Well, I'm done teaching for a little while. Submitted my final grades for the semester yesterday at around 11:58 a.m. (They were due at noon.) Then I sat and just breathed for a little while, thinking of the last four or so months--teaching and the NEA Big Read and the Great Lakes Poetry Festival and the death of a pope and my sisters moving and my daughter moving and my son finishing up his junior year in high school. I'm not even going to get into politics. The beginning of 2025 has literally felt like a couple centuries long.
I've been evaluating my life a lot since January. Thinking about jobs and family and friends and death and failure and success. What makes me happy and sad. What my dreams and hopes are. Even when I was a kid, I wanted to make a difference in the world somehow. Cure something incurable. Discover something undiscovered. Write something heretofore unwritten.
Now that I'm old(er), I'd be happy just knowing that I made someone smile on a bad day.
Sharon Olds confronts the racial divide while . . . .
On the Subway
by: Sharon Olds
His feet are huge, in black sneakers
laced with white in a complex pattern like a
set of intentional scars. We are stuck on
opposite sides of the car, a couple of
molecules stuck in a rod of energy
rapidly moving through darkness. He has the
casual cold look of a mugger,
alert under lowered eyelids. He is wearing
red, like the inside of the body
exposed. I am wearing old fur, the
whole skin of an animal taken
and used. I look at his unknown face,
he looks at my grandmother's coat, and I don’t
know if I am in his power —
he could take my coat so easily, my
briefcase, my life —
or if he is in my power, the way I am
living off his life, eating the steak
he may not be eating, as if I am taking
the food from his mouth. And he is black
and I am white, and without meaning or
trying to I must profit from our history,
the way he absorbs the murderous beams of the
nation’s heart, as black cotton
absorbs the heat of the sun and holds it. There is
no way to know how easy this
white skin makes my life, this
life he could break so easily, the way I
think his own back is being broken, the
rod of his soul that at birth was dark and
fluid, rich as the heart of a seedling
ready to thrust up into any available light.
This poem is not easy. It's confronting racism--the life of a wealthy white woman versus the life of a poor black young man. The white woman feels threatened by the young man's presence, even though she has no reason to. Through her words, Olds is trying to put a face on prejudice, make it not about ideologies but about real people.
That's what all poets do--speak truth, even when that truth is difficult. Truth can open people's eyes (unless you own a MAGA hat). That's why Stalin imprisoned poets and writers in gulags. It's also why dictators do things like ban books and attack journalists and arrest protestors. Truth is the greatest weapon against tyranny.
So, I'm going to share some of my truths tonight, even though my words are not going to stop the war in Ukraine or make the current President of the United States sane.
Currently, in Rome, around 130 some Catholic cardinals are conclaving in the Sistine Chapel to choose the next pope. Around 1:30 p.m., black smoke came pouring out of the chimney, indicating that no pontiff had been selected. Voting begins again tomorrow.
I was baptized by a bishop. His name was Joseph M. Breitenbeck. I never met the man, but I did see him on TV serving Mass with Pope John Paul II at the Pontiac Silverdome in 1987. I think my mom thought I was her best shot at having a priest son. However, I never felt that call. The best I could do was become a church organist.
Except for a few years (high school into college) when I avoided religion, I've been a pretty faithful churchgoer most of my life. I find the history of the Catholic church fascinating, especially the highly secretive process of selecting popes. So, for the last couple weeks (ever since the funeral of Pope Franics), I've been reading up on the rules of a conclave and the names of the papabile (favored cardinals).
I'm sure the mothers of each of those cardinals had dreams of their sons becoming pope. Perhaps, as Bishop Breitenbeck was drowning me with holy water, my mom had some thought about me becoming the first pope from the United States. (The first of many disappointments she experienced because of me.)
Maybe I was a pope in a former life. Personally, I’d prefer to be the reincarnation of Robert Frost or Flannery O’Connor or Sylvia Plath (without the mental illness, I’ve already got daddy issues). Of course, before Pope Francis was pope, he was just Jorge from Buenos Aires, and before Flannery O’Connor was THE Flannery O’Connor, she was just Mary from Savannah. Fame is an artificial construct. It can change people, sure, but, for the most part, I’d bet Pope Francis still felt like that little Argentinian boy even while blessing the crowds from the balcony of Saint Peter’s.
I will never be a priest or bishop or cardinal or pope. I will never be a Southern gothic writer from Georgia. As Popeye says, “I yam what I yam.” I’m a poet from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I’m also a husband, father, teacher, friend, church musician, and library programmer. In a year’s time, I might be something else.
Whether I like it or not, life is about change and reinvention. I will not be the same person tomorrow that I am today. Yes, a bishop baptized me—the same bishop who served Communion with Pope John Paul II over 40 years ago in Detroit. That doesn’t mean the cardinals are going to elect me the first pope from North America.
Saint Marty wrote a poem tonight about reincarnation, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:
On this day in 1977, Seattle Slew won the Kentucky Derby. Since racehorses have the most interesting names, look up the names of horses (they don’t have to be famous) and use ten to fifteen of them in a poem. Or make a list of your own made-up humorous, poignant, or whimsical racehorse names. Write a poem about something other than a horse race using either list of names.
When I Come Back
by: Martin Achatz
it will be as a flower
with a name like Charismatic
or American Pharoah or Tim Tam.
My petals will be striped purple,
my stem laced with thorns
to discourage being plucked for vases.
Or I will find myself buried
in a field of goldenrod, nestled
in the rib cage of a long-dead
moose or sealed in a tomb
of sun-baked manure—yes, I will
be a stone so precious it defies
words, begs to be placed on
the tongue and sucked until
it’s smooth as a frozen
tear or frog belly. At night,
the moon will call me, sing
out my name: Sunday Silence.
Or maybe I’ll sprout as a feather
in a peacock tail, ride all day
behind her until she shivers
herself into glory at dusk, a pleasant
colony of eyes blinking at the heavens.
A field of Ferdinand grass, swale
crowded with cattails, flash
flood in Thunder Gulch where
unbridled waters swallow
rock, mesa, saguaro in one
big brown gulp—I could be
all of these when I come back.
Or just maybe I’ll be a word or breath
in a poem that makes everyone
say Damn! then Damn! again,
as if they’ve just found twenty dollars
in an old coat pocket or been kissed
hard by an old lover they haven’t seen
since high school or college.
❤️
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