A Nancy Drew Poem for Labor Day

Labor Day brings to mind many things for me.  I think of the ways this holiday has changed.  In my lifetime, Labor Day signaled a coming end to the intense heat, with only a week or two left.  But in our time of planetary climate upheaval, no longer.

Labor Day has also signaled fashion choices, like when to put away white clothes and sandals.  But we are no longer bound by these dictates.

Most people have forgotten or never learned about various Labor movements of the 20h century.  We have time off, most of us, in large part because of those movements.

I am thinking of all the workplace poems I've written, poems about workplaces and thankful that I no longer work there, and sad, too, because corporate types destroyed them.

So let me post a different kind of poem, about Nancy Drew, in her retirement returning to the public school classroom.  Nancy Drew wouldn't be teaching college. She'd have had a teacher's certificate from pre-feminist days. And they'd let her teach the kids that were headed to juvenile jails and drop out land--who cares about those kids?

When I wrote it, I thought about a friend's experience teaching those kinds of kids. She was allowed to do basically whatever she wanted, to abandon textbooks and to teach whatever came to her, so long as she kept the kids from hurting each other or the other children in the school.

I thought about Nancy Drew's friends, Bess and George--what happened to them? Could they help Nancy Drew solve the mystery of how to reach these students?

Of course! Bess has started a bakeshop and this generation of students, raised on cooking shows, eat up what she has to offer in the way of old-fashioned home-ec. George, the tomboy, has gone on to become a marine biologist, so she leads field trips into various ecosystems.

 This poem appears my third chapbook, Life in the Holocene Extinction.

Nancy Drew and the Mystery of the Pre-Drop Outs



Nancy Drew decides she needs new
mysteries to solve, so she returns
to school, to mold young minds.

Long ago, in between cracking cases
involving diaries or letters or maps and solving
secrets in attics and towers, she got a teaching
certificate, as ambitious women did in those days.
Now she calls the school board to see
how she might be of use.

Her credentials, old and out of date,
don't prevent her from taking charge
of the most hopeless classrooms,
the students on a layover
on their journey to juvenile court.

Given tattered textbooks and worksheets without
answer keys, Nancy Drew adopts
a different approach. As always, she calls
on her friends.

Bess runs a bakeshop, so she teaches
the students to cook, a retro home-ec
approach. Nancy Drew's feminist critics
would not approve, but this generation
of students, raised on cooking shows, responds
with rare enthusiasm.

Nancy Drew believes in fresh air and sunshine,
so she recruits her friend George, a marine
biologist, for ideas. George leads
field trips to various ecosystems:
swamp walks and snorkeling and soon
some of the students are ready
for college-track science classes.

These clues to a better future don't prevent
some of her students from sneaking
away to explore more ancient secrets.
She tries to keep them focused on the future,
but she remembers Ned Nickerson
and those cars now considered classics.

She thinks of Ned in the roadster,
and later, her love confined to the hospital bed,
immune from rescue, unable to hear
her whispered pleas.

She kisses the old locket always worn
around her neck and writes the day's lesson
plan on the white board. At the end
of the day, she erases the smeared
lines from the board to leave a blank
space to be filled again in the morning.

The Triune Quilting God

Here we are on the last day of August.  As always, the month has zoomed by, and I feel a looming despair that I didn't get any writing done.  But let me do a more honest record keeping of my poetry writing:

-- 5 rough drafts of varying degrees of completeness.

-- 2 rough drafts revised to intermediate status.

-- One of those rough drafts taken to completion.

And of course, poetry writing isn't the only writing I have done.  As I looked back over my past week of blogging, a new poem began to twinkle at me from the side of my consciousness.  What if Jesus decided to go to Quilt Camp?  I wrote a few lines, and it has potential; I'll return to it later this week.

As I was writing, I wondered if I had already written any poems that show Jesus quilting.  The only one that came to mind was one that wasn't Jesus, but God.  

It's a good day for a poem about God as a quilter, and not just any quilter, but an old woman quilter.  Here's the poem in its entirety. It first appeared in Interdisciplinary Humanities.

The Precious Nature of Junk

If God is an old woman,
She uses no recipe.
Long ago she learned
what she needed to know:
how to make do with scarce
resources, how to create successful
substitutions, how to create
magic from simple kitchen chemistry.

If God is an old woman,
She saves all our old clothes. She alone
has a vision of a collage of cloth.
She cuts new shapes out of our discards
and pieces them into an intricate quilt,
even though she knows we will fail
to appreciate her demonstrated skill.

If God is an old woman,
She longs for closer connection.
She sends cards for every occasion
and fills the answering machine with cryptic
messages. She has such important
information to pass on and such little
time left. We listen
and wonder at her mental state.

If God is an old woman,
She knows that everything could have a larger
purpose. She hoards items we’d have discarded
long ago. She understands the precious
nature of junk.

All Our Cells: Cars, Monastic, and Other

Yesterday was a good day--we all headed to Bristol for church in our separate cars and lunch afterward.  The classy brunch place was closed because of some kitchen malfunction, so we went to a different downtown hotel for a different lunch experience.

Happily, they had both a breakfast and a lunch menu; it could have been worse.

Today I head down I 26 in a different direction towards Columbia.  A grad school friend had a catastrophic stroke 2 years ago, and she's in a skilled nursing unit in Columbia.  I try to get down to see her every 4-6 weeks.  After that visit, I'll swing by the house of another grad school friend.

This morning I was thinking about cells, the Julian of Norwich kind, and cars, the modern cell and wondering about poem possibilities, even though I'm sure I've used that imagery before.  I'll post the poem, but that doesn't mean I won't revisit this idea.  After all, I wrote the poem a long time ago, during a different time of commuting to adjunct jobs in South Florida.  What does it mean to be doing this driving now, as an older woman?  Stay tuned!

In the meantime, here's the older poem, first published in my chapbook, Whistling Past the Graveyard:

My Habit, My Hairshirt


A modern day anchoress, I commit
myself to my car. In my moving cell,
I sing constantly and pray without ceasing.

I dedicate myself to our modern religion
of hectic pace. I rush from one location to another,
showing my devotion in twelve hour increments.

No time for contemplation, the anathema
to the modern ascetic. I flog
myself with my cell phone and briefcase.

Occasionally, a heretical urge lures
me, a siren song urging me to slow down,
tempting me to tame my frantic schedule.

But no Gnostic visions for me. I race
through another week in the grip of my Daytimer,
my habit, my hairshirt.

A Poem for Ascension Day

Today is Ascension Day, the day that 40 days after Easter, 10 days before Pentecost. This feast day commemorates Jesus being taken up into Heaven.

Imagine it from the eyes of those who have followed Christ from traipsing around Galilee, Crucifixion, and then Resurrection. You have just gotten your beloved Messiah returned to you, and then, poof, he's gone again. What a whipsawed feeling they must have had.

For more on this day from a theological view, head over to this post on my theology blog.

A few years ago, May Day, Ascension Day, and performance review deadlines all converged, and I wrote a poem, "Conducting a Performance Review on the Feast of the Ascension."  It reminds me of how I am so grateful to have ascended out of administration.

Conducting a Performance Review on the Feast of the Ascension

I have wrestled
with these forms—a modern
crucifixion—for over forty
days. I spend more time
trying to coerce
the software into cooperation
than I do in assessment
of employee performance.

Regulations require me to assemble
the same information across several forms.
Employees must cobble
together thick packets of proof
that they’ve done what the forms
report, although if they hadn’t,
the work would have ground to a halt.

How I wish I could ascend
above all this bureaucracy,
that I could shower
my employees with all the glory
they deserve. I long to welcome
them with praise instead of forms.

Alas, the modern workplace
has yet to be redeemed,
and so, I slog
through forms and documentation and rubrics and scales
of pay. I protect my cowering, stressed
employees as best I can.
I whistle “Solidarity Forever” as I complete
the tasks that must be done.

Fan Letter for Forgotten Poem, "The Moon Remembers"

Like many others, I get the occasional e-mail that tells me that the sender can help me find new readers for my brilliant books, millions and millions of readers.  Yesterday I got a different e-mail, an old-fashioned fan letter of sorts.  

The e-mail writer told me that she had selected my poem for a specific reason:  "This is to let you know that as a member of a Lectio Poetry group that met this morning, I chose your poem 'The Moon Remembers' for our session. Because of the recent NASA mission to send humans farther into space than ever before, and to study the dark side of the moon, I felt fortunate to find your poem to share."

The e-mail concluded this way, "In this world of chaos, 'The Moon Remembers' gave us an hour of peace, of joy, of hope."

Wow--what writer could hope for more than that?  I mean that sincerely.  It is one of the reasons I write, in the hopes of bringing something positive to people.

I don't get many fan letters anymore, and the ones that I get are usually about "Heaven on Earth," perhaps my most famous poem, read on Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac.  Yesterday's e-mail referenced "The Moon Remembers."  It's a poem I barely remember writing, and at first, I wondered if she was writing to the wrong poet.

Happily, my blog answers many a question for me.  I posted it in this blog post, and I'm guessing that's how the group leader found my poem.  Even though it's not one of the poems I remember, I'm still happy with it.

Let me post it here again, as I also say a prayer for the Artemis Mission which returns home Friday:

The Moon Remembers

                “I sing and the moon shudders"
                            Li Po, “Drinking Alone by Moonlight”



The moon does not approve of elementary choir
masters who stop the rehearsal, make each quivering
child sing a solo to find the one
who is off key. The helpless moon, marooned
so far away, wishes she could offer sanctuary.

The moon knows what the choir master forgets.

The moon doesn’t understand scales or the division
of voices into the caste systems of chorus:
superior sopranos, dowdy altos, basses as the bubble
of depth holding us up, the star tenor.

The moon remembers what the choir master forgets.

The moon sees our best selves as we sing:
the lonely driver late at night, singing to stay awake,
the melancholy mother, humming Christmas carols
to cheer the babies, the desperate lover
serenading the empty window.

The moon remembers what we all forget.

The moon knows that if we believed in our songs,
strengthened our fragile voices, and sang
as if we meant it, then galaxies would blow
to bits as the universe expands.

Good Friday in a Better Place

It is Good Friday, and I'm tired.  But of course I'm tired.  Yesterday I drove down the mountain to teach, drove home, and then my spouse and I drove up I 26 in the opposite direction so that I could preach and preside at Faith Lutheran for Maundy Thursday worship service; for more on that, see this post on my theology blog.

I am reminding myself that I have plenty of time to get all the things done that need to get done today.  The primary thing is grading.  I am caught up at Spartanburg Methodist College, but my online classes need attention.

I also need to write a rough draft of my Easter sermon.  I know what I plan to write, so I am less stressed about that.

But I don't want this blog to just be a catalog of to do lists.  I spent a bit of time looking at old Good Friday posts and thinking about what a strange assortment of experiences I've had.

The body experiences are the ones that come to mind, not the worship experiences:

--In 2022, I went out for my normal walk in the pre-dawn dark and fell and broke my wrist.  There wasn't a clear precipitating event, no trip, no misstep.  One minute I was walking and the next I was falling.  I didn't think I had broken my wrist because it didn't hurt.  I am still a bit spooked by this experience, if we're telling the truth.

--In 2024, I spent the morning of Good Friday in the mammography center getting a more advanced scan.

I've had a wide variety of worship experiences, at various points in the day.  None of them match my memories of childhood Good Friday services, which seemed more dramatic than any other, with tales of torment and spookiness and the big Bible slammed at the end.

I've done a variety of the Stations of the Cross, which always leave me wanting to make my own version, not because I find them lacking but because they are so inspiring.

And of course, there are the days when I have had to work because I was in such a secular setting.  I have always had a liturgical calendar moving alongside my secular life, and they rarely match.

Today, I am in a much better place, both physically (healthy even though I'm carrying 30 pounds more than I would like) and in terms of my work life.  I am grateful on this Good Friday.

Here's a poem from a harder time, back in 2003, a time of many home repairs and infestations.  It was inspired by the time when the termites came out of the ceiling in two places inside the house as they swarmed, and it was awful.  It happened in the spring which made me think of spring holidays:  Easter and Passover, and this poem emerged, published for the first time here:

A Thousand Wings



The termites swarm on Good Friday,
the one day of the year when bread and wine
cannot be consecrated.
The termites fill my book-lined study.
I cannot kill them fast enough.

Finally, I shut the door and weep.
I cry for the Crucified Christ.
I cry for my house, under assault
from insects who have declared war
on wood, as if to avenge His death.
I cry for terrors and tribulations and plagues
that do not pass over.

In the evening, I sweep up a thousand wings.
I dust my shelves and attend to my house,
the way the women must have prepared the corpse,
bathing and anointing with oil

so lost in misery and despair,
resurrection blindsides us,
coming from a direction we could never expect,
a cold tomb, modern chemicals,
a spirit unconquered by minutiae.

A Different Poem for Maundy Thursday

Today is Maundy Thursday, the day that celebrates "The Last Supper" of Jesus.  Of course, it's not the last supper.  After his resurrection, he gets right back to having meals with people, cooking fish on the beach for breakfast.  But it's the last supper on this side of the crucifixion.

If you'd like a serious Maundy Thursday sermon, I've posted the manuscript (which might change a bit between now and tonight's 6:30 worship service at Faith Lutheran in Bristol, TN) in this blog post.

On a less serious note, I pulled a loaf of bread out of the freezer for tonight's worship and realized that I had pulled out a chunk of fatback.  Happily, I realized it right away and pulled out the correct bag that contains bread not pig fat.  I double checked and will double check again, probably several times before I leave for school.

My poet brain is already making connections.  But it won't be in time for today's blog post.

Instead, let me post an earlier poem.  It's never been published, and it's not my favorite Maundy Thursday poem (those are here and here).  I wrote it back in 2012 when I was filling in for one of the deans who was away for a week on vacation.  It was a high traffic time in the dean's office when students would come in to discuss their failures and their options, so the office needed to be staffed.  I was a department chair who volunteered.  It was also Holy Week, which provided me all kinds of interesting parallels and possibilities.

The Dean Hears Student Appeals During Holy Week


On the Monday after Palm
Sunday, the students form
a line outside the office of the Dean.

The students come to protest
their sudden change of fortune.
They’ve always been good
students! They can’t fathom
why they’ve been forced
to leave school.

The dean drifts off during
their pleas. The dean thinks of palm
branches, donkeys, and crowns of thorns.
The dean studies transcripts
and hears sad tales of woe.
Like Pontius Pilate,
the dean, several steps removed, asks
questions but never knows for sure:
each decision, a shot in the dark.

Unlike Pontius Pilate, the dean never
has scrubbed hands. The dean listens
to each appeal and offers second
chances, even if undeserved,
a gleam of grace
in a world where redemption
seems impossible.

A Poem for International Women's Day

Today is International Women's Day.  I realize that I am luckier than many women throughout the world.  I have part-time work that I can do in the wee, small hours of the morning--or any time and place that I can get an Internet connection.  I have a full-time job that pays me a decent salary with decent benefits.  I am safe at both jobs, and my employers deposit my pay without incident.  I also have a part-time preaching job that feeds my soul in a different way.

I have a lovely house in a relatively safe neighborhood.  I have food in my kitchen and a way to keep it safe until I'm ready to cook it.

I have a bit of time here and there to do the activities that nourish me:  reading and a variety of creative work.  I have time to see friends.  My family members are in good shape.

We are bombarded, day after day, with stories of women who have not been so lucky, reminding us that we still have work to do.

I'm thinking of the multitude of poems that I've written about gender and history and all of those intersections.  Here's a poem that I wrote years ago that says a lot about the life of a certain class of women in modern, capitalistic countries.  It's part of my chapbook, Life in the Holocene Extinction.

The Hollow Women


We are the hollow women,
the ones with carved muscles,
the ones run ragged by calendars
and other apps that promised
us mastery of that cruel slavedriver, time.

We are the hollow women
with faces carved like pumpkins,
shapes that ultimately frighten.

We are the hollow women
who paint our faces the colors
of the desert and march
ourselves to work while dreaming
of mad dashes to freedom.

At night, the ancient ones speak
to us in soft, bodily gurgles
and strange dreams from a different homeland.
We surface from senseless landscapes
to wear our slave clothes
and artificial faces, masks
of every sort. We trudge
to our hollow offices to do our work,
that modern drudgery,
filing papers and shredding documents,
the feminine mystique, the modern housework,
while at home, domestics
from a different culture care
for the children.

A Poem for Epiphany

As I look back through my poetry folder, I'm surprised to see how many Epiphany poems I have.  I've always found the liturgical year and holidays to be fruitful places for inspiration, and Epiphany is particularly rich.  You've got a new star, wise people from a distant land, a murderous dictator, a baby whose story we already know, and various types of knowledge (observation, dreams, ancient information).

I often read T. S. Eliot's "Journey of the Magi" as Epiphany approaches; this year, Ross Douthat posted a reading which I like even better than my own internal voice reading the poem.  That reading sent me back to my poetry folder, and today I'm posting this poem which draws inspiration from Eliot's.  It was written about 10 years ago, and this appearance is its first publication.

Dispensations Old and New



The old dispensation cannot save
you now. Hard and bitter agony.
Eat stones for breakfast, crack
your teeth before sunrise,
it makes no difference.
Suckle the camels who cannot eat cactus,
wait for the silken girls with their sherbet,
No one will sing to you.

You must listen to a different song.
Plug your ears against the angel chorus.
Put away the mandolin and fiddle.
Listen for the star’s quiet plainsong.
Follow the single note.

Leave death’s twilight kingdom.
Enter the deep midnight,
the place you hoped
would be a temporary sojourn.
Learn the new landscape with only
your fingertips for navigation.

Slaughter of Innocents and Non-Compliance with Tyrants

Today is one of those church commemoration days that doesn't get observed in a big way, at least not often.  December 28 is the day when we remember the Holy Innocents, those babies under the age of 2 who lived in Bethlehem, the babies that Herod killed when the wise sages from the east brought news of the arrival of a new ruler, heralded by a new star.  

Some might see it as a strange day in the midst of the Christmas season. Others might see modern corollaries, scared despots who will do anything to maintain their stranglehold on power.  Sadly, we have no shortage of twenty-first century rulers who would slaughter the innocent in their quest to maintain power or gain more.

This morning I'm thinking about the wise sages who inadvertently created this crisis, by visiting Herod and telling him what they saw in the sky.  Herod asks that they come back so that he, too, can go and pay homage.  They are warned in a dream not to go back to Herod.  They return home a different way.  Here's a carving in a European cathedral (Autun Cathedral in France) that depicts the moment of warning:

This morning I am thinking of all the ways that ordinary people can disrupt evil.  There are all sorts of ways of non-compliance.

This train of thought leads me back to a poem I wrote in 2019, a poem with multiple strands: Epiphany, the ongoing debates/actions concerning immigration, the crisis between east and west that ultimately led to the taking down of the wall between East and West Germany, a bit of the underground railroad. Ultimately, this poem arrived, and Sojourners published it in late 2019 or 2020. It fits my mood for today.


Border Lands


I am the border agent who looks
the other way. I am the one
who leaves bottled water in caches
in the harsh border lands I patrol.

I am the one who doesn’t shoot.
I let the people assemble,
with their flickering candles a shimmering
river in the dark. “Let them pray,”
I tell my comrades. “What harm
can come of that?” We holster
our guns, and open a bottle to share.

I am the superior
officer who loses the paperwork
or makes up the statistics.
I am the one who ignores
your e-mails, who cannot be reached
by text or phone, the one
with a full inbox.

When the wise ones
come, as they do, full of dreams,
babbling about the stars
that lead them or messages
from gods or angels,
I open the gates. I don’t alert
the authorities up the road.
Let the kings and emperors
pay for their own intelligence.

I should scan the horizons,
but I tend the garden
I have planted by the shed
where we keep the extra
barbed wires. I grow a variety
of holy trinities: tomatoes, onions,
peppers, beans, squashes of all sorts.
I plant a hedge of sunflowers,
each bright head a north star.

Christmas Pageants, Modern and Medieval

Yesterday's sermon about Joseph had a bit of pondering about Christmas pageants.  I began by thinking about the traditional Christmas pageant, where the starring role is Mary, while the rambunctious boys get cast as farm animals.  Yesterday's sermon was about Joseph, the part of the story that we rarely see in Christmas pageants:  Joseph who has one future mapped out, only to find out that his betrothed is pregnant with someone else's baby.

No, not pageant material--as I wrote in the sermon:  "it would make me deeply uncomfortable to see elementary school kids acting out today’s Gospel. But as an adult, I find this part of the Nativity story may have more to say to us in our non-Christmas lives than the rest of the incarnation story."

Here's what I posted on Facebook:  "If you are feeling a bit like Joseph, feeling like you had solid plans that have dissolved into a huge mess, perhaps my sermon that I preached this morning at Faith Lutheran Church (in Bristol, TN) would have meaning for you."

You can find the recording of my sermon here on my YouTube channel.  You can read along here and count the times I go off-script.

As I was preaching, I was thinking of a poem that I wrote, about being part of the angel choir and not realizing how much more powerful an angel would be than Mary.  I wrote it a long time ago, and my theology around Mary has changed.  I now see her as much more powerful.  But still, I wanted to revisit the poem, and I'm happy that my blog makes it much easier than digging through computer files, trying to remember the name of the poem.

It was first published in The South Carolina Review, and then I included it in my first chapbook, Whistling Past the Graveyard.  It does make me wonder if people even have Christmas pageants anymore.  My church has not in the time that I've been there, although they once did.  We just don't have enough children to do a pageant.

If we had a pageant, I'd try to make it different than the ones I was part of as a child.  I'm not sure how I would do that, so I'm glad I haven't been forced to come up with a plan.  But I wouldn't want today's children to have the experience I had and try to capture in this poem:

Medieval Christmas Pageants


The Sunday School pageant director embraced
the medieval ideals. Mary would have dark
hair and a pure soul. Joseph, a mousy
man who knew how to fade into the background.
Every angel must be haloed with golden
hair, and I, the greatest girl, the head
angel, standing shoulders above the others.

It could have been worse. Ugly and unruly
children had to slide into the heads and tails
of other creatures, subdued by the weight
of their costumes, while I got to lead
the processional. But I, unworldly foolish,
longed to be Mary. I cursed
my blond hair, my Slavic looks which damned
me to the realm of the angels.

I didn’t see Mary’s role for what it was: bit
player, vessel for the holy, keeper of the cosmic.
I didn’t understand the power of my position.
I could have led an angel uprising, although the history
of angel uprisings suggests that though whole new
worlds emerge, so do new tortures with the triumph.
I could have imparted messages of God’s plan,
spoiled all the surprises. I could just appear,
scaring mere mortals into submission.

Instead, I smoldered, smarting
at the indignities of mother-made wings
and long robes to ruin my long legged run.
I internalized the message of the culture
which didn’t offer starring roles for girls,
no head angel power for us.
Instead, the slender, the meek, the submissive
girl got the prize, the spotlight focused
on her kneeling knees, her bowed head.
I tried not to sing too loudly, to shrink
my Teutonic bones into the Mary model.

Armistice Day with Monastic Poem

It has been many years since I was teaching the second half of British Literature in a Fall semester when Armistice Day/Veterans Day happens.  This year, I am.  We've already covered the material, although now we're discussing Mrs. Dalloway, a book which may be the first depiction of World War I caused PTSD in a novel.

I think it's hard for most of us to conceive of how many people died in World War I.  Even when I have my students imagine all of their male classmates going off to fight and no one coming back, I think it's hard to get our heads around the total.  I wish we could all go to the WWI cemeteries in France.  It's a visual that's tough to capture in a picture; it does make a very different impact.

Years ago, I was at Mepkin Abbey on Armistice Day.  It also happened to be near All Saints Sunday, the first All Saints Day after Abbot Francis Kline had been cruelly taken early by leukemia, and the Sunday we were there was the day of the memorial service for him. Part of one of the services was out in the monks' cemetery, and all the retreatants were invited out with the monks. I was struck by the way that the simple crosses reminded me of the French World War I cemeteries:

I took the above picture later from the visitor side of the grounds, but it gives you a sense of the burial area. I turned all these images in my head and wrote a poem, "Armistice Day at the Abbey."



 Armistice Day at the Abbey



The monks bury their dead on this slight
rise that overlooks the river
that flows to the Atlantic, that site
where Africans first set foot on slavery’s soil.

These monks are bound
to a different master, enslaved
in a different system.
They chant the same Psalms, the same tones
used for centuries. Modern minds scoff,
but the monks, yoked together
into a process both mystical and practical,
do as they’ve been commanded.

Their graves, as unadorned as their robes,
stretch out in rows of white crosses, reminiscent
of a distant French field. We might ponder
the futility of belief in a new covenant,
when all around us old enemies clash,
or we might show up for prayer, light
a candle, and simply submit.

Osama's Sunflowers: A Poem for September 11

In the years since September 11, 2001, I have never not thought about that anniversary each year.  In 2017, it wasn't the first thing on my mind, since we had just had a hurricane, and we were trying to decide if it was safe to return home.  But eventually, I did realize what day it was.

In the years just after 2001, everyone remembered that anniversary each year when it arrived.  Now I have students who weren't born in 2001.  I think of my own reaction to my elders remembering the anniversary of the JFK shooting, which happened just a few years before I was born.  It seemed like such ancient history to me, while it was still very vivid for my elders.  I suspect the same is true of my students.

In 2001, we seemed to have shifted from the violence of assassinations to the violence of terrorist acts.  And now, we have a wide variety of types of violence, and I have no idea where the world is headed.

In 2011, I heard  this interview with Lawrence Wright, who wrote The Looming Tower.  I'm haunted by all the things we missed, all the pieces we didn't put together.  I'm haunted by the folks who say they tried to get a meeting with the President and key staff to go over all of this, but the scheduled meetings were cancelled again and again and again.

It makes me think about my life and all its facets.  What am I missing?  What should I focus upon?

Lawrence Wright told this nugget about Osama bin Laden, who flirted with both terrorism and agriculture, before committing to terrorism.  He loved his sunflowers.  

I understand how people become disaffected enough to leave their sunflowers behind and turn to dreams of destruction.  I'm grateful for my religious heritage that reminds me of the seductive qualities of evil, that warns me not to succumb to that glittery facade.

I continued to think about the terrorist that loved sunflowers, and not surprisingly, that nugget later led to a poem:

Osama’s Sunflowers


The terrorist sits in his armed
compound and watches videos
of himself. He counts
his weapons and yearns
for a nuclear bomb.

The terrorist dreams of hamburgers
and the joy of a cold beer
on a hot day.
The terrorist remembers the grill
he used to have, a container
of gas used to cook,
not to kill.

The terrorist tamps
down his longing
for the sunflowers he used to grow,
their bright smiles turned
towards blue skies.
He wonders about the different trajectory
had he chosen seeds and soil
instead of flame and ash.

Hurricane Katrina Memories, Twenty Years On

Twenty years ago, New Orleans was being slammed by hurricane Katrina.  I've heard and seen a 20th anniversary report or two, and it's fitting that New Orleans gets the focus.  We lived in South Florida at the time, and South Floridians have their own Hurricane Katrina memories, which can be dramatic, on an individual level.

I didn't watch the flooding of New Orleans happen in real time, or even see much about it.  I remember hearing a radio snippet for a brief time when the power blipped on and then blipped off again.  The levees had been breached, but had not broken.  We know how that was about to turn out.

No, we were dealing with this:

It's a downed ficus tree with my spouse and his chain saw (that pink blob) in the foreground of the picture.  The standing tree stretched across the whole back border of our fence.  The downed tree took up our whole back yard.

The pictures are grainy, because they've been scanned and saved through many formats.  What you can't see underneath the green at the lower right is a smushed shed.  Here's a  better picture--that triangle of a roof was a shed that had been squashed by the tree:

The picture below gives a bit of a sense of perspective.  Look to the left of the picture, and you'll see my spouse by the fence.  You can see the twisted trunk of the tree rising in the center of the picture.

 

Of course, we lost most everything in that shed.  But it could have been much worse.  The tree brushed the wall of our house as it gently fell over, after a day of soaking rain, but it didn't go through the roof or the windows.  I'm still not sure what prevented that.

We spent a week cleaning up what we could, and then the insurance folks finally got in touch with us, and we used the insurance payment to have an arborist company finish the job.  We never could have done the trunk grinding by ourselves.

I have not written many poems about specific hurricanes, but hurricanes do swirl through my body of work.  They make such great metaphors, after all.

Here's a poem I wrote last century, around 1996.  I think it still holds up relatively well:

Weather Wife

The hurricane flirts with us; like a reluctant
suitor, the storm cannot decide whether or not to commit
to us. It won’t even make a definitive date.
We watch it vacillate, wonder
if it might decide to court another.

Why do these storms always arrive at night?
They party with Caribbean island after island,
leaving the coastal wife watching the clock
and waiting for its arrival, keeping the lights
lit and the supper warm.

The storm should sneak in, with a whisper of wind,
A dozen roses of rain, leaving a bit of sleep
to the exhausted wife of a coastline.
Instead, the hurricane roars in, renouncing
all others to embrace us fully.

Like a battering spouse, it smacks
us again and again. Not content to just hit
until we back down, it smashes
us to unconsciousness and rips
our most beloved possessions to shreds.

We clean up the damage while we try to soothe
the little ones. We try to convince
ourselves that it won’t happen again. The weather woos
us with calm surf and skies full of sunshine.
We continue in this marriage. We cannot divorce
ourselves to head to the passionless calm
of a chillier climate.


If you want a book-length treatment of hurricane Katrina in poems, I recommend  two wonderful books. Patricia Smith's Blood Dazzler does amazing things, an astonishing collection of poems that deal with Hurricane Katrina. I love the way that Katrina comes to life. I love that a dog makes its way through these poems. I love the multitude of voices, so many inanimate things brought to life (a poem in the voice of the Superdome--what a cool idea!). I love the mix of formalist poetry with more free form verse and the influence of jazz and blues music. An amazing book.


In Colosseum, Katie Ford also does amazing things. She, too, writes poems of Hurricane Katrina. But she also looks back to the ancient world, with poems that ponder great civilizations buried under the sands of time. What is the nature of catastrophe? What can be saved? What will be lost?

Here's a more recent poem, written years after after Hurricane Wilma (which wreaked devastation just 2 months after Katrina, just after we had finished up our hurricane Katrina clean-up) when I found myself weeping in the car, flooded by post-hurricane despair, even though the clean-up had been done and regular life mostly restored:


What They Don’t Tell You About Hurricanes



You expected the ache in your lazy
muscles, as you hauled debris
to the curb, day after day.

You expected your insurance
agent to treat
you like a lover spurned.

You expected to curse
your bad luck,
but then feel grateful
when you met someone suffering
an even more devastating loss.

You did not expect
that months, even years afterwards
you would find yourself inexplicably
weeping in your car, parked
in a garage that overlooks
an industrial wasteland.

That year, 2005, was the year when I got the first glimmer of a thought that would become a pounding scream:  "South Florida is not a safe place to be as the planet succumbs to global warming."  Even though we got to North Carolina in time to experience the worst natural disaster in the state's history, Hurricane Helene, I'm still glad we got to higher ground.

Trinity Test Site, in History, Film, and Poetry

On this day in 1945, the United States exploded the first atomic bomb at the Trinity test site in New Mexico.

Robert Oppenheimer named the site, and when asked if he had named it as a name common to rivers and mountains in the west, he replied, "I did suggest it, but not on that ground... Why I chose the name is not clear, but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne, written just before his death, which I know and love. From it a quotation: 'As West and East / In all flatt Maps—and I am one—are one, / So death doth touch the Resurrection.' That still does not make a Trinity, but in another, better known devotional poem Donne opens, 'Batter my heart, three person'd God;—.'"

I love a scientist who loves John Donne. Metaphysical poetry and atomic weapons: they do seem to go together in intriguing ways.

I think of Oppenheimer watching that explosion. In one book I read, the author states that these scientists were fairly sure what would happen, but not certain. There was some fear that they might somehow ignite the earth's atmosphere and destroy the planet. But they proceeded anyway.

Oppenheimer says that he watched the explosion and thought about The Bhagavad Gita: "I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds." Once we had a crew of guys come to cut down a tree. The leader with the shaved head took off his shirt and tattooed across his back was the same line; it was a big tattoo--I could read it from inside the house. On that same day, from the gay guys' apartment complex on the next street, I could hear disco music, The Village People and Donna Summer, in an endless loop, interrupted by the buzzing chain saws from the tree crew. Some day I'll use these details in a poem or a short story. Or maybe having recorded them in my blog, I won't feel the need to use the details elsewhere.

I thought with the film Oppenheimer, more people might know the history, but the significance of this day can get a bit lost.  I hadn't remembered until doing some digging this morning that the explosion was scheduled for this date because Truman had an important meeting with Allied leaders in Potsdam on July 17. Bomb as savior?

Oh, so many poetry possibilities! There's the desert aspect, the prophets that so often emerge from wilderness areas. There's the fact that this part of the country has become a detonation point for various immigration fights through the last four (or more) decades.

Those of you who have been reading this blog and/or my poems for awhile now will be saying, "Haven't you already explored this poetic terrain?"

Indeed, I have. Yet I think there may be more to do.

But for today, let's look back.

This poem was first published in The Ledge in the early part of this century:


Ash Wednesday at the Trinity Test Site


I didn’t develop a taste for locusts until later.
Instead I craved libraries, those crusted containers of all knowledge,
honey to fill the combs of my brain.

I didn’t see this university as a desert.
How could it be, with its cornucopia of classes,
colleagues who never tired of spirited conversations,
no point too arcane for hours of dissection.
I never foresaw that I might consume too many ideas,
that they might stick in the craw.

I never dreamed a day would come when I preferred
true deserts, far away from intellectual centers.
No young minds to be midwifed,
no hungry mouths draining my most vital juices,
no books with their reproachful, sad sighs, sitting
in the library, that daycare center of the intellect.

The desert doesn’t drown the voice
the way a city does. No drone
of machinery, no cacophony of crowing
scholars to consume my own creativity.
In the desert, the demand is to be still, to conserve
our strength for the trials that are to come.

Here, the earth, scorched by the fissile
testing of the greatest intellects of the last century, reminds
us of the ultimate futility of attempting to understand.
The desert dares us to drop our defenses.
In this place, scoured of all temptations, all distractions,
the sand demands we face our destiny.

Toddler Sleep Schedules

My sleep schedule is completely wrecked.

Actually, it's the sleep schedule that I fall into periodically.  I can  barely keep my eyes open in the early evening, I finally give up and go to bed between 6:00 and 7:45, I wake up very early between 2 and 3 a.m.  I'm most aware of this alternate sleep schedule, which I call my toddler sleep schedule, in the autumn, when we end daylight savings time.  This time, I've fallen into this sleep schedule because of my cold combined with my work schedule.

I lay in bed wondering if it was time to get up, and for a brief moment, I thought I saw a person with a flashlight moving in the trees beyond my bedroom window.  The back yard area that I can see from my bedroom window is fairly impassible with downed trees, so I was pretty sure it wasn't a flashlight.  Distant headlights?  The first summer fireflies?  Mystical creatures, with flashlights or the light of their own inner goodness?

I also had a memory of a poem that I wrote years ago, which sent me on a hunt for it.  First I went to the folder where I keep all the poems that I once thought were publishable, but have yet to find a home for them, outside of my folders.  I didn't find the folder, but I did find a poem that I barely remembered writing.  I changed all the contact information and moved into the folder of poems in active circulation.

I went to the file of published poems and found the poem there.  I did a bit more digging and found this blog post from over 10 years ago (10 years ago!!!) that announced the poem's 2014 publication in Slant.

Here is the poem, in all its quirky strangeness:

Insomnia



No one sleeps at our house.
In the attic, the monks keep
their vigil; Psalms chanted
undergird the night.

The younger brother catalogs
the fish tanks and the ant farm.
The older brother conducts
experiments and charts the sky’s
passage through the hours.

The poet lights a single candle
and composes sonnets until dawn.
We can hear her counting
iambic pentameter as she paces.

One grandmother arranges flowers
and then resorts them.
One grandmother continues
her life’s project: to attempt
every pie recipe that ever existed.

The choir performs concerts
complete with a string quartet.
We think the grass grows faster
with a musical accompaniment.

All the mothers and fathers are invited
to dance in the basement ballroom.
The bright chandeliers trick
the senses into believing time’s illusion.

And I pull the comforter close.
I read stories from my youth:
of spunky girl detectives
with absent parents
or families on prairies
who build houses of sod
in just three days.

A Poem for Maundy Thursday

Here we are at Maundy Thursday again, the Thursday in Holy Week that celebrates Jesus' last meal before the crucifixion.  I've celebrated in a variety of ways through the years.  Today I'll head down to Spartanburg (South Carolina) to teach, then I'll come home, and we'll go across a different mountain to be with Faith Lutheran Church in Bristol, Tennessee, where I will preach and preside.  It's a busy life, but a good one.

Blogging time is short this morning, so let me post an older poem. I wrote it years ago, I wrote it when my flight was delayed by hours and hours on Maundy Thursday at the Atlanta airport. As I observed the airport and thought about the ancient holiday and my home church, the poem practically wrote itself.  It was published in College English.

Maundy Thursday at Hartsfield


We long for Celestial food, or at least to leave our earthbound
selves behind, but it is not to be. The airport shuts
down as late thunderstorms sweep across the south.
I resign myself to spending Maundy Thursday in the airport.

One of a minority who even knows the meaning of Maundy,
I roam restlessly. I cannot even approximate
a Last Supper—the only food to be had is fast
and disgusting. I think of that distant
Passover, the Last Supper that transformed
us into a Eucharistic people.

A distant outpost of a vast empire, teeming
with a variety of humans, all hurrying
and keeping our heads down: Jerusalem or the modern
airport? I watch my fellow humans, notice
the hunger in their faces, their haunted feet,
so in need of love and water.

I watch Spring Breakers and athletes and moms
and gnarled elders and unattached children, all racing
through their earthly days, hurtling through time,
crossing continents, without any rituals to ground
them. I think of Christ’s radical
agenda: homelessness, care, and listening,
ignoring rules that made no sense,
making scarce resources stretch,
food eaten on the run, a community hunted
by their own and by the alien government.
I miss my own church, by now gathered in a dark
sanctuary, participating in ancient rituals
we don’t fully understand, looking for that thin
place between the sacred and the every day.

Poems for the Feast Day of the Annunciation

Tomorrow I will get back to blogging about teaching and commuting with a stray post about seminary classes.  I realize that I wrote about a feast day yesterday, but there's another one today, the Feast Day of the Annunciation, which celebrates the day the angel Gabriel visited Mary to tell her that God had a vision for her and for the salvation of the world and invited her to play a huge role.  She asked a question or two and then said yes.

I've spent much of my life thinking about this pivotal moment.  In my early years, I thought about consent.  In my childhood years, we didn't think much about consent as we discussed this story; we thought about the honor of being chosen.  In my teenage years, I thought about the burden of being the mother of the messiah.  I thought about consent--was God a rapist?  

I have since decided that Mary could have said no, which made me think about other women who might have said no along the way.  Was Mary God's first choice?  I've also thought about modernizing the story, which is a typical approach of mine.

Here's a poem I wrote some years ago now.  (for more process notes, see this blog post), which was included in the book Annunciation:

A Girl More Worthy

The angel Gabriel rolls his eyes
at his latest assignment:
a virgin in Miami?
Can such a creature exist?

He goes to the beaches, the design
districts, the glittering buildings
at every boundary.
Just to cover all bases, he checks
the churches but finds no
vessels for the holy inside.

He thinks he’s found her in the developer’s
office, when she offers him coffee, a kind
smile, and a square of cake. But then she instructs
him in how to trick the regulatory
authorities, how to make his income and assets
seem bigger so that he can qualify
for a huge mortgage that he can never repay.


On his way out of town, he thinks he spies
John the Baptist under the Interstate
flyway that takes tourists
to the shore. But so many mutter
about broods of vipers and lost
generations that it’s hard to tell
the prophet from the grump,
the lunatic from the T.V. commentator.

Finally, at the commuter college,
that cradle of the community,
he finds her. He no longer hails
moderns with the standard angel
greetings. Unlike the ancients,
they are not afraid, or perhaps, their fears
are just so different now.


The angel Gabriel says a silent benediction
and then outlines God’s plan.
Mary wonders why Gabriel didn’t go
to Harvard where he might find
a girl more worthy. What has she done
to find God’s favor?

She has submitted
to many a will greater than her own.
Despite a lifetime’s experience
of closed doors and the word no,
she says yes.

It's a topic I return to again and again, a question I continue to have.  What relevance does this Bible story have to our modern lives?  I am thinking of a nap I took years ago, when I woke up and looked at a palm tree, and a poem came to me.  I took this picture of the tree:

Look at the two browner fronds at the bottom, closest to the trunk--don't they look like a pair of wings?  That musing led to this poem:

Annunciation


In the early hours of this feast
day of the Annunciation, I listen
for God’s invitation, but all I hear
is the roar of a motorcycle speeding
away after last call. The rustle
of the palm fronds in the wind,
the only angel wings today,
as I lay enfolded in the arms
of my beloved of thirty years.

Coracles of Hope on St. Patrick's Day

On Sunday afternoons, we often watch recordings of livestreamed church services from churches where we have been members.  Once we've done that, we often go to the recording of the Sunday service at the National Cathedral.  

Usually, each pastor is preaching on the day's Gospel reading from the Revised Common Lectionary.  But yesterday, the sermon at the National Cathedral was delivered by The Most Reverend John McDowell, Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland and Metropolitan, Church of Ireland.  His stole and cope did not match the purple of the others.  No, his had gold shamrocks.  He preached about Saint Patrick and Jesus, and what we can learn.  I had not realized that Patrick and Augustine were alive at the same time.  

The sermon made me think of a poem that I wrote long ago, "Coracle of Hope."  Yesterday I went to look it up, and happily, having much of my writing online makes it easy.  I think it holds up well, and I'll post it below.

The poem was inspired by Dave Bonta's experience with coracles in Wales, which I wrote about in this blog post years ago:  "I found myself captivated by this post of Dave Bonta's about his experience with coracles on his recent trip to Wales. He reminded us of the ancient Celtic monks, some of whom set off without even an oar. Somehow, my brain made some connections to the modern workplace, and I was off, composing a poem."

This poem is part of my latest chapbook, Life in the Holocene Extinction .  It seems like a good choice for March 17--happy St. Patrick's Day!

Coracle of Prayer


As my computer dings
its constant reminders
of meetings and appointments,
I think of those ancient
Celtic monks and their coracles,
their faith in fragile canoes and currents
and a God who will steer
them where they need to go.

Having given over my free will
to Microsoft Office, I allow
the calendar to steer
me. I rely on my e-mails as a rudder,
although I often feel adrift
on this sea of constant communication.

Perhaps it is time to ransom my soul
which has been sold to this empire
of the modern workplace.
I look to the monks
and their rigorous schedule of prayer.
Feeling like a true subversive,
I insert appointments for my spirit
into the calendar. I code
them in a secret language
so my boss won’t know I’m speaking
in a different tongue. I launch
my coracle of prayer
into this unknown ocean,
the shore unseen, my hopes
rising like incense across a chapel.

That Year When Jesus Came to Your High School

When I was at my mom and dad's, my mom showed me various books that she had used as devotional texts for Lent.  One book, Forty Days with Madeleine L'Engle, had all sorts of scraps of paper in it, including some of my poems.

We couldn't remember whether or not we were using the book together, but across a distance, or whether she was using it to lead a local church group.  I was happy to see that I still liked the poem.  It was first published in Chiron Review, back in 2009.  I'm almost certain that I wrote it earlier.

I've now written a variety of these kinds of poems, the ones I think of as Jesus in the modern world poems.  They are an attempt to answer that old Sunday School question of how the world would react if Jesus returned again and what would Jesus do and how would we recognize him?

I think of my Sunday School teachers of long ago, asking those questions, and I imagine that they would be scandalized by my poetic answers.  Of course, they may have been secretly radical themselves, as they taught us about the Jesus that the Church wanted us to know.  They may have planted these seeds that have bloomed into poems, decades later. 

New Kid

If Jesus came to your high school,
he'd be that boy with the untuned guitar,
which most days was missing a string.
Could he not afford a packet of guitar strings?
Did he not know how to tune the thing?
Hadn't he heard of an electronic tuner?
Jesus would smile that half smile and keep playing,
but offer no answers.

If Jesus came to your high school,
he'd hang out with the strange and demented.
He'd sneak smokes with the drug addled.
He'd join Chorus, where the otherworldly
quality of his voice wouldn’t quite blend.
He'd play flute in Band.
He'd spend his lunch hour in the library, reading and reshelving.

You would hear his songs echoing
in your head, down the hallways, across the years.
They'd shimmer at you and just when you thought you grasped
their meaning, your analytical processes would collapse.
Instead, you write strange poems
to delight your children who draw mystical
pictures to illustrate your poems inspired
by Jesus, who sang the songs of angels,
that year he came to your high school.