A poem on the occasion of the 4th of July

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A poem on the occasion of the 4th of July

The bee balm are bursting in air—
fireworks above the bright stars
of evening primrose. At dusk fireflies
flare up like breaths of economy
among these bulwarks
of gallantly parading flowers.

   What madness to erupt and effuse
   for hours, even days on end

the fireflies seem to say as they
hold then release their neon light.

Oh, which is right?
The greed I feel for
the glare of light now, all—

or the occasional throbbing of it, in its
transience, like the firefly’s?

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Seamus Heaney: "Digging" in Ireland

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Portrait of Seamus Heaney (b. 1939), by Peter Edwards

National Portrait Gallery, London;
I have a postcard of this painting
taped to my file cabinet at work.

For St. Patrick's Day stores are sprouting plastic shamrocks, a paltry substitute for the island rock of green that grows deep down in many of us, even if we're not Irish: green and purple hills, icy lakes, soft woolen caps, pocked stone fences and crosses, rain on the roof, a fiddle, a fire on the hearth, a glass of stout, a never-ending talker on the other side of the table, an old history of pain and struggle, faith, and writing. A smile, a song and a lament.

Poet Seamus Heaney is a lighthouse in an island country cultivated with literary lighthouses. He was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland, and many of his poems are rooted there in the rural countryside of his childhood. I just love this one, one of his most famous, about his father the digger. See how he alludes to a gun, which was a familiar and ugly character in the Northern Ireland of his youth. In the YouTube video is a montage of clips in which he recites "Digging" in many different venues, at different ages, with different timbres in his voice. Think of that. One life, one family, one man, one poet, who harvests and feeds us riches like this, in and out of just one poem. Oh my dear friends, the world in one person! See the spade and hear it slide into the wet dirt. Smell the iron, the wet steel, the potato mold. Feel the hands of father and son, one with a shovel and one with a pen. Hear the pen, Heaney's shovel, that digs for sustenance, and replants it too, to come up for us again and again, like Swift, Wilde, Beckett, Lewis, Joyce, Yeats, Shaw, and a lot of other pen-diggers. (There are no women in my list, for I have not studied Irish women writers, but here is a list to explore; no doubt you could help me too.)

After the video, I've lined up my own St. Patrick's Day parade of photos taken over two summers, 2006 and 2007, while I helped students traipse around Dublin, Killarney and Cork. I have not been to Northern Ireland, or I would share scenes from those counties. Six out of thirty-two Irish counties are in Northern Ireland. As you probably already know, Southern Ireland became the Irish Free State in 1922, now known as the Republic of Ireland, and is no longer part of the United Kingdom. I knew Ireland as the Celtic Tiger in the mid 2000s high-tech boom, but now, Ireland has the highest ratio of household debt relative to income of any developed country in the world. I really feel for those young families who thought prosperity would last forever. As Roger Cohen recently said, maybe it's time for "emotional prosperity" since the financial kind is becoming a thing of the past for many of us.

Digging

   by Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.

Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.

My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.


- from Death of a Naturalist (1966)

 Students on study abroad program, Cork

Graveyard on the Hill of Slane, site of St. Patrick's Paschal Fire

County Meath, Ireland

Killarney National Park

County Kerry

 Residential neighborhood
Kinsale, County Cork

 Cork, County Cork

Kinsale, County Cork

 Trinity College, Dublin, County Dublin

 Killarney National Park
County Cork
The sheeps' heads are red, not because they are Irish redheads, 
or because they are bleeding, but they are marked by their owners

 Killarney National Park
County Cork

 Street in Cobh, County Cork

Window in Cork, County Cork

 Blarney Castle, County Cork

Ha'penny Bridge, Dublin

 My dear friend of the mind-heart, Inge,
at Four Knocks, the 5000 year-old passage tomb
in County Meath; Inge taught on the study abroad program

Me, photographed by Inge, who taught in the program in 2007,
looking at abstract art in the 5000 year-old passage tomb
at Four Knocks, County Meath

Beech tree in the church yard at Tara
County Meath

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Merry Christmas

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Come in from a cold deep walk in the night

Where stars and moon peg indigo with white 

Curl up by the fire or lounge by the tree

Drink from a spicy cup

Here next to me.

Let’s warm up together like birds on a bough

And remember the year we’ve shared until now

Our flights have been wild, our songs wide and clear

May we scout, soar and sing

Even freer next year!

Dickens' Christmas Spirit

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Not having taken part in any of the true miseries known to man, I only know about them through words and images shared by others. The plight of the poor throughout history, and now on the very planet I inhabit, is beyond the comprehension of someone like me who lives in the best of comfort and health. As I prepared this post, I read about the Poor Laws in Britain’s history, fascinating and horrifying. (You can read a good wiki article about Britain’s Poor Laws here.) The New Poor Law of 1834, enacted a decade before Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, was a huge legislation to ensure that no one would receive relief from poverty outside the parish workhouses, which were intentionally kept miserable so that a person wouldn’t be tempted to rely on them out of indolence. Dickens himself had to work at a factory as a child, and the anguish he experienced remained with him his whole life, infusing it in his novels that are so poignantly sympathetic to the poor.

Earlier the same year that he published A Christmas Carol . . .

Dickens was keenly touched by the lot of poor children . . . In early 1843, he toured the Cornish tin mines where he saw children working in appalling conditions. The suffering he witnessed there was reinforced by a visit to the Field Lane Ragged School, one of several London schools set up for the education of the capital's half-starved, illiterate street children. Inspired by the February 1843 parliamentary report exposing the effects of the Industrial Revolution upon poor children called Second Report of the Children's Employment Commission, Dickens planned in May 1843 to publish an inexpensive political pamphlet tentatively titled, "An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man's Child" but changed his mind, deferring the pamphlet's production until the end of the year. He wrote to Dr. Southwood Smith, one of four commissioners responsible for the Second Report, about his change in plans: "[Y]ou will certainly feel that a Sledge hammer has come down with twenty times the force – twenty thousand times the force – I could exert by following out my first idea." The pamphlet would become A Christmas Carol. (Copied from this wiki article)

After re-watching the 1938 film "A Christmas Carol" with Reginald Owen on the weekend, I was reminded what the magic and mystery of Christmas is. We have the Christmas energy inside us all the time, all the love we have ever encountered with family, friends and even strangers. The joy of human connection, even in the most dire of circumstances, even when we are surrounded by greed. The possibility that with the right outlook, joy is always possible, and can always be spread to another. At Christmas, we pull out our lifetime of stored love when we re-open Christmas boxes. White lights remind us of stars that have shone on every man and woman in history – the same stars. Imagine. We are all one human organism. The magic we share is available outside of Christmas! For some, it seems especially hidden at Christmas. What a shame, if we forget it after Christmas, or miss it during Christmas when it is eclipsed by commercialism.

For me, old decorations and illustrations bring out a special nostalgic feeling that makes Christmas special. I am a big fan of Arthur Rackham (good bio here), the British illustrator who was hugely successful at the turn of the 20th century known for his "depictions of gnomes, goblins, witches, and fairies, as well as his anthropomorphized trees," so I am posting five of his illustrations for the 1915 edition of A Christmas Carol, along with a few quotes from Dickens’ classic novel. Can you imagine a world without this story? Apparently the greeting “Merry Christmas” was first used after this novel. 

Bob Cratchit went down a slide on Cornhill, at the end of a lane of boys, 
twenty times, in honour of its being Christmas Eve.

Nobody under the bed; nobody in the closet; nobody in his dressing-gown,

which was hanging up in a suspicious attitude against the wall

"If I could work my will," said Scrooge indignantly, "every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!"

"How now?" said Scrooge, caustic and cold as ever

"What do you want with me?"

"There are some upon this earth of yours," returned the Spirit, "who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all out kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us."

The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in

restless haste and moaning as they went

Again the Ghost sped on, above the black and heaving sea -- on, on -- until, being far away, as he told Scrooge, from any shore, they lighted on a ship. They stood beside the helmsman at the wheel, the look-out in the bow, the officers who had the watch; dark, ghostly figures in their several stations; but every man among them hummed a Christmas tune, or had a Christmas thought, or spoke below his breath to his companion of some bygone Christmas Day, with homeward hopes belonging to it. And every man on board, waking or sleeping, good or bad, had had a kinder word for another on that day than on any day in the year; and had shared to some extent in its festivities; and had remembered those he cared for at a distance, and had known that they delighted to remember him.

Then old Fezziwig stood out to dance with Mrs. Fezziwig

The poulterers' shops were still half open, and the fruiterers' were radiant in their glory. There were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers' benevolence to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people's mouths might water gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy and brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among the woods, and pleasant shufflings ankle deep through withered leaves; there were Norfolk Biffins, squab and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner.


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"It's Christmas Day!" said Scrooge to himself. "I haven't missed it. The Spirits have done it all in one night. They can do anything they like. Of course they can. Of course they can."


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"A merry Christmas, Bob!" said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. "A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you for many a year! I'll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob! Make up the fires, and buy another coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit."
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The way I want Christmas

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     The way I want Christmas is withdrawn, but attentive, and giving. Like a woman. During holiday hullabaloo the thrusts of commerce, and even sometimes of the church, impose upon the quiet of inner space. Any day of the year, whether in a state of joy, sorrow, or even turmoil, I want to rise and fall gently on the day's currents--nose flared, eyes raised, hands unclasped, ears unlocked. But some of the air is raucous, rank, deafening, false, and deadening. At home I pull down Christmas tubs and unsnap lids. Out with the ribbons and glitter spirals the remembered scent of oranges studded with cloves. It is a woman’s fragrance, the earth. My mother.

     And out comes the 1955 Christmas songbook, dull matte blue with worn embossed singing angels on the cover, its spine reinforced with duct tape by my father. Mom’s dark eyes ignite in candlelight at the mahogany piano, and blue-ridge vein rivers roll over her knuckles while she plays Go Tell It on the Mountain. Hip-to-hip on the needlepointed piano bench we sit where she has also taught me to play in hours of tearful frustration. But as if turning out the lamps and lighting the tree and candles illuminates a different piano and alternate faces, during these easy-going Christmas carol hours there is no tension, no mother-daughter resistance or pride. She plays and plays, and I sing, and turn the page to the next. The music floats in flakes of effortless snowfall. Many songs are foreign, strange, and special, never appearing in a church hymnal. They are haunting in their folk lyrics and minor keys. They are of woods and tender brown animals. They bloom with holly leaves and stars. They rasp with bagpipe and fiddle. They are blue, cold nights of Croatian shepherds, French rushes of wings, and a hand hewn rocking cradle of Czechoslovakia. They are whisper-sung by a woman in front of a fire, baby at her breast, fat cheeks aglow and rosy-warm, drinking the quieting calm that streams from inside a woman. Christmas is my mother’s lullaby.

TO SAY BEFORE GOING TO SLEEP

I would like to sing someone to sleep,

to sit beside someone and be there.

I would like to rock you and sing softly

and go with you to and from sleep.

I would like to be the one in the house

who knew: The night was cold.

And I would like to listen in and listen out

into you, into the world, into the woods.

The clocks shout to one another striking,

and one sees to the bottom of time.

And down below one last, strange man walks by

and rouses a strange dog.

And after that comes silence.

I have laid my eyes upon you wide;

and they hold you gently and let you go

when something stirs in the dark.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke
(from The Book of Images, translated by Edward Snow in 1991)

Sleep, little Jesus, my treasure, my blessing,

While Mary comforts Thee, tender, caressing.

Lullaby, little one, in loving arms lying,

Guarding my darling and stilling Thy crying.

~ Polish Lullaby
(translated by Henry W. Simon)
from my mom's Treasury of Christmas Songs and Carols,
which I posted about previously here

Please listen to Edyta Górniak tenderly whisper-sing this lullaby in Polish, 

called 'Lulajże Jezuniu', here

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A Note of Thanks

To my Blog Friends on Thanksgiving ~

In the rare hush over America
when Thanksgiving closes out November,
when Democrats and Republicans shelve their squeaky horns,
and early commercial Christmas crooners mute their carols,
in this silence when the sibilance of our familial

kissing and embracing,
back slapping and handshaking,
head bowing and glass raising

whispers sighs and murmurs of thanks,

I want to say thank you to You.

You shine your flashlight on aspects of life
and the world that no one else illuminates.
You help me think. You teach me your ways,
and you listen to mine.
I learn about music, art, biographies, history, culture, travel, films, books
all through your inimitable voices.
You write wild and wise stories and poems.
You show nature surrounding you through luminous photographs.
You let me see your grandchildren, and I pretend to hold them.
When I am afraid, you give me tips!
We play, you make me laugh!
You teach me to cook!
When you get sick, I pray.
When we’re happy, we’re happy together.
When we’re sad, ours is a chorus of weeping.

Thank you, my friends, for what you bring to this place,
which is not held captive in screeny web boxes,
but suffuses and inspires my heart-mind.
Yes, you're here, in my heart,
which is full and fat, and still hungry for more.
Soon it will have to lie on its side
like the 200-pound pumpkin Don grew!

I will be away for a few days.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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Thank you: a warm, cozy house

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Next week Thursday my country celebrates thank you. No fireworks. No pink hearts or leprechauns.
No gift buying. In the holiday year, Thanksgiving remains a warm, cozy house with flickering lamp and candle light, with leaves of bittersweet orange and tawny saffron spread on the table. The smells and tastes that hum from the kitchen as we glide and bump around each other jockeying for space to chop, blend with the mixer, stuff the turkey, or watch the Lions play football whisper warmth, and love, and thank you. I rejoice. I simply rejoice.

It's a time when words are hard to find, because either they feel clichéd, or we don't know how to be grateful for the tragedies of existence, while also being thankful for what we hold dear. The words of my dear friend and former boss Ed ring in my ears when I asked him how to thank someone who had written a powerfully supportive recommendation letter for me, for my current job. Wise Ed said, "Sometimes there is nothing more valuable than a simple, heartfelt, thank you."

In the gliding and bumping heart prep for Thanksgiving week, I'd like to share THE DOG-EARED PAGE from the hard copy November issue of The Sun, which touches me, and perhaps will also meet your heart. (I don't believe THE DOG-EARED PAGE can be found in the online edition.) The text below about Merwin is copied directly from The Sun.

Thanks

by W.S. Merwin

New York City-born poet William Stanley Merwin has written more than thirty books of poetry, translation, and prose. A Buddhist and environmentalist, he often addresses humankind's separation from nature in his work. His writing has received two Pulitzer Prizes and a National Book Award, and in 2010, at the age of eighty-two, Merwin was appointed the Library of Congress's Poet Laureate. Since the late 1970s he has lived in Hawaii on a former pineapple plantation that he has restored to its original rain-forest state. "Thanks" was first published in The Rain in the Trees by W. S. Merwin, copyright 1988 by W. S. Merwin. 

Listen

with the night falling we are saying thank you

we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings

we are running out of the glass rooms

with our mouths full of food to look at the sky

and say thank you

we are standing by the water thanking it

standing by the windows looking out

in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging

after funerals we are saying thank you

after the news of the dead

whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you

in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators

remembering wars and the police at the door

and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you

in the banks we are saying thank you

in the faces of the officials and the rich

and of all who will never change

we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us

talking our feelings we are saying thank you

with the forests falling faster than the minutes

of our lives we are saying thank you

with the words going out like cells of a brain

with the cities

growing over us

we are saying thank you faster and faster

with nobody listening we are saying thank you

we are saying thank you and waving

dark though it is

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Family reunion #2: my family at the lake cottage

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I did pull down a jigsaw puzzle. It says it's the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon, although the castle-like house looks European. It was just what Nancy and I wanted, lots of green. In this shot midway through the weekend, my brother-in-law Rodger only has about 750 pieces to go. I don't know if it got completed after we left Sunday evening.

The kids keep us young. But they didn't stay as little as they were at the last family gathering. They keep narrowing the gap between short and tall. I wish I could harvest and store the youthful energy that was spent running, jumping, diving and swimming. Not that I know what I'd do with it if I had it. You also have to have something you want to do, and the will to do it. I am a sedentary person, but Don and I have decided we're going to start biking around our beautiful state. At least I can do that sitting down.

There were play fights. There were serious adult conversations too. Sometimes I think some play fighting as adults wouldn't be a bad idea, as long as there are quick peace talks, the way the A-team, Aden and Asher demonstrated.

There was sport and adventure. Eric, my tireless fisher-nephew, was no end of entertainment for his nieces, nephews and first cousins once removed. (Did I say that right?) But poor Lydia didn't have a stomach for the fish's pain.

Eric tried to show how to cause the least amount of damage extricating the hook, before letting the fish go.

We have gobs of love and joy in our family, but we also have pain, just like everyone. There is illness, there is heartache. In the cycle of family, new ones being born and starting life's journey, it's up to the older ones to show the younger ones how to not only endure suffering, but how to gather around each other, encircling and touching, even when we don't understand. We fail sometimes when we can't stomach the particular type of hardship we face. Other times the younger ones show the older ones how to do it better. 

Life gets so messy. When you're at the cottage with 20 or 30 people, life really gets disheveled, and you're sleeping pretty close to someone else. You might be closer to the person in the next bed than you are to the one in your own. You wouldn't do that with just anyone.

We all have shadow selves, the parts we don't really want anyone to see, the aspects that cause us shame. But these are thankfully only part of who we are. What I saw this 4th of July, more than any other in memory, were some of the greatest challenges we've faced to the cohesiveness and flexibility of our big, and getting bigger, family. Look at us. We look like oddly shaped countries, with distinct borders, and big bodies of water separating us. The nice thing about being human, and not land mass, is that we can easily grab hands and shoulders and instantly thin the distance to a stream. One that flows between us and is easily crossed.

There is a Blogger issue I have reported at a forum, along with many other bloggers, that comments that get posted (since at least 9:30pm EST July 5) do not appear on the post. I received email notification of 8 comments from Mystic Rose, Gemma, Anna, Terresa, Delilas, Gwei Mui and rauf, but they have not appeared at this post. When I posted a comment about this below, it appeared when I posted it, but when I refreshed the page, it was not there. I hope you are not experiencing this at your blog, and I sincerely hope it is rectified soon. I am still not over the grief of discovering some time ago that I had lost at least the first year's comments at this blog, and also at Paris Deconstructed. These were precious exchanges with dear friends, including the first time rauf visited synch-ro-ni-zing, with Wordsworth's daffodil poem. :(

UPDATE: As of 11:30AM July 6, comments seem to be sticking. 

UPDATE: As of 1:00PM July 6, some comments don't stick! It's a random comment stickiness.

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