April 3: "Sight," Kwame Dawes, Time to Change

Sight

by:  Kwame Dawes

               for Rwanda

Every ax should have an eye
to see the havoc
that it wreaks.

These days our tools are made
in factories.  Machetes
blind as stone arrive
stacked high in trucks.

They do no see
the soft eyes
of a child.

Every ax must have an eye
to see the havoc
that it wreaks.

____________________

No, this is not a happy poem.  It's a necessary poem.  You see, for the last several weeks in America, the news has been full of young people, marching in the streets, protesting gun violence and guns, demanding change in our country.  It was exhilarating to see and hear.  The clear voices of the young teaching the old and out-of-date.

Now, news makers have moved on to other topics and stories.  It seems as though this time will be forgotten.  Again.  Until the next school shooting.  Then we'll be reminded of what the youth said, what they begged for.

The world has a short memory.  Things like school shootings and genocide and brutality and rape and racial violence have the shelf life of a carton of milk.  They go sour and are tossed aside, until there's another classroom filled with dead students, another country where citizens are macheted in the streets, another woman bruised and bleeding, another person of color carrying a cell phone takes a bullet in a backyard.

It's time to change.

Saint Marty just wanted to remind you.

March 31: "Divination," Kwame Dawes, Happy Easter

Divination

by:  Kwame Dawes

You give them names only after you wake,
after you have studied the patterns of threes--
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fire,
but none of these are hobos, none traveling
from Nazareth to Jerusalem, and not a sheep
in sight, but thieves on the cross, and the noble
Magi have least to say--still you dream these
train hoppers, bleak with hunger, their clothes
loose, ragged, their eyes dancing with mischief
and in the dream you know to follow them
through doors into hallways.  You know
to count to three, the third being the closure
of all stories, the arrival at peace.  Every
gathering has the loose-legged dancer
with his knobby stick and a mouth full
of lies that rise like moths over the heads
of folks; it has a hand of steel, that engine
soul scowling in the shadows, wanting
everyone to scowl or laugh, and then
the clear-eyed diviner, one eye shut,
the other reading that pattern in the clouds--
every fathering has a sermonizer to balm
the faithful, has a rod to beat against
the stone, to frighten the wolves in the gloom;
every meeting place has its anchors,
and the believers will come softly.

_____________________

A little poem from Kwame Dawes that, for some reason, feels like Easter to me.  The real Easter, full of hobos and thieves and wolves in the gloom.  And believers coming together softly to celebrate.

The snow is falling in the Upper Peninsula right now.  It's supposed to snow most of the day--white filling the ground and trees and roofs and steeples.  For some reason, this also makes me think of Easter.  It's like a cleansing.

Saint Marty wishes you all a blessed Easter.

March 30: "Requiem," Kwame Dawes, Sacrifice and Sadness

Requiem

by:  Kwame Dawes

I sing requiem
for the dead, caught in that
mercantilistic madness.

We have not built lasting
monuments of severe stone
facing the sea, the watery tomb,

so I call these songs
shrines of remembrance
where faithful descendants

may stand and watch the smoke
curl into the sky
in memory of those

devoured by the cold Atlantic.
In every blues I hear
riding the dank swamp

I see the bones
picked clean in the belly
of the implacable sea.

Do not tell me
it is not right to lament,
do not tell me it is tired.

If we don't, who will
recall in requiem
the scattering of my tribe?

In every reggae chant
stepping proud against Babylon
I hear a blue note

of lament, sweet requiem
for the countless dead,
skanking feet among shell,

coral, rainbow adze,
webbed feet, making as if
to lift, soar, fly into new days.

____________________

Saw and heard Kwame Dawes read at the university last night.  He was . . . How can I say this? . . . Ah-mazing.  I knew he would be.  He filled me with the urge to write, which, for me, is the litmus test of a really great poetry reading.  (Another great test--if the reading is so good that it makes me want to abandon pen and journal.)

It is Good Friday.  This afternoon, I heard the Gospel account of the trial and death of Christ.  As always, it moved me deeply.  Throws me into a deep funk until tomorrow night, when the candles are lit at the Easter Vigil Mass.

The poem for tonight is in honor of sacrifice and sadness.

Saint Marty is ready for a little more light, a little less fish.

March 29: A Ponderous Task, Holy Thursday, Poetry Reading

There are only two books in being which at all pretend to put the living sperm whale before you, and at the same time, in the remotest degree succeed in the attempt. Those books are Beale's and Bennett's; both in their time surgeons to the English South-Sea whale-ships, and both exact and reliable men. The original matter touching the sperm whale to be found in their volumes is necessarily small; but so far as it goes, it is of excellent quality, though mostly confined to scientific description. As yet, however, the sperm whale, scientific or poetic, lives not complete in any literature. Far above all other hunted whales, his is an unwritten life.

Now the various species of whales need some sort of popular comprehensive classification, if only an easy outline one for the present, hereafter to be filled in all-outward its departments by subsequent laborers. As no better man advances to take this matter in hand, I hereupon offer my own poor endeavors. I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete must for that very reason infallibly be faulty. I shall not pretend to a minute anatomical description of the various species, or- in this space at least- to much of any description. My object here is simply to project the draught of a systematization of cetology. I am the architect, not the builder.

But it is a ponderous task; no ordinary letter-sorter in the Post-Office is equal to it. To grope down into the bottom of the sea after them; to have one's hands among the unspeakable foundations, ribs, and very pelvis of the world; this is a fearful thing. What am I that I should essay to hook the nose of this leviathan! The awful tauntings in Job might well appal me. "Will he (the leviathan) make a covenant with thee? Behold the hope of him is vain! But I have swam through libraries and sailed through oceans; I have had to do with whales with these visible hands; I am in earnest; and I will try. There are some preliminaries to settle. . . 

So Melville/Ishmael continues with his whale discourse, appointing himself as the drafter of a classification system for whales.  As he points out, ". . . it is a ponderous task," made even more ponderous by the severe lack of scientific inquiry.  Indeed, at the time Melville wrote Moby-Dick, I imagine whales were still seen as sea monsters, barely removed from mythology.

Last night, I attempted a revision of an essay.  Note the word "attempted."  I didn't get it done.  The essay requires a fairly substantial rewrite, so it is probably going to take me a couple of days.  To paraphrase Melville, it is a ponderous task.  I will put some more time into it this evening, after I go to a poetry reading at the university. 

It is Holy Thursday, so I feel a little guilty that I'm forgoing the first part of the Easter Triduum to hear Kwame Dawes read his poems.  But listening to poetry is sort of a religious experience for me.  (Okay, I know I'm trying to justify my dereliction of Christian duty.  Cut me some slack.  I'm playing the organ and singing for Good Friday, AND I'm cantoring, playing the organ, and singing for the Easter Vigil Mass, which is going to be a three-and-a-half hour marathon of readings and baptisms and confirmations and incense.  I deserve a little poetry.)

I'm hoping to get some inspiration tonight for my rewrite.  Kind of struggled a bit last night.  I thought that it was going to be easy, and it wasn't.  The plan that I had in my mind sort of fell apart.  Now I'm trying to pick up the pieces to see what I have left.  It's one of those writing situations where I'm trying to force the essay in one direction, and it seems to want to go in another.  I may just have to surrender and just let the words show me the way.

It is almost time for me to leave for the poetry reading.  I have really said nothing in this blog post, aside from the fact that I'm a terrible Christian and, at the moment, a terrible writer, struggling, like Melville, with a seemingly gargantuan project.

Saint Marty is thankful for poetic distraction tonight.

January 22: Routine, Kwame Dawes, "Coffee Break"

Life is really short.  I am the father of a high school junior.  In a little over a year, I will be the father of a high school graduate.  That astounds me.  I still think of my daughter as the little girl whose hair I would braid every night.

I am sitting in my living room.  It's almost 11 o'clock at night.  There's a winter storm raging outside my front door.  It's supposed to continue all night long.  School has already been called off for my kids.  Pretty soon, I'm going to brush my teeth and go to bed.

That is my life.  A series of routines.  I like the comfort of routine.  It make me feel safe.  However, as Kwame Dawes poem demonstrates in its short lines and simple narrative, life has a way of disrupting things, pulling the blanket off of you.

Saint Marty prays for uninterrupted routine for everyone he loves tomorrow.

Coffee Break

by:  Kwame Dawes

It was Christmastime,

the balloons needed blowing,

and so in the evening

we sat together to blow

balloons and tell jokes,

and the cool air off the hills

made me think of coffee,

so I said, “Coffee would be nice,”

and he said, “Yes, coffee

would be nice,” and smiled

as his thin fingers pulled

the balloons from the plastic bags;

so I went for coffee,

and it takes a few minutes

to make the coffee

and I did not know

if he wanted cow’s milk

or condensed milk,

and when I came out

to ask him, he was gone,

just like that, in the time

it took me to think,

cow’s milk or condensed;

the balloons sat lightly

on his still lap.