October 19, 2025: “Dear Heart,” Protest, “No Kings Day Canticle”

Greetings, faithful disciples!

It has been quite the weekend.  One of the largest, one-day protests in U.S. history occurred yesterday—No Kings.  Of course, those in power are trying to turn it into some kind of January 6-like insurrection.  It wasn’t.  We gathered, held signs, chanted slogans, sang, danced, high-fived inflatable unicorns.

Of course, the question is:  will it make a difference?

My answer is:  I don’t know.

However, simply sitting back and letting the United States of America become the Third Reich Part Two isn’t an option for any clear-thinking, intelligent citizen.  We must stand up, speak out, regardless of the consequences.  The U.S. Constitution gives us that right, until the justices of the Supreme Court decide to turn that document into a roll of Charmin.

But I can’t tell you how or if this will all end.  I just watched a video about the Doomsday Clock.  Now, this little symbol has been in existence since about 1940, and it represents the “estimated likelihood of a human-made global catastrophe.”  Currently, that clock now stands at 89 seconds to midnight (due to ongoing threats from nuclear weapons, climate change, bio weapons, and technologies like AI).  That means that the world is less than 90 geologic seconds away from total annihilation.  

And what happens when civilization as we know it ends?  Well, if history is any indication, something new will be born.

Sharon Olds writes about rebirth . . . 

Dear Heart,

by: Sharon Olds

How did you know to turn me over,

then, when I couldn’t know to take

the moment to turn and start to begin

to finish, I was out there, far ahead

of my body, far ahead of the earth,

ahead of the moon—like someone on the other

side of the moon, stepped off, facing space, I was

floating out there, splayed, facing

away, fucked, fucked, my face

glistening and distorted pressed against the inner

caul of the world.  I was almost beyond

pleasure, in a region of icy, absolute

sensing, my open mouth and love-slimed

cheeks stretching the membrane the way

the face of the almost born can appear, still

veiled in its casing, just inside

the oval portal, pausing, about

to split its glistering mask—you eased me

back, drew me back into the human

night, you turned me and the howling slowed, and at the

crux of our joining, flower heads grew

fast-motion against you, swelled and burst without

tearing—ruinless death, each

sepal, each petal, came to the naught

of earth, our portion, in ecstasy, ash

to fire to ash, dust to bloom to dust.

It’s a very dense poem.  I remember reading and rereading it several times when I first encountered it in graduate school.  Sure, it’s about the pleasure of sex and the speaker’s need to be drawn back from the ether of ecstasy.  But, mostly, the poem is about love and desire and bodily autonomy.  Being in control (or not in control) of your own happiness and pleasure.

Of course, we know that female autonomy is not a high priority for the current people in power in Washington, D.C.  So, we have protests and marches and petitions and, eventually (hopefully?), elections.  That’s what yesterday was all about.  Taking power away from leaders whose only aim is protecting the ultra-wealthy and disenfranchising as many of the poor/middle class as possible.

I’m not trying to convert anyone here.  If you’re Republican and you’re happy, clap your hands, as the old children’s song goes.  And if you’re Democrat and you’re pissed off, clap your hands.  I have friends on both sides of the political spectrum.  I don’t care, as long as their beliefs don’t start infringing on my rights.

If you’re a MAGA Republican, go paint your bedroom walls with swastikas.  If you’re a Bernie Sanders democratic socialist, let me know where to sign up for universal healthcare.  

Saint Marty wrote a poem about yesterday’s protests, based on the following prompt from October 18 of The Daily Poet:

In 1892, New York and Chicago were connected for the first time by a long-distance telephone line.  For this poem, we’re going to do a poetic play on the kids’ “Telephone Game” where you whisper something to one person in a circle and watch it change as it moves from child to child.  Write a first line to a poem about anything you like.  Now take this line and morph it a bit; that line will become the first line of your second stanza.  For example, if you wrote,” I dream in color about cantaloupes,” your next line might be, “I dream in color, but can’t elope.”  Now take that new second line and morph it a bit more.  This will be the first line of your third stanza.  Continue to do this two more times, so you have five similar (but different!) lines, write a poem where each of these lines begins each of your five stanzas.

No Kings Day Canticle

by:  Martin Achatz

We line the highway with signs and unicorns,

raise our arms, shout as if we’re being called

at a tent revival to accept Jesus as our savior,

because this is what democracy looks like, crowded

with wheelchairs, dancing frogs, strollers, and drag queens.

We find the highway with signs and unique horns,

set up camp, listen to Pete Seegers enjoin

us about overcoming hand-in-hand,

Dylans growl about blowing winds, Guthries 

walking that ribbon, that golden valley.

Be kind, the skyway pines and forlorns

on this bright day when freedom fills

the air like the smell of popcorn

at a movie theater, making us all

hungry for its buttery promise.

Be mindful of why they whine, scorn

our flags and chants, the torches we

hold high as Emma Lazarus did

for the exhausted, the penniless who

crossed the sea to these stolen lands.

We blind fools cry and mourn

for the good old days when racism

hid under sheets, behind badges.

Maybe, just maybe, that’s the problem:

we never threw out our whips and chains.

February 9-10-11-12: Woodsmoke in the Air, "Parasite," Bernie Sanders, Puppy

Merton settling into France with his father:

We flew over the brown Loire, by a long, long bridge at Orleans, and from then on I was home, although I had never seen it before, and shall never see it again.  It was there, too, that Father told me about Joan of Arc, and I supposed the thought of her was with me, at least in the back of my mind, all the day long.  Maybe the thought of her, acting as a kind of implicit prayer by the veneration and love it kindled in me, won me her intercession in heaven, so that through her I was able to get some sort of actual grace out of the sacrament of her land, and to contemplate God without realizing it in all the poplars along those streams, in all the low-roofed houses gathered about the village churches, in the woods and the farms and the bridged rivers.  We passed a place called Chateaudun.  When the land became rockier, we came to Limoges, with a labyrinth of tunnels, ending in a burst of light and a high bridge and a panorama of the city crowding up the side of a steep hill to the feet of the plain-towered cathedral.  And all the time we were getting deeper and deeper into Aquitaine:  towards the old provinces of Quercy and Rouergue, where, although we were not sure yet of our destination, I was to live and drink from the fountains of the Middle Ages.

In the evening we came to a station called Brive.  Brive-la-Gaillarde.  The dusk was gathering.  The country was hilly, and full of trees, yet rocky, and you knew that the uplands were bare and wild.  In the valleys were castles.  It was too dark for us to see Cahors.

And then:  Montauban.

What a dead town!  What darkness and silence, after the train.  We came out of the station into an empty, dusty square, full of shadows, and a dim light, here and there.  The hoofs of the cab-horse clopped away along the empty street, taking some of the other people who had descended from the express off into the mysterious town.  We picked up our bags and crossed the square to a hotel that was there, one of those low, undefined, grey little hotels, with a dim bulb burning in a downstairs window, illuminating a small cafe, with a lot of iron tables and a few calendars covered with flyspecks and the big volumes of the Bottin crowding the rickety desk of the sourfaced lady in black who presided over the four customers.

And yet, instead of being dreary, it was pleasant.  And although I had no conscious memory of anything like this, it was familiar, and I felt at home.  Father threw open the wooden shutters of the room, and looked out into the quiet night, without stars, and said:

"Do you smell the woodsmoke in the air?  That is the smell of the Midi."

Funny thing.  I sort of come from a town that outsiders might describe as "dead."  Of course, visitors don't see all the stuff that goes on in little bergs like Merton's Montauban or my hometown.  In my city, on Main Street, there's a library at one end.  At the other, is a Catholic Church.  In between, there are bars and antique shops and a little diner where everyone goes on Fridays nights for the fish fry.  In winter, Main Street looks like Santa's village at the North Pole.

Today (February 12) as snow storm has moved into my little pocket of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  We are supposed to receive between six to seven inches from this tiny squall.  That may sound like a lot of snow to my disciples from warmer climes, but for Yoopers, that amount of snow doesn't even warrant an extra trip to the grocery store.  However, my hometown will look like Santa's village by the time I get home from teaching this evening. 

Much has happened in the world since the last time I wrote a blog post.  A foreign language film (Parasite from South Korea) pretty much cleaned up at the Academy Awards on Sunday, February 9, winning all the major awards, including Best Picture.  A first in the history of the Oscars. 

Bernie Sanders narrowly won the New Hampshire Primary after coming in a close second in Iowa last week.  I don't know what that means politically, but it sort of heartens me that people support Senator Sanders' ideas in the United States, which increasingly seems to be edging toward the cliff of fascism.  Perhaps there is hope for my country after all.

And on Tuesday, my new puppy, Juno, had her first vet appointment since becoming a part of my family.  She currently weighs 5.9 pounds and can be distracted by dog treats when getting a shot.  (Seriously, she didn't even flinch.)  She has become the center of love in our home.  Over the last month or so, I have learned that, no matter how shitty my day has been, a few licks on the face from a puppy can cure the darkest of moods.

That about catches you up on what has been going on in this wannabe saint's life.  Snow.  Oscars.  Social Democrats.  Puppies.  What more can you ask for in a blog post?

Saint Marty will be blogging from Calumet, Michigan, tomorrow evening.  He's on the road for a little radio show called the Red Jacket Jamboree at the Rozsa Center on the campus of Michigan Technological University.  Stop on by if you get the chance. 

June 26: Contingent Professor, Economic Injustice, Classic Saint Marty

Sunday.  12:56 p.m.  85 degrees outside.  Cranky daughter just got out of bed.

I have some work to do today for the online class I'm teaching.  It starts tomorrow, and I think I'm pretty much ready.  I just have some small details to finish up.  A quiz to post.  Lecture notes to work on for next week.  I am feeling much more confident than I was last week at this time.

Which gets me thinking about being a contingent professor at the university.  For the work that I have done/am doing for this class, a full-time professor would be getting paid about four times as much as I am being paid.  I have a terminal degree. I have been teaching at the university longer than most of the full-time, tenure-track/tenured professors in my department.  And the full-timers rule the roost.

Sorry if I'm sounding a little like Bernie Sanders, but it is true that there is a great deal of injustice in the world.  In the academic world, too.

Two years ago, I was saying the same thing:

June 27, 2014:  Going Home, Elitist Intellectuals, Once Upon a Toad

"Charlotte," said Wilbur.  "We're all going home today.  The Fair is almost over.  Won't it be wonderful to be back home in the barn cellar again with the sheep and the geese?  Aren't you anxious to get home?"

E. B. White loved the life he led as a child.  He loved the summers he spent in a cabin on a lake with his family.  He loved the horses his father owned.  Later, he loved his life in farm country.  The barns.  Cows.  Chickens.  The spiders and geese.  In fact, White made a career for himself writing about everything he cherished from his youth.  He was constantly going home.

I have been an adjunct instructor at a university for going on 20 years.  That's a long time.  I've seen professors come and go.  Retire.  Die.  I've taught through the administrations of about five or six English Department Heads and six University Presidents.  I have never been offered more than a one-semester contract.  At the end of each semester, I'm not sure if I'll be teaching one class, two classes, or no classes the next term.  It's a tenuous existence at best.

One of the reasons I've never been offered something more permanent is because of a bias that exists in academia.  The English Department is full of professors who think they're better teachers and scholars because they've studied in such exotic locations as Indiana or Texas or Canada.  They went on a Holy Grail quest for a tenured position at a university and lucked out.  They've made sacrifices for their careers.

These elitist intellectuals are of the opinion that their sacrifices have somehow made them worthier of their privileged lives than others.  They look down on the likes of me, who elected to stay put, raise a family, and pursue an academic career closer to home.  I've sat through department meetings where contingents and adjuncts were treated like inferior children by tenured colleagues.

I think it does take a lot of courage to leave home and pursue a career wherever the academic winds blow.  I admire my colleagues.  They're smart, talented people.  However, I also think it takes a lot of courage to stay home, get married, have children, and roll the academic dice.  In fact, it may take more courage because there are more obstacles in the way of success, not the least of which are the opinions of elitist intellectuals.

Sorry for the rant, folks.  It's something about which I've been thinking quite a bit this summer.  I had to get it off my chest.

Once upon a time, a toad lived in a swamp in the middle of the woods.  The swamp was his home.  The toad was born there, grew up there.  He spent his days sitting on the same rotten log where his father sat his whole life (until a rather cranky snake came along and ate his father).

One day, a lizard from the other side of the forest moved into the swamp.  The lizard said to the toad, "Don't you ever get bored of sitting on this log, eating the same kinds of bugs, day after day?"

The toad just blinked at the lizard.

The lizard cleared his throat.  "I think life is too short to fritter away.  A life without change and adventure isn't a real life.  It's a wasted life."

The toad just blinked at the lizard

The lizard licked his eyes.  "Are you hearing what I'm saying?  You don't deserve this log or this swamp.  You can't appreciate it the way I can."

The toad just blinked at the lizard.

"I deserve this swamp more than you," the lizard said, "because I've been to other places.  I'm worldly and smart."

The toad just blinked at the lizard.

"And, furthermore--" the lizard continued.

Just then, the cranky snake came by and swallowed the lizard.

The toad just blinked.

Moral of the story:  don't fuck with a cranky snake.

And Saint Marty lived happily ever after.

Something like this...

June 25: A Monster, Smaug, Xenophobia

Either this world, my mother, is a monster., or I myself am a freak.

It's a simple statement that Dillard makes.  She has been meditating on death and evolution.  The world is full of examples of animals, insects, plants, and fish that spawn and devour, live and kill.  Our Monster Mother is ruthless in her ability to care for her children.  The strong overcome.  The weak perish and are devoured.  Dillard sees some cruelty in this process.  But cruelty is a human invention.

Survival is a difficult thing.  I think most people will agree with me on this.  In the United States (as in the rest of the world), a privileged few do not have to worry about clothing and shelter and food and warmth on a daily basis.  They see something they like or want, and they acquire it.  For the rest of us, it is not that simple.  If we need a new car, we don't fix a hole in the ceiling.  If we need to pay the water bill, we push off buying groceries for a few days.  Vacations are things you save up for (sometimes for years).  That's the way it is.

I'm not complaining.  These are simple facts.  My two Constant Readers will agree with me.  However, the fact that so few people control the majority of the wealth and resources of this world is sort of an abomination.  Picture Donald Trump sitting on a pile of gold in the bowels of a mountain, like Smaug, protecting it from all us hobbits and dwarfs.

Nothing will change this situation, despite Bernie Sanders' call for political revolution in the United States.  The issue for the upcoming presidential in the United States is whether we want to put Smaug in charge of the whole country.  The recent Brexit vote in the United Kingdom does not bode well for us in U. S.  It seems that xenophobia and exclusion are the current political flavor of the day.

I would like to think that the world will not have to endure a President Smaug.  However, we in the Shire know that the dragon is stirring in the heart of Lonely Mountain.

Saint Marty may have to get on a boat to Rivendell (or at least Disney World)  come the November election.

This is really funny if you know The Lord of the Rings

April 25: Jesus and Bernie, Terrance Hayes, "What I Am"

You know, I have been following the presidential race in the United States with quite a bit of fear.  Donald Trump is frighteningly close to being a candidate for President of the United States.  If not Trump, then Ted Cruz (who is a quieter, sneakier version of Donald Trump).

I have never hidden my politics in this blog.  I find any candidate who runs on a platform that belittles or disenfranchises people a little, well, reprehensible.  Donald Trump wants to send all immigrants back where they came from (much the same way that he expels any person from his rallies who disagrees with him--shouting, "Get 'em out of here!").  Ted Cruz doesn't want to build a wall along our Southern border, but he's not overly fond of illegal immigrants, either.

Yesterday, at my wife's church, I was reminded by a visiting speaker that God's commandments can basically be summed up in two statements:  1) love God, and 2) love your neighbor.

That's pretty simple.  God doesn't say love everyone EXCEPT illegal immigrants or transgender people.  God doesn't exclude people.  Neither did Jesus.  In fact, I think Jesus went out of His way to have dinner with prostitutes and thieves and tax collectors.  Jesus sought out the disenfranchised.

I think that Donald Trump would probably kick Jesus out of one of his campaign rallies, because Jesus would probably be wearing a Bernie Sanders button on his robe.

The Poet of the Week knows a little bit about disenfranchisement.  His name is Terrance Hayes, and he has won all kinds of awards, including a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship (that's a Genius Grant, if you didn't know).  He's a young African American poet who provides a necessary voice for people who are overlooked and underestimated.

Saint Marty thinks Terrance Hayes wouldn't last very long in a Donald Trump rally, either.

What I Am

by:  Terrance Hayes

Fred Sanford’s on at 12
& I’m standing in the express lane (cash only)
about to buy Head & Shoulders
the white people shampoo, no one knows
what I am. My name could be Lamont.
George Clinton wears colors like Toucan Sam,
the Froot Loop pelican. Follow your nose,
he says. But I have no nose, no mouth,
so you tell me what’s good, what’s god,
what’s funky. When I stop
by McDonalds for a cheeseburger, no one
suspects what I am. I smile at Ronald’s poster,
perpetual grin behind the pissed-off, fly-girl
cashier I love. Where are my goddamn fries?
Ain’t I American? I never say, Niggaz
in my poems. My ancestors didn’t
emigrate. Why would anyone leave
their native land? I’m thinking about shooting
some hoop later on. I’ll dunk on everyone
of those niggaz. They have no idea
what I am. I might be the next Jordan
god. They don’t know if Toni Morrison
is a woman or a man. Michael Jackson
is the biggest name in showbiz. Mamma se 
Mamma sa mamma ku sa, sang the Bushmen 
in Africa. I’ll buy a dimebag after the game, 
me & Jody. He says, Fuck them white people 
at work, Man. He was an All-American 
in high school. He’s cool, but he don’t know 
what I am, & so what. Fred Sanford’s on 
in a few & I got the dandruff-free head 
& shoulders of white people & a cheeseburger 
belly & a Thriller CD & Nike high tops 
& slavery’s dead & the TV’s my daddy-- 
   You big Dummy!
Fred tells Lamont.

Donald, you big dummy!!!