Poems
SOME
Some stood up once and sat down.
Some walked a mile and walked away.
Some stood up twice and sat down
I’ve had it, they said.
Some walked two miles and walked away
It’s too much, they cried.
Some stood and stood and stood.
They were taken for dummies
They were taken for fools
They were taken for being taken in.
Some walked and walked and walked.
They walked the earth
They walked the waters
They walked the air.
Why do you stand?
they were asked, and
Why do you walk?
Because of the children, they said, and
Because of the heart, and
Because of the bread.
Because
the cause
is the heart’s beat
and the children born
and the risen bread.
Less Than
The trouble was not excellence.
I carried that secret,
a laugh up my sleeve
all the public years
all the lonely years
(one and the same)
years that battered like a wind tunnel
years like a yawn at an auction
(all the same)
Courage was not the fault
years they carried me shoulder high
years they ate me like a sandwich
(one and the same)
The fault was—dearth of courage
the bread only so-so
the beer near beer
I kept the secret under my shirt
like a fox’s lively tooth, called
self-knowledge.
That way
the fox eats me
before I rot.
That way I keep measure—
neither Pascal’s emanation
naked, appalled
‘under the infinite starry spaces’
nor a stumblebum
havocking
in Alice’s doll house.
Never the less!
Summon
Courage, excellence!
The two, I reflect, could
snatch us from ruin.
A fairly modest urging—
Don’t kill, whatever pretext.
Leave the world unbefouled.
Don’t hoard.
Stand somewhere.
And up to this hour
(Don’t tell a soul)
Here I am.
My Name
If I were Pablo Neruda
or William Blake
I could bear, and be eloquent
an American name in the world
where men perish
in our two murderous hands
Alas Berrigan
you must open those hands
and see, stigmatized in their palms,
the broken faces
you yearn toward
You cannot offer
being powerless as a woman
under the rain of fire—
life, the cover of your body.
Only the innocent die.
Take up, take up
the bloody map of the century.
the long trek homeward begins
into the land of unknowing.
Prophecy
The way I see the world is strictly illegal
To wit, through my eyes
is illegal, yes;
to wit, I live
like a pickpocket, like the sun
like the hand that writes this, by my wits
This is not permitted
that I look on the world
and worse, insist that I see
what I see
–a conundrum, a fury, a burning bush
and with five fingers, where my eyes fail
trace—
with a blackened brush
on butcher sheets, black on white
(black for blood, white for death
where the light fails)
–that face which is not my own
(and my own)
that death which is not my won
(and my own)
This is strictly illegal
and will land me in trouble
as somewhere now, in a precinct
in a dock, the statutes
thrash in fury, hear them
hear ye!
the majestic jaws
of crocodiles in black shrouds
the laws
forbidding me
the world, the truth
under blood oath
forbidding, row upon row
of razors, of statutes
of molars, of grinders—
those bloodshot eyes
legal, sleepless, maneating
–not letting me
not
let blood
Prayer for the Morning Headlines
MERCIFULLY GRANT PEACE IN OUR DAYS,
THROUGH YOUR HELP MAY WE BE FREED FROM PRESENT DISTRESS…
HAVE MERCY ON US
WOMEN AND CHILDREN HOMELESS IN FOUL WEATHER,
RANTING LIKE BEES AMONG GUTTED BARNS AND STILES.
HAVE MERCY ON THOSE (LIKE US) CLINGING ONE TO ANOTHER UNDER FIRE, TERROR ON TERROR, GRAPES THE GRAPE SHOT STRIKES.
HAVE MERCY ON THE DEAD, BEFOULDED, TRODDEN LIKE SNOW IN HEDGES AND THICKETS, HAVE MERCY, DEAD MAN, WHOSE GRANDIOSE GENTLE HOPE DIED ON THE WING, WHOSE BODY STOOD LIKE A TREE BETWEEN STRIKE AND FALL, STOOD LIKE A CRIPPLE ON HIS WOODEN CRUTICH WE CRY: HALT!
WE CRY: PASSWORD! DISHONORED HEART, REMEMBER, AND REMIND, THE OPEN SESAME: FROM THERE TO HERE, FROM INNOCENCE TO US:
HIROSHIMA DRESDEN GUERNICA SELMA SHARPEVILLE COVENTRY DACHAU.
INTO OUR HISTORY, PASS!
SEED HOPE!
FLOWER PEACE!
Zen Poem
How I long for supernatural powers!
said the novice mournfully to the holy one.
I see a dead child
and I long to say, Arise!
I see a sick man
I long to say, Be healed!
I see a bent old woman
I long to say, walk straight!
Alas, I feel like a stick in paradise.
Master, can you confer on me
Supernatural powers?
The old man shook his head fretfully.
How long have I been with you
and you know nothing?
How long have you known me
and learned nothing:
Listen; I have walked the earth for 80 years
I have never raised a dead child
I have never healed a sick man
I have never straightened an old woman’s spine
Children die
men grow sick
the aged fall
under a stigma of frost
And what is that to you or me
but a turn of the wheel
but the way of the world
but the gateway to paradise?
Supernatural powers!
Then you would play God
would spin the thread of life
and measure the thread
5 years, 50 years, 80 years
And cut the thread?
Supernatural powers!
I have wandered the earth for 80 years
I confess to you,
sprout without root
root without flower
I know nothing of supernatural powers
I have yet to perfect my natural powers!
to see and not be seduced
to hear and not be deafened
to taste not be eaten
to touch and not be bought
But you–
would you walk on water
would you master the air
would you swallow fire?
Go talk with the dolphins
they will teach you glibly
how to grow gills
Go listen to eagles
they will hatch you, nest you
eaglet and airman
Go join the circus
those tricksters will train you
in deception for dimes–
Bird man, bag man, poor fish
spouting fire, moon crawling
at sea forever–
supernatural powers!
Do you seek miracles?
listen–go
draw water, hew wood
break stones–
how miraculous!
Listen: blessed in the one
who walks the earth 5 years, 50 years, 80 years,
and deceives no one
and curses no one
and kills no one
On such a one
the angels whisper in wonder;
behold the irresistible power
of natural powers–
of height, of joy, of soul, of non belittling!
You dry stick–
in the crude soil of this world
spring, root, leaf, flower!
Trace
around and around
and around–
an inch, a mile, the world’s green extent–
a liberated zone
of paradise!
PAYMENT
It was something akin
To paying your way
(No saving metaphor
To be sure)
Paying
For the next mile
The next heartbeat
The next sunset
Something owed life,
The sheer beauty,
Yes, the heartbreak—
Small price, all said
Handcuffed,
Driven in a chain gang
Across Manhattan
At cold midnight,
Something paid
To strike
The manacles Christ bore
And bears in the world.
Does the metaphor befit?
I’m unsure.
That way it might.
***
(This poem is about one dark cold miserable night, Dr. King’s birthday, 2000, when Dan, John Dear, and a few friends were arrested for protesting at the USS Intrepid War Museum in Manhattan, and handcuffed, chained together, and walked through the streets of New York City until 3 in the morning until they were placed in the Tombs, because all the local jails were full.)
Credentials
I would it were possible to state in so
Few words my errand in the world: quite simply
Forestalling all inquiry, the oak offers his leaves
Largehandedly. And in winter his integral magnificent order
Decrees, says solemnly who he is
In the great thrusting libs that are all finally
One: a return, a permanent riverandsea.
So the rose is its own credential, a certain
Unattainable effortless form: wearing its heart
Visibly, it gives us heart too: bud, fullness and fall.
Each Day Writes
In my heart’s core
ineradicably, what it is to be human.
Hours and hours, no sun rises, night sits
kenneled in me: or spring, spring’s
flowering seizes me in an hour.
I tread my heart amazed: what land,
what skies are these, whose shifting weather
now shrink my harvest to a stack of bones;
now weigh my life with glory?
Christ, to whose eyes flew,
whose human heart know, or furious or low,
the dark wing beat of time: your presence give
light to my eyeless mind, reason to my heart’s rhyme.
Peacemaking Is Hard
hard almost as war.
the difference being
one we can stake life upon
and limb and thought and love.
I stake this poem out
dead man to a dead stick
to tempt an Easter chance—
if faith may be
truth, our evil chance
penultimate at last,
not last. We are not lost.
When these lines gathered
of no resource at all
serenity and strength,
it dawned on me
a man stood on his nails,
an ash like dew, a sweat
smelling of death and life.
Our evil Friday fled,
the blind face gently turned
another way. Toward Life.
A man walks in his shroud.
Children in the Shelter
Imagine: three of them.
As though survival
were a rat’s word,
and a rat’s death
waited there at the end
and I must have
in the century’s boneyard
heft of flesh and bone in my hands
I picked up the littlest
a boy, his face
breaded with rice (his sister calmly feeding him
as we climbed down)
in my arms fathered
in a moment’s grace, the messiah
of all my tears. I bore, reborn
a Hiroshima child from hell.
The Trouble with Our State
The trouble with our state
was not civil disobedience
which in any case was hesitant and rare
Civil disobedience was rare as kidney stone
No, rare; it was disappearing like immigrants’ disease
You’ve heard of a war on cancer?
There is no war like the plague of media
There is no war like routine
There is no war like 3 square meals
There is no war like a prevailing wind
It blows softly; whispers
Don’t rock the boat!
The sails obey, the ship of state rolls on.
The trouble with our state
–we learned it only afterward
When the dead resembled the living who resembled the dead
and civil virtue shone like paint on tin
and tin citizens and tin soldiers marched to the common whip
—our trouble
the trouble with our state
with our state of soul
our state of siege—
was
Civil
Obedience
Swords Into Plowshares
Everything enhances, everything
gives glory—everything!
Between bark and bite
Judge Salus’s undermined soul
betrays him, mutters
very alleluias.
The iron cells—
Row on row of rose trellised
Mansions, bridal chambers!
Curses, vans, keys, guards—behold
the imperial lions of our vast acres!
And when hammers come down
and our years are tossed to four winds—
why, flowers blind the eye, the saints
pelt us with flowers!
For every hour
scant with discomfort
(the mastiff’s baleful eye,
the bailiff’s mastery)—
see, the Lord’s hands heap
eon upon eon,
like fruit bowls at a feast.
Vision
(after Julian of Norwich)
then showed me he
in right hand held
everything that is
the hand was a woman’s
creation all lusty
a meek bird’s egg
nesting there waiting
her word and I heard it
newborn I make you
nestling I love you
homing I keep you
Consolation
Listen
if now and then
you hear the dead
muttering like ashes
creaking like empty
rockers on porches
filling you in filling you in
like winds in empty
branches like stars
in wintry trees
so far
so good
you’ve mastered finally
one foreign tongue
THE CATHOLIC BISHOPS APPROVE BUSH’S WAR
(November, 2001)
Lest I merge
With mountains that surely will fall,
Their decrepitude my own –
Lest I walk shod
In blood of Abel crying from the earth,
‘My tantamount, my brother, my undoer’ —
Lest for eons I must carry
Rachel’s sacrifice, her tears my albatross –
Lest I the Christ
Disavow,
And Him who shackled there
I drag through sludge
Of cowardice and dismay–
Lest weighed, I be found
Wanting –
No guest of heaven,
A ghost, and no egress
From foolish trumpery of time –
Lest I disappear, down down
The 110th escalation
Of pride,
And truncated, eyeless, soulless,
Be found
unfit for armed might
for rubble and America—
Lest I be sifted
Like wheat or chaff,
And under a pall
(the appalling flag)
Am borne away
Piecemeal
To broken doorways
Of shoel or limbo,
(The divergencies
Not large, nor mine to choose) –
Lest I
AFTER
(September, 2001)
When the towers fell
A conundrum
Shall these from eternity
inherit the earth,
All debts amortised?
Gravity was ungracious,
A lateral blow
Abetted, made an end.
They fell like Lucifer,
Star of morning, our star
Attraction, our access.
Nonetheless, a conundrum:
Did God approve, did they prosper us?
The towers fell, money
Amortised in pockets
emptied, once for all.
Why did they fall, what law
Violated? Did Mammon
mortise the money
That raised them high, Mammon
Anchoring the towers in cloud,
Highbrow neighbors
Of gated heaven and God?
“Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great…
They see the smoke
Arise as she burns….”
We made pilgrimage there.
Confusion of tongues.
Some cried vengeance.
Others paced slow, pondering
–This or that of humans
Drawn forth, dismembered–
A last day – Babylon
Remembered.
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