February 21, 2026: “Persephone, in the Meadow,” Misery and Snow, “Hold”

So, it is Saturday.  Laundry day.  After a week of shoveling and pushing snow heavy as wet cement, I’m so excited to be sitting at a table in the laundromat, watching towels and underwear have an orgy in the washer.  (Read that with sarcasm, please.)

It’s been a really busy seven days.  I had a production of the play Misery at the library on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday (yes, THAT Misery by Stephen King).  That pretty much gobbled up most of my energy and time from last Friday to now.  On top of that, there’s been snow and snow.  So much snow that I don’t think I’m going to have a driveway if another blizzard hits my little portion of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  I’m a Yooper (I’ve lived the majority of my life north of the Mackinac Bridge), but I’m getting a little tired of this shit.

I’ve also been struggling with a bout of sadness these last few days.  It’s partially weather-related; I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen blue sky and direct sunlight.  But there’s something else going on, too—a feeling of loneliness and loss that seems to be humming beneath the surface of my life like bees in a dormant hive.

Marie Howe writes about Persephone’s face , , , 

Persephone, in the Meadow

by: Marie Howe

When I looked at the meadow flowers,

many of them looked back

offering their faces:  sometimes crawling with ants or a bee.

And that was that.

But after I’d spent several hours with my mother

I often felt her face on my face—as if my face were her face.

After leaving my mother I’d go to the mirror and look and look.

And it was my face I saw.

But from the inside it felt like hers,

and it was hours before I felt her likeness fade.

I get what Howe is describing in this poem.  After I visit my daughter downstate (or she drives home to visit us), I’m haunted by her presence for a while afterward.  I look in the mirror, and I see her face reflected in mine.  She has my chin and smile and eyes.  It makes the separation more acute for three or four days.

I also see my mother’s face mirrored in my face.  My sister Sally’s face, as well.  We have Hainley features.  (“Hainley” was my mother’s maiden name.). Family has been central to my entire life.  Before Sally died of lymphoma of the brain, Sundays were reserved for big dinners at my parents’ house.  My sisters would cook.  I would bring dessert.  For a few hours, we ate and visited and laughed and loved.  It was a way to stay connected despite our busy schedules.

I’m glad my daughter is old enough to remember those good times.  My son was pretty young when Sally died, so his memories are fuzzier, although when he says her name or mentions her, it’s with the kind of reverence reserved for prayer.  And my kids still get big get-togethers with my wife’s side of the family—birthdays and holidays and homecomings.  It’s always joyful chaos, loud and laugh-filled.

It’s not uncommon for family members to live far and wide.  One of my brothers lives in Pennsylvania.  Before that, he lived in California.  I have a niece who’s a resident of Germany.  One of my sisters and her kids live in Washington state.  My closest blood relatives (two sisters and a brother) live a good hour’s drive away.  Like I said, far and wide.

My wife and I have been together for 35 years now.  Her family is my family just as much as my remaining siblings are.  At our Christmas gathering in December, I thanked my brother-in-law for always treating me like a real brother.  His reply:  “You’re family.  Always will be.”

I’ve been holding onto that moment.  It reminds me that I’m not Oliver Twist, if that makes sense.

Saint Marty has a new poem about holding onto love . . . 

Hold

by: Martin Achatz

I hold this pen in my hand, try

to conjure images of love to hold

this poem together, hold it like

a cupped palm holds water to thirsty

lips or the bowl of a spoon holds

sugar to sweeten coffee.  I hold

my mother and sister:  Mom holding

my sister’s hand, my sister’s breath held,

let go, held, let go, held, let go, held, 

Mom holding tighter and tighter 

because she knows to release her hold 

would be like releasing a balloon held 

in a child’s sticky fist, watching it float 

up, up into the gold and blue circus 

tent of heaven.

January 25, 2026: “The Saw, The Drill,” Another Shooting, “Laundry Day”

WARNING;  I am going to be writing about yesterday’s shooting in Minneapolis.  

Another day, another shooting.

Some things are impossible to ignore, and I’m not sure that ignorance is bliss in this situation.  To ignore is to be complicit, and I simply can’t pretend that everything is sunshine and chocolates in the United States at the moment.

A little over two weeks ago, Renee Good was murdered on the streets of Minneapolis by a masked ICE agent whose only response after shooting here in the face was to call her a “fucking bitch.” Yesterday (Saturday, January 24, 2026) a group of ICE agents murdered another innocent protestor in Minneapolis.  His name was Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse who worked for a Veterans Administration hospital in the city.  Trying to protect a woman, Pretti was pepper-sprayed, forced to the sidewalk, brutally beaten, and then shot multiple times.  (I’ve watched the video of the killing.  The ICE agents fire at least ten shots into Pretti’s prostrate body in the space of about five or seven seconds.)  After they shot him, one ICE agent can be seen clapping while the others turn Pretti’s body to count bullet holes.

I know I said I was going to try to remain positive in my posts, but I just can’t tonight.  I . . . just . . . can’t.

Marie Howe writes about how humans break things . . . 

The Saw, The Drill

by: Marie Howe

There’s always a chain saw somewhere,

the high whine of a drill, somebody building something or

tearing it down—fastening metal to metal.

When did wood give way to iron?

Then to plastic?

Almost everywhere the sound of the human will:

the bluster of engine, the grind of a blade, the wheel:

hammering, construction, repair.

Someone nailed to a cross, someone leashed, lashed.

Someone hung from a scaffold:  listen:  the squeak of the rope

the hammering.

Kill him with his own gun, a woman shouted,

Kill him with his own gun.

What have we made?  What are we making?

And who or what made us that we should make

such things as we do and did?  We grow smaller.  We break things.

Then turn to each other and beg for what no human can give.

This is a difficult poem for me to read tonight.  It’s all about humankind’s inherent need to break things.  We create, we destroy.  The line that sticks with me:  Kill him with his own gun.  I’m tired of ruthless mercenaries patrolling our streets, tear-gassing and detaining legal protestors, and un-aliving mothers and poets and nurses.  Yesterday, after seeing the video of Pretti’s assassination, I said to my wife, “I don’t recognize the country I live in anymore.”  

As I’m typing these words, I’m trying to formulate a message that isn’t all anger and retribution.  I’m failing miserably because I want these federal thugs to be arrested, convicted, and punished.  The Winter Olympics will be starting in Italy very soon, and, if I were an athlete, I’d be ashamed to represent the United States.  (Keep in mind that the fear and righteous anger we all feel right now is the same fear and righteous anger that African and Indigenous Americans have been experiencing for hundreds of years.)

I haven’t lost hope completely, though.  As Ann Frank said, 

In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.

Ann Frank was right.  The cruelty did end, but not before she was killed in a Nazi concentration camp.  Renee Good and Alex Pretti are martyrs for democracy, freedom, kindness, and compassion.  One day, plaques and statues should be erected in their honor.  They should never be forgotten.  

That is Saint Marty’s hope.  

A poem for tonight . . . 

Laundry Day

for Alex Pretti

by: Martin Achatz

I sit with the normal Saturday-morning crew, watch underwear, socks tumble and agitate as if I’m binging some Netflix series.  Martin and Malcolm have loads going, too, built up after a week of marching and teargas in the Twin Cities.  They huddle in a corner, drink hot coffee, compare notes, bruises, scars from the good old days, wonder when the good old days will end.  Alex comes in, fills a washer with towels and sheets, finds a seat, asks no one in particular, Is this a dream?  Martin and Malcolm laugh, offer him a stick of Juicy Fruit.  All three watch the machines cycle and spin, cycle and spin, trying to remove stains that just won’t come out, even after hundreds of years of scrubbing.

November 1, 2025: “The Prepositions,” All Saints’ Day, “Litany of Saints for Laundry Day”

Yes, it is the first day of November.  All Saints’ Day.  

In all the years that I’ve been a music minister (at Catholic, Methodist, and Lutheran churches), I don’t think I’ve ever played a service or Mass for All Saints’ Day, which is strange since my son was baptized on this feast.  That’s almost four decades of playing the pipe organ without having to deal with saintly litanies.  (At Catholic Easter Vigil Masses, the priest/cantor sings several litanies involving saints and angels and whatnot, and I have a confession:  I don’t like litanies or Gregorian chant all that much.  A little too medieval for me.)

Sharon Olds comforts herself with a litany of prepositions . . . 

The Prepositions

by: Sharon Olds

When I started Junior High I thought
I’d probably be a Behavior Problem
all my life, John Muir Grammar 

the spawning grounds, the bad-seed bed, but
the first morning at Willard, the dawn 

of seventh grade, they handed me a list
of forty-five prepositions, to learn
by heart. I stood in the central courtyard,
enclosed garden that grew cement, 

my pupils followed the line of the arches
up and over, up and over, like
alpha waves, about, above,
across, along, among, around, an
odd calm began in me,
before, behind, below, beneath,
beside, between, I stood in that sandstone
square and started to tame. Down,
from, in, into, near, I was
located there, watching the Moorish half-
circles rise and fall. Off,
on, onto, out, outside, we
came from 6th grades all over the city 

to meet each other for the first time,
White tennis-club boys who did not
speak to me, White dorks 

who did, Black student-council guys who’d gaze 

above my head, and the Black
plump goof-off who walked past and
suddenly flicked my sweater-front, I thought to shame me.
Over, past, since, through,
that was the year my father came home in the
middle of the night with those thick earthworms 

of blood on his face, trilobites of
elegant gore, cornice and crisp
waist of the extinct form,
till, to, toward, under, the
lining of my uterus convoluted,
shapely and scarlet as the jointed leeches 

of wound clinging to my father’s face in that
mask, unlike, until, up, I’d
walk, day and night, into 

the Eden of the list, hortus enclosus where
everything had a place. I was in
relation to, upon, with, and when I
got to forty-five I could just start over, 

pull the hood of the list down over 

my brain again. It was the first rest

I had had from my mind. My eyes would run
slowly along the calm electro-
cardiogram of adobe cloister,
within, without, I’d repeat the prayer I’d
received, a place in the universe,
meaningless but a place, an exact location—
Telegraph, Woolsey, Colby, Russell—
Berkeley, 1956,
fourteen, the breaking of childhood, beginning of memory.

Litanies can provide some comfort, as Olds’ poem demonstrates.  They occupy the mind, provide a kind of stability.  Olds keeps returning to the list of prepositions because the real world (full of nipple-flicking boys and injured, alcoholic fathers) is so out of her control.  

As you know, I’m what is sometimes referred to as a “cradle Catholic”—that means I was born, baptized, and raised in the Catholic Church.  There have only been a few times in my life that I haven’t attended weekend Masses on a regular basis.  I think every young Catholic goes through that sort of rebellious stage where, instead of going to church on Sunday morning, you hit McDonald’s instead.  (That little rebellion ended for me when I started to get paid for playing the pipe organ on Saturday evenings.)  I’ve been doing my church musician thing for going on 40 years now.  

So, my weeks are full of teaching and library work, and my Saturdays and Sundays are full of organ and piano benches at one Catholic parish (on rare occasions two), two Lutheran parishes, and one Methodist parish (very infrequently).  If you’re wondering when I get a day off, the answer is pretty simple:  I don’t.  Planning any kind of time off for me is like planning the invasion of Normandy.

Today, I was able to pull off something pretty special.  In the middle of working and teaching and music ministering, I planned a surprise 30th anniversary party for my wife.  My biggest surprise for her:  our daughter drove up from medical school to attend.  While my wife and I attended our regular Saturday Mass, our kids and friends gathered at a local restaurant, decorated its back room, and waited for us to walk through the door.

To say that my wife was taken aback is an understatement.  She had no idea what was happening.  I could see it on her face as our litany of friends and relatives all shouted “Surprise!”  And when she realized that our daughter was sitting at the head table, she just about lost it.  

Everyone we loved was there.  We ate and talked and laughed and reminisced.  In a year that has been dominated by President 47 dismantling democracy and taking food and healthcare away from American citizens, tonight was balm for my heart and soul.

After the dinner, our daughter and her significant other came to our house to play games and visit.  It was such a good day and night.  (I didn’t even mind going to the laundromat today, and I hate doing laundry.)

Saint Marty wrote a litany for today, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:

Write a poem that includes visits from three saints.  You can research saints on the Internet and choose your favorite, or make a list of your obsessions and create a saint from that.  Write a poem to the Saint of Poets, the Saint of Birds, or make up your own saint.  The Saint of the Internet, perhaps?  The Saint of Broken Violins?  Feel free to use one or more real or invented saints in your poem.

Litany of Saints for Laundry Day

by: Martin Achatz

I wake on dirty clothes day 

     to first snow on the grass,

     a breath of white that will

     be gone as soon as the sun

     opens its morning eye.

Our Lady of Termination Dust, pray for us.

I stare at autumn gold 

     on the hillside across 

     from King Koin Laundry

     this first day of November.

Saint Maidenhair, pray for us.

I scribble these words, my first

     lines while the colds

     spin cycle, tumbling

     like teens in a Buick’s backseat.

Saint Coitus, pray for us.

I think of you, my first (and only)

     love at home, waiting

     for me to return with

     baskets of bread-warm clothes.

God of Bounce Dryer Sheets, remind us

     we were all once fresh and clean.