May 27, 2026: “Sorrow,” Son’s Graduation, “Wisdom for My Son as He Graduates High School”

I have been a little unmoored today (actually all week long) because of my son’s impending graduation.  I knew it was coming and thought I was prepared, but, sitting in the auditorium this evening for the ceremony, I realized there simply was no way to prepare for the hurricane of emotions I was experiencing (am still experiencing).  Joy.  Pride.  Relief.  Grief.

Marie Howe writes about sadness . . . 

Sorrow

by: Marie Howe

So now it has our complete attention, and we are made whole.

We take it into our hands like a rope, grateful and tethered,

freed from waiting for it to happen,  It is here, precisely

as we imagined.

If the man has died, if the child’s illness has taken a sudden

turn, if the house has burned in the middle of the night

and in winter, there is at least a kind of stopping that will

pass for peace.

Now when we speak it is with great seriousness, and when

we touch it is with our own fingers, and when we listen

it is with our big eyes that have looked at a thing

and have not blinked.

There is no longer any reason to distrust us.  When it leaves

it will leave like summer, and we will remember it as a break

in something that had seemed as unrelenting as coming rain

and we will be sorry to see it go.

There really is no way to prepare for sorrow, even if the loss is expected, as Howe points out.  The sorrow might be coupled (guiltily) with relief and may “pass for peace,” but it is still “unrelenting as coming rain.”  Sorrow just hangs on, like a bad cold.  Weeks go by, and you’re still coughing and drinking NyQuil.

As most of my faithful disciples know, my son’s educational journey has not been easy.  Five years ago, I wasn’t even sure he would make it to high school graduation.  It seemed like every other day we were being called to the principal’s office.  On his last day of eighth grade he had to be escorted out of the building by a teacher because another student had threatened to jump him after the final bell.  Two weeks prior to that, I took a couple days off work because I was afraid he was going to hurt himself.  

Tonight, my son stood in front of an auditorium full of almost 300 people and delivered a speech to his classmates and teachers, thanking them for putting up with his “dumb ass.”  He opened himself up.  I’ve never seen him be that vulnerable in public.  And there I was, choking back sobs.

He did it.

I’m going to type that one more time.

He did it.

And I’m a complete mess, sitting on my couch at home, typing this post.  Writing is the way I gain a little control over difficult emotions and situations.  When my daughter graduated and drove off to her all-night party, I sat in the dark in my living room after everyone else had gone to bed, and I cried and wrote and cried some more.  Tonight, my son is with a couple of his best friends, and, after I publish this blog post, I’m going to sit in the dark in my living room and cry and cry.

Saint Marty wrote this poem for his son today . . . 

Wisdom for My Son as He Graduates High School

by: Martin Achatz

Yes, Darth Vader really is Luke’s dad, and,

yes, Han Solo shot Greedo first in Mos Eisley.

Diet Pepsi really is better than Diet Coke

because it’s sweeter, burns less when you swallow,

and that will be important when you get older,

realize you prefer Christmas to Halloween,

milk chocolate to bitter dark, when a nap

on a warm July afternoon is your definition

of perfection more than Michelangelo’s David

or the Mona Lisa’s curved lips.  In this world,

bellies bloat with famine, schoolgirls die

in bombed classrooms, polar bears drown

because we’re running out of ice the way

Walmarts run out of air conditioners during Texas

heatwaves.  There are things worth fighting for:

racial justice, the Oxford comma, gender

equity, leftover KFC cold from the fridge,

marriage equality because love is love is love is

really all your need, and I don’t care I used

the word love three times in this poem because

when this night is over—speeches spoken, songs sung,

marches marched, diplomas handed out—that’s all

you’re going to remember, the rest of us sitting

in our seats, waiting to hear your name called

as if for the first time, our hearts (yes,

I’m using the word hearts, too) blazing 

like wildfires on the cusp of a tinder-dry summer.

May 18, 2026: “Without Devotion,” Last Week of High School, “Midnight Thunderstorm”

This Monday begins the last week of high school for my son.  Friday is his official final day of secondary education.  

Now, my son acts all tough; he doesn’t really reveal his emotions all that much.  But I can tell he’s sensing a huge shift coming in his life.  I remember that shift from “I’m in high school” to “Holy shit!  I’m an adult!”  It was not an easy transition for me.  Even today, I still don’t know what I want to be when (if?) I grow up.

When you devote so much of your life to something, you feel the loss of that something acutely, whether it’s a school or person or career.  I enjoyed my high school days.  Enjoyed my classmates and classes.  Sure, there were challenges, but those challenges were incidental compared to some of the shit I’ve gone through since getting my diploma.  Devotion is easier when you’re younger.  There’s not so much clutter in your noggin.  The path seems clearer.

Marie Howe reflects on devotion . . . 

Without Devotion

by: Marie Howe

Cut loose, without devotion, a man becomes a comic.

His antics are passed

around the family table and mimicked so well, years

later the family still laughs.

Without devotion, any life becomes a stranger’s story

told and told again to help another sleep

or live.  And it is possible

in the murmuring din of that collective loyalty

for the body to forget what it once loved.

A mouth on the mouth becomes a story mouth.

It’s what they think they knew—what the body knew

alone, better than it ever knew anything.

Without devotion, his every gesture—

how he slouched in the family pantry, his fingers

curled into a fist, the small things he said

while waiting for water to boil—

becomes potentially hilarious.  Lucky for him

the body, sometimes, refuses translation,

that often it will speak, secretly,

in its own voice, and insist, haplessly,

on its acquired tastes.  Without devotion, it might

stand among them and listen, laughing,

but look, how the body clenches,

as the much discussed smoke intermittently clears.

It has remembered the man standing, wearing

his winter coat.

Watch how it tears from the table, yapping, ferocious

in its stupid inarticulate joy.

Howe is right.  Without devotion, most things become trivial or ridiculous.  I’m a church organist/accompanist.  If I don’t devote myself to several hours of practice each week, I know the results will be hilarious.  Or horrendous.  Either way, it will have people telling stories for quite a while.

I don’t think my son will have as difficult a transition to college next fall as I had when I was 17.  My son’s been taking college classes since his junior year of high school.  This past semester, he took an asynchronous online cyber security course.  That means that the entire class was virtual, with no in-class meetings.  My son pretty much had to teach himself everything, with email guidance from his instructor.  He had most of the semester’s work completed within the first month.  After that, he just had a research paper to write.  And he never came to me for help or advice.

Here’s how I know my son is going to do alright transitioning to college in September:  he got an A in the asynchronous class, and the instructor reached out to my son’s advisor to say my son was one of the best students he’s had in years.  My son devoted himself to doing well in the class, and that devotion payed off.

As most of my faithful disciples know, my son really struggled in elementary and middle school. Lots of bullying.  Lots of fights and visits to the principal’s office.  Five years ago, I wasn’t even sure my son was going to graduate—he hated school that much.  He just doesn’t learn the way most kids do.  And he struggled with suicidal depression and ADHD, as well.  By the time he hit eighth grade, he’d already been labeled a “bad kid.”  My wife and I had to make a change for our son, or he would have suffered for four years (if he didn’t drop out completely).  

So, we enrolled him in a local alternative high school.  He got a 4.0 GPA the first semester of his freshman year.  He went from almost failing every course in middle school to being an honor roll student his whole high school career.  That sad, isolated, and angry adolescent has became a happy, social, and accomplished young adult.  

Devotion pays off.  My wife and I were devoted to helping our son succeed.  My son was devoted to doing well in school (once he was in an educational environment where he felt safe and supported).  Without devotion, I don’t think I’d be sending out graduation announcements this week.  My son is one of the resilient people I know, even during his traumatic middle school years.  He could have simply given up on education, but he didn’t.  He stuck it out and found a place where he was accepted and respected.

CUE:  “Pomp and Circumstance”

And now, in a little over a week, he’s going to be walking into an auditorium in cap and gown, and he’s going to walk out with a diploma in his hand.

Saint Marty wrote a poem about resilience for tonight . . . 

Midnight Thunderstorm

by: Martin Achatz

1.

Nobody thought the radiated soil

of Hiroshima would green again,

predicted years of charcoal and hunger.

Yet, mere months after the bomb, oleander

blushed in the ruins, pink as first breath,

reclaiming ashes from armageddon, showing

us all how the world could begin again.

2.

Last night, I listened to a storm

roll through the dark like a panzer,

all wind and rumble, accompanied

by artillery fire rain on the roof.

Flashes of lightning strobed the bedroom

walls and ceiling, and I understood

why ancient people divined famines

and droughts and wars and plagues

from the heavens.  This morning, 

I smelled mud, saw worms fat and drowned

on the sidewalk.  Everything was bejeweled

with water:  pines, grasses, mailboxes.

The world was a bright, new diamond.

May 16, 2026: “Keeping Still,” Writing Conference, “What a Wonderful World”

It has been a very busy day.

I was invited to lead a youth poetry workshop and participate in a panel discussion today.  It was the annual meeting of UPPAA (Upper Peninsula Publishers & Authors Association) at the library where I work.  Maybe four years ago, I delivered the keynote address for UPPAA, so I am familiar with the organization and its people.  

Doing these kinds of events always makes me a little anxious.  Some of the questions running through my head:  Will these kids like me?  What do I know about recording audiobooks?  Did I leave the iron on?  (Okay, that last question was an allusion to the movie Airplane, but you get the idea.)  My inner Catholic schoolboy was fully present for most of the day.  Lots of noise in my head.

Marie Howe writes about finding a quiet place . . . 

Keeping Still

by: Marie Howe

If late at night, when watching the moon, you still

sometimes get vertigo, it’s understandable

that you wish suddenly and hard for fences, for someone

to marry you.  Desiring a working knowledge,

needing to know some context by heart, you might

accept anything:  the room without windows,

the far and frozen North, or the prairie, the prairie 

even, if it means that.

The long wide space and cold dirt that will not

be seduced into hills, and the dust, that even after

you have kicked and swept and fallen on it pounding,

will not produce a tree.  It will allow you

to rise with certainty and move with the relief

of necessary things to the wash on the line,

to the small maple you brought here that must be tied

for the winter or die.

Even the prairie night, blind with snow,

when no one comes, and you no longer look

to the mirror but force your fingers to the stitching

and produce a child to help with the lambing

and the carrying of water.  Although it might be years

before you turn and stop, startled

by the sweet and sudden smell of sheets snapping

in the sun, and the drunken lilac, prairie purple,

blooming by the doorway, because you planted it.

Keeping still is difficult because there’s so much noise in the world these days.  There are wars and inflation and soaring gas prices and an idiot tearing down/destroying national monuments.  (Said idiot is responsible for everything else in that previous sentence, as well.)

I don’t keep still very often.  Even when I fall asleep at night, I have to have some kind of noise.  Lately, it’s been old movies like Steel Magnolias and Crocodile Dundee.  My ADD mind doesn’t rest easily.  It requires distraction and, sometimes, medication.  (Not afraid to admit that I have a customer loyalty account at my local cannabis dispensary.)

Today, keeping still was impossible for me.  Too many things happening.  However, after my youth poetry workshop, I was able to sit in my office and write for a while, and it was glorious.  I rarely get more than 30 or 40 minutes of writing time in a 24-hour period.  Plus, I went to the laundromat after supper tonight, and I was able to write there, too.  So I found a few still moments during the parade of this day.  

I wish I was more like my puppy.  She can fall asleep practically anywhere, and very little disturbs her when she’s dozing.  (Every once in a while, in the middle of the night, I’ll hear her quietly bark in her crate, undoubtedly chasing a bunny or chipmunk in her dreams.  But that’s it.)  Dogs aren’t gifted with consciences or concepts of sin.  They just eat and sleep and (if they’re not neutered or spayed) fuck.  That’s it.  Maybe everyone should aspire to a dog’s life.  The world would be a much happier place, I think.

Saint Marty wrote the following poem at the laundromat tonight . . . 

What a Wonderful World

by: Martin Achatz

No offense, Louis, but it’s pretty hard

to notice rainbows in the sky or friends

shaking hands, saying “How do you do?”

or even imagining those three words 

(I and love and you) uttered in polite

company these days, when poets

are murdered in their cars and bombs

fall on school buildings filled with girls

too young to even know how to hate

anything but peas or an 8 p.m. curfew.

I want the world to be wonderful.

I really do.  But even bees are having

trouble finding the wonder of pollen,

and polar bears drown because the wonder

of ice can only be found in poems like this

by people like me who remember their parents

swaying in the kitchen, holding each other

close as you, Louis, growled your way

through that wonder-filled song, their hard

bodies shining like new pennies, the kind

no longer being minted these days.  Oh, yeah.

May 15, 2026: “Gretel, from a sudden clearing,” Rose, “On Your 61st Birthday”

Greetings, faithful disciples.  

Yes, I’ve been out of commission for the last couple weeks when it comes to blogging.  I had a little mishap with my iPad.  Basically, I was grading some final exams, and my iPad fell off the corner of a table.  The screen shattered.  So, for the past 14 or so days, I’ve been waiting for my replacement iPad, screen protector, and bluetooth keyboard.

Well, as evidenced by this post, I am back in business, and just in time for my sister Rose’s birthday.  She passed in 2022, and, since that time, I don’t think a day has gone by that I haven’t thought of her.  I miss her terribly.  She would have been 61 years old today.

Marie Howe writes about a sister missing her brother . . . 

Gretel, from a sudden clearing

by: Marie Howe

No way back then, you remember, we decided,

but forward, deep into a wood

so darkly green, so deafening with birdsong

I stopped my ears.

And that high chime at night,

was it really the stars, or some music

running inside our heads like a dream?

I think we must have been very tired.

I think it must have been a bad broken-off

piece at the start that left us so hungry

we turned back to a path that was gone,

and lost each other, looking.

I called your name over and over again,

and still you did not come.

At night, I was afraid of the black dogs

and often I dreamed you.next to me,

but even then, you were always turning

down the thick corridor of trees.

In daylight, every tree became you.

And pretending, I kissed my way through

the forest, until I stopped pretending

and stumbled, finally, here.

Here too, there are step-parents, and bread

rising, and so many other people

you may not find me at first.  They speak

your name, when I speak it.

But I remember you before you became

a story.  Sometimes, I feel a thorn in my foot

when there is no thorn.  They tell me,

not unkindly, that I should imagine nothing here.

But I believe you are still alive.

I want to tell you about the size of the witch

and how beautiful she is.  I want to tell you

the kitchen knives only look friendly,

they have a life of their own,

and that you shouldn’t be sorry,

not for the bread we ate and thought

we wasted, not for the turning back alone,

and that I remember how our shadows walked

always before us, and how that was a clue,

and how there are other clues

that seem like a dream but are not,

and that every day, I am less

and less afraid.

Howe’s poem is kind of heartbreaking.  I can almost taste the grief in Gretel’s words, that longing to find her lost brother—every tree in the forest reminding her of Hansel.

My sister Rose was unforgettable, too.  She wrote letters to friends and family, even though the doctor told my mom when my sister was born that she would never be able to walk or speak.  She did latch hook rugs, even though she barely followed the designs, instead creating her own, Picasso-esque images.  She watched movies on repeat—Mama Mia! and Sleeping Beauty and Steel Magnolias, even though she frequently wore out the VHS tapes and DVDs.  And Rose had Down syndrome.  I put that fact last because, if I put it first, people tend to define her by it.  She was much more than her extra chromosome.

The last few years of Rose’s life were a struggle.  She suffered from terrible asthma and frequently ended up in the hospital with bouts of pneumonia.  During her final hospital stay, she struggled and fought for breath for days.  Then, one morning, one of her lungs collapsed.  Her body was tired, and she was ready to be with all the people she missed—Mom, Dady, sister Sally, and brother Kevin.  The nurses removed her oxygen, and, in the silence that followed, her breathing got quieter and quieter until it ceased altogether.

That winter morning, the sky was pink and orange with the rising sun, as if it knew Rose would soon be coming and wanted to throw her a huge “Welcome Home” party.  It was one of the most beautiful and difficult moments of my life.  She passed so peacefully that, at first, I didn’t even realize she was gone.

Like Gretel in Howe’s poem, I see Rose everywhere—in the shapes of trees and clouds, taste of Diet Coke on my tongue, melodies of ABBA songs on my playlist.  She’s gone, but she’s never been gone.

Saint Marty wrote this poem for Rose tonight . . . 

On Your 61st Birthday

by: Martin Achatz

I think of you before gulls

picked your brain clean of words,

when you could still spoon Dairy Queen

ice cream cake to your mouth, or strip

your KFC breast so clean the bones

looked like they belonged in a Georgia 

O’Keeffe desert scape.  In a photo, 

my daughter kneels beside you, my son 

hovers behind your chair, and you smile

as if you’ve just discovered how

to smile and can’t wait to share

your discovery with the rest of the world.

I wish there was a museum of your

smiles I could visit today.  I’d sit

on a bench in the wing dedicated 

to all the smiles you gave me, each

lip and tooth thick and alive

as brushstrokes on a van Gogh canvas,

you know the one with all the screaming

stars and black finger of a tree pointing

heavenward, as if directing me to the cloud

where hosts of seraphs are singing 

hosannas to your bright birthday comet.