Poetry

Here’s a great poem by Walt Whitman!

O Me! O Life!
by Walt Whitman

That you are here—that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.

Found on PrayerCards:

Meditation Exercise/Exorcize:

Try this once a day forever

found in a comment on Eric Alterman’s Altercation is by Brian Donohue based on Paul Simon’s Slip Slidin’ Away. (My guess as to title. Brian doesn’t say which Paul Simon song.)

Flip-flopping away, flip-flopping awa–aay…
You know the nearer the destination the more he’s flip-flopping away…

Flip-flopping away, flip-flopping awa–aay…
You know the nearer the destination the more he’s flip-flopping away…

Can you guess who the man is in the song? Why, it’s none other than that master flip-flopper, and not so darling of the far right, John “Hundred Year War” McCain. Easy to guess, eh?

I’d better get this all down while it’s still fresh in my mind. Where to start? Why not at my arrival in the sanctuary Saturday around 11am? Yes! What should I find but a group of about ten or twelve Bradley family members singing a Finnish song. David had had a long association with the Finns, starting as a newspaper reporter to cover the Finnish-Russian Winter War. The song was beautifully sung in Finnish.

Soon they got around to rehearsing Goin’ Home and I found out their whole group expected to participate as well. This was fine with me. They allowed me to sing my beginning solo on the first few bars, and I felt I hit this really well. The reason I got to participate at all was that Dave had wanted me to sing this song. As the song went on to the higher notes, I actually found them easier to sing and I surprised myself by hitting the high Fs in what I felt was a full Lawrence Tibbett fashion!

The various rehearsals — there were other songs as well — finished around Noon and then a one hour wait began for the service to begin at 1pm. The Bradley folk were writing further notes on what they would say during the remembrance portions of the service, and some were having sandwiches. Darby Bradley passed out water bottles and others got their boxes of tissues ready. I ate a single tangelo, which I realized later was not enough.

Shortly before 1pm I sat with our choir and my water bottle handy. Right about 1pm the troop of Bradleys — there must have been 25 or 30 in all — walked into the sanctuary and took their places in the front rows. We were in front but off to the side just behind the piano where Heather Pierson was ready. The minister, the Rev. Richard Beal, gave a short and thoughtful welcome to the 150 or so people in the sanctuary, and then Ben Tucker III strode to the podium to announce the Joyous Jubilation that was about to begin. He began by warning that the service could be a long one and that we ought to feel free to move around or take a necessary break if needs be. This got me thinking, Oh oh, this isn’t going to be over in a half hour! I swallowed hard and took a drink from my water bottle.

Ben Tucker III’s speech was indeed joyous and jubilant as he described the reasons for celebrating David Bradley’s truly amazing life as a skier, sailer, mountain climber, war correspondent, doctor, author, atomic energy lecturer, legislator, teacher, singer, mentor, husband, and father of six children. And I might add, practical joker and humorist, although I think Ben probably did cover this as well.

First to celebrate was Dave’s youngest son, Steven, with an assist from Nicolette Corrao who is married to one of Dave’s sons. Steven had a tough time speaking at first with tears and Nicky had to keep pushing the mic closer, but when he got to singing, it was beautiful. He had written this music to his Dad’s poem and homage to his mother, Josephine.

Next came a teenage granddaughter, Caitlin Morgan, who had been sitting in the pew across from me with a box of tissues. She tearfully spoke and delivered a short poem. I had trouble catching it. This is partly because I’m not wearing my uncomfortable but expensive hearing aids.

Then the Family Remembrances began. These indeed took quite a while but were interesting and moving. A grandson, Markus Bradley, bearded in his early 20’s started it off. He was a charming fellow and I caught a few of his interesting stories involving his granddad.

OK, this post is getting too long and I’m running out of steam. I’ll never be able to recapture all of this amazing and inspirational event. So what about me?

After several other celebratory events, there came a time for General Remembrances from anyone in the audience. Needing desperately to urinate, and knowing that the toilet was outside the door just beyond the mic, I rushed up after the first speaker had finished his five or ten minute speech — it was interesting and about Dave’s relationship to Finland but I missed a lot — grabbed the mic and told how I used to sit beside Dave in the choir. That helped cement a friendship between us, and I told of the time there was this discussion amongst the women in the front row which I — being slightly deaf as I’ve implied — couldn’t hear very well. Dave was even deafer than me, but I asked him, “What are they saying?” He waved his hand to say, “It doesn’t matter.” This drew quite a bit of laughter from the audience. Then I headed for the toilet, and returned later to my seat after waiting for another long-winded but interesting story-teller finish his remembrances of Dave.

By the time it got to be my turn to join the group and sing Goin’ Home, I was worn out from the long wait and lack of food. So, I don’t think I did as well with the song as during the rehearsal. But still, I felt good about it, hit the high notes well, and kept from crying. Before I sang and just before the Benediction by Rev. Beal, Nicolette Corrao gave a powerfully beautiful performance of Gounod’s Ave Maria.

Finally, Ben Tucker III gave inspirational and profound Closing Remarks and everyone held hands for the closing prayer about the importance of our mutual love. We were all eager after this to sample the great supplies of food put together downstairs by church member Kathi Pewitt and her helpers.

Juan Cole posts a great visual history of Middle Eastern empires beginning about 1800 BC. This is the YouTube version of the Maps of War with a neat musical accompaniment add-on:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The above poem, Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley is perhaps appropriate, as Juan points out.

Richard (Rev. Richard Beal, UU minister) had a great service at church today. He read a number of fine poems written by veterans of various wars. But the one poem that really got to me was done as a responsive reading. This was the powerful poem by Stephen Spender, The Truly Great. Here it is:

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields
See how these names are feted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s center.
Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honor.

This to me is a strong anti-war poem because it’s a poem for the greatness of life, honoring those who immerse themselves totally in passion for life and song and love. Their lives are brief because of the intensity, the fire that touches their lips and hearts. As the closing lines say, they travel a short while towards the sun and leave that vivid air signed with their honor. This in a sense may apply to all of us, and certainly to those young soldiers whose lives are cut off too soon by senseless war.

Brian Turner is a soldier-poet who had a year-long tour in Iraq as an infantry team leader. He has a new book out called Here, Bullet. Here’s the title poem from the book:

If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta’s opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,
that inexorable flight, that insane puncture
into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish
what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering
my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends, every time.

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

That’s the great poem by John Donne. Many years ago when I was in the choir of John Woodworth at the Arlington Street Church in Boston, we sang an anthem with those words, but I can’t remember now who wrote that music. Powerful indeed.

Whenever I get into my “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” mood, my Dylan Thomas “Rage, rage against the dying of the light!” mode, I think of the little horse that gave his harness bells a shake. You know, that famous poem by Robert Frost, “Stopping By The Woods On A Snowy Evening”, which I’ve memorized:

Whose woods these are I think I know,
His house is in the village though,
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep
But I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

This meditation was provided by the Reverend Glenn Turner at our Sunday Service in Norway, Maine, on March 18.

Let us join in meditation - spoken and silent:

When you can look into the visions you experience and recognize they are
composed of the same pure light as everything else in the universe, you will
be liberated. No matter where or how far you wander, the light is only a
split second, a half a breath away. It is never too late to recognize the
clear light. It is our calling and our home.

This seems to be a kind of Buddhist meditation. When the mind is finally cleared of all the busy thoughts that keep coming and going, being replaced by new thoughts, when the mind finally rises above all that and “sees the light”, then we are “home”. Can this really happen?

Well, I can say I’ve never experienced Nirvana. But I do like the idea of light being transcendent and the idea of experiencing transformation. Not that it’s ever happened to me. Well, maybe as a small child I could and did feel at one with the universe at times.

Oh, at other times I still feel an awe in the face of the question, Why? Why are we here? Why is there anything at all? But I’ve already spoken about this in a previous post.