January 9, 2025: "Things That Are Worse Than Death," President Jimmy Carter, "Not My Birthday Poem"

A somber day.  The national memorial service for President Jimmy Carter happened today in Washington, D. C.  The whole country stopped for a couple hours to honor the great man.  I sat in my office at the library, streaming the ceremony, listening to the eulogies and remembrances.

President Biden, in his remarks. said this about Carter:  "Now, it’s not about being perfect, because none of us are perfect. We’re all fallible. But it’s about asking ourselves: Are we striving to do things, the right things? What values? What are the values that animate our spirit? To operate from fear or hope, ego or generosity? Do we show grace? Do we keep the faith when it’s most tested?"

Mr. Biden is correct.  Being a good person doesn't mean that you're perfect.  It means that you operate from a place of generosity, compassion, and love.  Everyone messes up.  Good people learn from their mistakes and become better because of them.

Sharon Olds thinks about . . . 

Things That Are Worse Than Death

by: Sharon Olds

(for Margaret Randall)

You are speaking of Chile,
of the woman who was arrested
with her husband and their five-year-old son.
You tell how the guards tortured the woman, the man, the child,
in front of each other,
"as they like to do."
Things that are worse than death.
I can see myself taking my son’s ash-blond hair in my fingers,
tilting back his head before he knows what is happening,
slitting his throat, slitting my own throat
to save us that. Things that are worse than death:
this new idea enters my life.
The guard enters my life, the sewage of his body,
"as they like to do." The eyes of the five-year-old boy, Dago,
watching them with his mother. The eyes of his mother
watching them with Dago. And in my living room as a child,
the word, Dago. And nothing I experienced was worse than death,
life was beautiful as our blood on the stone floor
to save us that — my son’s eyes on me,
my eyes on my son — the ram-boar on our bodies
making us look at our old enemy and bow in welcome,
gracious and eternal death
who permits departure.

Yes, there are things worse than death.  Certainly, seeing your child harmed in front of you is one of them, as Olds points out.  I don't ever want to see my kids suffer.  Other things I would rank as worse than death:

• No chocolate
• Hallmark Christmas movies
• Pickles
• Insomnia
• World hunger
• Sitting next to Donald Trump at a funeral
• Watching reruns of Two Broke Girls
• Country music
• Poverty
• Adam Sandler movies
• Head cheese
• Anchovies
• Goodbyes

Okay, I may be joking about some of the items on that list.  However, I think that everyone has their own things that are worse than death.  I would rather sacrifice my life than see someone I love suffer in any way.  I like to think that I would do the same for complete strangers, as well, but I'm not sure.  (I certainly wouldn't throw myself in front of a bullet to save the life of the Felon in Chief, so I would make a really shitty Secret Service agent.)

As President Carter demonstrated through the life he led, good people try to make the world a better place.  He didn't just preach about his values.  He picked up and hammer and made a difference, one nail at a time.  Every minute of every day is an opportunity to put love into practice.

Saint Marty wrote an unbirthday poem today, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:

Today may not be your birthday, but write a birthday poem as if it is.  The poem can either be to yourself on a specific birthday or to a friend as in "To Martha on Her Fortieth Birthday."  Or if you just can't get into the birthday spirit, write a poem to or about Dave Matthews, Richard Nixon, Bob Denver (Gilligan on Gilligan's Island), or Joan Baez, and all who celebrate birthdays today.

Not My Birthday Poem,

January 9, 2025

by: Martin Achatz

Today is not my birthday,

but I still climb to the roof

of a building, stand ankle-deep

in snow, give myself

a present:  a sun as big

as my fist rising over a frozen

Lake Superior.  It's a gift

Bob Denver, who was born

on this day, wouldn't have

been impressed by, stranded

as he was with Skipper,

Professor, Ginger, Thurston

on that island for decades

with nothing but a coconut-

powered transistor to keep

him up on the Beatles, Stones,

Joan Baez (who was also born

today), Tina Turner, Wu-Tang Clan.

I'm sure Bob saw plenty 

of beach sunrises, got sick of them,

they way he got sick of eating

coconut cream pie every year

on this day, blowing out candles

made from gorilla ear wax.

So, my sunrise wouldn't even 

tempt Bob to leave his hammock

in the early morning, where

he was probably dreaming

of Mary Ann, the gingham folds

that hid the tanned slopes

of her calves and thighs.  She was

always my favorite.  I imagined

Gilligan and her ending up

together, sharing one of those

thatched huts, listening to waves

as they rocked together on a

mattress stuffed with palm fronds.

If I remember right, Mary Ann was

played by an actress named Dawn.

As I watch Lake Superior crack open

like an egg and the yolk of sun

ascend into the sky, I dream

of being marooned somewhere,

the arms of a Kansas farmgirl pulling

me down, her body filling me

with cornfields and the crow of a rooster.

July 21: "Boy Shooting at a Statue," Full Moon, President Biden

Billy Collins meditates on history . . . 

Boy Shooting at a Statue

by: Billy Collins

It was late afternoon,

the beginning of winter, a light snow,

and I was the only one in the small park

to witness the lone boy running

in circles around the base of a bronze statue.

I could not read the carved name

of the statesman who loomed above,

one hand on his cold hip,

but as the boy ran, head down,

he would point a finger at the statue

and pull an imaginary trigger

imitating the sounds of rapid gunfire.

Evening thickened, the mercury sank,

but the boy kept running in the circle

of his footprints in the snow

shooting blindly into the air.

History will never find a way to end,

I thought, as I left the park by the north gate

and walked slowly home

returning to the station of my desk

where the sheets of paper I wrote on

were like pieces of glass

through which I could see

hundreds of dark birds circling in the sky above.

It's an interesting poem to land on tonight--all about history and dark birds and violence.

Last night, the moon was incredible, fat and full and orange in the heavens.  My niece, Abby, and I went outside and tried to capture it with the different cameras at our disposal.  Abby had a much nicer camera and got some great shots, including the one below.  It was a great way to end a great week with her.

My wife drove Abby to Lake Michigan to meet up with Abby's mom today while I attended an all-day author/artist fair with one of my best writer/poet friends.  It was incredibly hot, but lovely, as well.  I visited with some good friends, met some interesting people, and made a little bit of money by selling CDs and instant poems.  

About halfway through the day, Abby sent me a text telling me that President Biden was stepping down from running for reelection.  She and I had just talked about this possibility last night, and I predicted that it was going to happen soon.  (I wasn't happy about it, but I knew it was only a matter of time.)

I just have a few words for my Democrat friends and acquaintances who are celebrating tonight.  These last few weeks since the debate between Trump and Biden, I have witnessed the worst kind of ageism I've ever seen.  On the basis of 90 minutes of bad TV, these friends somehow forgot all the good President Biden has accomplished in the last three-and-a-half years.  I didn't hear my friends complain when President Biden canceled student debt relief.  They didn't complain as he navigated the country out of the pandemic and chipped away at unemployment, not to mention stimulating a failing economy.  

I'm not saying that I oppose the possibility of a Kamala Harris presidency.  In fact, I'm excited about the prospect.  However, if you are one of my friends who was calling for President Biden to step aside because of his age, I think you need to do a little soul searching.  You literally canceled a good, decent public servant because of his age.  Isn't that sort of akin to Trump mocking a reporter with a disability?

Yes, I believe Donald Trump needs to be defeated in November to preserve democracy in this country.  Yes, I am excited by the possibility of seeing the first female President of the United States.  Yet, I think the attacks on President Biden from both sides of the political spectrum these last few weeks have been disappointing at best,  intensely ugly at worst.

I told Abby last night that I didn't think I was going to live to see a woman as President of the United States.  I hope to be eating those words in the next few months.

In the meantime, Saint Marty may be doing some more moongazing tonight.

January 24: Communion Two Days in a Row, Bernie Sanders Memes, My Sister Rose

Merton lives the life of an "intellectual" . . . 

The end of January came. I remember, when I took my exams for the M.A., I went to Communion two days in a row, and both days I was very happy, and also I did quite well in the examinations. So after that I thought it was necessary for me to go to Bermuda for a week, and sit in the sun, and go swimming, and ride bicycles along those empty white roads, rediscovering the sights and smells that had belonged to a year of my early childhood. I met a lot of people who liked to ride around all night in a carriage singing: “Someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah—strumming on the old banjo.” The weather was so good that I came back to New York brown and full of health, with my pocket full of snapshots of the strangers with whom I had been dancing and sailing in yachts. And I was just in time to see Bramachari leave for India, at last, on the Rex. He was sailing with the Cardinals who were off to elect the new Pope. 

Then I went to Greenwich Village and signed a lease for a one-room apartment and started work on my Ph.D. I suppose the apartment on Perry Street was part of the atmosphere appropriate to an intellectual such as I imagined myself to be and, as a matter of fact, I felt much more important in this large room with a bath and fireplace and French windows leading out on to a rickety balcony than I had felt in the little place ten feet wide behind the Columbia Library. Besides, I now had a shiny new telephone all my own which rang with a deep, discreet, murmuring sort of a bell as if to invite me suavely to expensive and sophisticated pursuits. 

I don’t, as a matter of fact, remember anything very important happening over that telephone, except that I used to make dates with a nurse who was stationed in one of the clinics out at the World’s Fair which opened that year on Flushing Meadows. Also, it was the occasion of a series of furiously sarcastic letters to the telephone company because of various kinds of troubles, mechanical and financial. 

The one I most talked to, over this phone, was Lax. He had a phone which did not even cost him anything, for he was living in the Hotel Taft, tutoring the children of the manager, and having access to an ice-box full of cold chicken at all hours of the day and night. The two principal items of news which he communicated to me, from his point of vantage, were, first, the appearance of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and, second, the election of Pope Pius XII. 

It was one of those first spring mornings when the new, warm sun is full of all kinds of delights, that I heard about the Pope. I had been sitting on the balcony in a pair of blue dungarees, drinking Coca-Cola, and getting the sun. When I say sitting on the balcony, I mean sitting on the good boards and letting my feet dangle through the place where the boards had broken. This was what I did a great deal of the time, in the mornings, that spring: surveying Perry Street from the east, where it ran up short against a block of brick apartments, to the west, where it ended at the river, and you could see the black funnels of the Anchor liners. 

When I wasn’t sitting on this balcony doing nothing, I was in the room, in the deepest armchair, studying the letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins and his Notebooks and trying to figure out various manuals on prosody and covering little white index cards with notes. For it was my plan to write a Ph.D. dissertation on Hopkins. 

The typewriter that was always open on the desk was sometimes busy when I got a book to review: for I had been doing occasional reviews for the Sunday book sections of the Times and Herald Tribune. But what was better, I sometimes managed to grind out, with labor and anguish, some kind of a poem. 

I had never been able to write verse before I became a Catholic. I had tried, but I had never really succeeded, and it was impossible to keep alive enough ambition to go on trying. I had started once or twice at Oakham, and I had written two or three miserable things at Cambridge. At Columbia, when I thought I was a Red, I got one stupid idea for a poem, about workers working on a dock and bombing planes flying overhead—you know: ominous. When it got on paper it was so silly that not even the magazines on the Fourth Floor would print it. The only other verse I had ever been able to turn out before my Baptism was an occasional line for the Jester. 

Baptism seems to have worked miracles in Merton's life.  Going to Church, studying literature, gives him purpose and energy.  Although he still hasn't fully surrendered himself to God's will, he is still able to accomplish things that his previous hedonistic life never allowed--including writing poems.  Baptism and Communion and Mass bring about a change in Merton, inching him toward the religious life he would later adopt.

Since the Presidential Inauguration last Wednesday, I have noticed a new kind of energy in the air.  A lightness that hasn't existed for about four years.  We, in the United States, have lived through a time characterized by meanness of spirit, absence of compassion, and ignorance of truth.  I have lived through the administrations of nine presidencies, Republicans and Democrats.  I haven't always agreed with the politics or policies of these leaders.  However, I never questioned their basic human decency.

Now, in these first days since President Biden took office, there has been a popular meme of Bernie Sanders dominating social media.  It's Bernie Sanders at the inauguration, in mittens and hat.  Looking like the old, hippy grandpa at Thanksgiving dinner who will speak his mind no matter what.  Confession:  I love Bernie Sanders.  Love the fact that his message has never changed from day one:  he wants a world where everyone is taken care of.  Everyone has healthcare.  Everyone makes a living wage.  Everyone pays their fair share of taxes, with the wealthiest paying the most, as it should be.

Bernie Sanders' presence at the inauguration on Wednesday was a reminder to everyone that there are people in Washington, D. C., and the world, who will fight for what is right and humane, no matter what.

Yesterday, I read a Facebook post about the wave of Bernie memes that has stormed the Internet.  It was written by person named Robin Tala.  Here is a part of what Robin said:

If Biden's inauguration is our relief, then Bernie is our cleaning.  He's basically a giant smudging, clearing the malevolent energy & ushering a new time of recommitment to our values of peace & justice.

. . . 

All this struck a deep chord in our society's psyche & heart space and we all bowed and venerated him [Bernie Sanders] with our love, humor, & joy.

It's so beautiful to witness this collective online ritual of relief, especially when we cannot be together to celebrate in person.

THANK YOU to Bernie Sanders, for being the elder that we need in our culture, the curmudgeonly revolutionary uncle, the warrior for justice, the guardian of our culture's inherent commitment to care & solidarity.

You give us all so much hope & strength to keep on marching for the future we KNOW is possible.

My sister, Rose, is still in the hospital.  They've changed her medications, and she has been showing a little improvement.  That is a miracle.  Rose, for me, sort of represents what is good in the world.  She's loving, kind, gentle.  Always happy to see me, even if she can't remember who I am and calls me by my brother's name.  She, like Bernie, is a smudging, as well, clearing out all the meanness, all the darkness of the world.  

And Bernie Sanders would love Rose.  I know this in my heart.  He would want her cared and provided for.  That's what we should all want.  To help everyone, no matter how poor or how sick or how in need.

Saint Marty gives thanks the miracle of Bernie memes tonight.  And his sister Rose.