The release date (Nov. 14) for my latest poetry collection, Almost Entirely, is almost here, I have been sharing a bit of the book. Poems are grouped in four sections: When the Wing Gives Way, Something for Us to Stand On, One Hundred Footsteps, and Like Light Through the Branches.
 
Here the link to a poem from the second section: “Something For Us To Stand On.” Poems in this section dwell in puzzlement and joy while reflecting on human affairs.
 
The poem, “Urine of Cows Fed on Mango Leaves” is inspired by a 2015 exhibition at Baltimore’s The Walters Art Museum (Pearls on a String: Artists, Patrons and Poets at the Great Islamic Courts). Off to the edge of one small gallery, an amazing case featured the raw pigments used to create so many of the vivid illuminated images featured in the exhibition. One of the stunning piles was a bright, rich yellow with a tag that said Indian Yellow is made from the urine of cows fed on mango leaves.
 
I am puzzled and delighted by human inventiveness. Many of our creations are dangerous, many are wondrous. How, I imagined, did that Indian Yellow actually come into being? This poem is my imagining: 
 
Urine of Cows Fed on Mango Leaves
 
 
Imagine the discovery. Food being scarce, a herder
       gathered the shiny leaves that had fallen
from the single courtyard tree and threw them down
       among the hooves.
 
The beasts were glad for it, something other than
      scraping for the few tufts left in the dust where
they were staked. And they gorged and chewed,
      chewed and grunted throughout the night.
 
The next day, the herder—or maybe his children
      passing time among the flies — stepped back
when the first rump arched, letting loose its stream.
     And the second and third. Great pools of sunshine
 
graced the sand and muck. Someone used a stick
      to stir the stuff, someone else scooped it up and
spread it on a leather scrap, just to fool with it, just to
       see what it would become. When the Minister
 
of Painted Books came to collect his milk, he pinched
       a bit between his finger and his thumb. He gasped
as if the clouded heavens opened for the lighted one.
      The herder and his family became famous in the town.
 
Priests and artists came for more from miles around.
They planted two more trees and purchased three more cows.
 

As the release date (Nov. 14) for my latest poetry collection, Almost Entirely, approaches, I’d like to share a sense of the book and its arcs. Poems are grouped in four sections: When the Wing Gives Way, Something for Us to Stand On, One Hundred Footsteps, and Like Light Through the Branches. Each week until the book's release, I will post another poem.
 
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Poems in “When the Wing Gives Way,” the first section of Almost Entirely, represent a “coming-out” for me. Many poems in this section are expressions of faith and doubt. These themes may have always informed my poems, but never as overtly as they do here. This one, “The Wind of God…” takes as its title a line from the Book of Genesis (1:2).
 
I am always wondering which pronoun to use when referring to God. It is sometimes “he” or “she” or “they” or even “It.” Until recently, God was for me an “It,” a limitless, anonymous (but upper case) expanse that incorporates everything. I am coming lately into an awareness of a personal, less abstract, relation with God. Here is the poem:
 
The Wind of God…
 
…moved over the face of the waters. And after reading this,
the awareness that, more than once,
God has turned my head in the right direction,
yet I haven’t seen the gesture for what it is.
 
The world charges and is charged with a white-hot flame.
I might turn away, but each morning my head is turned for me
toward a crow’s flight, squirrel passage, or a person
with whom I share an ever-present reaching toward.
I let myself be turned sometimes. Sometimes
I get into my car and drive away.
 
Today I picture God’s hand cupped atop my head --
a quiet turning and then receding.
We are ‘fine’ with each other. This god has all the time in the world.

I shall make a practice of seeing people as they are. Flannery O’Connor said—rightly so—that it takes reciprocity and risk. Reminds me of a hymn we sing: “Take me, take me as I am.” To take others, to be taken as is, entails danger of upsetting all apple carts.
 
If I adopt these ideas in my relationships with others, communication might be better. Taking others as they are, where they are, means letting go of judgments and my controlling images of what I need them to be or to do for my own comfort.
 
But how does this work with abhorrent people and behaviors? White supremacists. All haters. Trigger-happy world leaders. If I work to see them with my heart [until the 1400’s the word ‘vision’ referred exclusively to sight with the mind’s eye—prophetic, mystical revelation or contemplation], I can blend empathy for their anger with a sense of their woundedness, while not condoning the cruelty they demonstrate by their church bombs or hate speech. And what might happen if this manner of seeing becomes mutual?
 
When I bother to quiet my own insistent voice and visions, to ask with authentic interest about another’s state of mind, or to ask the other to do so for me—will tensions de-escalate? We might be able to till in a new garden where insight flourishes alongside the thorns. Yet, tribe against tribe seems to be our forever fate. It all begins with me.
 
 
 
 
Inspired by the recent Commonweal article “Seeing is Believing” by Cassandra Nelson.
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/seeing-believing
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My partner is undergoing chemotherapy for an aggressive breast cancer. I still come up short of breath when saying those words. And I am reluctant to bring this part of my personal life into this blog. Yet, every bone and nerve in my body says that--to be an honest writer--I need to be there 100% with my whole being. Avoiding my daily and hourly participation in her diagnosis and care would be a sham.

Nausea, fatigue and moodiness are our roommates. We live with contradictory partners: hope and poison. Where does stamina come from? What about grace? Pure will. Steel thread, Steel cable. Girder. Thin strand again.

Our survivor friend finds her power as researcher. My partner ignores all scientific reports, medical journals and pilots her small ship by attending to what is in front of her each hour. Each day. Each minute of each hour of each day.

I am the chart reader, forecast receiver. I catalogue everything but do not share unless asked. Forever processing—a feeble microchip. Calculating, relaying, paraphrasing, converting to plain speech the most convoluted and contradicting.

No, I am the ballast. Below decks. Storm-tossed and coming back to center again and again. 

 Today I started to prepare for my fall semester classes. I browsed a file of images I’ve collected over the years, hoping to find a few to use in my critical thinking class (with first semester college students).
 
I was simultaneously thinking about my latest project (THE BEAUTY PROJECT), a collection of ideas about beauty from people of all walks of life and from all cultural traditions. And, then I found these two images and I thought: “Are either of these beautiful?” “How might we talk about each of them or about them together as a diptych?”
They were taken at the time of the 2015 uprising in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray and in 2016 during a Black Lives Matter protest in Baton Rouge.
 
It was, as artist Makato Fujimura proposes, “a generative moment,” a moment when a still, small urging arises from who knows where—exactly—but from somewhere nonetheless, a moment that asked for something from me and that received my longings. It is a risky moment to talk about publically. Because the idea of beauty is problematic—it points us to relativism, to distasteful and damaging impulses as well as to deep connectivity and caring. Fujimura links generative thinking and attention to beauty to something he calls “Culture Care,” a care for the world and all its sources of beauty and strife, a call to make culture inhabitable.
 
            Culture Care ultimately results in a generative cultural environment:
            open to questions of meaning, reaching beyond mere survival, inspiring
            people to meaningful action, and leading toward wholeness and harmony.
            It produces thriving cross-generational community. To make culture            
            inhabitable, to make it a place of nurture for creativity, we must all choose
            to give away beauty gratuitously. “Gratuitous” can be a negative word, as in            
           “gratuitous violence,” but here I am using it to speak of intentionality, and
            even forcefulness, which, as we will see in later chapters, is necessary in
            our deeply fragmented culture. I will also be looking at how the reality of            
            beauty can help integrate such fragmentation.
 
And so, I propose my question again: “Are either of these images beautiful?” If you are inspired to comment here, please also consider adding your name to the growing, world-wide list of BEAUTY PROJECT contributors. You can do that here on this blog-page. Please rest assured that I will never share our e-mail address with any third party. It will be used only by me to send you quarterly updates.

Wheaton College professor, Clyde S. Kirby, distributed his “Eleven Resolutions to Guide Life” to his students at the start of each term. Resolution #7 begins with this sentence, I shall open my eyes and ears….and it continues: Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud, or a person. I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are but simply be glad that they are. I shall joyfully allow them the mystery of what Lewis calls their “divine, magical, terrifying, and ecstatic” existence.
 
As I read this again today, I am reminded of 2008, the year the great recession hit, when one of my sons, a recent art school graduate, said, “Somewhere along the line beauty became a cop-out, a word synonymous with vacancy.” He jolted me, a punch to my gut…my gorgeous, soulful son uttered those sad words. That very day I started an inquiry whose goal was to collect other thoughts about the big idea of beauty. I called it “The Beauty Project.” Contributors run the gamut: poets, artists, plumbers, doctors, etc. You can check out the comments here.
 
After a long hiatus, amidst so much ugliness, it seems now a good time to reinstate “The Beauty Project.” I invite you to share your thoughts by visiting my website and adding your comments to this blog post.
 
I will collect comments periodically and will post updates via my site, Facebook & Twitter. Additionally, you will see a place on the blog page for you to add your e-mail address. By adding your e-mail, you’ll receive occasional updates and reading/listening/viewing suggestions gleaned from The Beauty Project’s database. You can trust that I will never share your address with third parties of any kind.
 
And, please pass the link to your friends, neighbors, colleagues. Let’s widen the circle.
 

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​http://thepagename.blogspot.com

This is  a really great website for poets and writers and readers. So much to explore.  Here's a little tidbit from today's page

"Churchyard was no less keen on the use of words as weapons. Woodcock finds that his “dominant character” is “Churchyard the complainant or petitioner”, adopted right from his first publication, Davy Dycars Dreame (1551). Emulating Langland and Skelton, he sets out the social and economic grievances of the common man (in this case a “dyker”, a ditcher or labourer) in a broadside poem which provoked a print controversy comprising sixteen further works by various authors." Helen Hackett TLS

"Well the sonnet is an obsessional form. Its intellectual skeleton is opposition, its form is imbalance, the impatient compression of its concluding section (whether six, four, three or two lines) always leaving a question only temporarily settled, so the writer is invited or compelled to return to the charge, as in a domestic argument: “ … And another thing”. Eilean Ni Chuilleanain DRB

"The curse poem is a well-known Irish literary genre, especially in the Gaelic tradition Hartnett inherited through his Kerry-born grandmother, one of the last native Irish speakers in west Limerick." Frank McNally Irish Times