, danced. Nobody recorded it on Facebook, but it happened. And we'll get through it again. We can lament and grieve, and then we can keep going.
You're in my prayers, Spiritual Journey Thursday buddies. Keep me in yours, too.
Head on over to Donna's place to see what others have written for today.
Welcome to National Poetry Month! Thirty days of focus on poetry: it's such a treat every year, but I always wish for more time to be able to take advantage of all the riches. Will I get it this year? It remains to be seen. I am, like so many others in the world, locked in at home, but online teaching isn't less work than in-person teaching. If anything, it's more work, because the assignments just trickle in all...day...long. When we did it before, it felt as though it was all the non-fun parts of teaching (grading, mostly - I do actually enjoy the planning part) and none of the fun parts (students, classroom interaction, time with colleagues). This time around it's going much more smoothly, since both my students and I have experience in this. But it still takes up a lot of my day.
I'm going to try to post every day, as I did last year, using open tabs on my computer. Here's what I wrote last year:
Some years I have attempted to do a daily post in NPM, and some years
not, and this year on the whole I thought not, but then I realized that I
have so many open tabs on my desktop that contain poems that I could
probably post for two weeks just by sharing those. This would allow me
to close the tabs, and also it would allow others to see what I've kept
open over the last few months. Sometimes I save something because I just
want to read it again, sometimes because I want to write something
similar. My husband is endlessly horrified by how many tabs I have open all the time.
When I run out of open tabs, I have poems I've saved in email that I
can share, and by that time I'll have new tabs open, anyway.
The thing is, I know I'll be mostly talking to myself in these posts.
All my poetry-loving friends are just as busy during NPM as I am. If you
are stopping by to read, welcome, and leave a comment to let me know
you've been here.
So this year, I'm going to try all that again. I hope to write some of my own poems this month, too, and if I can manage it, I'll be sharing some of those.
When I woke up this morning, the internet wasn't working, and for a few moments I indulged a nightmarish vision in which we'd be locked in our house for a bazillion more weeks with no ability to teach our students, no way to contact our people around the world, no way to receive news. By the time our hard-working ISP technicians (wherever they are, God bless 'em) had restored our access, it took me a while to talk myself down to my "it's going to be OK" mindset that I have to cultivate each morning. And also, I didn't get my NPM post written until now, late afternoon. All this to say, there may be days this month when I can't write a post, and that will have to be OK.
Like last year, I want to start this year with a song by Andrew Peterson, "To All the Poets."
To All the Poets
by Andrew Peterson
To all the poets I have known
Who saw the beauty in the commonplace
Saw incarnation in a baby's face
And in a drop of rain the stars
When there was mud and blood and tears
You sang a song at night to calm our fears
You made a moment last a thousand years
You are the poets I have known
To all the poets I have known
You built a kingdom out of sea and sand
You conquered armies with a marching band
You carved a galaxy in stone
You built an altar out of bread
And spent your soul to see the children fed
You wove your heart in every story read
Thank God for poets I have known
And you keep on dreamin'
When the dreams all fade
When friends desert me
You're the ones who stay
To write the prayers when every prayer had been prayed
You are the poets I have known
You turned your tears into a string of pearls
You held your sorrow high to light the world
When I thought I was alone
In every man you saw the boy
The hidden heart the dark could not destroy
Slipped past the dragons with a tale of joy
Thank God for poets I have known
'Cause you keep on dreamin'
When the dreams all fade
When friends desert me
You're the ones who stay
To write the prayers when every prayer had been prayed
You walking wounded of my life
Who bled compassion in the heat of strife
You stood between my heart and Satan's knife
With just the armor of a song
You are the heroes and the brave
Who with a slender pen our passions save
And chisel epitaphs upon the graves
Of all the poets I have known
So keep on dreamin'
Keep on dreamin'
So keep on dreamin'
Keep on dreamin'
Keep on dreamin'
Thanks to Andrew Peterson, one of the poets I have known, and thanks too to Jama, who once again has compiled a list of NPM activities at her blog, Jama's Alphabet Soup. People are so creative and amazing, and at a time like this, what a comfort that is! One of those activities is the Progressive Poem, enjoying its ninth year. I've participated since the beginning, and this year my line is on April 23rd. Here's the list of where the lines will be hosted each day (notice, there's still one line open, on the 28th):
In 1640, The Bay Psalm Book was the first book to be printed "in British North America," according to Wikipedia. In 2013, a copy of it sold at auction for $14 million. But I'm pretty sure its value to the original users was beyond money. These people understood sickness and death and uncertainty. They also understood that rhyme and meter help to fix ideas in human brains.
Here's Psalm 23 in the Bay Psalm Book version:
The Lord to me a shepherd is,
want therefore shall not I:
He in the folds of tender grass,
doth cause me down to lie:
To waters calm me gently leads
restore my soul doth he:
He doth in paths of righteousness
for his name's sake lead me.
Yeah, though in valley of death's shade
I walk, none ill I'll fear:
Because thou art with me, thy rod,
and staff my comfort are.
For me a table thou hast spread,
in presence of my foes:
Thou dost anoint my head with oil;
my cup it overflows.
Goodness and mercy surely shall
all my days follow me:
And in the Lord's house I shall dwell
so long as days shall be.
Do you notice how in these times, people are sharing art and music and poetry online? And turning to books on their own shelves? Here's a post I wrote yesterday about what I've been reading. What are you reading or listening to that's helping you "fear none ill?" Share in the comments.
It's been a while since my last reading update, although I have a list of five finished books to write about at some point. In the week since we have been banished to our homes for yet another lockdown, this one due to COVID-19, I have been somewhat distracted and had trouble reading much of anything. But here are some thoughts about what I'm reading.
During our last period(s) of distance learning, I abandoned my read-alouds, even though I consider reading aloud to my students one of the most important things I do as a teacher. But this time, feeling a little more comfortable with the tools we're using to send and evaluate our students' work, I decided to record the readings. I'm enjoying it, and the feedback from the students has been...well, OK, I don't expect feedback from my middle schoolers, but at least there hasn't been any negative feedback. I am requiring my students to keep reading, and to write to me about what they are reading, and let's just say that their choices run the gamut from classic to...not. At all. So at least when I am sending them chapters to listen to, I ensure that there's some quality literature in their lives.
Here's what I'm reading with my students. In seventh grade, we are finishing up Seedfolks, by Paul Fleischman. I had planned to finish it our last day of school before going to distance learning, because we were going to do that last Monday, but then the government shut schools down by a decree Thursday night, so I had four chapters left. The chapters in this book are very short, and each is in a different voice. There are only thirteen chapters in the whole book. Ironically, the book is about coming together, focusing on a community garden in downtown Cleveland. Tomorrow I'll send out the last chapter, and we'll be done with that book. I'm not sure what we'll read next, but maybe Peak, by Roland Smith. (I wrote a post last May about teaching that book.)
In eighth grade, we are reading The Running Dream, by Wendelin Van Draanen. This is about a girl who loses her leg, and over the last couple of years of teaching it, I have collected a bunch of YouTube videos that go along with it, which I am now sending online for the kids to watch. We're not even halfway through this one, and the students were getting invested in it, and I think it's appropriate to read about struggle right now. After we get done with this, I want to try teaching my favorite unit, on a retelling of the Iliad and the Odyssey, The Trojan War, by Olivia Coolidge. I'm not sure how I will condense all the song and dance I usually do into an online presentation, but my husband has had some success with using ShowMe, and he has promised to, um, show me.
I've been reading aloud to my husband; we usually have a book on the go, and the one we're in right now is The Street of a Thousand Blossoms, by Gail Tsukiyama. Here's a passage we read this morning, about Japan in April 1946:
"Still, every day after the firestorm Haru went outside, a scarf covering her face and mouth, her hands bandaged, hoping the world might have returned to the way it was. In her mind, she played I See, a game she and Aki had played as small children. I see a cat . . . , she began, which was followed by Aki's I see a cat with black, black eyes . . . I see a cat with black, black eyes and a long, bushy broom tail . . . I see a cat with black, black eyes and a long, bushy broom tail that sweeps the floor . . . It went on and on until Aki couldn't remember any more and became silly, or gave up, her attention already focused on something else.
Haru looked at the devastation around her. I see a world covered in gray ash. I see a world covered in gray ash with flecks of white bone. I see a world covered in gray ash with flecks of white bone of all those who will never rise again . . . She walked around the sumo stable seeking signs of life, thinking in her twelve-year-old mind that not until she found it would she believe things could return to normal."
As in past crises in my life, I find it oddly comforting to read about people going through worse, and triumphing, or at least surviving.
I've also been reading The Gospel of Trees, by Apricot Irving. This is a memoir by the daughter of missionaries to the north of Haiti. It's well-written and unflinching in its look at the challenges of trying to help people.
I've been reading Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, by Kathleen Rooney, for a while now. I'm enjoying it, but somehow have not made much progress on it. I just get distracted so easily these days.
Here's another one I pulled out for inspiration this morning.
I was writing letters to the parents of my students, and wanted to do some of them in French. Perhaps needless to say, this book wasn't much help.
I had a conversation with a friend on another Caribbean island earlier in the week about, among other things, A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles (which she just finished, and which I read twice in 2018). Since this is a book about a sudden shrinking of someone's world, it seems very appropriate for right now, and my friend thought so, too. At the end of our discussion, I thought about checking it out again from the library. I also have read some in Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis. This one might be a little too on the nose; it's about a woman time traveling back to the middle ages (Black Death, anyone?) during a pandemic in a future setting where time travel is a common reality. And I started The Second Sleep, by Robert Harris, without knowing what it was about. This one might be a little too on the nose as well, but I definitely want to finish it someday, because it's fascinating so far.
I will still blog about the books I finish, including, I hope, some of the ones in this post. What are you reading? What's perfect for a pandemic?
We are at home today after the Haitian government officially announced last night that there are two confirmed cases of the virus here in Haiti. Schools are closed and we're waiting to see what happens next.
Here's a poem while we wait. It's "Blessing of Hope," by Jan Richardson, from her book The Cure for Sorrow.
Blessing of Hope
by Jan Richardson
So may we know
the hope
that is not just
for someday
but for this day -
here, now,
in this moment
that opens to us:
hope not made
of wishes
but of substance,
hope made of sinew
and muscle
and bone,
hope that has breath
and a beating heart,
hope that will not
keep quiet
and be polite,
hope that knows
how to holler
when it is called for,
hope that knows
how to sing
when there seems
little cause,
hope that raises us
from the dead -
not someday
but this day,
every day,
again and
again and
again.
Sometimes it helps to take your eyes off the news and look at the birds. At least, that's what I'm finding. I suppose anything that's completely unaffected by tidings of virus mayhem would work as well, but there's just something about those birds. I got in the habit of sitting in my chair on my front porch during our weeks of lockdown here in Haiti (for political reasons, not health reasons) in our fall semester. Having to stay home made me decide that I needed to learn to identify the flora and fauna in my own yard, partly to keep from losing my mind and partly just to shift my focus.
I wrote this poem about my birdwatching the other morning, when I saw this guy (photo from eBird.com):
Redstart
I see the American redstart
first thing in the morning
before I even sit down in my birdwatching chair
and before I can get my binoculars out of their case.
It flashes the brilliant orange on its wings,
vivid against their black background,
as it flies from the ground to a branch above.
I open my Notes app
and type “American” with my thumbs
and surely it is a good thing
that instead of
“president,”
“hegemony,”
or even
“flag,”
my predictive text suggests:
redstart.
Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com
I'm not sure how it can be Friday again already, since I haven't yet finished reading all of last week's posts. But it's been a great week. We're finishing up our third quarter of the school year, and I have loads of assignments coming in today that I will spend the next few days grading. We made it through the whole quarter without missing any days of school except the ones previously scheduled (Carnival break took place, even though the festivities in Port-au-Prince were cancelled for the second year in a row). This has been a bizarre and uniquely challenging school year, but I can honestly say I have loved every day of this quarter with my students. Our classes are smaller than they were when we started the year, because many of our families have moved, or at least sent their kids somewhere a little more predictable. The State Department moved the travel advisory number back up to 4 yesterday afternoon (4 is the highest number, the worst number, the level you don't want). To all those undeniable facts, I say, I know, but it was still a wonderful quarter and I'm so thankful for being able to teach in my classroom instead of long-distance over the internet.
Now we are reading about teachers in other parts of the world having to do the distance-learning thing due to COVID-19 (and of course teachers in China have been dealing with this for months now), and to them I say, I see you, friends, wouldn't want to be you. You have all my sympathy and I hope and hope and hope that the virus (which is officially here on our island, one case in the Dominican Republic, an Italian national) doesn't force us to do the same. I hope you, too, will soon be back in your classroom with your kids, teaching them face-to-face, and appreciating that privilege as never before.
I will soon be posting a Birthday Edition post for Poetry Friday, as I received several poetic gifts on my recent birthday. I'm not ready to do that yet, but in my current "everything's awful and yet everything's fabulous" mood, there's nothing more appropriate than this anthology that the inimitable Irene sent me.
It's called Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, edited by Phyllis Cole-Dai and Ruby R. Wilson. I have been loving the beautifully-chosen selections, each one guaranteed to lower one's blood pressure and cause stress to drain out one's fingertips. I promise a review when I have read more of the book.
I also promise a better Poetry Friday post next week, with some, you know, poems in it, but in the meantime, listen to this song by one of my favorite poets, Paul Simon. Here are the lyrics on his site.
"You know life is what you make of it.
So beautiful or so what."
Clearly I let things get out of balance this month, because the first Thursday crept up on me. On the subject of balance, suggested by our host Fran, I offer this from Walter Brueggemann, from his sermon "Trusting Two Rocks," preached in August 2008. His texts are Isaiah 51:1-6 and Matthew 16:13-20. Brueggemann writes:
"Both stories, both rocks, aim to create a peculiar, self-aware people who will live in the world differently. And that is how these two texts are addressed to us, after they are addressed to ancient Jews and to Jesus' disciples. We in the church now are just like them. We in the church now also live in the midst of a superpower that is not unlike Babylon or Rome. And our superpower, like those ancient superpowers, leaves us off balance with demand and the frantic pace of economic uncertainty and political instability. It is enough to cause you to lose your balance, to retreat into something safe, to quit thinking about it or to just go along.
But these texts say otherwise. These texts say to ancient Jews, to the followers of Jesus, and to us, don't quit thinking, don't quit hoping, don't just go along. Rather, claim your peculiar identity as the people who trust God's promises and who know that God's good purpose will prevail in the world:
So watch for the way in which God comforts and turns places into the Garden of Eden;
Watch for the ways in which a teaching of peace and justice grabs the nations and all parts of God's world;
Listen for the word of rescue that persists in the world.
We are authorized to be in the world differently because we are chips off the old block. We do not need to be aggressive or quarrelsome or anxious or despairing, because God has not quit. We are God's people. We have been so since that ancient day with Sarah and Abraham. The world still revolves around impossibilities that are given by God. We know who we are because we know the story and the God of the story and the Messiah who is among us."
I've been privileged to live in three of the world's great cities (Nairobi, Port-au-Prince and Asunción, Paraguay) as well as spending time in many others (including nine weeks in Paris as a college student). I just moved to a new city: Kampala, Uganda. I've also lived in smaller towns in three countries. In all of those places there have been difficult days, but I've never found a city or town yet where God is not, and I don't anticipate finding one in the future, either. The name of my blog comes from the song "Love is Always There," by Carolyn Arends.
