June 20, 2026: “Buying the Baby,” Father’s Day Weekend, “Hard Work”

From a very young age, I was taught the value of hard work.  Even when my dad retired (after almost 50-plus years of cabling sewers, replacing water heaters, and installing furnaces), he still got up before 5 a.m., sipped his strong black coffee, and then headed out into the day for whatever task he had set for himself to accomplish.  Mowing the lawn or tinkering around in his warehouse or chopping wood at camp.  He never slowed down.  And he instilled that same work ethic in each of his kids.

On this Father’s Day weekend, I find myself thinking about my dad a lot.  How he forced me to do things I hated, like going on plumbing jobs when I was a kid; mowing the lawn to his exact specifications (not an easy feat); and attending catechism and Mass with the Society of St. Pius X (a Catholic sect that rejected the reforms introduced by the Vatican II and insisted on Latin liturgy).  Simply put, I didn’t see eye-to-eye with my dad on a lot of things, emotionally, spiritually, socially, or politically.  But I loved him, even though our relationship was complicated.

Marie Howe writes about attending Catholic school . . . 

Buying the Baby

by: Marie Howe

In those days you could buy a pagan baby for five dollars,

the whole class saved up.  And when you bought it

you could name it Joseph, Mary, or Theresa, thee class took a vote.

But on the day I brought in the five dollars

my grandmother had given me for my birthday something happened

—fire drill?  An assassination?  And if it was announced 

Marie Howe has, all by herself, bought a baby in India and gets to name it,

it was overshadowed and forgotten

And if I tried to picture my baby, the CARE package

carried to her hut and placed before her, as her sisters and brothers watched,

that image dissolved into the long shining hall to the girls’ lavatory.

Even in my own room, waiting for Roy Orbison to sing “Only the Lonely”

so I could sleep, I couldn’t conjure that baby up.

The five dollars I gave her would never reach her.  I knew that,

because I wanted my class to think me good for giving it.

Spiritual Pride the nuns called it, a Sin of Intention,

sister to the Sin of Omission, which was 

the price for what you hadn’t done but thought.

Sometimes I prayed so hard for God to materialize at the foot of my bed

it would start to happen,

then I’d beg it to stop, and it would.

I don’t have much memory of those catechism classes I attended as a kid.  Vaguely, I recall buying cows and sheep and chickens for remote African villages.  I also have a memory of learning the Lord’s Prayer in Latin when I was in second or third grade and a priest forcing me to recite it for a group of snickering high schoolers.  However, I have no recollection of buying a pagan baby for five bucks.

But I worked hard at being the perfect Catholic schoolboy.  I went to confession every Sunday, even though second graders don’t really commit a lot of serious sins.  The one sin I committed over and over was this:  I hated attending the Latin Mass.  I admitted this fact to the priest every week in that stuffy little room, and I listened to his admonitions and accepted my penance.  Every week.  Truly, though, I was pretty unrepentant.  To this day, I’m not a fan of Latin liturgy or Gregorian chant or hymns based on Gregorian chants.  Yes, I know I’m going to hell.

So, I didn’t inherit my dad’s penchant for ancient rituals in dead languages.  However, I watched him work from dawn to dusk every day.  To relax at night, he drank 7 and 7s.  A lot of them.  (He eventually gave this practice up after he realized he had a big problem with alcohol.  He never attended an AA meeting or worked any twelve step program.  He just went cold turkey one day and never looked back.)  Because of my dad’s addiction, I’m very cognizant of my own consumption of alcohol and other substances.  I think that’s the reason I waited until I was a high school senior before I indulged in my first puking blackout.  

But, because of the work ethic I inherited from my parents, I was salutatorian of my high school class and received a full-ride scholarship to college, from which I graduated summa cum laude.  Then I went on to graduate school and earned two advanced degrees.  Currently, I hold down five jobs (teaching at a university, programming at a library, and playing keyboard/pipe organ at three different churches).  I’m not a lazy person, and I have my dad and mom to thank for that.

At the laundromat this afternoon, Saint Marty wrote a poem . . . 

Hard Work

by: Martin Achatz

After a morning bagging up dog crap,

stray branches, a desiccated mouse carcass

(probably dropped by a barred owl), then pushing

a mower for a couple more hours under 

a punishing sun, avoiding fat toads in the grass 

after a night of heavy rain, I sit on my living 

room couch in front of a fan, chew an ice cube

in the window-shaded dark, and lick sweat

from my upper lip as I contemplate the real 

hard work ahead of me:  this poem 

with its concrete nouns, feral verbs, Homeric

mystery.  In a few minutes, I’ll launch myself

toward the shores of Troy, ready to war

five, ten, twenty years for a single line of verse

so beautiful and perfect it would make Paris 

forget the golden apple of Helen’s body.

June 18, 2026: “Sixth Grade,” Regrets, “Imaginary Family Tree”

We all have experiences in the past that cause us shame, especially when we get older.  It’s inevitable.  I could provide a laundry list of my personal regrets and hurts.  Chances not taken.  Cruelties inflicted.  Things not said.  It’s not healthy to obsess over these moments, but I do, late at night, when I can’t fall asleep.

Marie Howe writes about a childhood trauma . . . 

Sixth Grade

by: Marie Howe

The afternoon the neighborhood boys tied me and Mary Lou Maher

to Donny Ralph’s father’s garage doors, spread-eagled,

it was the summer they chased us almost every day.

Careening across the lawns they’’d mowed for money,

on bikes they threw down, they’d catch us, lie on top of us,

then get up and walk away.

That afternoon Donny’s mom wasn’t home.

His nine sisters and brothers gone—even Gramps, who lived with them,

gone somewhere—the backyard empty, the big house quiet.

A gang of boys.  They pulled the heavy garage doors down,

and tied us to them with clothesline,

and Donny got the deer’s leg severed from the buck his dad had killed

the year before, dried up and still fur-covered, and sort of

poked it at us, dancing around the blacktop in his sneakers, laughing.

Then somebody took it from Donny and did it.

And then somebody else, and somebody after him.

Then Donny pulled up Mary Lou’s dress and held it up,

and she began to cry, and I became a boy again, and shouted Stop.,

and they wouldn’t.

Then a girl-boy, calling out to Charlie my best friend’s brother,

who wouldn’t look

Charlie! to my brother’s friend who knew me

Stop them.  And he wouldn’t.

And then more softly, and looking directly at him, I said, Charlie.

And he said Stop.  And they said What?  And he said Stop it.

And they did, quickly untying the ropes, weirdly quiet,

Mary Lou weeping.  And Charlie?  Already gone.

Certain experiences stay with you like scars throughout your life.  Some are collective traumas—the JFK assassination, Challenger explosion, 9-11 attacks.  Others are more personal—physical abuse, schoolyard bullying, high school heartbreak.  What Howe describes here is a childhood trauma that haunts her into adulthood.  

As I said above, I have tons of regrets and hurts.  I never told my dad I loved him.  Ever.  My mother spent the final two or three years of her life in a nursing home, and I can count on one hand the number of times I visited her.  I was a chubby kid who played piano, wrote poems, and went to see the original Star Wars 27 times in the theater.  I pretty much had a target on my back all through middle school.  Faithful disciples of this blog know all about the struggles that addictions have inflicted on my marriage and family.  (I still go to therapy over these.)

I believe that most poetry comes from places of pain.  Old wounds that haven’t healed.  There’s something exquisitely beautiful about sorrow and grief.  Because you can’t experience either of those emotional states without also experiencing great joy and love.  Only the people we love and trust the most can inflict trauma in our lives.  I can vouch for that statement.  (Sorry, but I am not going to drag those skeletons out of my closet for this post.  Suffice to say, I have childhood traumas that shaped me into the person I am today.)

If I could go back in time to change my past and avoid those childhood traumas, would I?  I don’t think so.  Those wounds run deep, and I think they’ve made me a kinder, gentler individual than I would have been otherwise.  More empathetic and understanding.  Plus, I get a hell of a lot of poems out of that material.

I don’t think pain is intrinsically negative or positive.  It’s what we do with that pain that matters.  My childhood pain made me a better father, I think.  The marital struggles I endured taught me a great deal about trust and love and respect.  Made me a better partner.  You get the idea.  Trauma can destroy or shape you.

Saint Marty wrote a poem about generational trauma for this evening . . . 

Imaginary Family Tree

by: Martin Achatz

My dad jogged behind that limo in Dallas,

kept a white shirt rusted with Kennedy’s blood

in the bedroom closet until the day he died.

My mother marched on Washington in 1963,

stood under Lincoln’s marble gaze

while Martin climbed that mountaintop

and dreamed in front of her.

My great grandma sewed suffragette sashes

for Susan B. Anthony, slept next to her

at night, voting yes! and yes! again 

with lips and fingers in the dark.

My great great great grandpa stood by Grant

in the courthouse, watched a war end

so quietly he could hear flies buzzing

on Lee’s Confederate gray gelding outside.

Me?  I’ll bequeath my Nobel Prize diploma

to my kids.  It’s hanging above my desk 

at the moment, looking a lot like a Valentine

my daughter made me in kindergarten,

a flock of crayon hearts slapping my eyes.

June 14, 2026: “The Boy,” Shared Joy, “Waiting for the Bus”

It has been a quiet weekend of shared joy.

Yesterday, my wife and I attended our local Pride Fest, manning a table for the library where I work.  It was a sunny, warm day with strong winds that upheaved tents and sent pamphlets and brochures flying.  But none of that mattered.  It was all about welcome and acceptance, seeing people for who they are and greeting them with a holy Hell yes!

The United States is so divided and angry right now, marching quickly toward totalitarianism; kindness and empathy and joy are endangered species.  I sometimes don’t even recognize the country in which I grew up, and that makes me feel like a kid who wants to run away from home.

Marie Howe writes about a runaway . . . 

The Boy

by: Marie Howe

My brother is walking down the sidewalk into the suburban summer night:

white T-shirt, blue jeans—to the field at the end of the street.

Hangers Hideout the boys called it, an undeveloped plot, a pit overgrown

with weeds, some old furniture thrown down there,

and some metal hangers clinking in the trees like wind chimes.

He’s running away from home because our father wants to cut his hair.

And in two more days our father will convince me to go to him—you know

where he is—and talk to him:  No reprisals.  He promised.

A small parade of kids in feet pajamas will accompany me, their voices

like the first peepers in spring.  And my brother will walk ahead of us home,

and our father will shave his head bald, and my brother will not speak 

to anyone the next month, not a word, not pass the milk, nothing.

What happened in our house taught my brothers how to leave, how to walk

down a sidewalk without looking back.

I was the girl.  What happened taught me to follow him, whoever he was,

calling and calling his name.

Howe’s narrative is pretty familiar to me.  I loved my father, but he could be a pretty hard guy.  He had pretty clear ideas of the roles of men and women.  From a very young age, I was expected to learn my father’s trade (plumbing) like each of my three brothers did.  My father’s expectations for my sisters were a little more open and accepting.  One of my sisters became a registered nurse.  Another became a medical transcriptionist and coder, running a local hospital’s entire medical record department.  My oldest sister drove trucks for the mines in the area and also became a licensed Master Plumber, like my brothers.

Me?  Well, you know how things turned out for me.  English professor.  Writer.  Blogger.  Musician.  Actor.  Director.  Poet.  My life choices seemed to come right out of the book Being the Black Sheep of the Family for Dummies.  Until I started dating the woman who would eventually become my wife, I’m pretty sure my father was convinced I was gay, which was the only thing worse than being a poet in my father’s estimation.

I know my father was proud of my achievements.  He attended almost all of my poetry readings, even though I’m pretty sure he didn’t quite get my work.  At the very least, he respected my accomplishments.  He learned to accept me for who I was.  And that’s pretty much the best gift a father can give his children.

I never put any expectations on my kids.  I don’t care whether they’re gay, straight, bi, or trans.  My only hope for them is happiness.  Even if (God forbid!), they became Republicans, I’d still love them, although that would really test my threshold of acceptance.  

At the moment, there’s a UFC fight going on in front of the White House to celebrate you-know-who’s 80th birthday.  I’ve been avoiding news reports all day because I know the kind of crowd that event is going to draw, and, after this weekend of love and acceptance, I don’t want to end it with beer-drinking, red-hat-wearing white supremacists spouting hate speech in the same place where Martin Luther King spoke about his dreams for America and Americans.   Not gonna do it.  Wouldn’t be prudent.

I’m not a person who hates.  (This has been put to the test over and over in the last ten years.)  I didn’t raise my children to hate.  Life is way too short to hand over that kind of power to some individual or group.  If my one contribution to the universe is raising my daughter and son to love unconditionally, I can march up to the Pearly Gates with my head held high.

Saint Marty wrote a poem for tonight about the shared joy of the human experience . . . 

Waiting for the Bus

by: Martin Achatz

Some know each other, greet on approach

the way mothers greet children coming

home from war.  Patient as sheets

on a clothesline, they wait for

the blue-and-white bus to appear, know

this hurried world will soon swallow

them into grocery stores, medical appointments,

soul-killing jobs cleaning hotel rooms

or dropping baskets of fries into boiling oil.

But right now, in this moment, they share

stories about hernias and old dogs

with cataracts and grandkids who’ve just

graduated from high school.  They’re in no

rush.  None of them.  They savor these simple

intimacies like blueberries sprinkled on

a bowl of soggy Cheerios, milk sweet with sugar,

just like they used to eat on Saturday mornings

watching Bugs Bunny when they were kids.

June 11, 2026: “Encounter,” Redefining, “Ignorance is Bliss”

Yes, I’ve taken a few days to recuperate from all of my son’s graduation festivities—from the ceremony to the open house.  It’s an exciting time in a young person’s life.  For parents, it’s physically and emotionally draining.  After 17 or 18 years, a whole chapter of the parenting handbook draws to a close, and the question that lingers is “Now what?”

For better or worse, when you have a child, you have to redefine who you are.  My wife and I used to go to movies and restaurants all the time before the birth of our daughter.  We were an incredibly social couple, always planning get-togethers with family and friends.  However, after our kids came along, I was no longer just “Saint Marty” or “Teacher Marty” or “Poet Marty.”  My new title carried more weight:  “Father Marty” (not in the Catholic priest sense).  Parenthood makes you redefine everything you believed about yourself, including life goals and hopes and dreams.

Marie Howe writes about a life-redefining experience . . . 

Encounter

by: Marie Howe

First, the little cuts, then the bigger ones,

the biggest, the burns.  This is what God did

when he wanted to love you.

She didn’t expect to meet him on the stairway

no on used but she did, because she was

afraid of the elevator, the locked room.

She didn't expect him to look like that, to be

so patient, first the little ones, then

the big ones.  Everything

in due time, he said, I’ve got all the time

in the world.  She didn’t imagine it would take

so long, the breaking.

He did it three times before he did it.  Love?

She had imagined it differently, something

coming home to her,

an end to waiting.  And she did stop, when

the big cuts came.  It was all there was,

the burning, and that’s what God was

everywhere at once.  Someone had already

told her that, not only in his voice.  He was

inside her now—

the bigger ones, then the burning—and gone,

then back again.  This was termite, when

nothing happened that wasn’t

already happening.  She couldn’t remember.

After the burning, even the light went quiet.

She didn’t think God would be so

specific, so delicate—inside her elbow, under

her arm, the back of her neck, 

and her knees.

It’s true, she struggled at first until after

the breaking.  Then God was with her, and she

was with him.

Every spring, something miraculous happens in my backyard.  Quite a few years ago, I noticed one or two trillium blossoms growing at the base of some lilac bushes.  Now, calm down.  I know trillium are endangered, and just picking one can cost a person up to $1000 or 90 days in jail.  Let me be clear:  I did not troop into the forest in the middle of the night to hunt down trillium like the toothless Chris Cooper hunting down Ghost Orchids in the movie Adaptation.  

I don’t know how those trillium got into my backyard.  Perhaps the former owner of my house did the whole Chris Cooper thing.  Or maybe the house was built on top of bulldozed field of trillium before they were endangered.  Or, maybe, like in Howe’s poem, God just walked by one day and left a God-fragment behind for me to encounter.

Whatever origin story is true, the miracle of my backyard trillium happened again this year, and, in the almost quarter century we’ve lived in this house, these ghostly trinities have multiplied.  Where once there was only two or three blossoms, now an entire host of whiteness materializes in May, blazes for a few weeks, and then vanishes until the following spring.  My hope is that, eventually, trillium will redefine the landscape of my entire backyard like a low-hanging fog bank.

You’re probably thinking to yourself:  what do trillium have to do with Saint Marty’s son graduating from high school?  Well, we’re all trillium, struggling to hang on and flourish in a world that’s seems determined to endanger or extinct us.  The only way to survive is to give ourselves permission to evolve and germinate.  Cling to the wonder that brought us into existence in the first place.  

That’s what I’m trying to do right now, and that’s what I’m encouraging you, faithful disciples, to do, as well:  enjoy this year’s season of trillium (the sun on its petals, mud in its roots).  Stop and really take in that miraculous patch of beauty.  Don’t worry about the hard winter we’ve just endured, or the wildfires of the coming summer.  To paraphrase a really old cliché:  stop and smell the trillium.  The redefining will come soon enough.

Saint Marty wrote a poem about another cliché today . . . 

Ignorance is Bliss

by: Martin Achatz

Across the street, the new neighbors

(an older man and younger woman)

hang wind chimes on their front porch.

When I get home, the chimes chime

like a teenage girl’s jewelry box,

a plastic ballerina twirling 

to “Waltz of the Flowers” slower

and slower and slower until it stops

mid-spin, becomes a Degas pastel.

I stand in dusky light, imagine

the older man and younger woman

cooking naked in their kitchen, him

lifting a spoon to her lips, her sipping

its sauce, telling him to add more salt.

I may learn their names tomorrow, or

that they’re actually brother and sister, or

she had miscarriage last year, or

he is in the middle of chemo for lung cancer.

But for now, just let me have this stupid joy:

the older man and younger woman

holding each other tight as the pasta boils

and chimes chime in the evening breeze.