January 3, 2025: "Race Riot, Tulsa, 1924," Point Out Truths, "Sticks & Stones"

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January 2, 2025: "Photograph of the Girl," Good Friend's Brother, "Blue Ball"

I spent some time this morning scrolling through the pictures in my phone.  (Confession:  I'm terrible at organizing my photos.  It's just one big string of images in chronological order--no neatly-labeled folders for me.)  Of course, with each snapshot comes a flood of memories--smells, tastes, sounds.  Old friends.  New friends  Christmases past and present.  Loved ones here.  Loved ones gone. 

Sharon Olds studies a picture . . .

Photograph of the Girl

by: Sharon Olds

The girl sits on the hard ground,
the dry pan of Russia, in the drought
of 1921, stunned,
eyes closed, mouth open,
raw hot wind blowing
sand in her face. Hunger and puberty are
taking her together. She leans on a sack,
layers of clothes fluttering in the heat,
the new radius of her arm curved.
She cannot be not beautiful, but she is
starving. Each day she grows thinner, and her bones
grow longer, porous. The caption says
she is going to starve to death that winter
with millions of others. Deep in her body
the ovaries let out her first eggs,
golden as drops of grain.

As Olds' poem demonstrates, a photo can tell a story.  A young Russian girl during a famine, her body full of the promise of womanhood.  Of course, that promise remains unfulfilled.  Instead, she disappears with millions of others during a winter of hunger and starvation.  

Tonight, a good friend reached out to me with the news that her younger brother passed today.  Of course, she's lost, wandering around her apartment, not really sure what to do with herself.  I've been in the same situation a few times, and it takes a while to feel normal again.  Because you have to redefine what "normal" is.  

My friend lives quite a distance away, so I have no way to physically comfort her.  All I can offer are empty words (because all words are empty in the face of such loss) and a conversation about Woody Woodpecker and Marvin the Martian.  Nothing is going to replace her longing to hear her brother's voice right now.  

Tonight or tomorrow, my friend will probably start scrolling through pictures on her phone or in family albums.  It's natural--a way to resurrect someone you've lost.  Like the Russian girl Olds raises from the dead after 102 years.  

My friend will experience these small Lazarus moments a lot over the next few days/weeks/months.  Even years.  I still see my dad walking into church on Saturday evenings even though he's been gone since 2018.  My sister, Sally, is a constant presence in my life.

Please keep Saint Marty's friend in your thoughts in the coming days.  The dead stick with the living for quite a long time.

Today, in The Daily Poet, the prompt was this:  On this date in 1929, a document was signed between the U.S. ad Canada, protecting Niagara Falls from construction.  Write a poem about something you want to protect.  It can be a relationship, a memory, something in nature, or something in or about yourself.  If this is a first person poem, allow the speaker to be vulnerable.

Blue Ball

by: Martin Achatz

In the picture, you hold a blue ball

in your jaws, your spaniel ears

golden and long, eyes bright,

expectant, as if you want me

to reach through 20 years, snatch

the ball away, send it bouncing

across the living room floor, 

the bell inside its rubber shell

jingling like a harness bell

on a horse at full gallop through

a snowy, Robert Frost woods.

I hold the photo, pinched between

pointer and thumb, as if it's made

of crystal so thin a breath would

shatter it.  I can still hear the low

rumble in your chest, feel the steam

of your lungs on my palm.  Oh,

old friend, gone these many years,

I wonder if, in your last days,

a squirrel memory of me darted

through the pine trees of your mind,

you wanting to chase it with fury,

the coiled spring of your body

so tight your paws don't even touch

the earth as you run.  I hold onto

this hope, this precious blue thing--

somewhere, somehow you're still

running, my voice in your ears, calling

Fetch, boy, fetch!

January 1, 2025: Sharon Olds, "Ideographs," "I Resolve"

Welcome to the Year of Sharon Olds on Saint Marty.

When I was a teenager, Sharon Olds made me want to be become a poet.  My first encounter with her work was when I was sixteen or seventeen--a tiny little poem titled "The Pope's Penis."  It dazzled me with its audacity and made me realize I could write about anything at all.

Around 20 years ago, I had the great fortune of being a part of a weeklong poetry workshop that Olds led in Big Sur, California.  It was amazing to climb the hill to her cabin every day and sit in a room with her while she shared her poetic advice and wisdom.  I sort of felt like Moses on Mount Sinai, getting the Ten Commandments.

So, be prepared to be challenged and surprised this year.  Because that's what Sharon Olds does.

Tonight, Olds meditates on suffering . . . 

Ideographs

by: Sharon Olds

(a photograph of China, 1905)

The small scaffolds, boards in the form of

ideographs, the size of a person,

lean against a steep wall of

dressed stone.  One is the simple

shape of a man.  The man on it

is asleep, his arms nailed to the wood.

No timber is wasted; his fingertips

curl in at the very end of the plank

as a child's hands open in sleep.

The other man is awake--he looks

directly at us.  He is fixed to a more

complex scaffold, a diagonal cross-piece

pointing one arm up, one down,

and his legs are bent, the spikes through his ankles

holding them up off the ground, 

his knees cocked, the folds of his robe flowing

sideways as if he were suspended in the air

in flight, his naked leg bared.

They are awaiting execution, tilted against the wall

as you'd prop up a tool until you needed it.

They'll be shouldered up over the crowd and

carried through the screaming.  The sleeper will wake.

The twisted one will fly above the faces, his

garment rippling.

Here there is still the backstage quiet,

the dark bottom of the wall, the props

leaning in the grainy half-dusk.

He looks at us in the silence.  He says

Save me, there is still time.

As I said above, Sharon Olds doesn't shy away from difficult, controversial, or painful topics.  Rather, she embraces them.  This poem, from her collection The Dead and the Living, is all about the nature of suffering and violence.  The two condemned men are described in physically explicit terms, and their impending executions really call into question the nature of humanity.

I know, I know.  That's pretty serious shit for the first day of a new year.  However, I think it's appropriate to examine the barbarity of state-sanctioned murder at this particular moment in history when hatred/wars are rampant while empathy/understanding are in short supply.  The final line--a plea for mercy and salvation--is heartbreaking.  

For me, and hopefully for you, too, dear disciple, Olds' words are powerful reminders of the need for forgiveness and the possibility of redemption.  People should never be defined by their worst actions.  I know I wouldn't want to be defined by my biggest mistakes.

Perhaps that's a New Year's resolution we should all make:  to erase violence and hatred with love and understanding.

Another thing I plan to do in each post this year is write a new poem.  I'm using a really wonderful book called The Daily Poet by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano to accomplish this.  In it, there are 365 poetry prompts, one for each day of the year.

Tonight's challenge was pretty simple:  write a poem containing a list of New Year's resolutions that are ridiculously hard, if not impossible.

Saint Marty wishes all of his faithful disciples love and understanding this coming year.

I Resolve

by: Martin Achatz

January 1, 2025

to stop global warming by standing with the refrigerator door open while deciding what to have for dinner

to end world hunger by always leaving food on my plate to send to the starving children of Africa, as my mother taught me

to combat institutional racism by making everyone read Charlotte's Web and imagine Charlotte is Aretha Franklin or Morgan Freeman

to save the Amazon rain forest by changing it's name to something friendlier--the Eugene or Patty or Willy rain forest

to save polar bears from extinction by creating an International Polar Bear Preserve somewhere.  How about Greenland?

to bring about world peace by sending homemade chocolate chip cookies to every leader with a note attached:  Please play nice