A poem from Jericho Brown’s 2020Pulitzer Prize winning book The Traditionwent viral earlier this year as police violence against People of Color continues unabated despite years of Black Lives Matter protests.  It has even more relevance in the current moment as the trial of Derek Chauvin  for the Murder of George Floyd winds down in Minneapolis, new protests erupt over the impossibly accidental shooting of  Daunte Wright in the neighboring suburb of Brooklyn Center, and outrage pours into the streets of Chicago after the murder of a Brown child,  Adam Toledo, in Little Village.

He was born Nelson Demery III. on April 14, 1976 and was raised in Shreveport, Louisiana.  Brown later changed his name and graduated from Dillard University in the fall of and went on to earn  Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from the University of New Orleans and a Ph.D. from the University of Houston.  He went on to a distinguished academiccareer at  University of Houston from 2002 to 2007 as avisiting professor at San Diego State University's MFA program in 2009, and an assistant professor ofEnglish at the University of San Diego.

He has been much honored as a rising poet.  In 2011, Brown received the  National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. His verse has appeared in The Iowa Review, jubilat, The Nation, New England Review, The New Republic, Oxford American, The New Yorker, Enkare Review, and The Best American Poetry. He serves as an Assistant Editor at Callaloo.

His first book, Please published in 2008 won the American Book Award.  His second, The New Testament, from 2014 won the 2015 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.  The Tradition earned even higher accolades.

Brown is a 45 year old Black poet who also happens to be Gay and lives with HIV/AIDES, a check list of things that put him at heightened risk of violent victimization.

Bullet Points

I will not shoot myself

In the head, and I will not shoot myself

In the back, and I will not hang myself

With a trashbag, and if I do, 

I promise you, I will not do it

In a police car while handcuffed

Or in the jail cell of a town

I only know the name of

Because I have to drive through it

To get home. Yes, I may be at risk,

But I promise you, I trust the maggots

Who live beneath the floorboards

Of my house to do what they must

To any carcass more than I trust

An officer of the law of the land

To shut my eyes like a man

Of God might, or to cover me with a sheet

So clean my mother could have used it

To tuck me in. When I kill me, I will

Do it the same way most Americans do, 

I promise you: cigarette smoke

Or a piece of meat on which I choke

Or so broke I freeze 

In one of these winters we keep

Calling worst. I promise if you hear

Of me dead anywhere near

A cop, then that cop killed me. He took 

Me from us and left my body, which is, 

No matter what we've been taught, 

Greater than the settlement

A city can pay a mother to stop crying,

And more beautiful than the new bullet

Fished from the folds of my brain.

        —Jericho Brown 

Before the Coronavirus pandemic changed everything, McHenry County in Chicago’s far northwest boonies was the home of a perhaps surprising serious outbreak of poetry.  Several venues held regular readings or programs that included verse.  A long running series at the Raue Center had just concluded but monthly programs at McHenry’s hip coffee house the Hidden Pearl more than took up that slack.  The Atrocious Poets group hosted programs at the Old McHenry County Court House in Woodstock as well as offering developmental programs for local poets.  Stage Left by the Woodstock Opera House featured poetry and spoken word at monthly events curatedby story teller Jim May and musician Cassandra Vohs-Demann.  Poets turned up at the estimable local independent bookseller Between the Lynes.  Poetry was always included at Coffee House Open Mics at Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregations and a student coffee houses at McHenry County College,

Tree of Life was just about to host a major event, Poets in Resistance II which had to be cancelledjust three days before it was scheduledwhen the state went into lockdownlast March.

Since then crickets and home bound poets with plenty of time to work and themes and angst to explore with no outlet for their words.  Until now!

Kenneth Balmes and Patrick Murfin are cracking the door with a program at Warp Corps, 114 North Benton Street in Woodstock this evening, April 14 from 7 to 9 pm.  Poets are encouraged to bring those pent-up versesto share for the Open Mic.  Hopefully this will be the first in a new regular series.

Covid-19 precautions will be observed.  Masks are required and seating will be spacedfor social distance.  In keeping with current guidelines for indoor events, attendance will be limited to 20.

The reading is free and open to the public.  Coffee and water will be available.  Guests can bring other non-alcoholic beverages of their own.

Michael McClure was there—an attendant the birth when the squalling slippery babe nearly fell to the floor before ardent arms saved it.  Which is to say that he was one of the five young, obscure poets who read in the smoky confines of San Francisco’s Gallery Six on October 7, 1955. That was the famed event where Kenneth Rexroth, a Bay Area bohemian bard of an earlier generation, introduced largely unheralded young poets Allen Ginsberg, Philip Lamantia, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, as well as McClure.  Famously it is where Ginsberg first read Howl.  A drunk Jack Kerouac refused to read his own work but cheered the other poets on, shouting “Yeah! Go! Go!” during their performances. It was a memorable moment and was almost instantly mythologized as the “Birth of the Beat.”

McClure went on to be a continued counter-cultural presence in the Rock & Roll era hobnobbing and collaborating with the likes of Bob Dylan, the Doors, and others.

McClure, poet, playwright, novelist, and documentary filmmaker was born in Marysville, Kansas on October 20, 1932 and raised there and in Seattle. He was educated at the University of Wichita, the University of Arizona, and San Francisco State College—where he studied with poet Robert Duncan.

He was the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Persian Pony (2017), Mephistos and Other Poems (2016), Of Indigo and Saffron(2011), Mysteriosos and Other Poems(2010), Rebel Lions (1991), and The New Book/A Book of Torture(1961).  

“McClure’s poetry combined spontaneity, typographical experimentation, Buddhist practice, and body language in performance to merge the ecstatic and the corporeal,” according to his Poetry Foundation bio.  Publishers Weekly noted of his work, “McClure infuses ecstatic direct address and colloquial diction with an exquisite sensibility, one that reveals the world in its ordinary complex gorgeousness.”  He frequently performed his poetry with musical collaborators, including composer Terry Riley, and recorded several CDs with Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek.

He wrote more than 20 plays and musicals, several television documentaries, and the song Mercedes Benz, which was made famous by Janis Joplin. His 1965 play The Beard, which depicted an imagined sexual encounterbetween Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid, gained notoriety when it was unsuccessfully brought to trial on charges of obscenity.  Kerouac based the character Pat McLear on him in his autobiographical novel Big Sur.

McClure's honors included a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Alfred Jarry Award, a Rockefeller grant for playwriting, and an Obie Award for Best Play.

McClure taught poetry at California College of the Arts for over 40 years. He lived in Oakland with his wife, the sculptor Amy Evans McClure, before his death on May 4, 2020 in 2020 at age 87.

McClure burst on the scene reading this poem at the Gallery Six event.

For the Death of 100 Whales

In April, 1954, Time magazine described seventy-nine bored American G.I.s stationed at a NATO base in Iceland murdering a pod of one hundred killer whales. In a single morning the soldiers, armed with rifles, machine guns, and boats, rounded up and then shot the whales to death.

Hung midsea

Like a boat mid-air

The liners boiled their pastures:

The liners of flesh,

The Arctic steamers

Brains the size of a teacup

Mouths the size of a door

The sleek wolves

Mowers and reapers of sea kine.

THE GIANT TADPOLES

(Meat their algae)

Leapt

Like sheep or children.

Shot from the sea’s bore.

Turned and twisted

(Goya!!)

Flung blood and sperm.

Incense.

Gnashed at their tails and brothers

Cursed Christ of mammals,

Snapped at the sun,

Ran for the Sea’s floor.

Goya! Goya!

—Michael McClure

The Chamber, dedicated to Kerouac, was included in McClure’s Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems published in 2011.

The Chamber

for Jack Kerouac

IN LIGHT ROOM IN DARK HELL IN UMBER IN CHROME,

     I sit feeling the swell of the cloud made about by movement

                 of arm leg and tongue. In reflections of gold

           light. Tints and flashes of gold and amber spearing

                     and glinting. Blur glass…blue Glass,

             black telephone. Matchflame of violet and flesh

                 seen in the clear bright light. It is not night

                and night too. In Hell, there are stars outside.

            And long sounds of cars. Brown shadows on walls

                                       in the light

                           of the room. I sit or stand

                 wanting the huge reality of touch and love.

            In the turned room. Remember the long-ago dream

   of stuffed animals (owl, fox) in a dark shop. Wanting

             only the purity of clean colors and new shapes

                                     and feelings.

                 I WOULD CRY FOR THEM USELESSLY

                   I have ten years left to worship my youth

                      Billy the Kid, Rimbaud, Jean Harlow

  IN DARK HELL IN LIGHT ROOM IN UMBER AND CHROME I

                                                                                            feel the swell of

smoke the drain and flow of motion of exhaustion, the long sounds of cars

                                                                                                     the brown shadows

on the wall. I sit or stand. Caught in the net of glints from corner table to

                                                                                                                       dull plane

from knob to floor, angles of flat light, daggers of beams. Staring at love’s face.

      The telephone in cataleptic light. Marchflames of blue and red seen in the

                                                                                                                            clear grain.

I see myself—ourselves—in Hell without radiance. Reflections that we are.

              The long cars make sounds and brown shadows over the wall.

                               I am real as you are real whom I speak to.

                   I raise my head, see over the edge of my nose. Look up

                    and see that nothing is changed. There is no flash

                            to my eyes. No change to the room.

    Vita Nuova—No! The dead, dead world.

                     The strain of desire is only a heroic gesture.

                       An agony to be so in pain without release

                             when love is a word or kiss.

—Michael McClure

These two poems are personal.  Sort of.  They were not written to or about me and the poets presumably are totally unaware of my existence on the planet.  But each provided an ah-ha moment of personal recognition for me as a person of advancing age in increasing decrepitude.

Sydney Lea is a poet, novelist, essayist, editor, and professor, and was the Poet Laureate of Vermont from 2011 to ‘15.  His most recent book is The Exquisite Triumph of Wormboy, a graphic mock-epic poemin collaboration with former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate James Kochalka—how utterly Vermont to have a Cartoonist Laureate.   His thirteenth collection of poetry, Here was published 2019.  He founded New England Review in 1977 and edited it till 1989. His work has appeared in literary journals and magazinesincluding The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, and Virginia Quarterly Review.  Lea has taught for the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program at Dartmouth College, and at Yale University, Wesleyan University, Vermont College, Middlebury College, Franklin University Switzerland, and the National Hungarian University.

Reckoning struck me first because it opens in the state of my birth under the vast starry sky of the West that was such a part of my childhood and then because it shifts to the lights of a big city—Gotham for him, the Windy City for me.  I have no son, but daughters, I hear their voices—the bored indifference to those same Montana mountains and eagerness to find a mall—any mall—in the small towns among the pine smells.  The childrenof those two eldest daughters are grown now and one has a laughing toddler of his own.  My third and youngest lives with us now with her baby daughter.  I wonder if Matilda will walk by the hand with me to find the elf doorin a rotting tree in a remnant wood or a flop-eared rabbit in a cage.  I, too, feel some sort of transgenerational connection.

Reckoning

Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

         —Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader

Once, on the steps of a cabin in wild Montana,

just before dawn I stood stunned

by that delirium of stars.

I’ve looked from a friend’s apartment in New York

at nine o’clock in the evening,

likewise astounded by countless windows.

Light everywhere. Light everywhere. And dark.

Coleridge opined that the sublime

can make us feel like nothing.

I’m sure I’d have known as much without him.

The older I become the less I aim

at epic self-expression.

It’s best, I think, as I didn’t always,

to keep my counsel in face of sights and themes

that lie beyond my ken, right where they’ve lain

lifelong, though once ambition

obscured all that. But I check myself:

I’m no more nothing, in fact, than anybody.

My memory feels boundless,

and if it fetches no sublime,

still moments may be fashioned into stories.

As randomly as I might choose a star

or a single light from some high-rise,

I summon a time—or it summons me—

when I and my son, then just three years old,

walked through a patch of woods

to spy on a hidden beaver pond.

I longed for this adventure to unfold

exactly as it did. The wind came right,

and just enough of day

remained for both of us to see

three beavers swimming, a mere five feet from where

we crouched in pond-side reeds.

Clear as judgment in my mind,

the rasp of roost-bound crows, thick August air,

that tannic orange of the cruising rodents’ teeth.

My son appeared transported

as we left the place by early starlight.

“How was it?” asked his mother back at home.

“Oh, Mom! You should have seen!

There were some bugs in the water! They all were swimming!

All of them were swimming around and around!”

In my twenties then, I didn’t know

how not to feel let down.

I know some things today, that is,

that compensate for slackened aspiration.

That child is forty-seven,

his children much older than he was then.

I study my boy. I’m lost in speculation:

I resembled him, I hope, in intending kindness.

In my case, though, vague zeal

distracted my heart and mind and soul.

He’s taking his daughter to ski this afternoon.

They’ll command an epic view,

yet it may be only the shape of a mogul

or cloud that, come the evening, she’ll retain.

And my son? He has perhaps already traveled

like me to where all types of light are local.

— Sydney Lea

The next poem was shared just yesterday on Facebook by my best friend from high school, Jonathan Ben Gordon, now a retired Cantor. 

Camisha L. Jones is the author of the chapbook Flare published by Finishing Line Press in 2017. She received of a 2017 Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship from the Loft Literary Center.  She currently serves as the managing director at Split This Rock, a national nonprofit that cultivates, teaches, and celebrates poetry that bears witness to injustice and provokes social change.  According to the Deaf Poets Society blog Jones “lives with fibromyalgia, Ménière's Disease, and an adamant commitment to keep her writing lifefrom scorching on the back burner.”  She lives in Herndon, Virginia.

At first glance it would seem that I would not have much in common with a young deaf Black poet.  Certainly I am not deaf but I am hard of hearing due to prolonged exposure to industrial noise and ear-bleeding rock and roll as a young man.  Before I finally got hearing aids I had plenty of those I’m-sorry-I-can’t-hear-you moments, especially when clerking overnight at a gas station/convenience store  to exasperated customers whose lottery and cigarette requests I could not quite make out.  Equally annoyedwas my wife who got tired of repeating herself over and over.  Things are mostly better now if I “have my ears in.”  But why the hell do they whisper on all of my favorite TV dramas?  And last week I must have said “huh?” a dozen times to my fellow activists at a Cancel the ICE Contract in McHenry County action.  And don’t get me started on garbled phone calls. 

Disclosure

I’m sorry, could you repeat that. I’m hard of hearing.

To the cashier

To the receptionist

To the insistent man asking directions on the street

I’m sorry, I’m hard of hearing. Could you repeat that?

At the business meeting

In the writing workshop

On the phone to make a doctor’s appointment

I’m-sorry-I’m-sorry-I’m-so-sorry-I’m-hard-for-the-hearing

Repeat.

           Repeat.

Hello, my name is Sorry

To full rooms of strangers

I’m hard to hear

I vomit apologies everywhere

They fly on bat wings

towards whatever sound beckons

I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry

           and repeating

                       and not hearing

Dear (again)

I regret to inform you

I       am

here

—Camisha L. Jones

The other day it was siblings day on Facebook and I shared old photos of my Twin Brother Timothy who died on Valentine’s Day in 2004, 17 years ago now.  We had a complicated relationship. 

His short obit in the Chicago Tribune read:

Timothy Peter Murfin, 54, formerly of Chicago, IL and Portland, OR, died in Cincinnati, OH on Feb. 14. Born in Twin Bridges, MT on March 17, 1949 to Willard M. Murfin and Ruby Irene, nee Mills, Murfin, who have both preceded him in death. Survived by children Ira Samuel Murfin of Chicago and Shani Colleen Menz-Murfin of New York City; brother Patrick Murfin (Kathy) of Crystal Lake, IL; stepmother Rae Murfin of Alberton, MT; former spouse Arlene (Packer) Brennan (Michael) of Chicago; former longtime companions Luanne Menz of Georgia and Normandie Nunez of Portland, OR; and three nieces. Memorial service is pending in Chicago.

I was working alone at Briargate Schoolin Cary, Illinois where I was head building custodian.  It was a Saturday, but a basketball program used the gymfrom 8 am to 9 pm.  I had to be there and was little resentful of not spending Valentine’s Day with my wife.  I was shampooing hall carpetswhich were encrusted by tracked mudand salt from a winter’s worth of boots.  About 7 pm I got a call on my cell phone, a new-to-me gizmo that seldom went off.  It was from Kathy with the news that my brother was dead.

It was a shock, but oddly not totally unexpected in that he had abused his body with alcohol and a virtual pharmacopeia of self-prescribed medication for many years.  I was stunned, but went through the motions until the last kid and the last chatty parent was finally locked out of the building.

Two or three days later I was in a cardriven by Ira S. Murfin,  Peter’s—he preferred to be called Peter, the Biblical name he had adopted upon entering a religious order years before—son.  My middle daughter Heather Larsen was with us.  We were driving through the night to Cincinnati to make final arrangements and collect whatever was in his “estate”—the few personal belongings he had hauled with him to Ohio after his virtual exile from Oregon.  An odd conversation we had in that car—maybe more of a rambling monologue by me, would become the gist of the opening words of a memorial poem.  More about that later.

The two of us were adopted at birth by W.M. and Ruby Irene Murfin.  Despite being twins, we were not identical.  In fact in many ways we could not have been more different.  Tim was dark haired and so good looking as a child that women stopped my mother on the street to compliment her.  I was larger, blond, and from the beginning oafish.  In school I was simultaneously a loud know-it-all showing off all of the hours of reading I did while still managing to fail at math and spelling.  I had no friends and was a magnet for bullies.

Tim was not a star student or an athlete.  None-the-less exuded a kind of charisma.  Other kids swirled around him, naturally following his interests.  From always being Roy Rogers in the neighborhood cowboy games, to being the 12-year-old leader of Cheyenne’s sidewalk surfers, to being the first guy in town with a Beatle haircutand Nehru jacket he was popular and naturally had the prettiest girlfriends.

When we moved to Skokie and Niles West High School he and his willowy girlfriend were elected to Prom court.  He planned to be a radio disc jockey and got himself gigs hosting sock hops and basement parties with his portable record player and boxes of 45s.

I was into newspaper, theater, and increasingly radical politics.  Tim got interested in religion and was soon a leader in Young Life, a denizen of church basement coffee houses, and talking about becoming a minister.  Always, a gaggle of kids followed him.

I went away to college at Shimer.  Tim stayed home, mostly to keep his adoring posse together.  He attended Kendal College, a two year school in Evanston.  I came home a long haired, dope smoking hippy and draft dodger.  It turns out he had discovered marijuana too and the use of hallucinogens as spiritual practice.

After I left Shimer and moved to Chicago, I lived with him a couple of times.  Each time he had a full house of roommates and acolytes.  I was the improvident brother he found space for in an unheated room off of an Old Town kitchen or the unfinished basement of a Rogers Park townhouse.  By then he had grown a patriarchal beard and seemed to be gathering his own hippy cult, which would literally gather at his feet as he smoked a fat one and waxed beatifically on arcane mysteries.

Tim married Arlene, a very nice young woman who worshiped him.  She followedhim into an outfit called the Holy Order of Mans, which practiced some sort of mystical catholicism with a small c.  He took the name Peter—the Rock of the Church.  Together they were sent on mission to California.  A few years late Arlene returned to Chicago with their toddler son Ira.

Peter drifted out of the Order and pursued various spiritual paths with complete earnestness.  He lived in Portland and had a day job at an early big box hardware store.  But he yearned to be a saint.  He found folks who thought he might be.  Got into another relationship, had a daughter, Shani and lost that family to boutsof depression and heavy drinking and self-medication.

He cleaned himself up in AA and characteristically became a star.  Soon he was speaking all over Oregon and northern California and re-inventinghimself as a spiritually based addiction councilor.  He was making big plans and chasing various gurusand guides looking more for tips on how to become one of them than for enlightenment.  Or so it seemed to me from my great distance in Chicago when he would phone with plans.

Eventually he became a substance abuse specialistwith the county department of probation.  He entered another relationship with an adoring older woman with a teen age daughter.  But the depression never went away and he fell off the wagon in secret repeatedly.  Each episodebecame more intense.  It became harder to hide.

In all of those years I saw Peter only three times.  We came to Missouri where he was asked as an ordained priest by my fatherto conduct my mother’s funeral.  He did so with grace, although his relationship with my father was strained.  It would become an obsession which he would pour out to me in drunken middle-of-the-night telephone calls.

In the summer of 1983 just after Kathy and my daughter Maureen was born, Peter stayed with us for a week.  It was also his first visit with his ex-wife and son.  He showed up trim, tanned, and handsome.  His black beard was neatly trimmed, his hair barberedto a fare-thee-well, his clothes West Coast casual sharp.  I was still a scraggly post-hippy in thrift shop clothes and a cowboy hat.  I had the family reputation, well earned, as a heavy drinker.  I did nothing to hide it. Peter was supposedly sober.  But Kathy walked in on him pulling from the fifth of whiskey he had hidden in is bag.  It turned out he was killing a bottle a day or more but never actually seemed drunk.

The last time I saw him alive was after we had moved to Crystal Lake.  He was back for another visit to Ira and spent most of his time in Chicago, but came up for a couple of days with us.  By this time he was in rougher shape.  He ambled over to St. Thomas Church across the street where Kathy was an active parishioner and RE volunteer, to ask the Priest for permission to say a private mass at their altar.  He explained that he was also “an ordained Priest in the Higher Order of Melchizedek” and required to say mass daily.  He was upset that he was turned down, saying that some priest pal in Portland had let him use his church.  He made Kathy and the girls uncomfortable.

Back in Portland his life slowly unraveled.  The relapses became more frequent, the depression blacker.  He wrecked cars, lost his job.  Normandie stood by him as long as she could, and supportedhim in the later years.  But in the end he wrecked that, too.  He exiledhimself to a closet of a room in Eugene where some former acolytes tried to help him.  He burned through that, too.

He was virtually homeless and on the run from the law for failure to pay fines for his traffic accidents.  David Sellers, an old friend who he had met hangingout at WLS radio studios while he was in high school and who had lived with us in that Old Town apartment, offered him a bed in suburban Cincinnati.  He was reportedly trying to get himself together and was apparently sober.  He had settled into regular Catholic worship, but he still received tons of mail from all of the cults and gurus he had associated himself with.  Although he couldn’t find work, he finally got qualified for Social Security Disability.  Just after accomplishing that he came home one day, sat down on his bed and died of a massive heart attack.

To our amazement, drugs were not directly involved, except that long abuse had generally wrecked his health.

Ira, Heather, and I arranged to have him crematedand gathered the boxes of his life timewhich were crammed in the closet and under the bed of his room.  Tons of mystical books, art work, beads, crystals, candles, vestments, journals in his meticulous calligraphy.  We packed the urn and the stuff and returned to Chicago.  The stuff mostly went into storage, Ira and I each keeping a few items.

We arranged for a Catholic funeral massat an old Polish parish just west of the Loop.  The Mass was said by, a Milwaukee priest and the brotherof Arlene’s second husband Michael Brennan.  It was solemn and holy and in a lovely old chapel.  Peter would have approved.  After the Mass folks got up to testify about him in one way or another.  When my turn came I read a suite of six elegies that I had been working on for weeks.  This is what I read:

Elegies for My Brother

Timothy Peter Murfin

March 17, 1949-February 14, 2004

I.

Hurtling down an Interstate on any black night,

say the route angling south southeast from Gary

for Indianapolis then slung around the racetrack

to Cincinnati, Queen City of the West,

you realize in an instant that this great gray marvel

was not constructed for the likes of us,

mere civilians on inconsequential errands

encapsulated in puny steel,

that it was wrought for Commerce,

for that endless caravan of behemoths

jeweled in red and yellow charging indefatigably

for endless rendezvous with profit,

and that our vagrant desires to come home or to escape,

to begin a new life or repeat by rote an established tedium,

to make love or to break tender hearts,

or on this one night in this one box loose amid that stream,

to unite the living with the dead,

seize an unworthy opportunity to tag along for the ride.

II.

Roy Rogers is dead.

The King of the Cowboys with his nickel plated, pearl handled revolvers

resplendent in pearl snap shirt and neckerchief

with a cockeyed and confident grin,

the hero of every summer morning adventure

with Dale Evans at his side

and Hopalong Cassidy on loan from the two reeler next door,

has fallen from Trigger,

Bullet noses his lifeless sprawl in the dust.

[Here sing Happy Trails to You]

Happy trails to you, until we meet again.

Happy trails to you, keep smiling’ on ‘till then.

Who cares about the clouds when we’re together?

Just sing a song and bring the sunny weather.

Happy trails to you, till we meet again.

Happy trails to you, ‘till we meet again.

III.

Youth bestows its virtues capriciously,

a dollop of beauty here, audacious valor there,

sweet innocence and brash confidence

doled out as if rationed by a miser,

many seeming to be passed over

and left with only churlish resentment,

bad skin and worse judgment.

But he stood beneath the fountain,

let its waters bathe him in every gift

a dark handsomeness,

a dj’s soothing voice,

charm,

charisma,

so that he dazzled his way through life,

gathering around him tight circles

not just of friends, but followers

who dreamed his dreams.

The hippy guru of Sheridan Road,

they gathered as acolytes at his feet

as he sat with Old Testament patriarchal beard,

eyes blazing one moment,

the beatific smile of yoga saint the next,

in hallucinogenic communion.

And I, no account wastrel with dim prospects,

swung on the icy path of an asteroid

orbiting far, far from that blazing Sol.

IV.

One year, just before Christmas,

he wrote from somewhere on the West Coast.

This year, could I send him a blank book,

bound in leather, hand stitched,

virgin velum pages waiting for his pen?

I want, he wrote, to be a Saint

and no mere tablet or collegiate spiral notebook

would be worthy of the great and inspirational words

which he would meticulously enter

in that fine calligraphic print he assumed.

It struck me, even in my heathen ignorance,

that saints had no ambition but simply were.

But I hunted through the stationers until I found the perfect journal,

inscribing on its fly leaf my own haughty judgment—

See Ecclesiastes, Chapter 1, Verse 2

Vanity of vanities saith the Preacher,

All is vanity.

V.

He took his religion like he took the whiskey

that he stashed,

straight from the bottle,

no ice, no diluting soda.

He demanded the real thing,

raw and powerful,

burning the throat on the way down

but leaving a warm belly glow.

He may have wandered here and there

amid crystals and pyramids,

astrologers and New Age frou-frou,

but settled only where the mysteries

were deep and hard.

For him no dallying among the ladies of

Saturday morning yoga and meditation,

no time for the plain/simple Buddhism

of the agnostic heart so embraced by

disappointed Western rationalists,

but the stern, demanding Tibetan school

with spinning prayer wheels,

real gods and real demons,

The Book of the Dead.

And no Vatican II Catholicism for him,

no priests in sweaters named Father Phil,

no guitar masses and suburban congregations in Ban Lon,

no cheap and easy grace,

only the penitent's worn out knees,

the endless rosaries endlessly repeated,

icons,

medals,

Holy Water,

the prophetic apparitions of Mary,

the stigmata of Padre Pio

in which, if he could,

he would dip his handkerchief

to press to his lips to kiss.

VI.

Something inside of him was broken.

He knew it and spent a questing life

trying to find it,

trying to fix it.

Was it some trauma of childhood,

inflicted by the fragile, damaged woman who raised us

or the god-like but distant father?

He often thought so, obsessed over each moment

of remembered agony and rejection,

taking the hard knocks of ordinary childhood

and building an edifice of unremitting pain,

unable to forget what he had constructed,

unable to forgive.

Or, now that Freud has been cast aside as Fraud,

was it just some accident of biochemistry,

a roll of the dice that elected him

by alchemy of genetic chance

to have neurons that misfire just so?

As a former Friend of Bill W

did he have to assume responsibility

and seize control of the disease himself,

or did the pickling years of hidden bottles,

the various stews of pharmaceuticals prescribed

and self-prescribed

finally overcome that mind?

Was it all three?

Does it matter?

He was broken and tried to repair himself as best he could

and in the process leaned how to balm the wounds

of other troubled souls,

but like the Physician, could not heal himself.

—Patrick Murfin

Even before the emergency there was an ongoing theological debate about whether the church is the building or the congregation.  Let’s split the difference and say it’s both.

The buildings in which we gatherand worship tell us a lot about the folks therein and perhaps their expectationsand hopes.  Should the building be a hymn and monument to God, or should it be a humble house for the faithful?  Christianity has tugged us both ways. 

Here are three takes on that.

Building Aix la Chapelle Grandes from the Chroniques-de-France

The 20th Century Welch poet John Ormond considered the masons and laborers who spent their whole lives building temples that their grandchildren might not see completed.

The Cathedral Builders

They climbed on sketchy ladders towards God,
with winch and pulley hoisted hewn rock into heaven,
inhabited the sky with hammers,
defied gravity,
deified stone,
took up God’s house to meet him,
and came down to their suppers
and small beer,
every night slept, lay with their smelly wives,
quarrelled and cuffed the children,
lied, spat, sang, were happy, or unhappy,
and every day took to the ladders again,
impeded the rights of way of another summer’s swallows,
grew greyer, shakier,
became less inclined to fix a neighbour’s roof of a fine evening,
saw naves sprout arches, clerestories soar,
cursed the loud fancy glaziers for their luck,
somehow escaped the plague,
got rheumatism,
decided it was time to give it up,
to leave the spire to others,
stood in the crowd, well back from the vestments at the consecration,
envied the fat bishop his warm boots,
cocked a squint eye aloft,
and said, “I bloody did that.”

—John Ormond

The American poet E. E. Cummings was the son of noted and scholarly Unitarian minister.  In his youth he rebelled against his father and his religion.  Late in life he reconsidered and re-connected with Unitarianism.  It was during that period he wrote this.

I am a little church (no great cathedral)

i am a little church (no great cathedral)

far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities

-i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest

i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower

my prayers are prayers of earth's own clumsily striving

(finding and losing and laughing and crying) children

whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around me surges a miracle of unceasing

birth and glory and death and resurrection:

over my sleeping self float flaming symbols

of hope and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

i am a little church (far from the frantic

world with its rapture and anguish) at peace with nature

-i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;

i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring, i lift my diminutive spire to

merciful Him Whose only now is forever:

standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence

(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)

—e. e. cummings

And finally, one from the Old Man,  the title poem in fact of my 2004 Skinner House collection.  This is the original version, slightly longer than it appeared in the book

We Build Temples in the Heart

We have seen the great cathedrals,

stone laid upon stone,

carved and cared for

by centuries of certain hands,

seen the slender minarets

soar from dusty streets

to raise the cry of faith

to the One and Only God,

seen the placid pagodas

where gilded Buddhas squat

amid the temple bells and incense.

We have seen the tumbled temples

half buried in the sands,

choked with verdant tangles,

sunk in corralled seas,

old truths toppled and forgotten,

even seen the wattled huts,

the sweat lodge hogans,

the wheeled yurts,

the Ice Age caverns

where unwritten worship

raised its knowing voices.

But here, we build temples in our hearts

side by side we come,

as we gather—

Here the swollen belly

and aching breasts

of a well-thumbed paleo-goddess,

there the spinning prayer wheels

of lost Tibetan lamaseries;

mix the mortar of the scattered dust

of the Holy of Holies

with the sacred water

of the Ganges;

lay Moorish alabaster

on the blocks of Angkor Wat

and rough-hewn Stonehenge slabs;

plumb Doric columns

for strength of reason,

square with stern Protestant planks;

illuminate with Chartres’

jeweled windows

and the brilliant lamps of science.

Yes here, we build temples in our hearts,

side by side we come,

scavenging the ages for wisdom,

cobbling together as best we may,

the fruit of a thousand altars,

leveling with doubt,

framing with skepticism,

measuring by logic,

sinking firm foundations in the earth

as we reach for the heavens.

Here, we build temples in our hearts,

side by side we come,

a temple for each heart,

a village of temples,

none shading another,

connected by well-worn paths,

built alike on sacred ground.

—Patrick Murfin

This week the Vogue unveiled it cover and a fashion spread by photographer Annie Leibovitz featuring young poet Amanda Gorman.  It was just the latest media coup for the 23 year old Phenom  who was profiledby Lin-Manuel Miranda for Time magazine’s 100 Next list and who rose to unprecedented public acclaim for her poem The Hill We Climb at Joe Biden’s inauguration.  Although that may have been her introduction to many Americans she already had many noteworthy accomplishmentsunder her chic belt.  Michael Cirelli, executive director of Urban Word NYC said in some awe  her “bio goes out of date every two weeks.”

The media savvy poet knows that in some circles her appearance as a fashionistawill be attacked as “selling out” her professed themes of Black pride and empowerment, feminism, and social justice.  Gorman could not care less.  She had been interested in fashion and design since her early teen years, self-curated the outfits she wore at readings as she climbed to fame, and had signed a modeling contract well before the inauguration,  As for selling, out Gorman clearly is not in it just for the money.  Shortly after the inauguration she said that she had already turned down $17 million in contract offers and endorsement deals.

Gorman, influenced by Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Audre Lorde more than the hip-hop poetry slam poets of her own generation, still has become the tip of a spear of young female Black bards who are making poetry an important and influential art form again after decades of being over shadowed by other literary forms and relegated to the margins of the culture.  Others in this new wave include international refugee poet Emi Mahamoud just a few years older than Gorman and several women who rose to attention as voices of the Black Lives Matter Movement.  If Gorman seems less radical than some and less strident, it is only by degrees and is the logical product of her unique biography.

Gorman was born in Los Angeles on March 7, 1988 and was raised by Joan Wicks, a single mother, a 6th-grade English teacher in Watts, She had two siblings including her twin sister, Gabrielle, who is now an activistand filmmaker She has described her young self as a “weird child” who enjoyed readingand writing and was encouraged by her mother.  She was brought up and remains a Black Catholic which has deeply influenced her social justice passion.

She an auditory processing disorder and is hypersensitive to sound and also had a speech impediment during childhood.  Gorman had speech therapy during her childhood.   Gorman told The Harvard Gazette in 2018:

 I always saw it as a strength because since I was experiencing these obstacles in terms of my auditory and vocal skills, I became really good at reading and writing. I realized that at a young age when I was reciting the Marianne Deborah Williamson quote that “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure” to my mom.

She also practiced singing Lin-Manuel Miranda’s song  Aaron Burr, Sir from  Hamilton because “it is jam-packed with R's. And I said, 'if I can keep up with Leslie in this track, then I am on my way to being able to say this R in a poem.”

Gorman attended New Roads, a private school in Santa Monica, and as senior, she received a Milken Family Foundation college scholarship. She studied sociology at Harvard graduating cum laude in 2020as a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

She was still in high school when she began reading her poetry in school and at community events.  She became a youth delegate to the United Nations in 2013 and was inspired and empowered to hear an address by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai.  The next year she was selected as the first youth poet laureate of Los Angeles. She published her first poetry book The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough in 2015. 

In 2017 she was named the first National Youth Poet Laureate and read her poem In This Place (An American Lyric) for her performance at the Library of Congress.  Shortly after she signed a contract to develop a children’s book which became Change Sings: A Children's Anthem which was released after her inaugural appearance.

While still at Harvard amid rising recognition she pointed out that her interests went beyond literary.  She wanted to be an agent for change and several times noted that she planned to run for President of the United States in 2036.  No one should discount her.  After hearing her inaugural poem Hillary Clinton  Tweeted her support.

In 2019, Gorman was chosen as one of The Root magazine’s “Young Futurists”, an annual list of “the 25 best and brightest young African-Americans who excel in the fields of social justice and activism, arts and culture, enterprise and corporate innovation, science and technology, and green innovation.” In 2020, Gorman presented Earthrise, an Earth Day poem focused on the climate crisis.  That May  she appeared in an episode of the web seriesSome Good News hosted by John Krasinski, where she virtually met Oprah Winfrey and issued a virtual commencement speech to those who could not attend graduation ceremoniesdue to the Coronavirus pandemic.

After her inauguration performance The Hill We Climb was issued a slender stand-alone book and a collection of the same title is slated for release this fall and has already appeared on Best Seller lists in pre-publication sales.

She was quickly tapped to compose and perform an original poem, titled Chorus of the Captains for  Super Bowl LV’s pregame ceremonial coin tossfeaturing honorary captains who were essential workers—James Martin, a U.S. Marine veteran; Trimaine Davis, an educator; and Suzie Dorner, an ICU nurse manager.  It certainly was something most football fans had never experienced and there was some blow back by white fans.  Gorman was glad to break down the silos of culture which prevent people from communicating meaningfully with each other.

But even triumphs like this can’t prevent the daily insults African-Americans have to face.  In March  Gorman said she was racially profiled by a security guard near her New York City apartment home, and Tweeted afterwards, “He left, no apology. This is the reality of black girls: One day you’re called an icon, the next day, a threat.”  She later Tweeted, “In a sense, he was right. I AM A THREAT: a threat to injustice, to inequality, to ignorance. Anyone who speaks the truth and walks with hope is an obvious and fatal danger to the powers that be. A threat and proud.”

What’s next for Gorman?  Who know except that it will likely  be unexpected, surprising, and entirely true to special vision.

Her inaugural poem has been so widely shared that today we will feature that 2017 Youth Poet Laureate verse.

In This Place (An American Lyric)

There’s a poem in this place—

in the footfalls in the halls

in the quiet beat of the seats.

It is here, at the curtain of day,

where America writes a lyric

you must whisper to say.

There’s a poem in this place—

in the heavy grace,

the lined face of this noble building,

collections burned and reborn twice.

There’s a poem in Boston’s Copley Square

where protest chants

tear through the air

like sheets of rain,

where love of the many

swallows hatred of the few.

There’s a poem in Charlottesville

where tiki torches string a ring of flame

tight round the wrist of night

where men so white they gleam blue—

seem like statues

where men heap that long wax burning

ever higher

where Heather Heyer

blooms forever in a meadow of resistance.

There’s a poem in the great sleeping giant

of Lake Michigan, defiantly raising

its big blue head to Milwaukee and Chicago—

a poem begun long ago, blazed into frozen soil,

strutting upward and aglow.

There’s a poem in Florida, in East Texas

where streets swell into a nexus

of rivers, cows afloat like mottled buoys in the brown,

where courage is now so common

that 23-year-old Jesus Contreras rescues people from floodwaters.

There’s a poem in Los Angeles

yawning wide as the Pacific tide

where a single mother swelters

in a windowless classroom, teaching

black and brown students in Watts

to spell out their thoughts

so her daughter might write

this poem for you.            

There's a lyric in California

where thousands of students march for blocks,

undocumented and unafraid;

where my friend Rosa finds the power to blossom

in deadlock, her spirit the bedrock of her community.

She knows hope is like a stubborn

ship gripping a dock,

a truth: that you can’t stop a dreamer

or knock down a dream.

How could this not be her city

su nación

our country

our America,

our American lyric to write—

a poem by the people, the poor,

the Protestant, the Muslim, the Jew,

the native, the immigrant,

the black, the brown, the blind, the brave,

the undocumented and undeterred,

the woman, the man, the nonbinary,

the white, the trans,

the ally to all of the above

and more?

Tyrants fear the poet.

Now that we know it

we can’t blow it.

We owe it

to show it

not slow it

although it

hurts to sew it

when the world

skirts below it.      

Hope—

we must bestow it

like a wick in the poet

so it can grow, lit,

bringing with it

stories to rewrite—

the story of a Texas city depleted but not defeated

a history written that need not be repeated

a nation composed but not yet completed.

There’s a poem in this place—

a poem in America

a poet in every American

who rewrites this nation, who tells

a story worthy of being told on this minnow of an earth

to breathe hope into a palimpsest of time—

a poet in every American

who sees that our poem penned

doesn’t mean our poem’s end.

There’s a place where this poem dwells—

it is here, it is now, in the yellow song of dawn’s bell

where we write an American lyric

we are just beginning to tell.

—Amanda Gorman

Just a year ago Gorman addressed the pandemic engulfing the world.

The Miracle of Morning

I thought I’d awaken to a world in mourning.

Heavy clouds crowding, a society storming.

But there’s something different on this golden morning.

Something magical in the sunlight, wide and warming.

I see a dad with a stroller taking a jog.

Across the street, a bright-eyed girl chases her dog.

A grandma on a porch fingers her rosaries.

She grins as her young neighbor brings her groceries.

While we might feel small, separate, and all alone,

Our people have never been more closely tethered.

The question isn’t if we can weather this unknown,

But how we will weather this unknown together.

So on this meaningful morn, we mourn and we mend.

Like light, we can’t be broken, even when we bend.

As one, we will defeat both despair and disease.

We stand with healthcare heroes and all employees;

With families, libraries, waiters, schools, artists;

Businesses, restaurants, and hospitals hit hardest.

We ignite not in the light, but in lack thereof,

For it is in loss that we truly learn to love.

In this chaos, we will discover clarity.

In suffering, we must find solidarity.

For it’s our grief that gives us our gratitude,

Shows us how to find hope, if we ever lose it.

So ensure that this ache wasn’t endured in vain:

Do not ignore the pain. Give it purpose. Use it.

Read children’s books, dance alone to DJ music.

Know that this distance will make our hearts grow fonder.

From these waves of woes our world will emerge stronger.

We’ll observe how the burdens braved by humankind

Are also the moments that make us humans kind;

Let each morning find us courageous, brought closer;

Heeding the light before the fight is over.

When this ends, we’ll smile sweetly, finally seeing

In testing times, we became the best of beings.

—Amanda Gorman

156 years ago today, April 9, 1865, Robert E. Lee offered up his sword  in surrenderof the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S Grant, Commanding General of the United States Army.  Grant gallantly refused to accept it and in fact let all officers of the Confederate force retain their side arms and personal mounts.  In the popular imagination, this act was the end of the Civil War.

In fact, it just represented the collapse of the major army facing the Union’s main forces, the Armies of the Potomac and the James.  Although the Confederate Government and President Jefferson Davis were on the lam, they hadn’t surrendered.  One by one the other armies capitulated, the last in far-away Texas where the last soldiers fruitlessly fell on May 15.

In the mid-19th Century poetrywas still the most popular literary form in America.  Everybody read it.  And it seems everyone literate enough to scratch out his or her name, tried their hand at it.  The events leading up to, during, and after the war were all documentedin the popular press, both North and South as much by poetry as by battlefield dispatches.  Probably tens of thousands were published in newspapers and gazettes both small and large.   The vast majority, of course, were dreadful—mostly breast beating and cheering for each respective side or later maudlin in grieving for loss.  But some by poets famous, obscure, and anonymous paint a vivid picture of the bloody turning point of American history.

Herman Melvillewas a struggling, nay failing, literary man in 1866 when he issued a collection of poems about the war, most of which had appeared in the press.  Like almost everything else he had written, Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War sold poorly and was snubbed by most critics.  Melville was forced to take a patronage job as a Port of New York Customs Inspector to support his family.  But the verses was far above average and taken together trace the course of the conflict.  He starts before Fort Sumter with the execution of John Brown, a hero to him as for many of his New England Unitarian and Abolitionist friends.

The Portent

Hanging from the beam,

      Slowly swaying (such the law),

Gaunt the shadow on your green,

      Shenandoah!

The cut is on the crown

      (Lo, John Brown),

And the stabs shall heal no more.

Hidden in the cap

      Is the anguish none can draw;

So your future veils its face,

      Shenandoah!

But the streaming beard is shown

      (Weird John Brown),

The meteor of the war.

——Herman Melville

At war’s onset John Greenleaf Whittier had to make a terrible choice.  Known far and wide as the Quaker Poet he had to choose between his pacifist faith and his ardent abolitionism.  Abolitionism won out.  For the balance of the war he would worship with the Unitarians and lend his voice to the Union.  Early in the war he took reports of an act of heroism by an elderly lady in Maryland and created a poem that became a Union rallying cryand was required recitation materialfor generations of school children.  Like most tales, this one had a grain of fact wound up in legend.  In fact 90-year-old Barbara Frietche, who had been a personal friend of Francis Scott Key, did have a flag hung from her Fredrick, Maryland home and it was peppered by shots from angry Rebels.  But the old lady was sick in bed that day and had told her maid to bring the flag in for safe keeping.  The maid, also tasked with hiding the silver and other family valuables, forgot.  Troops under Lee did pass within a block of her home and seeing the flag peppered it with fire.  Fritche never came to the window and even if she had could probably not be heard.  But it was a great yarn for getting Yankee blood to boil. 

Barbara Frietche

Up from the meadows rich with corn,

Clear in the cool September morn,

The clustered spires of Frederick stand

Green-walled by the hills of Maryland.

Round about them orchards sweep,

Apple- and peach-tree fruited deep,

Fair as a garden of the Lord

To the eyes of the famished rebel horde,

On that pleasant morn of the early fall

When Lee marched over the mountain wall,—

Over the mountains winding down,

Horse and foot, into Frederick town.

Forty flags with their silver stars,

Forty flags with their crimson bars,

Flapped in the morning wind: the sun

Of noon looked down, and saw not one.

Up rose old Barbara Frietchie then,

Bowed with her fourscore years and ten;

Bravest of all in Frederick town,

She took up the flag the men hauled down;

In her attic window the staff she set,

To show that one heart was loyal yet.

Up the street came the rebel tread,

Stonewall Jackson riding ahead.

Under his slouched hat left and right

He glanced: the old flag met his sight.

“Halt!”— the dust-brown ranks stood fast.

“Fire!”— out blazed the rifle-blast.

It shivered the window, pane and sash;

It rent the banner with seam and gash.

Quick, as it fell, from the broken staff

Dame Barbara snatched the silken scarf;

She leaned far out on the window-sill,

And shook it forth with a royal will.

“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,

But spare your country’s flag,” she said.

A shade of sadness, a blush of shame,

Over the face of the leader came;

The nobler nature within him stirred

To life at that woman’s deed and word:

“Who touches a hair of yon gray head

Dies like a dog! March on!” he said.

All day long through Frederick street

Sounded the tread of marching feet:

All day long that free flag tost

Over the heads of the rebel host.

Ever its torn folds rose and fell

On the loyal winds that loved it well;

And through the hill-gaps sunset light

Shone over it with a warm good-night.

Barbara Frietchie’s work is o’er,

And the Rebel rides on his raids no more.

Honor to her! and let a tear

Fall, for her sake, on Stonewall’s bier.

Over Barbara Frietchie’s grave

Flag of Freedom and Union, wave!

Peace and order and beauty draw

Round thy symbol of light and law;

And ever the stars above look down

On thy stars below in Frederick town.

—John Greenleaf Whittier

A surprising amount of Civil War poetry was soldier written.  No army in the history of the world to date was as literate as the boys in blue.  If the Confederates lagged in that department, they still had plenty of young men ready to take pencil stub to scrap of paper and send it home or to the home town paper.  Some of these poems are among the most poignant of the war.  This one captures the long periods between great battles when boredom and chance encounters were the order of the day.  And like other such poems, this one was eventually set to music and published to be sung around parlor pianos.

The Picket Guard

All quiet along the Potomac “they say,”
“Except now and then a stray Picket”
Is shot as he walks on his beat to and fro,
By a rifleman hid in the thicket.
‘Tis nothing—a private or two, now and then,
Will not count in the news of the battle;
Not an officer lost, only one of the men,
Moaning out all alone the death rattle.

All quiet along the Potomac to-night,
Where the soldiers lie peacefully dreaming;
Their tents in the rays of the clear autumn moon,
O'er the light of the watch fire are gleaming.
A tremulous sigh, as the gentle night-wind
Through the forest leaves softly is creeping;
While stars up above, with their glittering eyes
Keep guard, for the army is sleeping.

There’s only the sound of the lone sentry’s tread,
As he tramps from the rock to the fountain,
And thinks of the two in the low trundle bed,
Far away in the cot on the mountain.
His musket falls slack, his face dark and grim,
Grows gentle with memories tender,
As he mutters a prayer for the children asleep—
For their mother—may Heaven defend her.

The moon seems to shine just as brightly as then,
That night when the love yet unspoken,
Leaped up to his lips, when low-murmured vows
Were pledged to be ever unbroken.
Then drawing his sleeve roughly over his eyes,
He dashes off tears that are welling,
And gathers his gun closer up to its place,
As if to keep down the heart swelling.

He passes the fountain, the blasted pine tree,
The footstep is lagging and weary;
Yet onward he goes, through the broad belt of light.
Toward the shade of the forest so dreary.
Hark! was it the night-wind that rustled the leaves?
Was it moonlight so wondrously flashing?
It looks like a rifle—“Ha! Mary, good bye,”
And the life blood is ebbing and plashing.

All quiet along the Potomac to-night,
No sound save the rush of the river;
While soft falls the dew on the face of the dead,
The Picket’s off duty forever.

—Anonymous song lyric

Probably soldier written..

 Johnson’s New Catalogue of Songs

As the war dragged on the senseless horror of it overwhelmed the early romantic nonsense.  George Henry Boker was a very successful Philadelphia businessman who dabbled with some success as a poet and playwright.  The war converted the one-time Democrat into a staunch Republican and Unionist who lent his pen to the Federal cause.  As ardent as he was, by war’s end he was worn down by ceaseless tragedy.

Untitled Poem

Blood, blood! The lines of every printed sheet
     Through their dark arteries reek with running gore;
     At hearth, at board, before the household door,
     'T is the sole subject with which neighbors meet.
Girls at the feast, and children in the street,
     Prattle of horrors; flash their little store
     Of simple jests against the cannon's roar,
     As if mere slaughter kept existence sweet.
O, heaven, I quail at the familiar way
     This fool, the world, disports his jingling cap;
     Murdering or dying with one grin agap!
Our very Love comes draggled from the fray,
     Smiling at victory, scowling at mishap,
     With gory Death companioned and at play.

—George Henry Boker

from Poems of the War (1864)

Of course the end of the war was a bitter pill for those who fought so long on the losing side.  Many simply could not believe it.  For years the out manned, out gunned, and out produced Confederates had whipped the Union or fought them to a standstill.  But that standstill sealed their doom.  In the end the inevitable tidal wave engulfed them.  This soldier poem captures that moment.  Sadly, in a few years, such sentiments, and the memories of all those early gloriesbecame enshrined in the holy Lost Cause and fueled the backlash that resulted in the Jim Crow laws, the disenfranchisement of Freedmen, and almost virtual return to slavery for many Southern Blacks.

Appomattox poem

 I stand here on this dusty road,
My rifle by my side.
They say we must surrender
And yet I’m filled with pride.
In knowing deep within my heart,
I gave my Southland all,
Like every man who took up arms
And answered Freedoms’ call.
I’ve worn the gray most proudly
And loved our banners dear.
To give them up and walk away,
The thought brings me to tears.
The worst for our brave men.
At least we’ll all be going home,
To be with Kith and Kin.

Throughout the years that follow,
This tragic fateful day,
We’ll be proud of our fair flag
And how we wore the gray.

—Anonymous

Probably Confederate soldier written

Since Herman Melville started all of this off, we will let him have the last word on behalf of the victorious Yanks.

The Surrender At Appomattox

(April, 1865.)

As billows upon billows roll,
On victory victory breaks;
Ere yet seven days from Richmond’s fall
And crowning triumph wakes
The loud joy-gun, whose thunders run
By sea-shore, streams, and lakes.
The hope and great event agree
In the sword that Grant received from Lee.

The warring eagles fold the wing,
But not in Caesar’s sway;
Not Rome o’ercome by Roman arms we sing,
As on Pharsalia's day,
But Treason thrown, though a giant grown,
And Freedom’s larger play.
All human tribes glad token see
In the close of the wars of Grant and Lee.

—Herman Melville

In the semi-cloister of her family’s Amherst, Massachusetts home Emily Dickinson read and admired the work of Emily Brontë, the most famous of the three English literary sisters and author of Wuthering Heights.  Brontë died in 1848 at age 30.  That was just about the time that the only universally acknowledge photo of Dickinson was taken as teen age girl.  Likely she had already read Wuthering Heights and perhaps the collection of poetry that the three sisters published together.  If not, she soon would, and find a kindred spirit.  Brontë was rooted firmly in English Romanticism.  Dickinson breathed the air of its American cousin, Transcendentalism.  Both eschewed orthodox Christianity and embraced an alternate, personal spirituality that still speaksto us today.

No Coward Soul is Mine

Vain are the thousand creeds

That move men’s hearts: unutterably vain;

Worthless as withered weeds,

Or idlest froth amid the boundless main,

To waken doubt in one

Holding so fast by thine infinity;

So surely anchored on

The steadfast rock of immortality.

With wide-embracing love

Thy spirit animates eternal years,

Pervades and broods above,

Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.

Though earth and man were gone,

And suns and universes ceased to be,

And Thou wert left alone,

Every existence would exist in Thee.

There is not room for Death,

Nor atom that his might could render void:

Thou—Thou art Being and Breath,

And what Thou art may never be destroyed.

—Emily Brontë

Some keep the Sabbath going to church

Some keep the Sabbath going to church —

I keep it, staying at Home —

With a Bobolink for a Chorister —

And an Orchard, for a Dome —

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice —

I just wear my Wings —

And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,

Our little Sexton — sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman —

And the sermon is never long,

So instead of getting to Heaven, at last —

I’m going, all along.

--Emily Dickinson

PBS ran Ken Burns’s new four hour documentary about Ernest Hemingway the last two evenings.  I have to admit that as much as I admire Burns’s work, I haven’t seen it yet.  I have recorded it but will have to wait for chunks of time when my wife Kathy doesn’t want the TV set.  She would never sit down that long for an examination of figure who she has never read but thinks of as a misogynistic, macho creep. 

And that has been Hemingway’s problem. Once consideredthe most important American novelist of the 20th Century—and there was plenty of competition for that honor—widely read and the recipientof the Nobel Prize for Literature.  He has fallen deeply out of favor in more recent decades.  That has been due as much as anything to his carefully constructed public image as a rugged he-man adventurer, a lover of war and blood sports, a two-fisted drinker, and a man who carelessly used women.

His forthright, Spartan, and straight forward style once considered a revolutionary liberation from ornate prose and sentimentalism is now viewed by modern critics as too anchored in time and place, too bland, and worst of all lacking introspection.  Feminists set him up to be an idol of patriarchy to be brought crashing down.

There is truth to all of that, of course.  But it also is not always supported by either his life or work.  Seen by modern conservatives as a model of masculinity and a lover of guns and glory, he was a life-longleftist and often wracked by the depression and self-doubtthat lead him ultimately to swallow a shotgun blast.  He admired and loved strong women and his female characters were well developedand usually the moral superior to the flawed men who loved them.  For every drop if heroism in his male protagonists there was plenty of ambiguity and angst.

Hemingway, no matter what we think of him, is so identifiedas a novelist, short story writer, reporter, and essayist that it may come as a shock that he also wrote poetry.  He wrote verse his entire life but most frequently in his younger years spanning his Nick Adams in the woods days, World War I, and jazz age Paris.  88 of those poems were included in Hemingway’s first privately printed book along with short stories.  Those poems were well served by the same economy of style and clarity as his prose.  They have stood up very well.

Along With Youthcomes from those days when Hemingway was escaping the “broad lawns and narrow minds” of his native Oak Park, Illinois by tramping around the woodsand streams of Michigan fishing, hunting, and trapping.

Along With Youth

A porcupine skin,

Stiff with bad tanning,

It must have ended somewhere.

Stuffed horned owl

Pompous

Yellow eyed;

Chuck-wills-widow on a biassed twig

Sooted with dust.

Piles of old magazines,

Drawers of boy’s letters

And the line of love

They must have ended somewhere.

Yesterday’s Tribune is gone

Along with youth

And the canoe that went to pieces on the beach

The year of the big storm

When the hotel burned down

At Seney, Michigan.

 

—Ernest Hemingway

 

Hemingway in an Italian military hospital in his Red Cross ambulance corps uniform with Agnes von Kurowsky, the lovely nurse eight years his senior he fell madly in love with.

Champs d’Honneur was written after the Great War where Hemmingway served as an ambulance driver in Italy and was gravely wounded.  Not much glorifying war here,

Champs d’Honneur

Soldiers never do die well;

         Crosses mark the places—

Wooden crosses where they fell,

         Stuck above their faces.

Soldiers pitch and cough and twitch—

         All the world roars red and black;

Soldiers smother in a ditch,

         Choking through the whole attack.

 

—Ernest Hemingway

 

“All Armies are the Same” is another bitter anti-war verse.

 

“All Armies are the Same”

 

All armies are the same

Publicity is fame

Artillery makes the same old noise

Valor is an attribute of boys

Old soldiers all have tired eyes

All soldiers hear the same old lies

Dead bodies always have drawn flies

 

—Ernest Hemingway

                                    Hemingway outside his Paris apartment about the time he wrote these short poems.

The Age Demanded was written in post-warParis.  The iron pants in the verse referred to the braces he had to wear on his legs in his long recovery from his war wounds.

The Age Demanded

 

The age demanded that we sing

And cut away our tongue.

 

The age demanded that we flow

And hammered in the bung.

 

The age demanded that we dance

And jammed us into iron pants.

 

And in the end the age was handed

The sort of shit that it demanded.

 

—Ernest Hemingway

 

As common as dust, my Grandma Mona used to say by which she meant as ubiquitous as sun rises and death.  Despite the most diligent attempts to defeat it, it settles everywherebecause it floats invisibly, save in a ray of sunshine through a window. We inhale it with every breath we take.  In my less-than-cleaned study it lies thick on every surface that is not touched daily.  But other than in that Bible verse cited at funerals and Woody Guthrie ballads precious little attention has been paidto this commonplace fact of life by writers and poets.

Here are two who noticed.

Danusha Laméris was born in 1971 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is the author of The Moons of August (Autumn House Press) in 2014which was selected as the 2013 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize, and Bonfire Opera (University of Pittsburgh Press, in 2020. She teaches poetry independentlyand lives in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains in coastal California.

Dust

It covers everything, fine powder,

the earth’s gold breath falling softly

on the dark wood dresser, blue ceramic bowls,

picture frames on the wall. It wafts up

from canyons, carried on the wind,

on the wings of birds, in the rough fur of animals

as they rise from the ground. Sometimes it’s copper,

sometimes dark as ink. In great storms,

it even crosses the sea. Once

when my grandmother was a girl,

a strong gale lifted red dust from Africa

and took it thousands of miles away

to the Caribbean where people swept it

from their doorsteps, kept it in small jars,

reminder of that other home.

Gandhi said, “The seeker after truth

should be humbler than the dust.”

Wherever we go, it follows.

I take a damp cloth, swipe the windowsills,

the lamp’s taut shade, run a finger

over the dining room table.

And still, it returns, settling in the gaps

between the floorboards, gilding the edges

of unread books. What could be more loyal,

more lonely, and unsung?

—Danusha Laméris

From Bonfire Opera by Danusha Laméris, © 2020.

The Old Man has frequently inflicted his verse on the reader of this blog.  This poem is one of several he wrote over the years marking the anniversaries of the 9/11 attacks.  This one appeared nearly 20 years ago.

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust

September 9, 2011, Crystal Lake, Illinois

The ash and dust, they say,

            rose as high as the skirts

            of the ionosphere.

Prevailing winds pushed it

            across oceans and around the world.

Most has sifted by now to the earth.

Some orbits still,

motes descending

            now and again.

My study is a cluttered mess.

Dust lays on any unattended

horizontal surface,

makes webs in corners,

balls in computer wire rats nests,

devils under bookshelves.

That speck, that one there,

            the one by the stapler,

            just might be what’s left

            of the Dominican cleaner

            who left her children

            with their Abuela

            and went to work

            in the sky

            only to be vaporized.

Hola, señora.

It is an honor to meet you.

—Patrick Murfin

Jerry Pendergast is a Chicago poet and activist who frequently shares his work on the Chicago Revolutionary Poets Brigade Facebook group.  He was a regular at such city venues as the  Guild Annex and Green Mill Tavern and looks forward to returning to the stage.  His work is often infused with music, especially jazz.  He also draws inspiration from the struggles of working people and the oppressed.

In this poem Pendergast evokes the spirit of Gil Scott Heron, the legendary musician and poet who has sometimes been called the God Father of Hip Hop verse.  For more about Heron and his most famous song/poem The Revolution Will Not Be Televised check out the lyrics from his 1971 album of the same name.

The Heron Remembered

1

You called out “What's the word?”

We shouted back “Johannesburg”

Hips, shoulders feet picked up the rhythm

No floor director

called out the correct steps

Can this be played on the dance hour?

Your voice

The fingers that joined you

on the piano

the guitar

were schooled in the blues

But can we call it that?

Sax rising

Piano holding the ground

Your voice stretching

the lower register

Can we call it Jazz?

You chanted

“The Revolution will not be televised”

above percussion

On SPIRITS

You bade us

“Keep the Nerve”

“Don’t let the Spirit Die”

“Don’t Give Up”

2

Can the voice

soaring with the sax

fly from Watts to Harlem?

Reach a mid pitch Groove in Roxbury

Ocean currents

Carry them

To Bog side?

Can Northerlies

Blow them South

To Alabama, Arizona

Can they join the street marchers, dancers

in Honduras?

3

The Heron remembered

narrated the history

of the music

the struggles

But sometimes

instruments were electric

Can we call it Folk?

If the lyrics

the rhythms

are long remembered

Can we call any of his songs

Classics?

If the songs

spoken word

his life

give strength

to anyone fighting

long term occupations

addiction,

mass eviction

poisoned elements,

Or for the right to save seeds

Can we call them

Spirituals?

Gil Scott Heron born on April first but he was no damn fool.

—Jerry Pendergast 

It’s National Poetry Month Again!  If you have been visiting here for a while, you know what that means—it’s our 10th annual round-up of daily doses of verse!  If you are new, here’s the scoop.  Every day all month I will feature poets and their poems.  I aim to be as broad and inclusiveas possible to style, subject, period, gender, race, and neglected voices. 

I don’t want just a parade of the usual dead white men, but a lot of them did write some damn fine poetry, so they have their place here too.  As always, selections follow my own tastes and whims.  Yours may be different.  But I am open to—eager for—suggestions, especially for contemporary writers.  I do not subscribe to dozens of little magazines or prowl the internet for poetry posts.  I often only stumble on new and unknown poets and I am sure I miss some great stuff.  Please feel free to turn me on to some—or be bold and submit your own. 

Here is a challenge—Poets, send me your responses to the Coronavirus pandemic be it personal, political, or polemical.  Everybody, send me pieces that catch your eye.  I don’t and can’t promise to use everything.  E-mail me at pmurfin@sbcglobal.net.

Leslé Honoré describes herself as a “Blaxican Poet, artivist, and author.” Her book Fist & Fire is a collection of powerful, unflinchingpoems that confront issues of social justice through the lens of real human lives and voices, and dive into the flames of love within the context of a relationship.  Her poetry and life empowers youth to find their voices through the arts, and to inspire people to stand in the gaps that social, economic, and racial inequities create.

Born and raised in Gardena, California, she remains deeply rooted in the heritage and culture of her father, a native of New Orleans and mother who was born in Sinaloa, Culiacan, Mexico, and immigrated to the US when she was 15. 

Poetry was always how Honoré expressed herself, discovering her writer’s voice in childhood.  She further honed her work at Xavier University of Louisiana where she studied English Literature and Spanish. She was a featured speaker at the inaugural Tedx Grand Boulevard in 2020. She has spoken and read her work at Obama Foundation convenings and events, the 2020 Watermark Innovation Conference, Elevated Chicago Symposium, the City of Chicago’s 19th Amendment Commemoration, Latino Progresando’s 2020 MEXtalks,  the University of Illinois Chicago’s Speaking Anarcha’s Name, the Mercantile Library in Cincinnati,  and at events including the Silver Room Block Party and National Period Day. She has been featured in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and on WBEZ (NPR), The Kendall Moore Show on WVON, and all major Chicago TV news outlets.  She also hosts a web-based series, Bestie Shine, with her friend, artist David Anthony Geary.

Leslé lives in Chicago with her three children Sage, Solomon, and Scarlett. Her forthcoming book, Letters and Lagniappe, will be released this year. You can follow Leslé on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.  Visit her web page for much more information.

Honoré’s poem for Women’s History Month is the perfect segue from that observance to National Poetry Month.

This is for the women

With 9 to 5s

And 7 to 3s

First shifts

And graveyard

With full times

And part times

Who have more month left

Than money

But still make rent

With passports

With no stamps

With vision boards

Of destinations

They are saving to see

With dreams they tuck away

And pull out late at night

Or early in the morning

While the babies are still sleep

Turn it over in their hands

And then shelve it again for safe keeping

This is for the women

Without titles without pensions

With some college

And a lot of loans

With late night classrooms

Online studies

Who won’t give up

Who run the world

On grit and perseverance

This is for the women

Who are anything but

Ordinary

But the world sees as regular

This is for the magicians

Who weave spells of hope

For their children

While putting their hopes on pause

This is for the over the counter

Beauty Queens

With Wet and Wild Lips

And Walgreens legs

And Suave smelling hair

For the women who look in the mirror

To see some one familiar

Because they rarely see reflections

Any where else

For the hustlers

Who with tired feet

And tired backs

And spirits whispering

Keep moving

We are almost there

For the women who know

Liberation isn’t found in the clothes they wear

The shoes on their feet

But the dignity in their souls

This is a song for you

Resourceful

And resilient

Moving mountains for your family

I see you

Stunning and Strong

I see you

Brilliant and beautiful

while putting their hopes on pause

With passports

With no stamps

This is for the women

With 9 to 5s

And 7 to 3s

First shifts

And graveyard

With full times

And part times

Who have more month left

Than money

But still make rent

With vision boards

Of destinations

They are saving to see

With dreams they tuck away

And pull out late at night

Or early in the morning

While the babies are still sleep

Turn it over in their hands

And then shelve it again for safe keeping

This is for the women

Without titles without pensions

With some college

And a lot of loans

With late night classrooms

Online studies

Who won’t give up

Who run the world

On grit and perseverance

This is for the women

Who are anything but

Ordinary

But the world sees as regular

This is for the magicians

Who weave spells of hope

For their children

While putting their hopes on pause

This is for the over the counter

Beauty Queens

With Wet and Wild Lips

And Walgreens legs

And Suave smelling hair

For the women who look in the mirror

To see some one familiar

Because they rarely see reflections

Any where else

For the hustlers

Who with tired feet

And tired backs

And spirits whispering

Keep moving

We are almost there

For the women who know

Liberation isn’t found in the clothes they wear

The shoes on their feet

But the dignity in their souls

This is a song for you

Resourceful

And resilient

Moving mountains for your family

I see you

Stunning and Strong

I see you

Brilliant and beautiful

I see you

Making a life

Out of thin air

Today is for you

An ordinary day

Unmarked on the calendar

No decorations at target

No songs to commemorate

Just an ordinary day

Full of promise

Full of possibilities

Full of hope

Full of magic

Just like you

You who pushes on

You who doesn’t give up

You who bends but doesn’t break

You

This is for you

You with the stars in your hair

Sun on your lips

Moonlit cheeks

This is for you

You are anything but regular

You are the

UNIVERSE

—Leslé Honoré

Secretary of State William H. Seward, a hold-over from the Lincoln Administration in the Cabinet of weak and unpopular President Andrew Johnson, concluded secret negotiations with envoys from Tsar Alexander II of Russia on March 30, 1867.  With a flourish of a pen he acquired Russian America, a huge territoryencompassing 586,412 square miles occupying the northwest of North America.

Of course the interests and claims of the indigenous peoples who had already been enslaved and abused by the Russians and who didn’t recognize the land as the Tsar’s to sell were not considered at all.

Approved by Congress, not without controversy but in good time, the Treasury Department dutifully paid for the deal in full with a single check for $7 million, the equivalent of just a little over two cents an acre—virtual pocket change.

From a narrow strip of landalong the Pacific Coast it opened up into trackless forest, rugged mountains, tundra, perpetually snowand ice covered lands on the Arctic Sea.  Except along the coast and a string of fur trading posts the new land was vastly under populatedwith only about 2,500 Russians and creoles, and 8,000 native peoples under the direct government of the Russian fur company, and an estimated 50,000 Inuit, Aleut, and other native tribes in the vast ungoverned areas.  A once lucrative tradein sea otter, harbor seal, and other furs was petering out due to excessive harvesting.  The territory had no other known resources except for timber too remote to get to markets.

The Russians had staked a claim to the whole Pacific Coast as far south as Spanish held Yerba Buena—later San Francisco—based on the explorations of Vitus Bering and his successors beginning in 1741.  A lucrative fur trade was established and in 1799 the Russian-America Companywas given exclusive rights and charged with governing. 

By the early 19th Century much of the area along the coast was being contested by claims by the British and Americans.  The British relied on activity by their Hudson’s Bay Company around Vancouver Island and the Americans on the explorations of Lewis and Clark and activity by John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company.  The rivalry first centered on what became called Oregon.  The Russian agreed to a treaty with the Americans in the 1840’s that ceded their costal claims south of Vancouver.

The British, however, were a more troubling rival.  Not only had the Russians been at war with them in the Crimea from 1853-56, they were emerging as a global threat the Tsarist empire.  After gold was discovered along the Thompson River in 1858, the British established the Crown Colony of British Columbia to reinforce their claims on the mainland north of the recently settled borderwith American-held Oregon abutting the already established Crown Colony of Vancouver (1849) on the island.  These territories began to fillwith gold seekers and settlers, were soon fairly strongly garrisoned with troops and the natural harbors made a perfect base for the mighty Royal Navy.

In St. Petersburg, the Russian government determined that its North American possessions were indefensible in the event of new hostilities with Britain.  Feelers went out to both the British and Americans about a possible sale.  The British turned the offer down, probably believing that they would sooner or later come into possession anyway. Serious negotiations with the United States never got underway after the Civil War broke out.

The end of the war in the in U.S coincided with a huge loan from the Rothschilds to the Tsar to pay off the debts of the Crimean War coming due.  Short on cash and fearing default, the Tsar dispatched a high level team to Washington to negotiate a deal that would pay off the loan, or most of it, and checkmate British ambitions in the Northern Pacific.

The shrewd Steward recognized that he had the Russians over the barrel.  He needed to buy the territory for a sum that would notrequire any borrowing on the US’s part and which could easily be paid in a lump sum out of Treasury reserves.  The Russians were forced to settle for $7 million, far less than they had hoped.

The history books would have usbelieve that the whole nation mockedSeward’s Folly as a wasteful, bad investment.  But it was actually only a noisy minority in the press who made the biggest stink.  Most Americans, if they paid attention at all, where more than happy to grab more landand pinch British Columbia in on both sides.  Many believed that the purchase would lead to the eventual acquisition of the British colonies on the coast.  The treaty sailed through a Senate dominated by a Republican super majority, many of the Senators loyalto Seward, if not his erstwhile Democratic boss.

But the protesting press was loudand creative.  Alaska was denounced as a frozen wilderness not worth accepting even as a gift.  One unknowingly prescient editorialist said that the government would never recoup its investment unless gold was unexpectedly discovered at some distant time.

Of course gold was discovered, but not until 1898 when the Alaskan Gold Rush erupted.  By that time other Alaskan resources, particularly its fisheries, were also beginning to pay off.

But all of that was far in the future when Russian America became the U. S. Department of Alaska under the military governance of General Jefferson C. Davis—no, not the former Confederate President, the former Union officer.  A ceremony in the muddy streets of Sitka on October 16, 1867 outside of the log Government House hauled down the Russian Double Eagle flag—after three soldiers had to be sent shinnying up the flag pole to cut it loose from a snag—and raised the Stars and Stripes .  A handful of American troops and ships in the harborrattled off a ragged salute.

The Russian residents and Creoles were supposed to be given three years to take American citizenship or return to their homeland.  But General Davis ordered most Sitka residents evicted from their homes to make way for Americans and general lawlessness soon overtookthe district.  Most Russians packed up their belongings and headed home on the first overcrowded ships available. 

Alaska finally became the 49th U.S, state on January 3, 1960.

In the end the massive natural resources of Alaska including not only gold, but copper and other metals, fisheries, timber, and at last oil and natural gas, made Steward’s investmentone of the shrewdest in history.  It also became a strategic check to the Japanesein World War II and the Soviets in the Cold War.  Ask Sarah Palin who said she could see Russia from her house…

Ok, quickly now, students, go to a map and show me the location of the colony of New Sweden.  What?  You say you’ve never heard of such a thing?  Well on March 29, 1638 two ships carrying Swedish and Finnish—Finland was at the time part of Sweden—immigrants sailed up Delaware River and landed near modern day Wilmington.  They claimed the river and its drainage for the New Sweden Company. 

In command was a veteran of North American colonization, Peter Minuit.  Minuit is familiar to school children as the Dutch Governor of New Netherland who supposedly swindled Native Americans out of the island of Manhattan for $24 in beads and trinkets.  Like most such arch-typical tales, the story was only half right.  Minuit did purchase the island—and near-by Staten Island—for about 60 Guilders—a significant sum in those days—in trade goods including steel ax heads, needles, hoes, drilling awls pots, and trade wampum.  A historiandescribed it as a significant “high-end technology transfer, handing over equipment of enormous usefulness.”  Both parties to the deal were happy and neither felt cheated. 

Minuit served as governor from 1626 to 1631 when he was suspended by the Dutch West Indies Company because the fur trade with Native Americans, which was supposed to finance the colony, was less remunerative than anticipated and because Minuit was suspected of skimming for his personal purse. 

Outraged Minuit turned to the Swedes, who were going about the business of entering the competition for New World riches.  They were glad to have him.  Sweden, at the time, was at its height of its influence as a world power.  It ruled over much of Scandinavia including Finland, and most of Norway, portions of Russia, all of modern Estonia, Latvia, and most of Lithuania, parts of Poland, Germany, and Denmark.  The Baltic Sea was a virtual Swedish lake.  The Swedes felt more than ready to join the mercantile powers in America.  

Minuit established Fort Christina, in honor of Sweden’s twelve year old Queen.  But as Minuit well knew, the drainage of the Delaware River was claimed by the Dutch.  After establishing his colony, Minuit decided to return to Sweden for more colonists and make a dash down to the Caribbean to pick up a load of tobacco to make the trip profitable.  Unfortunately, he was killed in a hurricane off of St. Christopher. 

Over the next dozen years 12 groups of settlers totaling more than 600 reached New Sweden and established settlements on both sides of the river.  The settlers were mostly small farmers.  They introduced a form of shelter never seen before in the new world—the log cabin—which would become the standard pioneer abode for the next two hundred years. 

They had excellent relations with the local tribes and lived comfortably with the near-by Dutch until a new governor arrived in 1654 and seized the Dutch post of Fort Casamir, modern day New Castle.  The notoriously bellicose Dutch governor in New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant, dispatched five armed shipsand 317 professional soldiers to retake the post.  They then proceeded up the river and forced the surrenderof Ft. Christina.  That ended Swedish sovereignty over the area. 

But the Dutch made no attempt to expel the existing settlers.  In fact they granted them extraordinary rights to retain their lands, practice their Lutheran religion, and govern themselves as a quasi-independent “Swedish Nation.”

But the Dutch themselves were not long to retain their American possessions.  After a series of wars, they were gone for good by 1674 and New Netherland became New York. 

In 1681 William Penn was granted his charter for Pennsylvania, which included the “Three Lower Counties” which make up today’s Delaware.  The Swedes, with no reinforcements coming from the mother country for decades, were quickly subsumed by the British.

Hundreds of years later an Irish American from Pennsylvania would settle in Delaware and put the small often ignored state back on the map of American consciousness.  But damned few of Joe Biden’s Senate constituentswere decedents of those old Swede settlers.