Hello All,
Daily life has caught up with me and I need to take today off from posting.
I’ll be back for my usual Saturday post. In it, I’ll share my involvement in the protest against the war in Vietnam back in 1969, ’70, and ’71 and my continuing quiet rather passive involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. That may end up to be two postings. Not sure right now.
Today I’d like to leave you with a brief poem by Daniel Berrigan. The first paragraph of his biography from Wikipedia states that “Daniel Berrigan, SJ (born May 9, 1921) is an American Catholic priest, peace activist, and poet. Daniel and his brother Philip were for a time on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list for their involvement in antiwar protests during the Vietnam war.”
My parents gave me his first book, Time Without Number, when I was in the novitiate back in 1958. Here is a poem from its pages.
EVERYTHING THAT IS
is not something other:
a ridiculous pablum for the poet’s mind
until the wind sing it, or star bring it
ringing its name through the astonished night:
or on a March day, the selfsame crocus struggle
wildly into air, because its roots, through all winter’s leveling,
remembered their own name.
Or the maple that shook its glory down
Puzzle strollers with its identical
And lovely form, four months later assumed again
Gradually as a morning.
Such things somersault the mind
Backward, inward:
I wonder who knew the stars
From flowers, before flowers were not stars:
Before trees spread between one and other, a growth
By night starlike, by day a flowering, and yet itself.
So, I’ll see you Saturday.
Peace as ever and always to all of you this day.
Dee
Photo by dan on freedigitalphotos.
