Tag / Poetry

by Michael

Ode to Gumbo & Other Memories

For weeks I have waited

for a day without death

or doubt.  Instead

the sky set afire

or the flood

filling my face.

A stubborn drain

nothing can fix.

Every day death.

Every morning death

& every night

& evening

And each hour

a kind of winter—

all weather

is unkind.  Too

hot, or cold

that creeps the bones.

Father, your face

a faith

I can no longer see.

Across the street

a dying, yet

still-standing tree.

So why not

make a soup

of what’s left?  Why

not boil & chop

something outside

the mind—let us

welcome winter

for a few hours, even

in summer.  Some

say Gumbo

starts with file

or with roux, begins

with flour & water

making sure

not to burn.  I know Gumbo

starts with sorrow—

with hands that cannot wait

but must—with okra

& a slow boil

& things that cannot

be taught, like grace.

Done right,

Gumbo lasts for days.

Done right, it will feed

you & not let go.

Like grief

you can eat & eat

& still plenty

left.  Food

of the saints,

Gumbo will outlast

even us—like pity,

you will curse it

& still hope

for the wing

of chicken bobbed

up from below.

Like God

Gumbo is hard

to get right

& I don’t bother

asking for it outside

my mother’s house.

Like life, there’s no one

way to do it,

& a hundred ways,

from here to Sunday,

to get it dead wrong.

Save all the songs.

I know none,

even this, that will

bring a father

back to his son.

Blood is thicker

than water under

any bridge

& Gumbo thicker

than that.  It was

my father’s mother

who taught mine how

to stir its dark mirror—

now it is me

who wishes to plumb

its secret

depths.  Black

Angel, Madonna

of the Shadows,

Hail Mary strong

& dark as dirt,

Gumbo’s scent fills

this house like silence

& tells me everything

has an afterlife, given

enough time & the right

touch.  You need

okra, sausage, bones

of a bird, an entire

onion cut open

& wept over, stirring

cayenne in, till the end

burns the throat—

till we can amen

& pretend

such fiery

mercy is all we know.

Kevin Young’s Ode to Gumbo in Dear Darkness

by Michael

Cornelius Eady’s Travelin’ Shoes

It’s something how poetry—and literature in general—can touch your reality with words that feel so much like your own.  I read this poem by Cornelius Eady last night and thought it an appropriate, almost exact, reflection of life right now.  It’s called “Travelin’ Shoes.”

And at last, I get the phone call.  The blues rolls into

my sleepy ears at five A.M., a dry, official voice from

my father’s hospital.  A question, a few quick facts,

and my daddy’s lying upstate on the coolin’ floor.

Death, it seems, was kinder to him in his last hour

than life was in his last four months.

Death, who pulls him to a low ebb, then slowly

floods over his wrecked body like a lover.

Cardio-vascular collapse, the polite voice is telling

me, but later my cousin tells me, he arrives on the

ward before they shut my father’s eyes and mouth to

see the joy still resting on his face from the moment

my daddy finally split his misery open.

by Michael

“Words Are Too Small”

Emily Allen quotes her sister friend, Sophia, who is reflecting on her son’s diagnosis and experience of Leukemia.  Her son, Jacob, was experiencing hair loss around that time:

I did not cry, not there, but later when going through the pictures of hair falling off. 
It’s just hair, you can say but no, it’s so much more. 
It’s love. 
It’s a statement. 
It’s hope. 
It’s pain.
It’s a side-effect.
It’s a mother’s heart.
Words are too small. 
I have seen my son’s hair fall off, seen the chemotherapy side-effects, all of them.
It is hair, but it is a big deal It is part of our identity, a part we cut and style and color and pay for to feel prettier. 
Without hair we look different, naked, people notice. 
I know God was there, counting, every single hair that fell, every tear. 
And he is there when new grows back, there in every moment.

I read this here at Rachel Held Evans’s blog.

by Michael

Inconvenience of Death

My next four posts will pull from my day yesterday.  It was a different day, unlike most of my Sundays.  Granted, as a pastor, I meet with people on Sundays.  I pray with people.  I talk about God, squint my eyes, and answer questions people have.  But this Sunday was unique.

I left home, and by the time I was passing the perimeter of blue and white officers around the president’s house, I got a call in the car about the death of a member’s mother.  Then I headed to a meeting before worship where me and another member talked theology.  I officiated a wedding for a couple and then ended the day meeting with another couple who’s expecting their first son in 7 weeks.  Inside those movements were all the other details of the day.  I harassed a few men from church for not wearing helmets while bicycling.  I hugged and held people.  I picked up my son and we went to retrieve his grandmother who would sit with him while we were out.  It turned into a long day.  Most of my Sundays are not this full.

So today I want to think about yesterday.  First, the notice of death’s coming.

Death is hardly convenient when it comes.  I say this as a man who has done some thinking about the confusing event.  I go back and forth between considering death an enemy and grounding my view of it in faith.  My own faith rewrites the story of death.  Christianity has encouraging things to say about death.  And still, good words, strong words, feel weak when death comes.

As I thought about the shocking news on that call yesterday morning, I wondered like most people what was on God’s mind.  I wondered whether the deceased had power over her own exit, whether she was close enough with God herself to choose when to meet him on the other side of life.  I wondered about her daughter, her son, her husband, and her son-in-law.  I turned off my radio because the gospel music I was listening to crowded the long thoughts of nothing-but-wondering.

I ran over the conversations I’d had with our member.  I saw her two days before.  I wasn’t sure if she had traveled to see her mother.  I’d later learn that she was with her mother when she died.  In the car, I heard myself whispering things about grace in the midst of death.  I was talking to myself in the car, rehearsing truths, but the truths came too quickly to take root.  I turned the music on again, thinking that music was the best thing to hear when the inconvenient angel hovered.  I told myself that music was better than truth.  Music was better than an answer with fast feet.

I held that member in my mind all day.  I thought about her during the worship service.  I mentioned her to a few people.  The weight of her grief was on me as I went throughout the other parts of my day.  As much as I was present with everyone else, I was accompanied by the anguish of that member and friend.  I imagined the pain, the anticipation of it I had seen in her eyes during our talks about her mother’s cancer, her father’s disposition, and her brother’s long-term care.

It’s interesting to me, inexplicable too, how you can be somewhere fully and yet be somewhere else.  How you can be with people and have some other matter grab you by the ear or the stomach.  Have you ever said to someone something like, “I’m with you in spirit”?  Or “You’ve been on my mind”?  Those words get at the wonder of being in two places, being with two people, being split, I suppose you could say.  I was very much with the couple I was marrying yesterday, but I was also with the couple who was lingering over the last days they had with their now dead beloved.  I was with my son in the car, but as a pastor, I couldn’t help but recall the shadow of death that cloaked over the otherwise bright day.

I read these words last night in Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem, “truth”

The dark hangs heavily

Over the eyes.

Isn’t that an image of death?  Hanging dark.  Heavy dark.  Eye-covering dark.  And that darkness, that hanging drape is hardly ever truly welcome.

by Michael

Gwendolyn Brooks Says Reaching Is His Rule

Life for my child is simple, and is good.

He knows his wish.  Yes, but that is not all.

Because I know mine too.

And we both want joy of undeep and unabiding things,

Like kicking over a chair or throwing blocks out of a window

Or tipping over an ice box pan

Or snatching down curtains or fingering an electric outlet

Or a journey or a friend or an illegal kiss.

No.  There is more to it than that.

It is that he has never been afraid.

Rather, he reaches out and lo the chair falls with a beautiful crash,

And the blocks fall, down on the people’s heads,

And the water comes slooshing sloppily out across the floor.

And so forth.

Not that success, for him, is sure, infallible.

But never has he been afraid to reach.

His lesions are legion.

But reaching is his rule.

by Michael

Books I’m Reading

I just finished Will and Spirit by Gerald May, a commitment of careful reading.  I took a year and a half to read it slowly while reading other things.  Here’s a list of the ten books in my current pile.  I’m holding the ones with asterisks now:

  1. The Memory Palace by Mira Bartok
  2. Blacks by Gwendolyn Brooks*
  3. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
  4. Exploring Prosperity Preaching by Debra Mumford*
  5. Lying Awake by Mark Salzman*
  6. Faith in the Fire by Gardner C. Taylor*
  7. Mothers and Sons by Colm Toibin
  8. An Altar In The World by Barbara Brown Taylor
  9. Allah: A Christian Response by Miroslav Volf
  10. A Happy Marriage by Rafael Yglesias

Any recommendations for me, particularly for novels, short story collections, memoirs, or psychology and theology?

And what are you reading?

by Michael

My Father’s Face

Over his fastidious hands

his voice breaks,

and because he had executed

the bequest

(typing the book lists

sermons in manuscript

& unlisted artifacts)

on his son’s birthday

in the Brooklyn brownstone,

this is a double loss,

unbeknownst, even to him,

at this late date

in the March snow,

how much the past costs;

how much the health

of one’s nation

as neighborhood,

is stored in the family,

the archives,

the handwriting

of our saints & sinners,

and the forgiveness

of sin’s remembering.

(As for the saints)

For now the ancient folders

are enough for the sorrow,

which is grief over my mother’s

life, and the grand thematics

of a little girl,

polishing her jacks

on her grandfather’s marble

steps, too close, even for him,

to the Germantown governors

who account for the meal

and his till.

We are here on the edge

of another parade,

a huge mural

as a gate,

east and west,

in honor of Nat Cole’s walk,

as if his majesty

on the keyboard,

the lilt of his Montgomery

voice,

was a memorial to running water,

to stone, and the masonry

of singing on the stone,

which was his pledge,

which was his right.

This is the penmanship

of song; we are journalists

for the race this Saturday,

in honor of Saturday’s child,

a sacred seat with the father.

A poem by Michael S. Harper

by Michael

Penguin, Mullet, Bread

Last night at the closing of the AWP, I listened to Nikky Finney read several of her poems, a few from her National Book Award winning collection, Head Off & Split.  It was my first time hearing her in person and while I listened to her, I wanted to keep leaning in and listening.

When Professor Finney signed my copy of her collection, she asked if I was a writer, if I lived in Chicago.  I told her yes to both, and saying yes, in the company of a woman, writer, communicator, and advocate so powerful was its own affirmation.  If you don’t know her work, it can offer you life and renewal and fullness.  Really, I wouldn’t suggest that you linger over her careful words unless they’d be worth it.

by Michael

How Do You Write A Poem

how do you write a poem

about someone so close

to you that when you say ahhhhh

they say chuuuu

what can they ask you to put

on paper that isn’t already written

on your face

and does the paper make it

any more real

that without them

life would be not

impossible but certainly

more difficult

and why would someone need

a poem to say when i come

home if you’re not there

i search the air

for your scent

would i search any less

if i told the world

i don’t care at all

and love is so complete

that touch or not we blend

to each other the things

that matter aren’t all about

baaaanging (i can be baaaanged all

day long) but finding a spot

where i can be free

of all the physical

and emotional demands and simply sit with a cup

of coffee and say to you

‘i’m tired” don’t you know

those are my love words

and say to you “how was your

day” doesn’t that show

i care or say to you “we lost

a friend” and not want to share

that loss with strangers

don’t you already know

what i feel and if

you don’t maybe

i should check my feelings

By Nikki Giovanni