January 19, 2026: “Prologue,” Marie Howe, MLK Day, “Broken Snow Shovel”

I have a confession:  I’m having difficulty writing.  

No, it’s not writer’s block.  I’m still scribbling in my journal, and every once in a while a poem appears.  Yet, on a day-to-day basis, I’m overwhelmed by the state of the world, or, more specifically, my country.  I find very little that’s uplifting and beautiful right now.  There are ruthless thugs brutalizing, kidnapping, and disappearing people across the United States.  Our unhinged pathological narcissist “leader” is invading sovereign nations; un-aliving innocents; and covering up child sex trafficking.  People are starving, losing jobs, and getting sick because our elected officials are more concerned with playing political games than actually doing what they’re paid to do:  taking care of their constituents.  It feels as if the great experiment of the United States of America is collapsing before my eyes.

That’s my struggle.

I’ve chosen Marie Howe as 2026’s poet of the year for this blog.  I’ve loved her writing for a very long time because she’s fearless.  She embraces joy and grief.  Hopefulness and hopelessness.  Light and dark.  

Prologue

by: Marie Howe

In the middle of my life—just past the middle—

walking along the street with our little dog Jack on a leash

—OK—just past the late-middle—

in what some might call early old age,

on a street crowded with children and tourists

my father dead, my mother dead,

my young husband gone from me and grown older (a father

a husband now to someone else),

Jason dead, John dead, Jane and Stanley and Lucy and Lucie

and Billy and Tony and now Richard dead,

I came to the edge

and I did not know that way.

Like Howe, I don’t know the way, either.  Should I just go about writing my pretty poems and turn a blind eye to all the violence and hatred around me?  Or take to the streets, march, raise my voice, stand in the line of fire?  I don’t know what my role is here, except to bear witness, speak the truth.  And I’m not sure that’s enough.

Today was Martin Luther King Day in the United States (regardless of any of #47’s Executive Orders).  We honor the memory of this brave man who did march, raise his voice, stand in the line of fire.  Martin dreamed of a better world, and he did everything in his power to make that dream a reality.  I’m sure, at times, Dr. King lost hope, got pissed.  How could he not, living in a country where racism is as much a part of our history as the Boston Tea Party?  Yet, he never gave up.

One person can make a difference.  Ask Martin.  Or Gandhi.  Or Malcom.  Or Nelson.  Or Mother Teresa.  Or Malala.  Or Dorothy Day.  

That’s my prologue for 2026.  We all need to stand up.  March.  Speak out.  Not lose hope.  If we do all that, we shall overcome.

Saint Marty wrote a poem for today about shoveling snow , , , 

Broken Snow Shovel

by: Martin Achatz

Ten winters, it battled

snow, ice, boulders of earth

hard as iron, storm after flurry

after blizzard after squall.

This morning, a wooden snap,

like a moose crashing through 

deadfall and brush, and its yellow

scoop head lodged in a ridge

of heavy slush, stayed there,

the way mammoths laid down

to nap eons ago, stayed buried

until some farmer plowed up 

their ribs and curled tusks.

January has just begun, several

shoveling months ahead.  I consider

gluing the handle back into

the scoop, taking the chance

it will last until the final flakes

of March or April or sometimes May.

Instead, I leave the scoop stuck,

push more snow over it, erase it

from the white landscape.  When

the waters of spring come, it will

emerge from its grave, remind me 

of this frozen day when I swear 

I see something immense and wooly 

lumbering down my street toward summer.

March 14: Pandemic Panic, Ellen Bryant Voigt, "Kyrie"

Since true pandemic panic took hold in my little corner of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan this week, I have found myself turning to one particular poet:  Ellen Bryant Voigt.  She published a collection of poems titled Kyrie in the early 1990s.  It's about the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. 

I have begun rereading this book, remembering how beautiful Voigt's writing is.  It's a book that captures the human side of tragedy and manages, somehow, to instill a sense of some kind of hope, as well.  It's brilliant.  I once went to a reading Voigt gave in Kalamazoo.  She read sections from the unpublished manuscript of Kyrie, and she had the audience breathless and rapt by the end. 

Saint Marty has decided, over the course of the next few weeks, to share this collection with you, one poem at a time.  Just because . . .

Epigraph:

Nothing else--no infection, no war, no famine--
has ever killed so many in as short a period.
                     Alfred Crosby
                    America's Forgotten Pandemic:
                    The Influenza of 1918

Prologue:

After the first year, weeds and scrub;
after five, juniper and birch,
alders filling in among the briars;
ten more years, maples rise and thicken;
forty years, the birches crowded out,
a new world swarms on the floor of the hardwood forest.
And who can tell us where there was an orchard,
where a swing, where the smokehouse stood?

April 27: Old Grendel, Edward Hirsch, "On Love," New Cartoon

"Well, most of the time we were on the Anglo-Saxons.  Beowulf, and old Grendel, and Lord Randal My Son, and all those things.  But we had to read outside books for extra credit once in a while.  I read The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy, and Romeo and Juliet and Julius--"

Holden is really well-read.  At the beginning of The Catcher in the Rye, he's reading Isak Dinesen, but, as he tells a young nun he meets at a diner, he's read Shakespeare and Beowulf, as well.  Holden doesn't shy away from poetry the way most teenage boys would.  Poetry seems to give Holden solace, even pleasure, especially when he's thinking about his brother, Allie.

Holden would appreciate poet Edward Hirsch.  Hirsch doesn't shy away from the forms and traditions of poetry.  Harold Bloom described him as "fresh, canonical, and necessary," a poet who embraces both lyricism and form.  His book, On Love, includes villanelle and pantoum, meditations on love in the voices of diverse writers (Gertrude Stein and and Ralph Waldo Emerson, to name a couple).  Hirsch approaches the subject of love like a linguistic anatomist--dissecting art and music and mythology and religion--to find the bone and muscle of this emotion.

The book opens with a meditation on the origin of love in a child, the need to escape ancestral grief in order to experience a future of hope and choice:

The Poet at Seven

He could be any seven-year old on the lawn,
holding a baseball in his hand, ready to throw.
He has the middle-class innocence of an American,

except for his blunt features and dark skin
that mark him as a Palestinian or a Jew,
his forehead furrowed like a question,

his concentration camp eyes, nervous, grim,
and too intense.  He has the typical
blood of the exile, the refugee, the victim.

Look at him, looking at the catcher for a sign--
so violent and competitive, so unexceptional,
except for an ancestral lamentation,

a shadowy, grief-stricken need for freedom
laboring to express itself through him.

This is a poem about the love of ancestor, or origin, expressed in the features, the collective unconscious, of a small boy.  He is a part of something larger that he can't define, yet feels in his body like oxygen or sugar.  It's nurturing and necessary.

The first section of the book is filled with personal reflections of love like this.  Lessons learned from childhood to adulthood, love of mother to love of wife.  The second section of On Love contains poems of dramatic monologue, Hirsch taking on the persona of many famous poets and writers, all of them examining some facet of love.  The "Prologue" to this section explains,

I woke up to voices speaking of love,
always leading me forward, leading me on,
taking me from the bedroom to the study
in the early morning or late at night,
emanations that seemed to come from night
itself, from leaves opening in the study
where many lives flow together as one
life, my own, these ventures in love.

What follows is a patchwork of love, each poem titled for the speaker/poet.  Taking on the voice of D. H. Lawrence, Hirsch provides this brief history of love:

After the sweet red wine and the dry lecture,
"The History of Love in Western Imagination"
(history is loveless without imagination)
we could not abide another listless lecture

and so we slipped into the castle library
and pushed highbacked chairs against a door
that refused to lock (so jam the door!)
and knelt to each other in the library.

I confess my fear of patrolling watchmen;
you seemed courageous and sure, as always:
I have learned to adore you myriad ways
of taking us back into man and woman...

And when we lay naked among the books,
the book shelves enclosed a sacred garden
for Adam and Eve safely restored to Eden,
ourselves immersed in a paradise of books.

Edward Hirsch gives readers a Eden of poems in On Love, each one a fractal, infinitely reflective of the patterns of love between man, woman, child, parent, descendant, ancestor, reader, writer, supplicant, and God.

Saint Marty loves On Love.

Confessions of Saint Marty