Poetry Celebration: Nikki Giovanni, part 3

Amid the women’s world of clothes to wash, food to cook, Nikki's poems voice a recurrent theme of loneliness. With chores that don’t end, and relationships that do end, the celebration of strength and the saving grace of family and community do not save us from getting lonely, too, sometimes.

[Untitled]

there is a hunger
often associated with pain
that you feel
when you look at someone
you used to love and enjoyed
loving and want
to love again
though you know you can’t
that gnaws at you
steadily as a mosquito
some michigan summer
churning his wings
through your window screen
because the real world
made up of baby clothes to be washed
food to be cooked
lullabies to be sung
smiles to be plaited
ribbons to be bowed
coffee to be drunk
books to be read
tears to be cried
loneliness to be borne
says you are a strong woman
and anyway he never thought you’d really miss him

* * * 

In “Boxes,” Giovanni expresses fatigue with the boxes of race and gender – and with the box of being strong, and even with the box of being poet. She writes, she says, because she has to. This reminds me to advice that is given to young people thinking about a career in the arts. Don’t do it unless you have to, someone might tell them. Indeed, twenty years ago when I was considering becoming a minister, I went to see my minister to ask whether she thought I should – and that’s what she said: Don’t do it unless you have to.

Well, I had to. Discernment of an inner compulsion validates a calling. But sometimes it’s just a box that we’re tired of. Sometimes we wish we didn’t have to.

Boxes

i am in a box
on a tight string
subject to pop
without notice

everybody says how strong
i am

only black women
and white men
are truly free
they say

it’s not difficult to see
how stupid they are

i would not reject
my strength
though its source
is not choice
but responsibility

i would not reject my light
though my wrinkles are also illuminated

something within demands
action
or words
if action is not possible

i am tired
of being boxed
muhammad ali must surely be pleased
that leon spinks relieved him

most of the time
i can’t breathe
i smoke too much
to cover my fears
sometimes i pick
my nose to avoid
the breath i need

i do also do the same
injustice to my poems

i write because
i have to

* * *

The paradox is, the very boxes that make one tired are also the ones that give us identity. In the case of a black woman, it may be a prison in some ways. But she is determined to make that prison an identity to embrace and celebrate. It’s a delicate line to walk, a constant paradox to negotiate: To see clearly the wrong of racism and sexism, to be adamant and militant about overthrowing it – while at the same time honoring and celebrating the identity that racism and sexism created.

Poem (for Nina)

we are all imprisoned in the castle of our skins
and some of us have said so be it
if i am in jail my castle shall become
my rendezvous
my courtyard will bloom with hyacinths and jack-in-the-pulpits
my moat will not restrict me but will be filled
with dolphins sitting on lily pads and sea horses ridden by starfish
goldfish will make love
to Black mollies and color my world Black Gold
the vines entwining my windows will grow butterflies
and yellow jackets will buzz me to sleep
the dwarfs imprisoned will not become my clowns
for me to scorn but my dolls for me to praise and fuss
with and give tea parties to
my gnomes will spin cloth of spider web silkness
my wounded chocolate soldiers will sit in evening coolness
or stand gloriously at attention during that midnight sun
for I would have no need of day patrol
if I am imprisoned in my skin let it be a dark world
with deep bass walking a witch doctor to me for spiritual
consultation
let my world be defined by my skin and the skin of my people
for we spirit to spirit will embrace
this world

* * *

Nikki Giovanni is a professor of English at Virginia Tech, as I mentioned. As of 2007, she’d been on the faculty there for 20 years. A student in one of her poetry classes was Seung-Hui Cho. She found him overtly menacing and mean. She went to her department chair to have him taken out of her class. She said she’d resign rather than keep teaching a class with him in it. Then in April that year: the Virginia Tech shooting. When she first heard of the shooting, Giovanni immediately suspected Cho – which turned out to be correct.

Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people on April 16, 2007. The Virginia Tech president asked Giovanni to speak at a campus convocation the next day. The chant poem she delivered to close the ceremony spoke to the horror, and also contextualized it. As she has done her whole long writing career, she faced tragedy frankly and found within it, identity and hope.

We Are Virginia Tech

We are Virginia Tech.
We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while.
We are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning.
We are Virginia Tech.
We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly, we are brave enough to bend to cry, and
we are sad enough to know that we must laugh again.
We are Virginia Tech.
We do not understand this tragedy.
We know we did nothing to deserve it, but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS,
neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by the rogue army,
neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory,
neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water, neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized.
No one deserves a tragedy.
We are Virginia Tech.
The Hokie Nation embraces our own and reaches out with open heart and hands to those who offer their hearts and minds.
We are strong, and brave, and innocent, and unafraid.
We are better than we think and not quite what we want to be.
We are alive to the imaginations and the possibilities.
We will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears and through all our sadness.
We are the Hokies.
We will prevail.
We will prevail.
We will prevail.
We are Virginia Tech.

* * *

Fourteen years earlier, in 1993, Giovanni had also evoked hope amid tragedy – the tragedy of slavery and the ongoing oppression of racism – when she spoke at the commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the Slave Memorial at Mount Vernon. A new day is always beginning. 

But Since You Finally Asked

No one asked us -- what we thought of Jamestown -- in 1619 -- they didn’t even say -- ”Welcome” -- ”You’re Home” -- or even a pitiful -- ”I’m sorry -- but we just can’t make it -- without you” -- No -- No one said a word -- They just snatched our drums -- separated us by language and gender -- and put us on blocks -- where our beauty -- like our dignity -- was ignored.

No one said a word -- in 1776 -- to us about Freedom -- The rebels wouldn’t pretend -- the British lied -- We kept to a space -- where we owned our souls -- since we understood -- another century would pass -- before we owned our bodies -- But we raised our voices -- in a mighty cry -- to the Heavens above -- for the strength to endure.

No one says -- ”What I like about your people” -- then ticks off the wonder of the wonderful things -- we’ve given -- Our song to God, Our strength to the Earth -- our unfailing belief in forgiveness -- I know what I like about us -- is that we let no one turn us around -- not then -- not now -- we plant our feet -- on higher ground -- I like who we were -- and who we are -- and since someone has asked -- let me say; I am proud to be a Black American -- I am proud that my people laboured honestly -- with forbearance and dignity -- I am proud that we believe -- as no other people do -- that all are equal in His sight -- We didn’t write a constitution -- we live one -- We didn’t say “We the People” -- we are one -- We didn’t have to add -- as an after-thought -- ”Under God” -- We turn our faces to the rising sun -- knowing -- a New Day -- is always – beginning

* * *
See also
Poetry Celebration: Nikki Giovanni, part 1
Poetry Celebration: Nikki Giovanni, part 2

Poetry Celebration: Nikki Giovanni, part 2

Nikki Giovanni's celebration of black women was accompanied by a celebration of black men. “Beautiful Black Men” appeared in her second book, Black Judgment. The second came out in in 1968, just a few months after her first book, Black Feeling Black Talk, and, like the first, the second was self-published. "Beautiful Black Men" mentions activities which we might judge unsavory -- but the poem reminds us that these activities, too, are carried out by human beings manifesting their beauty in all that they are and do.

Beautiful Black Men
(With compliments and apologies to all not mentioned by name)

i wanta say just gotta say something
bout those beautiful beautiful beautiful outasight
black men
with they afros
walking down the street
is the same ol danger
but a brand new pleasure

sitting on stoops, in bars, going to offices
running numbers, watching for their whores
preaching in churches, driving their hogs
walking their dogs, winking at me
in their fire red, lime green, burnt orange
royal blue tight tight pants that hug
what i like to hug

jerry butler, wilson pickett, the impressions
temptations, mighty mighty sly
don't have to do anything but walk
on stage
and i scream and stamp and shout
see new breed men in breed alls
dashiki suits with shirts that match
the lining that compliments the ties
that smile at the sandals
where dirty toes peek at me
and i scream and stamp and shout
for more beautiful beautiful beautiful
black men with outasight afros

* * *
Along with the celebrations of womanhood -- and manhood -- Nikki's poetry includes frank indictments of the way that gender is constructed: the demands placed on women, the enforced domesticity, and the double-standards used to judge and dismiss women’s poetry – the assumption that anything a person of color says must necessarily be unimportant. "A Poem Off Center" appeared in Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day (1978).

A Poem Off Center

how do poets write
so many poems
my poems get decimated
in the dishes the laundry
my sister is having another crisis
the bed has to be made
there is a blizzard on the way go to the grocery store
did you go to the cleaners
then a fuse blows
a fuse always has to blow
the women soon find themselves
talking either to babies or about them
no matter how careful we are
we end up giving tips
on the latest new improved cleaner
and the lotion that will take the smell away

if you write a political poem
you’re anti semitic
if you write a domestic poem
you’re foolish
if you write a happy poem
you’re unserious
if you write a love poem
you’re maudlin
of course the only real poem
to write
is the go to hell writing establishment poem
but the readers never know who
you’re talking about which brings us back
to point one

i feel i think sorry for the women
they have no place to go
it’s the same old story blacks
hear all the time
if it’s serious a white man
would do it
when it’s serious
he will
everything from writing a
poem
to sweeping the streets
to cooking the food
as long as his family doesn’t
eat it

it’s a little off center
this life we’re leading
maybe i shouldn’t feel sorry
for myself
but the more i understand
women
the more i do

* * *
Born in 1943, Nikki Giovanni celebrated her 75th birthday a couple months ago, on June 7. Through her late-20s, 1968 through 1972, poems were pouring out of her. Those were the years that saw publication of four books: Black Feeling Black Talk (1968), Black Judgment (1968), Re: Creation (1970), and My House (1972). She gained fame those years as a foremost author in the Black Arts Movement, offering a strong and militant voice for Black Liberation. She’s been called the Poet of the Black Revolution.

I mentioned that Giovanni speaks with both righteous anger and tender joy. In “The Great Pax Whitie” -- from Black Judgment (1968) -- the anger at America’s persistent and destructive racism is in full voice. The title evokes the “Pax Romana” – the Roman Peace, during which areas under Roman control were taxed and subject to Roman military control. There was a kind of peace, but no independence, no liberty. It was peace through suppression and oppression. The White empire parallels in that regard the Roman Empire. 

The Great Pax Whitie

In the beginning was the word
And the word was
Death
And the word was nigger
And the word was death to all niggers
And the word was death to all life
Andthe word was death to all
peace be still

The genesis was life
The genesis was death
In the genesis of death
Was the genesis of war
be still peace be still

In the name of peace
They waged the wars
ain’t they got no shame

In the name of peace
Lot’s wife is now a product of the Morton company
nah, they ain’t got no shame

Noah packing his wife and kiddies up for a holiday
row row row your boat
But why’d you leave the unicorns, noah
Huh? why’d you leave them
While our Black Madonna stood there
Eighteen feet high holding Him in her arms
Listening to the rumblings of peace
be still be still

CAN I GET A WITNESS? WITNESS? WITNESS?
He wanted to know
And peter only asked who is that dude?
Who is that Black dude?
Looks like a troublemaker to me
And the foundations of the mighty mighty
Ro Man Cat holic church were laid

hallelujah Jesus
nah, they ain’t got no shame

Cause they killed the Carthaginians
in the great appian way
And they killed the Moors
“to civilize a nation”
And they just killed the earth
And blew out the sun
In the name of a god
Whose genesis was white
And war wooed god
And america was born
Where war became peace
And genocide patriotism
And honor is a happy slave
cause all god’s chillun need rhythm
And glory hallelujah why can’t peace
be still

The great emancipator was a bigot
ain’t they got no shame
And making the world safe for democracy
Were twenty millon slaves
nah, they ain’t got no shame

And they barbecued six million
To raise the price of beef
And crossed the 38th parallel
To control the price of rice
ain’t we never gonna see the light

And champagne was shipped out of the East
While kosher pork was introduced
To Africa
Only the torch can show the way

In the beginning was the deed
And the deed was death

And the honkies are getting confused
peace be still

So the great white prince
Was shot like a nigger in texas
And our Black shining prince was murdered
like that thug in his cathedral
While our nigger in memphis
was shot like their prince in dallas
And my lord
ain’t we never gonna see the light
The rumblings of this peace must be stilled
be stilled be still

ahh Black people
ain’t we got no pride?

* * *
Nikki Giovanni never married. She is the mother of one child, Thomas Watson Giovanni, born in 1969, which probably had something to do with the fact that she began writing children’s literature in the 1970s. Aside from organizing and parenting and writing, Nikki Giovanni is an English professor. She’s taught at Queens College, Rutgers, and Ohio State. For the last 30 years, since 1987, she’s taught at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.

She’s expressed the anger of the nation’s injustices, as we’ve seen. Giovanni’s poems can also pause to take delight in simple pleasures. And those pleasures, in turn, become a metaphor for the affirming and nurturing power of community and family and love. "Winter Poem" appeared in My House (1972)

Winter Poem

once a snowflake fell
on my brow and i loved
it so much and i kissed
it and it was happy and called its cousins
and brothers and a web
of snow engulfed me then
i reached to love them all
and i squeezed them and they became
a spring rain and i stood perfectly
still and was a flower

* * *
Yet that web that waters us into bloom can then turn around and constrain. Women are expected to fill positions of service and support – passively waiting for a fulfillment that never comes. "All I Gotta Do" is from Re: Creation (1970).

All I Gotta Do

all i gotta do
is sit and wait
sit and wait
and it's gonna find
me
all i gotta do
is sit and wait
if i can learn how

what i need to do
is sit and wait
cause i'm a woman
sit and wait
what i gotta do
is sit and wait
cause i'm a woman
it'll find me

you get yours
and i'll get mine
if i learn
to sit and wait
you got yours
i want mine
and i'm gonna get it
cause i gotta get it
cause i need to get it
if i learn how

thought about calling
for it on the phone
asked for a delivery
but they didn't have it
thought about going
to the store to get it
walked to the corner
but they didn't have it

called your name
in my sleep
sitting and waiting
thought you would awake me
called your name
lying in my bed
but you didn't have it
offered to go get it
but you didn't have it
so i'm sitting

all i know
is sitting and waiting
waiting and sitting
cause i'm a woman
all i know
is sitting and waiting
cause i gotta wait
wait for it to find
me

* * *
See also:
Poetry Celebration: Nikki Giovanni, part 1
Poetry Celebration: Nikki Giovanni, part 3

Poetry Celebration: Nikki Giovanni, part 1

To honor the death of Aretha Franklin last week, and also honor Nikki Giovanni (very much still alive), let's start with Nikki's "Poem for Aretha"

Poem for Aretha

Cause nobody deals with Aretha—a mother with four children—
having to hit the road
they always say "after she comes
home" but nobody ever says what it's like
to get on a plane for a three week tour
the elation of the first couple of audiences the good
feeling of exchange the running on the high
you get from singing good
and loud and long telling the world
what's on your mind.

Then comes the eighth show on the sixth day the beginning
to smell like the plane or bus the if-you-forget-your-toothbrush
in-one-spot-you-can't-brush-until-the-second-show
the strangers
pulling at you cause they love you but you having no love
to give back
the singing the same songs night after night day after day
and if you read the gossip columns the rumors that your husband
is only after your fame
the wondering if your children will be glad to see you and maybe
the not caring if they are
The scheming to get
out of just one show and go just one place where some doe-doe-dupaduke
won't say "just sing one song, please!".

Nobody mentions how it feels to become a freak
because you have talent and how
no one gives a damn how you feel
but only cares that Aretha Franklin is here like maybe that'll stop
chickens from frying
eggs from being laid
crackers from hating

and if you say you're lonely or scared or tired how they always
just say "oh come off it" or "did you see
how they loved you did you see, huh, did you?"
which most likely has nothing to do with you anyway
and I'm not saying Aretha shouldn't have talent and I'm certainly
not saying she should quit
singing but as much as I love her I'd vote "yes" to her
doing four concerts a year and staying home or doing whatever
she wants and making records cause it's a shame
the way we're killing her.
We eat up artists like there's going to be a famine at the end
of those three minutes when there are in fact an abundance
of talents just waiting let's put some
of the giants away for a while and deal with them like they have
a life to lead.

Aretha doesn't have to relive Billi Holiday's life doesn't have
to relive Dinah Washington's death but who will
stop the pattern?

She's more important than her music—if they must be separated—
and they should be separated when she has to pass out before
anyone recognizes she needs
a rest and I say I need Aretha's music
she is undoubtedly the one person who put everyone on notice.
She revived Johnny Ace and remembered Lil Green. Aretha sings
"I say a little prayer" and Dionne doesn't
want to hear it anymore
Aretha sings "money won't change you"
but James Brown can't sing "respect" the advent
of Aretha pulled Ray Charles from marlboro country
and back into
the blues made Nancy Wilson
try one more time forced
Dionne to make a choice (she opted for the movies)
and Diana Ross had to get an afro wig pushed every
Black singer into his Blackness and negro entertainers
into negroness you couldn't jive
when she said "you make me feel" the Blazers
had to reply "gotta let a man be/a man"
Aretha said "when my soul was in the lost and found/you came
along to claim it" and Joplin said "maybe"
there has been no musician whom her very presence hasn't
affected when Humphrey wanted her to campaign for him she said
"woeman's only hueman"
and he pressured James Brown
they removed Otis Redding cause the combination was too strong the Impressions had to say "lord have mercy/we're moving on up"
the Black songs started coming from the singers on stage and the dancers
in the streets
Aretha was the riot was the leader if she had said "come
let's do it" it would have been done
temptations say why don't we think about it
think about it
think about it

Poetry is this thing – this thing you just gotta do. You gotta have poetry in your life.

Poetry gives us new metaphors, but metaphors ossify. When a metaphor is used so often and becomes so common that it becomes literal, we say it has ossified. "Skyscraper" is an ossified metaphor. The first person to call a tall building a skyscraper was evoking images of the sky itself being scraped, was imparting motion – the movement of scraping – to a stationary building. "Riverbed" and "spam" (to refer to unwanted email) have become ossified metaphors. When they were fresh, they stretched our associations, stretched our minds, stretched our world. But repeated use ossifies the metaphor – makes the delightful warp of a new way of seeing things into the rut of the literal.

A life of meaning is a life that continually takes in and makes new meaning. There is no such thing as understanding yourself, understanding the world, understanding anything -- apart from the processes of adding new understandings. Without the always ongoing making and taking in new ways to see things there is no seeing at all. That’s why I say you gotta do poetry – so your life doesn’t ossify.

And when I say “do poetry,” I mean four things: Read poems, listen to poems, write poems, and speak poems.

Read ‘em and write ‘em and hear ‘em and say ‘em.

I write poems – generally short verses for which I use a Zen koan as a prompt. I’ve been at this for years, and I don’t know what a poem is. The mysteriousness of the very idea of some string of words constituting a poem is not clearing up the more I do it. The mystery, instead, is deepening.

I remember, when I was a young and literal-minded philosophy professor, a conversation I had once with a colleague professor from the English department who was a poet. He was struggling with this question of the nature of poems. I said, “word wrap.”

He said, “Huh?”

I said, “Word wrap. If the words wrap to the next line only because of the margin with no relation to the text meaning, and you only press return at the end of a paragraph, then it’s prose. If the line breaks matter – if there is no need for word wrap because the lines are shorter and part of the meaning is conveyed by the line ending – then it’s a poem.”

I was being glib. I was treating line breaks as if they were the end of the matter, when they are only the beginning.

Why do we have this way of writing that pays attention to line breaks? I think it’s because the line breaks give the thing rhythm, and the rhythm signals the intensity of the language. It’s a mystery how language can be intense that way – and in that intensity, show us the world new. Somehow, it does.

At Community UU, we have a poetry celebration service every August. This is the sixth annual. The first celebrated the Beat poets collectively. The second singled out Jack Kerouac. The third, Mary Oliver; the fourth, Rumi; and the fifth, last year, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Today we celebrate Nikki Giovanni.

In 1967, at age 23, she graduated from Fisk University, the HBCU (Historically Black College or University) in Nashville. I showed up at Fisk twenty-five years later, in 1992, as assistant professor of philosophy. As a teacher there, I learned as much as I taught, and, Nikki, as a student there, I imagine, taught as much as she learned.

Not that Fisk was eager to learn what Nikki had to teach. It is a place that likes decorum. Fisk thought rabble was for distancing oneself from and rising above. Nikki thought rabble was for rousing. She had contempt for Fisk’s silly rules. Her run-ins with the Dean of Women led to expulsion. A few years later, with a new Dean, she re-enrolled.

1968: the year she turned 25, a year after graduating, her first book of poems, Black Feeling, Black Talk, came out. Because she feared rejection of publishers, she didn’t submit it to any. Instead, she borrowed money from family and friends to print it herself, and she distributed it herself. 2,000 copies were sold during its first year – extraordinary for a privately printed and privately distributed book of poetry.

I love the way that Nikki's high-minded ideals of art, and revolution and justice, and black liberation interweave with her delight in romance, in intimate relationship. She brings the force of righteous anger, but turn the page to find the tender joy of romantic love. Her affirmations of stunning power and strength interweave with the vulnerability of relationship. Political tension and sexual tension equally command her attention.

You see that on the first page of that first book. It’s a poem about going to a Conference of Unity and Art in Detroit in May, 1967. She met H Rap Brown at that conference, and they hit it off.

Detroit Conference of Unity and Art
(for HRB)

We went there to confer
On the possibility of
Blackness
And the inevitability of
Revolution

We talked about
Black leaders
And Black Love

We talked about
Women
And Black men
No doubt many important
Resolutions
Were passed
As we climbed Malcolm’s ladder

But the most
Valid of them
All was that
Rap chose me.

You see? For Nikki, the personal and the political are not separate.

Nikki Giovanni celebrated women – black women in particular. It was an antidote to the slurs so often cast upon them, at the intersection of racial hatred and misogynist patriarchy. Perhaps her most audacious celebration of black women -- and her most popular poem -- was "Ego Tripping," which appeared in the 1970 volume, Re-Creation.

Ego Tripping 

(there may be a reason why)

I was born in the congo
I walked to the fertile crescent and built
the sphinx
I designed a pyramid so tough that a star
that only glows every one hundred years falls
into the center giving divine perfect light
I am bad

I sat on the throne
drinking nectar with allah
I got hot and sent an ice age to europe
to cool my thirst
My oldest daughter is nefertiti
the tears from my birth pains
created the nile
I am a beautiful woman

I gazed on the forest and burned
out the sahara desert
with a packet of goat’s meat
and a change of clothes
I crossed it in two hours
I am a gazelle so swift
so swift you can’t catch me

For a birthday present when he was three
I gave my son hannibal an elephant
He gave me rome for mother’s day
My strength flows ever on

My son noah built new/ark and
I stood proudly at the helm
as we sailed on a soft summer day
I turned myself into myself and was
jesus
men intone my loving name
All praises All praises
I am the one who would save

I sowed diamonds in my back yard
My bowels deliver uranium
the filings from my fingernails are
semi-precious jewels
On a trip north
I caught a cold and blew
My nose giving oil to the arab world
I am so hip even my errors are correct
I sailed west to reach east and had to round off
the earth as I went
The hair from my head thinned and gold was laid
across three continents

I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal
I cannot be comprehended
except by my permission

I mean -- I -- can fly
like a bird in the sky.

* * *
This is part 1 of 3 of "Poetry Celebration: Nikki Giovanni"
See also
Poetry Celebration: Nikki Giovanni, part 2
Poetry Celebration: Nikki Giovanni, part 3

Tragedy In the Context of Beauty. Or Maybe Vice-Versa.

Poetry Celebration: Ferlinghetti, part 3

Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem, “Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes” describes four people – two garbage collectors and an elegant couple -- stuck at traffic lights in downtown San Francisco. The contrast between the two pairs, the class divide, bridged and yet not bridged by the circumstance of a traffic light, is a critique of American classism.

At the stoplight waiting for the light
nine a.m. downtown San Francisco
a bright yellow garbage truck
with two garbagemen in red plastic blazers
standing on the back stoop
one on each side hanging on
and looking down into
an elegant open Mercedes
with an elegant couple in it
The man
in a hip three-piece linen suit
with shoulder-length blond hair and sunglassed
The young blond woman so casually coifed
with short skirt and coloured stockings
on the way to his architect's office

And the two scavengers up since four a.m.
grungy from their route
on the way home
The older of the two with grey iron hair
and hunched back
looking down like some
gargoyle Quasimodo
And the younger of the two
also with sunglasses and long hair
about the same age as the Mercedes driver

And both scavengers gazing down
as from a great distance
at the cool couple
as if they were watching some odourless TV ad
in which everything is always possible

And the very red light for an instant
holding all four close together
as if anything at all were possible
between them
across that small gulf
in the high sea
of this democracy.

“As if anything at all were possible” he writes, with a kind of meta-irony. It's ironic, because he's exposing that the appearance of the possibility of equality and democracy is not the reality. And at the same time it's unironic, achingly sincere: for the closeness with which are held is the reality, and it's the gulfs between us that are small, and merely apparent. Ferlinghetti thus calls us to a politics in which we notice that equality and democracy aren't real -- and yet are. Our aspiration must be to better live out, live into, live from, the reality of connection, care, respect, mutuality, oneness that we vitiate by ignoring. We are like fish who deny or fail to notice that we are submerged in water -- giving our lives a kind of dryness even as, in reality, we are soaked through.

Other of Ferlinghetti poems engage with paintings. Ferlinghetti himself is a painter, and his painting gives visual expression to his words. In turn, his poems sometimes give verbal expression to a painting, and he shows us a new way to see a well known art work. “Short Story on a Painting of Gustav Klimt” is Ferlinghetti’s meditation on “The Kiss.”

They are kneeling upright on a flowered bed
He
has just caught her there
and holds her still
Her gown
has slipped down
off her shoulder
He has an urgent hunger
His dark head
bends to hers
hungrily
And the woman the woman
turns her tangerine lips from his
one hand like the head of a dead swan
draped down over
his heavy neck
the fingers
strangely crimped
tightly together
her other arm doubled up
against her tight breast
her hand a languid claw
clutching his hand
which would turn her mouth
to his
her long dress made
of multicolored blossoms
quilted on gold
her Titian hair
with blues stars in it
And his gold
harlequin robe
checkered with
dark squares
Gold garlands
stream down over
her bare calves &
tensed feet
Nearby there must be
a jeweled tree
with glass leaves aglitter
in the gold air
It must be
morning
in a faraway place somewhere
They
are slient together
as in a flowered field
upon the summer couch
which must be hers
And he holds her still
so passionately
holds her head to his
so gently so insistently
to make her turn
her lips to his
Her eyes are closed
like folded petals
She
will not open
He
is not the One

Politically, socially, personally, and in all aspects of life, we find ourselves living amidst both beauty and tragedy – constant joy and constant sorrow. This is the fundamental condition to which both preachers and poets are always speaking, so it is that theme to which I return.

Unitarian minister Forest Church spoke of the twin realities of being alive and having to die. The tragic parts seem divided between those that are unavoidable -- old age, sickness, death – and the parts that leave us wondering whether maybe we could do better. The serenity prayer asks for the serenity to accept what I cannot change, the courage to change what I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. But it’s that “wisdom to know the difference” part that is so elusive. We never know. Ferlinghetti seems to be simultaneously calling for change and accepting our shortcoming as “the constipations that our fool flesh is heir to” – while also at the same time celebrating the beauty and joy of life in a way that is simultaneously earnest and ironic.

Benediction: "The World Is a Beautiful Place," by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun
if you don't mind a touch of hell
now and then
just when everything is fine
because even in heaven
they don't sing
all the time

The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind some people dying
all the time
or maybe only starving
some of the time
which isn't half bad
if it isn't you

Oh the world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't much mind
a few dead minds
in the higher places
or a bomb or two
now and then
in your upturned faces
or such other improprieties
as our Name Brand society
is prey to
with its men of distinction
and its men of extinction
and its priests
and other patrolmen

and its various segregations
and congressional investigations
and other constipations
that our fool flesh
is heir to

Yes the world is the best place of all
for a lot of such things as
making the fun scene
and making the love scene
and making the sad scene
and singing low songs and having inspirations
and walking around
looking at everything
and smelling flowers
and goosing statues
and even thinking
and kissing people and
making babies and wearing pants
and waving hats and
dancing
and going swimming in rivers
on picnics
in the middle of the summer
and just generally
'living it up'
Yes
but then right in the middle of it
comes the smiling

mortician

* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "Poetry Celebration: Ferlinghetti"
See also
Part 1: Some Ferlinghetti
Part 2: Ferlinghetti and the Good of Poetry

Ferlinghetti and the Good of Poetry

Poetry Celebration: Ferlinghetti, part 2

The news has a crazy addictive attraction. I'm not talking so much about the storm and flood news about Harvey or Irma. I'm mostly talking about the news from D.C. about our elected leaders, and from wherever there are demonstrations about which said leaders may be commenting. I get fixated on knowing details of each fresh craziness. Much of the news this year has been both funny and deeply concerning at the same time. And many days I am scanning several times a day for the latest take on what’s happening -- torn between the impulse to giggle and the impulse to rage.

I have a jones on to know what’s going on, to make it all make sense, even if the sense it makes is that our species is incapable of making sense. I amass the bits of articles and videos hoping they will help me get a handle on what I’m supposed to do, hoping they will provide a clue about where all this is headed.

Are we as a people going to learn something, swing back the other way? Are we seeing the reactive death throes of white supremacy, patriarchy, etc. -- one last gasp before we as a people finally settle into the reality that black lives do matter, immigrant lives matter, women’s experience and wisdom matter, science and facts and telling the truth matter, ecosystems and species diversity and climate change matter? Or is this instead the beginning of the descent, the first steps down the road to a barren and vicious Mad Max dystopia?

Where is human civilization headed? The question keeps me fascinated by the news feed. But whatever the answer is, my job is the same: to love and be present to each moment as it presents. Lawrence Ferlinghetti said, “All I ever wanted to do is paint light on the walls of life.” That’s my job – maybe yours, too. Paint light on the walls of life. And consuming column-inches about what some elected official or other has gone and said now really doesn’t help me do that.

But poetry does help. And by "poetry," I mean engaging in each of four activities:

• Read poetry to yourself. Find favorite poets. Take looks at unfamiliar ones. Read one or several poems every day.
• Speak poems. Reading or recite them aloud to others, giving yourself the chance to savor the oral qualities, notice the interpretation that your own voice gives them, and notice the reactions of your listeners.
• Listen to poetry read aloud. Attend poetry readings, or, if that's really un-fun for you, then have a partner or friend occasionally read a poem to you at home -- or, heck, just listen to a recording (youtube has lots). Poems are meant to be heard -- at least every once in a while -- as well as seen.
• Write poetry. Yes, write poems -- yes, you. They don't have to be publishable; they don't have to be "good;" they just have to be your sincere effort at getting at something real or vital with words on paper. Most of them can be purely private, without another human ever laying eyes on them, although it's a good idea every once in a while to share one with another human being.

William Carlos Williams wrote 60 years ago:

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

Poetry, said Ferlinghetti, should be dissident, subversive, an agent for change. He wrote:

Every great poem fulfills a longing and puts life back together.
Every bird a word, and every word a bird, and birdsong is not made by machines.
Poetry breaks the brass wall between races.
Poetry is the distillation of articulate animals calling to each other across a great gulf.
It is worth nothing and therefore invaluable.
The idea of poetry as an arm of class war
Disturbs the sleep of those who do not wish to be disturbed in their pursuit of happiness.
The natural-born nonviolent enemy of the state
It is the ultimate resistance.
It is the voice within the voice of the turtle
It is the face behind the face of the race.
It is the voice of the Fourth-person singular
Poetry: the last lighthouse in rising seas.

In another work, Ferlinghetti calls on us to take up arms by taking up pens:

The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.
If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic.
You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain,
you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay,
you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini,
you are an American or a non-American,
you can conquer the conquerors with words.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti -- poet, painter, publisher, activist – was born here in Westchester – in Yonkers. His father died six months before he was born. His mother was committed to an asylum shortly after he was born. He was taken in by an aunt – actually his mother’s uncle’s former wife – who took him to France for his first five years. Returning to the US, this aunt surrendered the boy to an orphanage in Chappaqua, where he stayed for two years until taken in by a wealthy family in Bronxville. He went to Bronxville public schools. Became an Eagle Boy Scout.

During World War II, he served in the Navy. He later explained: “It’s what everyone did. I’d never heard of conscientious objection.”

He saw the devastation of the nuclear bomb in Nagasaki. Six weeks or so after that bomb, Ferlinghetti was part a detail that walked through the destruction where he saw the bones amidst the rubble. “It made me an instant pacifist,” he said, and he’s remained one ever since.

After the war, he went to Columbia University, studied literature and particularly loved Shakespeare, Marlowe, the Romantic poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins, James Joyce, Whitman, Eliot, Pound, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, and novelists Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos. Then he went to Paris, and got a doctorate at the Sorbonne. Got married, and the two of them settled in San Francisco.

In 1953, Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin founded City Lights bookstore, the first bookstore in the country to sell only paperback books: He wanted literature to be cheap and available to everyone. Two years later, Ferlinghetti, now the sole owner of City Lights, launched the publishing wing of the enterprise. The first book he published was his own first book of poems, Pictures of the Gone World.

Ferlinghetti is often classed as one of the West Coast Beats, along with Gary Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, and Phillip Whalen, in distinction to the East Coast Beats, Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs, but Ferlinghetti denies that he is a Beat writer. It’s true that he wasn’t much like a Beatnik: he was married, a war veteran, had graduate degrees, had a day job running a bookstore and publishing house, was not part of the On the Road life Kerouac and others wrote about.

What he did do is publish the Beat writers, gave them a platform, and his publishing allowed them to become known as a movement. The Los Angeles Times called Ferlinghetti, “The man without whom the Beat Generation might never have found its voice.” In style and theme, Ferlinghetti’s work is certainly quite different from what united Ginsberg and Kerouac, but every Beat writer was different, and Beat writing is not defined by any one style and theme.

Reasons for including Ferlinghetti among the Beat writers include: he shares the populist, democratic, Bohemian spirit of the Beatniks – the rejection of the stiff, stultifying conformity of the 1950s, the subversive impulse, the social critique that’s more implicit than explicit, and conveyed through irony, the questioning of authority. He wrote:

‘Truth is not the secret of a few’
Yet
you would maybe think so
the way some
librarians
and cultural ambassadors and
especially museum directors
act

you'd think they had a corner
on it
the way they
walk around shaking
their high heads and
looking as if they never
went to the bath
room or anything

But I wouldn't blame them
if I were you
They say the Spiritual is best conceived
in abstract terms
and then too
walking around in museums always makes me
want to
'sit down'
I always feel so
constipated
in those
high altitudes

Ferlinghetti also shares the Beat writers sense that poetry is an oral medium, meant to be read aloud, shared among real-live physically-gathered listeners, not merely ink on a page in an academic library. And the connection with jazz music. Ferlinghetti gave hundreds of poetry readings in the 1950s and 60s, reading counter-cultural poems to the accompaniment of jazz music – often, I might add, while wearing a beret. You can't get much more Beat than that.

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "Poetry Celebration: Lawrence Ferlinghetti"
See also
Part 1: Some Ferlinghetti
Part 3: Tragedy In the Context of Beauty. Or Maybe Vice-Versa.

Some Ferlinghetti

Poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, read at the Sunday service on Aug 27.

I Am Waiting

I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Second Coming
and I am waiting
for a religious revival
to sweep thru the state of Arizona
and I am waiting
for the Grapes of Wrath to be stored
and I am waiting
for them to prove
that God is really American
and I am seriously waiting
for Billy Graham and Elvis Presley
to exchange roles seriously
and I am waiting
to see God on television
piped onto church altars
if only they can find
the right channel
to tune in on
and I am waiting
for the Last Supper to be served again
with a strange new appetizer
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for my number to be called
and I am waiting for the living end
and I am waiting for Dad to come home
his pockets full of irradiated silver dollars
I am waiting
for the atomic tests to end
and I am waiting happily
for things to get much worse
before they improve
and I am waiting
for the Salvation Army to take over
and I am waiting
for the human crowd
to wander off a cliff somewhere
clutching its atomic umbrella
and I am waiting
for Ike to act
and I am waiting
for the meek to be blessed
and inherit the earth
I am waiting
for forests and animals
to reclaim the earth as theirs
and I am waiting
for a way to be devised
to destroy all nationalisms
without killing anybody
and I am waiting
for linnets and planets to fall like rain
and I am waiting for lovers and weepers
to lie down together again
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Great Divide to be crossed
and I am anxiously waiting
for the secret of eternal life to be discovered
by an obscure general practitioner
and save me forever from certain death
and I am waiting
for life to begin
and I am waiting
for the storms of life
to be over
and I am waiting
to set sail for happiness
and I am waiting
for a reconstructed Mayflower
to reach America
with its picture story and tv rights
sold in advance to the natives
and I am waiting
for the lost music to sound again
in the Lost Continent
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the day
that maketh all things clear
and I am waiting for old man river
to just stop rolling along
past the country club
and I am waiting
for the deepest south
to just stop reconstructing itself
in its own image
and I am waiting for god to look out
from lookout mountain
and see the ode to the confederate dead
as a real farce
and I am awaiting retribution
for what America did
to Tom Sawyer
I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting
for Tom Swift to grow up
and I am waiting
for Alice in Wonderland
to retransmit to me
her total dream of innocence
and I am waiting
for Childe Roland to come
to the final darkest tower
and I am waiting
for Aphrodite
to grow live arms
at a final disarmament conference
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings to come again
youth’s dumb green fields come back again
and I am waiting
for some strains of unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to write
the great indelible poem
and I am waiting
for the last long careless rapture
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn
to catch up to each other at last
and embrace
and I am awaiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder

A Coney Island of the Mind #17: This Life Is Not a Circus

This life is not a circus where
the shy performing dogs of love
look on
as time flicks out
its tricky whip
to race us thru our paces
Yet gay parading floats drift by
decorated with gorgeous gussies in silk tights
and attended by moithering monkeys
make-believe monks
horny hiawathas
and baboon astride tame tigers
with ladies inside
while googly horns make merrygoround music
and pantomimic pierrots castrate disaster
with strange sad laughter
and gory gorillas toss tender maidens heavenward
while cakewalkers and carnie hustlers
all gassed to the gills
strike playbill poses
and stagger after every
wheeling thing
While still around the ring
lope the misshapen camels of lust
and all us Emmett Kelly clowns
always making up imaginary scenes
with all our masks for faces
even eat fake Last Suppers
at collapsible tables
and mocking cross ourselves
in sawdust crosses

And yet gobble up at last
to shrive our circus souls
the also imaginary
wafers of grace

A Coney Island of the Mind #5: Sometime During Eternity

Sometime during eternity
some guys show up
and one of them
who shows up real late
is a kind of carpenter
from some square-type place
like Galilee
and he starts wailing
and claiming he is hip
to who made heaven
and earth
and that the cat
who really laid it on us
is his Dad

And moreover
he adds
It’s all writ down
on some scroll-type parchments
which some henchmen
leave lying around the Dead Sea somewheres
a long time ago
and which you won’t even find
for a coupla thousand years or so
or at least for
nineteen hundred and fortyseven
of them
to be exact
and even then
nobody really believes them
or me
for that matter
You’re hot
they tell him

And they cool him

They stretch him on the Tree to cool
And everybody after that
is always making models
of this Tree
with Him hung up
and always crooning His name
and calling Him to come down
and sit in
on their combo
as if he is the king cat
who’s got to blow
or they can’t quite make it

Only he don’t come down
from His Tree

Him just hang there
on His Tree
looking real Petered out
and real cool
and also
according to a roundup
of late world news
from the usual unreliable sources
real dead

A Coney Island of the Mind #15: Constantly Risking Absurdity

Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
above a sea of faces
paces his way
to the other side of day
performing entrechats
and sleight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics
and all without mistaking
any thing
for what it may not be

For he's the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap

And he
a little charleychaplin man
who may or may not catch
her fair eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence

Dog

The dog trots freely in the street
and sees reality
and the things he sees
are bigger than himself
and the things he sees
are his reality
Drunks in doorways
Moons on trees
The dog trots freely thru the street
and the things he sees
are smaller than himself
Fish on newsprint
Ants in holes
Chickens in Chinatown windows
their heads a block away
The dog trots freely in the street
and the things he smells
smell something like himself
The dog trots freely in the street
past puddles and babies
cats and cigars
poolrooms and policemen
He doesn’t hate cops
He merely has no use for them
and he goes past them
and past the dead cows hung up whole
in front of the San Francisco Meat Market
He would rather eat a tender cow
than a tough policeman
though either might do
And he goes past the Romeo Ravioli Factory
and past Coit’s Tower
and past Congressman Doyle
of the unamerican committee
He’s afraid of Coit’s Tower
but he’s not afraid of Congressman Doyle
although what he hears is very discouraging
very depressing
very absurd
to a sad young dog like himself
to a serious dog like himself
But he has his own free world to live in
His own fleas to eat
He will not be muzzled
Congressman Doyle is just another
fire hydrant
to him
The dog trots freely in the street
and has his own dog’s life to live
and to think about
and to reflect upon
touching and tasting and testing everything
investigating everything
without benefit of perjury
a real realist
with a real tale to tell
and a real tail to tell it with
a real live
barking
democratic dog
engaged in real
free enterprise
with something to say
about ontology
something to say
about reality
and how to see it
and how to hear it
with his head cocked sideways
at streetcorners
as if he is just about to have
his picture taken
for Victor Records
listening for
His Master’s Voice
and looking
like a living questionmark
into the
great gramaphone
of puzzling existence
with its wondrous hollow horn
which always seems
just about to spout forth
some Victorious answer
to everything

A Coney Island of the Mind #9: See It Was Like This When

See
it was like this when
we waltz into this place.
A couple of rakish cats
is doing an Aztec two-step

And I says
Dad let's cut
but then this dame
comes up behind me see
and says
you and me could really exist

Wow I says
Only the next day
she has bad teeth
and really hates
poetry.

* * *
This is part 1 of 3 of "Poetry Celebration: Lawrence Ferlinghetti"
See also
Part 2: Ferlinghetti and the Good of Poetry
Part 3: Tragedy In the Context of Beauty. Or Maybe Vice-Versa.

Love and Death Merge Into One

Celebrating Rumi, part 3

"Like This, Here"
Rumi

If anyone asked you how the perfect satisfaction
of all our sexual wanting will look, lift your face and say,
‘Like this.’
When someone mentions the gracefulness
of the night sky, climb up on the roof
and dance and say,
‘Like this?’
If anyone wants to know what “spirit” is,
Or what “God’s fragrance” means,
Lean your head toward him or her.
Keep your face there close.
Like this.
When someone quotes the old poetic image about clouds
gradually uncovering the moon,
slowly loosen knot by knot the strings of your robe
like this.
When someone asks what it means to die for love, point
here.
When lovers moan, they’re telling our story
like this.

"Words Swept Out the Window"
Rumi

Praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence. Existence:
This place made from our love for that emptiness,
This existence goes.
Praise to that happening, over and over!
For years I pulled my own existence out of emptiness.
Then one swoop, one swing of the arm,
That work is over.
Free of who I was, free of presence, free of
Dangerous fear, hope,
Free of mountainous wanting.
The here-and-now mountain is a tiny piece of a piece of straw
Blown off into emptiness.
These words I’m saying so much begin to lose meaning:
Existence, emptiness, mountain, straw:
Words and what they try to say swept
Out the window, down the slant of the roof.

Your capacity for sadness is equal to your capacity for joy, and they are the same capacity.

It’s a point that LoraKim and I sometimes make to each other when one of us is forgetting it. We do so reciting a favorite movie quote. From “The Thin Red Line,” about soldiers in World War II. Private Edward Train muses,

“One man looks at a dying bird and thinks there's nothing but unanswered pain. That death's got the final word, it's laughing at him. Another man sees that same bird, feels the glory, feels something smiling through it.”

Those with the capacity to stay with the unanswered pain, fully accepting death is the final word, are the ones who might then come feel the glory smiling through. Herein is discovered the sweetness of sorrow, the blessing of tragedy, as Rumi says:

“I saw grief drinking a cup of sorrow and called out, ‘It tastes sweet, does it not?’
‘You’ve caught me,” Grief answered, “and you’ve ruined my business.
How can I sell sorrow when you know it’s a blessing?”

And elsewhere:

“The cries of those free from pain are cold and dull:
The cries of the agonized spring from ecstasy.”

Throughout his works, Rumi articulates the yearning for union: union with the Beloved, with Reality, with all the pain of joy and sadness of ecstasy. Writes Rumi:

“The authentic human being, then, is one who is never free from striving, who turns restlessly and endlessly about the light of the Majesty.”

This yearning for union is our chief business as living creatures – yet we already have it!

“I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons,
Knocking on a door. It opens.
I’ve been knocking from the inside!”

That which we seek is given, is present – inescapably always. The seeking is the loving, and the loving itself is that which we seek.

“’Lo, I am with you always,’ means when you look for God,
God is in the look of your eyes,
In the thought of looking.”

As Rumi says it in “Love Dogs”:

“This longing you express
is the return message.”
The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.
Your pure sadness that wants help
is the secret cup.”

The longing is itself the fulfillment. And in our very failings is our insight, our salvation.

“The way of love is not a subtle argument.
The door there is devastation.
Birds make great sky circles of their freedom.
How do they learn it?
They fall and falling, they’re given wings.”

And death may be the final word, but that final word isn’t what you think it is. For one thing, we are the same – no, not the same as if we were two separate beings that happened to be identical. Rather, there is no separation. We are one being. That’s what Rumi means when he says:

“Even the phrase ‘each other’ doesn’t make any sense.”

Because we are all one being.

“I, you, he, she, we.
In the garden of mystic lovers
These are not true distinctions.”

So death is not possible. Rumi’s not talking about some clichéd child’s story of an afterlife, the ego’s dream of its own permanence. He’s saying that as long as there is life, that’s you. As long as there is anything, as long as there is existence, that’s you. The death that matters is the death of the ego, the death of the illusion of separation.

“Oh, let me not exist! for Non-existence
Proclaims in organ tones,
To Him we shall return.”

In the union of Rumi’s yearning, the oneness with the Beloved, with the love that constitutes reality, there is the death of separation, which is the death of life as we have known it. Love and death merge into one.

“Oh, I would love to kiss you.
The price of kissing is your life.
Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,
‘What a bargain. Let’s buy it.’”

And in this life-love merged with death, we surrender the illusions of control to which the ego so clings.

“You think I know what I’m doing?
That for one breath or half-breath I belong to myself?
As much as a pen knows what it’s writing
or the ball can guess where it’s going next.”

And yet, the ego, too – yours, mine – is itself an aspect of the glory of The Beloved. For all our sameness, our oneness, we also have our individual uniqueness.

“Our bodily personalities seem identical, but the globe of soul fruit we make each is elaborately unique.”

So we do as we are called to do, but we do not know what will come of it.

“Who makes these changes?
I shoot an arrow right, it lands left.
I ride after a deer and find myself chased by a hog.
I plot to get what I want and end up in prison.
I dig pits to trap others and fall in.
I should be suspicious of what I want.”

We are so small – and yet we contain such vastness. I am so small I can barely be seen. How can this great love be inside me? Look at your eyes. They are so small, but they see enormous things. The one-ness and the uniqueness are both traps, but better to err on the side of love, says Rumi:

“If you want what visible reality can give, you’re an employee.
If you want the unseen world, you’re not living your truth.
Both wishes are foolish.
But you’ll be forgiven for forgetting that what you really want is love’s confusing joy.”

Rumi makes one more point I want to mention, and I will conclude with. The work – the yearning for submersion in the ocean of the beloved – is not for you to do alone. We do it together. All of us. Each of us. We get nowhere without community. In one poem Rumi retells the familiar tale of seeking to know about an elephant – but then he surprises us with a solution to the conundrum.

“One by one, we go in the dark and come out saying how we experience the animal.
One of us happens to touch the trunk
'A water-pipe kind of creature.'
Another, the ear, 'A very strong, always moving
Back and forth, fan-animal.'
Another, the leg. 'I find it still
Like a column on a temple.'
Another touches the curved back.
'A leathery throne.'
Another, the cleverest, feels the tusk.
'A rounded sword make of porcelain.'
He’s proud of his description.
Each of us touches one place and understands the whole in that way.
The palm and the fingers feeling in the dark are how the senses explore the reality of the elephant.
If each of us held a candle there,
And if we went in together,
We could see it.”

If we each carry a candle – and if we go in together – we can see it.

May it be so. Amen.

"Let the Beauty We Love Be What We Do"
Rumi

Today, like every other day,
we wake up empty and frightened.
Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading.
Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "Celebrating Rumi"
See also
Part 1: Celebrating Rumi
Part 2: Capacity for Sadness, Capacity for Joy

Capacity for Sadness, Capacity for Joy

Celebrating Rumi, part 2

from The Mathnawi
Rumi

God has helped me understand a supreme grace –
The goodness hidden within cruelties,
The diamond beyond price hidden in dung.
The cruelty that comes from God
Is worth more than a hundred acts of mercy.
In his cruelty lives hidden tenderness.

"The Lame Goat"
Rumi

You have seen a herd of goats
going down to the water.
The lame and dreamy goat
brings up the rear.
There are worried faces about that one,
but now they're laughing,
because look, as they return,
that one is leading.
There are many different ways of knowing.
The lame goat's kind is a branch
that traces back to the roots of presence.
Learn from the lame goat,
and lead the herd home.

"Grieve Not that We Have Been Sleeping"
Rumi

I saw you and became empty.
This emptiness, more beautiful than existence,
it obliterates existence, and yet when it comes,
existence thrives and creates more existence.
To praise is to praise
how one surrenders to the emptiness.
To praise the sun is to praise your own eyes.
Praise, the ocean. What we say, a little ship.
So the sea-journey goes on, and who knows where?
Just to be held by the ocean is the best luck
we could have. It is a total waking-up.
Why should we grieve that we have been sleeping?
It does not matter how long we've been unconscious.
We are groggy, but let the guilt go.
Feel the motions of tenderness
around you, the bouyancy.

Sufi’s are known for their spiritual dancing – the whirling dervish. The Sufi Mevlevi Order, also known as the Order of the Whirling Dervishes was founded after Rumi’s death. Rumi’s eldest son and some of Rumi’s followers founded the order to continue and sustain Rumi’s approach and insights.

Rumi was passionate about the use of music, poetry and dance as a path for reaching God. He understood music to help devotees focus their whole being on the divine so intensely that the soul was both destroyed and resurrected. From these ideas, Rumi’s followers developed the whirling Dervish into a ritual form, and based the new order of the Mevlevi on Rumi’s teachings.

The dance represents the spiritual journey. The spinning, circling dance enacts and embodies the gravitational connected of the universe.

“Walk to the well.
Turn as the earth and the moon turn,
circling what they love.
Whatever circles comes from the center.”

The “seeker symbolically turns towards the truth, grows through love, abandons the ego, finds the truth and arrives at the Perfect.” The dance then leads the seeker back to the world, “to love and to be of service to the whole of creation.”

Rumi was clearly and deeply Muslim, grounded in the culture, practices, and literature of Islam. He understood, though, that the Muslim path – as well as the Hindu or Christian path, the Zoroastrian or Jewish path -- when earnestly pursued, leads to a place of universality. He wrote:

“On the seeker’s path, wise men and fools are one.
In His love, brothers and strangers are one.
Go on! Drink the wine of the Beloved!
In that faith, Muslims and pagans are one”

The light that for him was identified as the light of Muhammad, shines upon everyone, regardless of their faith tradition, bringing all who feel astray into the Way, out of the desert.

“We can’t help being thirsty, moving toward the voice of water.
Milk drinkers draw close to the mother.
Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Shamans,
everyone hears the intelligent sound and moves with thirst to meet it.
Clean your ears.
Don’t listen for something you’ve heard before.
Invisible camel bells, slight footfalls in sand almost in sight.
The first word they call out will be the last word of our last poem.”

Rumi was, we say, a mystic, but that doesn’t mean a proponent of magic, of what we would call the supernatural. It’s true that he did not have the modern scientific viewpoint. The truth that science pursues is the truth of reproducible results. The explanations science offers are the kind that allow for prediction and control. Rumi was interested in befriending the world rather than predicting and controlling it. He would, of course, have been astounded at how much predicting and controlling we can do today, but not as astonished as he was by life, love, and reality itself.

“Befriending” is too tame. Rumi ecstatically made love to this world. “Mystic” doesn’t mean that he proffered some magic, some nonscientific technology for making things happen. Nothing he says contradicts the findings of science. He is a mystic just in the sense that the fullness of our lives is not to be found in controlling and predicting.

Reasons and principles – knowledge in the form of true sentences that can be passed on in lectures and books – are important and have their place, but that place is within a larger context, and that context is made of love, not reason. Rumi’s attention, in his writings and in his way of living, is always on that larger context, and that is what makes him what we call a mystic.

The world has such sadness. Animals we are, with bodies made for pain, made for attachment and therefore made for loss. There is only so much of the grief of the world that one person can take in, before feeling the need to step back, turn away, think about something else.

You might read the article about Syria in the morning paper, or you might skip it, or if you do read half of it, you skip over additional articles and analyses of the horrors. A photograph, perhaps, captures my attention and holds me for a moment under the weight of the anguish there epitomized, but many other pictures also offer me that weight, but I glaze over them -- I slip quickly out from under them. I have work to get back to, let me not be weighed down.

There is only so much of the grief of the world that I can be present to before I need a break, before I begin casting about for something pleasant. That’s how it is for me. Is that how it is for you?

I think we notice this fact about ourselves and about each other, and we are generally sensitive to it. We don’t want to be a downer, always talking about the awfulness, oh, the horrible awfulness of it all. (We recognize that mocking, don’t we? It’s a device for pushing away the full experience of our bereavement.)

But here’s something you might not have noticed. It is the same with ecstatic joy. There is only so much we can take at a time before we feel the need to step back, turn away. Time to get serious again, get back to business.

We find ourselves pulled toward the equilibrium of the in-between, our hearts not overwhelmed with either grief or elation. Here, though, is the big truth – let this be remembered when you have forgotten all else from today: Your capacity to hold, take in, and stay with the world’s sadness is equal to your capacity for joy.

In fact, they are the same capacity.

The spiritual path is one of growing that capacity, the one capacity for being present to reality exactly as it is. When we are able to take in the woe, take it all the way in and not turn away, we perceive shining through it a jubilant beauty. When we stay with a euphoria, a rapturous happy celebration, take it all the way in and look at it all the way through, we perceive also its foundation of tragedy and pain. Your capacity for sadness is equal to your capacity for joy, and they are the same capacity.

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "Celebrating Rumi"
See also
Part 1: Celebrating Rumi
Part 3: Love and Death Merge Into One

Celebrating Rumi

Celebrating Rumi, part 1

Beyond Ideas
Rumi

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense.

Community of the Spirit
Rumi

There is a community of the spirit.
Join it, and feel the delight
of walking in the noisy street
and being the noise.
Drink all your passion,
and be a disgrace.
Close both eyes
to see with the other eye.

The Guest House
Rumi

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

It has become our custom at Community UU at White Plains, that on the last Sunday of August we have a poetry service – sharing together the words and insights that come to us through poems. Last year we celebrated Mary Oliver. The two years before that we lifted up various works from the Beat generation.

We celebrate today the poetry of Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, the 13th-century Persian sufi poet, born in 1207, in Vakhsh, a small village in what is now Tajikistan – or maybe in Balkh in northern Afghanistan. Sep 30 will be his 809th birthday.

Collections of his poems sell millions in the US. Bill Moyers called Rumi “the most popular poet in America,” read and loved by seekers of all religions and none. Rumi remains a compelling figure in all cultures.

At age 18, Rumi married Gowhar Khatun. The couple had two sons. After Gowhar’s death, Rumi re-married and had another son and a daughter. Rumi reached age 37, a husband and father and a traditional Muslim preacher, scholar, teacher, and jurist, as his father and father’s father before him had been. But it was then that Rumi had a transformative encounter with a wandering mystic, Shams of Tabriz.

Rumi and Shams, as one biographer writes, “have this electric friendship for three years – lover and beloved [or] disciple and sheikh, it’s never clear.” Rumi became a mystic. After three years Shams disappeared – “possibly murdered by a jealous son of Rumi, possibly teaching Rumi an important lesson in separation.”

Rumi searched widely for Shams, arriving finally in Damascus, where he wrote:

“Why should I seek? I am the same as
He. His essence speaks through me.
I have been looking for myself!”

“Most of the poetry we have comes from age 37 to 67. He wrote 3,000 [love songs] to Shams, the prophet Muhammad and God. He wrote 2,000 rubayat, four-line quatrains. He wrote in couplets a six-volume spiritual epic, The Mathnawi”: the “the longest single-authored emphatically mystical poem ever written.” Consisting of 26,000 couplets, The Mathnawi is arguably the second most influential text in the Islamic world after the Qu'ran.

“He’s a poet of joy and of love,” says the biographer. “His work comes out of dealing with the separation from Shams and from love and the source of creation, and out of facing death.”

He belongs to the tradition of ecstatic seers which includes Sappho and Walt Whitman. It was translator Coleman Barks, a poet in his own right, who is responsible for the American Rumi renaissance. Barks began translating Rumi in 1976, prior to which the only English translations of Rumi were in a stiff academic language.

Coleman Barks’ renderings of Rumi are not actually translations, since Barks doesn’t speak or read Persian. Rather, he paraphrases and interprets from the more academic and literal English translations.

Rutgers professor and Rumi scholar Jawid Mojaddedi identifies four innovations of Rumi’s poetry: First is his direct address to readers in the rare second person. You are this, you will find that, says Rumi. Second is his urge to teach. There’s a truth he very much wants you to know. Third, “his use of everyday imagery.” And fourth, “his optimism of the attainment of union.”

The mystic is not unattainable, but freely open to you at all times. Running through Rumi’s poems, never far in the background if not explicitly in the foreground is the soul’s separation from God and the mutual yearning to reunite. The mutual yearning. We want to connect ecstatically with this world in which find ourselves immersed, this world that brought us into being and makes us who we are – and the world desperately wants that too.

Rumi yearns for union with what is sometimes rendered “The Beloved,” sometimes “God.” If the God-talk is a sticking point for you, translate it as “Reality,” understanding that reality is made of love.

From the Mathnawi:

I died as a mineral and became a plant,
I died as plant and rose to animal,
I died as animal and I was Man.
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Yet once more I shall die as Man, to soar
With angels bless'd; but even from angelhood
I must pass on: all except God doth perish.
When I have sacrificed my angel-soul,
I shall become what no mind e'er conceived.
Oh, let me not exist! for Non-existence
Proclaims in organ tones,
To Him we shall return.

“Love Dogs” by Rumi. Translated by Coleman Barks

One night a man was crying, “Allah, Allah!”
His lips grew sweet with the praising,
until a cynic said,
“So! I have heard you
calling out, but have you ever
gotten any response?”
The man had no answer for that.
He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.
He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,
in a thick, green foliage,
“Why did you stop praising?”
“Because I’ve never heard anything back.”
“This longing you express
is the return message.”
The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.
Your pure sadness that wants help
is the secret cup.
Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.
There are love dogs no one knows the names of.
Give your life to be one of them. 

“The Seed Market” by Rumi. Translated by Coleman Barks

Can you find another market like this?
Where, with your one rose
you can buy hundreds of rose gardens?
Where, for one seed
you get a whole wilderness?
For one weak breath, the divine wind?
You’ve been fearful of being absorbed in the ground,
or drawn up by the air.
Now, your waterbead lets go -- and drops into the ocean,
where it came from.
It no longer has the form it had, but it’s still water.
The essence is the same.
This giving up is not a repenting.
It’s a deep honoring of yourself.
When the ocean comes to you as a lover,
marry, at once, quickly, for God’s sake!
Don’t postpone it!
Existence has no better gift.
No amount of searching will find this.
A perfect falcon, for no reason,
has landed on your shoulder, and become yours.

"We Glow and Glow Again" by Rumi. Trans. Coleman Barks

“All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that,
And I intend to end up there.
This drunkenness began in some other tavern.
When I get back around to that place,
I'll be completely sober. Meanwhile,
I'm like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.
The day is coming when I fly off,
But who is it now in my ear who hears my voice?
Who says words with my mouth?
Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way.
Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.
This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say.
I don't plan it.
When I'm outside the saying of it, I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.
We have a huge barrel of wine, but no cups.
That's fine with us. Every morning
We glow and in the evening we glow again.”

* * *
This is part 1 of 3 of "Celebrating Rumi"
See also
Part 2: Capacity for Sadness, Capacity for Joy
Part 3: Love and Death Merge Into One