patrickmurfin

This is the poem I have composed for the memorial worship service held today at the Congregational Unitarian Church in Woodstock.                                    

                                     KNOXVILLE: 7/27/2008 10:26 A.M

They are about to sing about Tomorrow,

            as fresh and delicate as impatiens in the dew,

            when Yesterday, desperate and degraded

            bursts through the doors

            barking despair and death

            from the business end of a sawed of shotgun.

Tomorrow will have to wait,

            Yesterday—grievances and resentments,

            a life full of missed what-ifs

and could-have-beens,

of blame firmly fixed on Them,

the very Them despised by

all the herald angels of perfect virtue—

has something to say.

Yesterday gives way to Now,

            the eternal, inescapable Now,

            flowing from muzzle flash

            to shattered flesh,

            the Now when things happen,

            not the reflections of Yesterday

            or the shadows of Tomorrow,

            the Now that always Is.

Now unites them,

            victims and perpetrator,

            the innocent and the guilty,

            the crimson Now.

Tomorrow there will be villain and martyrs,

            Tomorrow always knows about Yesterday,

            will tell you all about it in certain detail.

And yet Tomorrow those dewy impatiens

will sing at last—

The sun will come out Tomorrow,

            bet your bottom dollar on tomorrow

            come what may…

How wise those little Flowers

            To reunite us all in Sunshine.

--Patrick Murfin

Here’s a quick photo gallery from the World Premier of  Two Murfins. No Waiting.

This is the Paseo Prairie Garden in front of the historic Norwegian Church on Kedzie Ave. at the head of Logan Boulevard where the historic rendezvous occurred.

A pensive Ira S. Murfin mulls over his selections and digests a pre-reading breakfast at the brand new Logan Square Brew Pub where he dined with the other reader.

Patrick Murfin intones words of wisdom from his poetry.

Ira, in matching blue, does the same.

One fifth of the total audience.  The others were Kathy Brady-Murfin,  Ira’s mother Arlene Brennen and her Husband, Michael, and Laurie Tanenbaum, the designer of the garden and an old friend of Ira.  Ah, that urban ambiance!

What was it that Kurt Vonnegut used to say?  Oh, yeah—“And so it goes.”

It’s Memorial Day in the sixth year of a misbegotten war.  Most of those yellow ribbon car magnets have long since disappeared.  The American flags that were ubiquitous on almost every house after 9/11 and again in the early days of the war are mostly gone, too.  There may be a mild irony that up and down Ridge Avenue, the residential street that runs along the side of my house, this house with its locally notorious anti-war resident, is the only home flying a flag. I got a new one Saturday.  I always keep on display from Memorial Day through Veteran’s Day.  I never wanted the jingoists to take my patriotism or my flag away.

The war and its casualties are hardly news now.  Four inch stories on page 3 or 4 are the norm now.  The pundits tell us Americans have “moved on” and are now concerned more by the price of gas and the collapsing economy.  The war has “lost traction” as a political issue in a hot Presidential contest.

Locally, the return of “our heroes” is regular news in the NORTHWEST HERALD.  Every week or so soldier returns home to McHenry County either for good or for a brief rest after a deployment in the war zone.  Each and everyone is met by the motorcycle riding members of the Patriot Guard and escorted home.  And each one gets a write-up with pictures.

But no body much wants to think about a war despised by 70% of the American people but which everyone seems powerless to end.

In the mean time thousands of young American men and women are dead or damaged.  And hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans.

For the third year, I am observing Memorial Day with this poem.  An edited version appeared in WE BUILD TEMPLES IN THE HEART.  What follows here is the restored original.

PICTURES, POPPIES AND STARS

A SONG OF GENERATIONS

We knew war.

Somewhere in every home a handsome young man peered from a tinted photograph,
       overseas cap at a jaunty angle,
             or the fifty mission crush,
                   or the crisp square white beanie of a gob,
       usually someone’s Dad in some other life,
       but sometimes a ghost frozen in time,
       caught in that picture like a fly in amber
       while bloody shreds were left draped on barbed wire
       ten feet from low water on an anonymous beach,
           or splattered on the glass of the ball turret
                 of a Mitchell bomber spiraling for a date
                 with a German potato field,
                       or bobbing in a sea of burning oil
                        naked and parboiled.

We knew pity.

The veterans in neat blue uniforms,
     sleeves pinned to shoulders, ears shot away,
          noses burned off, faces twitching,
               fistfuls of red paper poppies in one hand
                    shaking white cans for nickels with the other
                    on every street corner, May and November,
     and no decent man or woman passed
     without emptying pockets of change,
     twisting flowers into button holes
     without ever looking the peddler in the eye.

We knew death.

Inside scrapbooks, brittle pages and fading ink,
     kept far up in the closet behind hat boxes
          surrounded by last winters scarves and mittens,
               between leatherette boards tied by black laces,
               amid the ration coupons and V-mail, 
               postcards from exotic ports, Brownie snapshots, 
               campaign maps, and yellow clippings
     a small fringed flag, edged in red and blue,
          a gold star in the center.

In the neighborhood,
     we looted footlockers and duffel bags,
          saved our dimes for the Army/Navy Store,
           outfitted ourselves in helmet liners,
           webbed belts, canteens and mess kits,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               smatterings of cast off khaki and drab,
     and amid the prairie burrs and grasses,
          between the wild rose hedge and lilac caves,
               on top of the car port and in the window wells,
     every summer day we sorted glory from horror.

We knew war, and pity and death.
We thought.

And then, suddenly, it was our turn for real,
games and fantasy were over,
we had to make grown up choices.

Some went to war with swagger; some with tears
     some went to Canada, some to prison
          and some took another toke and shrugged
     in the safe cocoon of a high number.

We knew war and pity and death.

Now, my grandchildren, it’s your turn.

What do you know?
What will you do?

--Patrick Murfin

I couldn’t decide on which of these images better fit my Spring/Easter/Resurrection theme—realism or whimsy.  So here they both are.

This poem was written a number of years ago.  As I recall it reflected the very earliest signs of spring coming that I saw as I made my morning walk to catch the train from work.  It was late February, perhaps, or the first week in March that I first heard the cardinal that year.

But it may be more apropro this year, when the winter has been long and hard and Easter early.  We broke a record for snowfall in McHenry County yesterday when six inches of wet heavy snow burried the county.  I lost track of how many big snows we have had.  Tomarrow is Easter, and I have yet to see my first crocus.

But the cardinal is singing in the dawn tree tops and the red-wing black birds in last years cat tails.

RESURRECTION*

From that frigid morning

            when the fog of humanity

            hangs palpable before our faces

            and that fat red sun pops           

            before our eyes at the far end of           

            the reaching blacktop

Then, when from the highest,

            barest twig the cardinal sings

             his whistle in the graveyard,

Our hearts know resurrection and murmur—

            Yes, yes.

We are a cold people in a cold land

            and every creeping inch

            of yellow willow hair,

            every footprint

            in newly giving earth,

            every ratchet tap of woodpecker

            on lifeless wood

Resonates with resurrection and nods recollection.

There is no wonder that in hot lands,

            perpetual in green,

            moist and ever fertile,

The natives snickered at tales

            of a hanging god,

            turned on naked heels

            and ran to sensible deities

            who would not abandon them

            only to hound them on return

            with foolish promises.

But here, at turning time,

our arctic hearts surrender

            to the sureness of the resurrection

            that surrounds us,

Embrace the fabulous

            as confirmation of the fact

            made real around us,

And in the echo of this miracle

understand redemption, too,

            In the merciful thaw

            Or our glacial souls.

--Patrick Murfin

*From We Build Temples in the Heart Skinner House Books, Boston, 2004

Many of the poems featured at a special service at the Congregational Unitarian Church are drawn from the Skinner House Meditation Manual WE BUILD TEMPLES IN THE HEART.

Patrick Murfin will lead a unique worship service at this Sunday’s 10:45 worship services of the Congregational Unitarian Church, 221 Dean Street.  The service, Don’t Be Alarmed, Ma’am, He’s Only Committing Poetry, will feature Murfin’s poetry and commentary.

            Many of the selections will be drawn from Murfin's 2004 collection, WE BUILD TEMPLES IN THE HEART, published by Skinner House Books of Boston.  Several poems from that book and other sources have been used in Unitarian Universalist worship across the country and in Canada, Britain, Australia, and even in Hungarian translation in Transylvania.

            Other poems will be drawn from Murfin’s collection in progress and will include observations of nature, commentary on war and social justice and personal reflections.

            The Adult Choir, under the direction of Tom Steffens, will present the Midwest premier of Rainbows are Not Enough, one of Murfin’s poems set to music by California choral composer Scott Henderson.

            Murfin is a long time member of the congregation and a social activist as well as a writer.  He is best known locally as the on stage host of the Diversity Day Festival held annually on Woodstock Square and as a leading member of the McHenry County Peace Group and other organizations.

He has twice led Poets Against War public readings in the county and presented a special reader’s theater style production of his Four Hundred Years of Unitarian Universalist Poetry From John Milton to Sylvia Plath at conferences and academic forums.

            Copies of Murfin’s book will be available for sale during the social hour following the service.

LET US BE THAT STABLE

Today, let us be that stable

            Let us be the place

            that welcomes at last

            the weary and rejected,

            the pilgrim stranger,

            the coming life.

Let not the frigid winds that pierce

            our inadequate walls,

            or our mildewed hay,

            or the fetid leavings of our cattle

            shame us from our beckoning.

Let our outstretched arms

            be a manger

            so that the infant hope,

swaddled in love,

may have a place to lie.

Let a cold beacon

            shine down upon us

            from a solstice sky

            to guide to us

            the seekers who will come.

Let the lowly Shepard

            and all who abide

            in the fields of their labors

            lay down their crooks

            and come to us.

Let the seers, sages, and potentates

            of every land

            traverse the shifting dunes

            the rushing rivers,

            and the stony crags

            to seek our rude frame.

Let herdsmen and high lords

            kneel together

            under our thatched roof

            to lay their gifts

            before Wonder.

Today, let us be that stable.

--Patrick Murfin

 
From WE BUILD TEMPLES IN THE HEART ,  Skinner House Books, Boston, 2007

          It rarely happens this way.  But tonight the JEWISH celebration of ROSH HASHANAH coinsides with the first night of the ISLAMIC holy month, RAMADAN.  Thus some of the most sacred moments of two traditions sprung from one well yet now often at bloddy odds are drawn together by their separate ancient calendars.  Those calendars persist even though triumphant CHRISTENDOM, in the muscular form of European and American Colonialism, managed to impose its standard on much of the world.  By that GREGORIAN CALENDAR both celebrations fall just a day after Americans, at least, paused to mourn the carnage of 9/11.

SEPTEMBER 12, 2007

The Day After 9/11—Ramadan and Rosh Hashana

Wheels turning within wheels—

     an astrolabe,

          Tycho’s observatory,

               gears in some fantastic machine,

                    electrons—atoms—molecules,

                        moons—planets—stars—galaxies—universes.

Today, just today—

     Point A on Wheel X, spinning urgently,

     comes to kiss  Point B on Wheel Y,

     rotating on its own good time,

     for just a nano-second

     having just brushed by

     Point C on cog Z.

These precise events will come again,

    I suppose—

     you do the math if you wish.

But if I wore stars on a pointed hat,

    I might conclude that there was something

    beyond mere physics at work here.

Call it an omen, if you wish,

     or the flat hand of something Greater

     slapping us up aside our

     merely mortal heads

     and scolding us—

               “Spin as you will,

                you spin not alone.”

--PATRICK MURFIN

            Coming home from church in WOODSTOCK to CRYSTAL LAKE on the METRA train, I found myself unaccountably without any thing to read.  Nothing to do but stare out the windows for the short trip.  Memory of other train trips was jarred.  Result, another damn poem.

TAKE A TRAIN

Take a train, any train,

            from here to there.

Peer half hearted through

            the tinted glass.

Come into the towns

            by the back door.

See the weedy, overgrown

            backside of things.

First the crops, any crops,         

            shining in the summer sun,

            that old barn slouching to oblivion.

Then the random outskirt clutter,

            rusting junk in abandoned lots,

            saw toothed factories derelict

                        with broken glass,

            cinder block and steel buildings,

                        old and new,

                        strewn randomly along the way,

            crumbling roads blocked by peeling arms,

 impatient pick-up drivers

                        drumming fingers on their wheels,

            box cars wild with the challenges

                        of urban war,

            the smudged places where the poor folk live.

Pick a town, any town,

            your’s, perhaps.

Come in through the back door.

See what the Chamber doesn’t

            want you to.

--Patrick Murfin

            The AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION (ACLU) will honor four Connecticut librarians and an anonymous internet service provider.  Each had the temerity to stand up to the pernicious NATIONAL SERVICE LETTERS (NSL) authorized under the PATRIOT ACT.  And each were persecuted—er, prosecuted—under its draconian and star chamber provisions.

            The story of the plight of librarians BARBARA BAILEY, PETER CHASE, GEORGE CHRISTIAN, and JANET NOCEK and the announcement of their prestigious ROGER BALDWIN AWARD, was posted on TRUTHOUT.  Check it out.

            Reading about their experience reminded me that one of the first groups in America to speak out against the strictures of the Patriot Act and urge member non-compliance was the AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION.  I was so impressed by the chutzpah of the organization at the very height of Bushist terrorism hysteria, that I commemorated the occasion in verse.

            That's right, ready or not here comes another damn poem.  It is part of my next collection, in search of publisher (hint, hint.)

LIBRARIANS AT THE BREACH

Who would have thought it?

That prim spinster,

    severe hair in a  bun pincushion

    for a slanting pencil,

    erect index finger epoxied

    to permanently pursed lips

    sssshing to the recalcitrant

    in a thousand cartoons.

That iron gray matron

    of the Cheyenne Carnegie Public Library

    hovering date stamp in hand

    taunting my nightmares

    demanding my two cents a day

    for the Teddy Roosevelt biography

    days AWOL under a corner of the davenport.

That pale, tweedy nebbish of the stacks,

     guardian of arcane tomes,

     leather books with marbled edges

     unmolested for decades

     but ever ready for his urgent call.

That smiling story lady

     perched on her high stool

     rapt, worshipful and fidgety

     acolytes at her feet

     sing-songing the words

     of dreams upon the pages.

Who would have thought it?

That these unlikely heroes

     would be called to unsheathe

     Excalibur from stone

     and set upon a Quest of Virtue,

     would need to set once more

     Liberty’s Red Cap upon the pole

     and storm again the Bastille,

     would resurrect the half forgotten promises

     of Jefferson, Madison, Adams et. al.

     against aspiring despots.    

Who would have thought it, indeed?

--PATRICK MURFIN

 FIRST LT. W.M. MURFIN,  U.S. ARMY MEDICAL COPRS, LEYTE ISLAND, THE PHILLIPINES 1944 or ‘45

  
  
NICHOLAS JORDAN BAILEY  ON HIS 16TH BIRTHDAY  WITH MOM, CAROLYNNE LARSEN AND FATHER, CHRISTIAN (MICKEY) BAILEY .    

            Last year at this time I posted one of my poems in honor of MEMORIAL DAY.  At the risk of being redundant, I will post the same one again. 

Since last year about a thousand more GI’s have died in IRAQ and dozens in AFGAHNISATAN.  We don’t have a clear count on the maimed or injured and even less of an idea of how many have been emotionally and psychologically afflicted or how many are now ill or who will fall ill from environmental illnesses linked to their deployment.

            The carnage inflicted on the populations of both countries dwarf our own losses yet are hardly acknowledged or felt here.  Defenders of the war, when pressed, will argue that only a tiny percentage of the civilian losses are attributable to American arms.  The vast majority are victims of the unacknowledged civil wars that now rend both countries.  Yet the utter collapse of a once stable Iraq and its descent into fratricidal mayhem is the direct result of our feckless adventure in that country.  The blood is on our hands as much as on any SUNNI JIHADIST or SHIITE MILITIAMAN.

            This Memorial Day I try to hold them all, Yank and HAJJI—the current equivalent of GOOK, JAP, or KRAUT—alike, in my heart.

            I also have in mind my father, W.M. MURFIN.  He’s been gone now nearly 17 years.  He didn’t die in the war.  But WORLD WAR II was the central and defining event of his life.  An over-aged soldier, her served in the ARMY MEDICAL CORPS, first as the Top Kick of a U.S. field hospital attached to the British Army in North Africa chasing ERWIN ROMMEL’S AFRIKA KORPS out of EGYPT across the SAHARA all the way to TRIPOLI. 

            After returning to the States for Officer Candidate School, he was dispatched to the PACIFIC THEATER where he participated in the landings at LEYTE in the PHILLIPINES, GUAM, and OKINAWA.

            I also am keeping my grandson-in-residence in mind.  NICHOLAS BAILEY will turn 17 this summer.  Like a lot of young men he has had some trouble in school and doesn’t have a clear idea what he wants to do with his life.  He just got his first job at a local Italian Beef stand.  This summer he will get his driver’s license.  Next year he will graduate from high school.  He has spent a huge chunk of his adolescence playing violent video games and wrapped up in sword-and-sorcery fantasy.  He is just the sort of young guy recruiters salivate over.  He is already getting mail from the Army, Marine Corps and the Air Force.  He has already been to a recruiting office at least once while accompanying a friend who is enlisting in the Army on the promise that they will make him a fire fighter.  By this time next year Nick might have responded to the Siren call of military glory.  A year after that, if GEORGE W. gets his way, Nick could be eating dust and dodging IUD’S.

PICTURES, POPPIES AND STARS

A SONG OF GENERATIONS

We knew war.

Somewhere in every home a handsome young man peered from a tinted photograph,
       overseas cap at a jaunty angle,
             or the fifty mission crush,
                   or the crisp square white beanie of a gob,
       usually someone’s Dad in some other life,
       but sometimes a ghost frozen in time,
       caught in that picture like a fly in amber
       while bloody shreds were left draped on barbed wire
       ten feet from low water on an anonymous beach,
           or splattered on the glass of the ball turret
                 of a Mitchell bomber spiraling for a date
                 with a German potato field,
                       or bobbing in a sea of burning oil
                        naked and parboiled.

We knew pity.

The veterans in neat blue uniforms,
     sleeves pinned to shoulders, ears shot away,
          noses burned off, faces twitching,
               fistfuls of red paper poppies in one hand
                    shaking white cans for nickels with the other
                    on every street corner, May and November,
     and no decent man or woman passed
     without emptying pockets of change,
     twisting flowers into button holes
     without ever looking the peddler in the eye.

We knew death.

Inside scrapbooks, brittle pages and fading ink,
     kept far up in the closet behind hat boxes
          surrounded by last winters scarves and mittens,
          between leatherette boards tied by black laces,
          amid the ration coupons and V-mail,
          postcards from exotic ports, Brownie snapshots                                          campaign maps, and yellow clippings
     a small fringed flag, edged in red and blue,
          a gold star in the center.

  In the neighborhood,
     we looted footlockers and duffel bags,
          saved our dimes for the Army/Navy Store,
               outfitted ourselves in helmet liners,
               webbed belts, canteens and mess kits, smatterings of cast off khaki and drab,
     and amid the prairie burrs and grasses,
          between the wild rose hedge and lilac caves,
               on top of the car port and in the window wells,
     every summer day we sorted glory from horror.

We knew war, and pity and death.
We thought.

And then, suddenly, it was our turn for real,
games and fantasy were over,
we had to make grown up choices.

Some went to war with swagger, some with tears
     some went to Canada, some to prison
          and some took another                                                                                                                                                                   toke and shrugged
     in the safe cocoon of a high number.

We knew war and pity and death.

Now, my grandchildren, it’s your turn.

What do you know?
What will you do?

--Patrick Murfin

The new monument in Haymarket Square and the memorial to the Haymarket Martyrs at Forrest Home Cemetary (formerly Waldheim Cemetary)

BECOMING AMERICAN (ANOTATED VERSION)
A Thumbnail History of the European-American Immigrant Experience

Micks, Krauts, Wops, Frogs, Kikes,

     Square Heads, Polacks, Bohunks,[i]

     our huddled masses, bewildered and frightened

     pressed against the Golden Door[ii]

     and burst in upon your Yankee yeomanry.[iii]

Ready or not, here we came,

     a stinking pestilence, a Popish rabble[iv]

     the shucked off waste of Babel[v]

     polluting your pristine English stream,

     the craven minions

     of the Elders of the Protocols of Zion[vi]

     with appetites for Christian babes

     and usury’s truncheon on honest men.

And you welcomed us with Know Nothing[vii]

     wet dreams of Maria Monk’s priestly orgies,[viii]

     with No Irish Need Apply[ix]

     posted in every clean and comfortable shop

     where moleskin and brogan slaves[x]

     might yearn for relief from spade and hod.[xi]

You cursed the Dutchy[xii]

     who worshiped in his guttural tongue,

     idled over beer instead of whiskey,

     dreamed of failed revolutions[xiii]

     and future one in endless

     alien newspapers—

          And, damn it, learn the language!

When you tired of lynching Black men,

     you burned your crosses in our yards[xiv]

     the purifying, scourging flames

     exorcising Roman anti-Christs

     and demonic Hebrew cults.

Yet we filled your tenements and slums,

     your Hoovervilles and hobo jungles,[xv]

     your railroad shacks and company towns,

     your Army posts, your prisons,

     and your potter’s fields.[xvi]

We dug and wove and dug some more,

     we felled the endless forests

     and reaped your amber waves of grain,[xvii]

     hog butchered to the world,[xviii]

     gandy danced and poured the very brimstone[xix]

     that steeled the nation’s progress,

     we sewed and stitched and vulcanized,[xx]

     sailed your Death Ship and dug your graves.[xxi]

We did all of the dirty, bloody labors

     that you spurned

     and you called us lazy, ignorant, and ungrateful

     as we died by the dutiful legion

     in your burning pits and suffocating sweat shops.

We were Henry Forded and Taylorized,[xxii]

     made mere interchangeable cogs

     in the vast machine that made

     more, always more,

     as our days and years ran on,

     a Mobius loop of numbing sameness.[xxiii]

And when we finally clenched our fists in rage

     and linked our arms in union,

     we were Hay Marketed, Joe Hilled,[xxiv]

     Sacco and Vanzettied, Ludlowized,[xxv]

     and Republic Steeled,[xxvi]

     we sang the new litany of martyrs

     and grew strong.

You called your Pinkertons and gun thugs[xxvii]

     and when we would not yield,

     you tagged us Reds and Commies,

     raided and deported us,[xxviii]

     wetted your bayonets and gassed us,

     and stuffed your prisons full.[xxix]

But we endured and inch by painful inch

     we climbed to our place at your table,

     now our children’s children’s children

     are Yankees, the old tongues and ways

     abandoned with no regret,

     we have mixed our blood

     until there are swarthy Olsens

     and Hebrew Fitzgeralds.

Now we hear our progeny say—

     “Why don’t they just learn English?

     They breed like rabbits

      and lay around on welfare.

     Go back to where you came from!”

Truly, they have become American.

[i] Irish, Germans, Italians, French, Jews, Scandinavians, Poles, Bohemians.

[ii] The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus

[iii] Free men subject to militia call.

[iv] Catholics.

[v] Tower in Genesis struck down by Yahweh scattering the builders across the earth with mutually unintelligible languages.

[vi] Forgery purporting to prove an international Jewish Conspiracy to dominate the world.

[vii] Secret anti-immigrant political party, 1825-1860.

[viii] THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARIA MONK, a popular anti-Catholic book of the 1840’s purporting to expose sexual perversion among priests and nuns and the practice of anti-Christian rites.

[ix] Signs posted by merchants in Boston Shop windows from the 19^th through the early 20^th Centuries.

[x] Soft, heavy material used in trousers by Irish workers and the heavy laced shoes that they wore.

[xi] A devise for carrying bricks or mortar. Irish workers frequently “carried the hod.”

[xii] German from Deutsche.

[xiii] The great German migration began after the failure of the 1848 uprisings throughout the German states.

[xiv] The 1920’s revival of the Ku Klux Klan gained considerable support in the North as an anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic organization.  The Klan seized control of the Indiana state government for a while.

[xv] Depression shanty towns named for Herbert Hoover and the camps of migrant workers near the railroads they used to get from job to job.

[xvi]  Grave yard where paupers were buried at public expense, usually without any grave markers.

[xvii] America the Beautiful by Katherine Lee Bates.

[xviii] Chicago by Carl Sandburg.

[xix] Railroad track layers and maintenance workers.

[xx] The process of heating rubber with sulfur so that it will not become brittle in cold or gummy in heat discovered by Charles Goodyear in 1839..

[xxi] THE DEAH SHIP by B. Travin.

[xxii] Fredrick Winslow Talyor, an American industrial engineer who originated “scientific management”  and “time motion studies” which led to the modern assembly line with each worker repeating highly specialized but limited tasks.

[xxiii] A three dimensional surface that has only one side, a continuous loop crated when a rectangular strip is twisted and the ends attached.  Named form German mathematician August Ferdinand Mobius.

[xxiv] The Haymarket in Chicago, site of a labor rally in support of the 8-hour day which was attacked by Police on May 4, 1886.  A bomb was thrown at the police, killing and wounding severs.  Eight labor leaders, all but one German, were convicted of conspiracy and murder, though none could be tied to the crime.  The youngest, Louis Ling, committed suicide.  Albert Parson, August Spies, George Engle and Adoph Fischer here hanged, becoming America’s first great labor martyrs.  Other defendants were later pardoned by Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld.  Joe hill was a Swedish immigrant who joined the Industrial Workers of The World (IWW) and became an itinerant organizer.  He became most famous as the writer of numerous labor songs including  The Preacher and the Slave, The Rebel Girl, and Casey Jones the Union Scab.  He was framed on a murder charge and executed by firing squad in Utah in 1915.  His final words became a labor legend, “Don’t mourn, organize!’

[xxv] ’Nicola Sacco, a shoemaker, and Barolomeo Vanzetti a fish monger, were Italian immigrants and anarchists charged with a payroll robbers at a shoe factory in which a guard was killed on April 15, 1920.  They were convicted on scant evidence and sentenced to death.  Their case became the great labor cause of the ‘20’s.  Despite world wide protests they wee executed in 1927.  Fifty years later Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis issued a proclamation clearing their names.  1n 1913 and 1914 coal miners, mostly Greeks and Slovaks, struck mines operated by the Colorado Fuel and Iron Co. at Ludlow, Colorado, owned by John D. Rockefeller.  During the bitter strike, the company evicted strikers and their families from the company town.  The strikers set up a nearby tent city.  On April 20, 1914 the Colorado the National Guard attacked the camp with machine guns. At least 39 men, women and children were killed and scores injured.

[xxvi]On Memorial Day, 1937 several thousand strikers demanding union recognition made a peaceful march on the Republic Steel plant Chicago accompanied by their wives and children.  The mayor had assured them that their march was legal and would be allowed.  They were met by more than 500 Chicago Police who attacked them with tear gas, truncheons, pistol and rifle fire.  Ten were killed outright, most shot in the back while on the ground.  90 others were wounded.  A newsreel crew caught the whole action on film.  Despite attempts to suppress the film and its damning evidence, Senate hearings called by Wisconsin’s Robert LaFollet exposed the truth of the attack..

[xxvii] Allen Pinkerton’s detective service had a long history of service to employers in labor disputes.  Pinkerton agent James McParland infiltrated and broke the Molly Maguires, an Irish miners’ secret organization.  Years later the same McParland kidnapped IWW William “Big Bill” Haywood and tried to frame him for the bombing murder of a former Idaho governor.  Pinkerton guards frequently escorted strikebreakers and attacked union pickets.  Gun thugs were simply local toughs employed by companies to intimidate or attack union supporters.  The most famous gun thugs were employed by Ford Motor to attack Walter Reuther and other United Auto Workers organizers in the ‘30’s.

[xxviii] The Palmer Raids of 1919, organized by a young J. Edgar Hoover of the Bureau of Investigation, swept up thousands of mostly foreign-born workers and radicals with little or no evidence of any crime.  Hundreds were deported.   

KAZIM ALI--Poet, Terrorist?

            ALTERNET ran a story on Tuesday by KAZIM ALI, a poetry professor at SHIPPENSBURG UNIVERSITY in Pennsylvania.    It seems that he was observed by an eagle-eyed ROTC cadet putting out a carton of poetry manuscripts to be recycled.  With the professor's suspicious pigmentation and the fact that he was observed driving that known terrorist vehicle—a VW BEETLE adorned with flower decals and an old KERRY/EDWARDS bumper sticker—he was naturally suspect.  What follows is my response to the Professor’s post.

Not that anyone noticed, but April is NATIONAL POETRY MONTH.  Welcome to the celebration!

In an era when almost no one reads poetry anymore, I guess building readership by any means is worth it.  Just think of all those mystified local cops.  Or—better  yet—some techno-spooks in a warehouse-like building some where near Langley, pouring over those discarded manuscripts, using the most sophisticated soft ware and cryptographic technology to de-code the secrets there-in!

On the other hand, pity that poor professor, not just because he was profiled for his alien duskiness, but because he is so poorly paid that he must supplement his income by judging poetry contests.  If he has enough discarded doggerel to dispose of by the carton, he must be employed by one of the vanity publishers that lures eager, but incompetent, amateur poets to submit their work.  Few get the prize, most will get an offer to include their work in some pricey anthology—for a fee.

But, hey, maybe those poems can still be put to good use for national security!  Ship ‘em to GUANTANAMO, I say.  Give them to the most hardened terrorists.  Make them read them 14 hours a day at gun point.  They will be turning in their grandmothers and their goats in no time!

            This Sunday at the CONGREGATIONAL UNITARIAN CHURCH in Woodstock, Illinois, we will be celebrating EASTER with a couple of guys named LONGFELLOW—HENRY WADSWORTH and brother SAMUEL.  And, an upstart pipsqueak of a poet, a guy named Murfin, will read one of his poems, too.  The service is called, naturally enough, A LONGFELLOW EASTER.

            The two men, both Unitarians, were the outstanding practitioners of their respective arts.  Henry Wadsworth was the most famous American poet of the Century—and the most popular.  Brother Samuel, a Unitarian minister, was a prolific hymnist.  His gentle, non-dogmatic hymns are still sung today, not only in UNITARIAN UNIVERSALSIT churches, but in many mainline Protestant denominations.

            TOM STEFFENS and the Choir will sing some of Samuel’s great hymns.  But the accomplished Steffens, not satisfied wit h the generic Protestant hymn tunes to which they were originally set, as re-cast two of them to alternative tunes.  He has put With joy we Claim the Growing Light to a traditional folk melody and Lo, the Earth Awakens Again to a traditional Hassidic Jewish tune.  Again, as Evening’s Shadow Falls will be sung to its original tune by AMIZI CHAPIN.

            DORA TIPPENS will read Henry’s poem Flowers.  The REV. DAN LARSEN will tie it together with musings about how the Romantic/Transcendentalist sensibilities of the Longfellows illuminates a modern UU take on Easter.

            Here are thumbnail sketches of the boys taken from the biographical notes accompanying my presentation 400 YEARS OF UNITARIAN AND UNIVERSALIST POETS:  JOHN MILTON TO SYLVIA PLATH.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW (1807-1882) Almost Emerson’s exact contemporary, Longfellow carved out a career as America’s most beloved poet without ever becoming part of the transcendental movement.  Instead he was a Victorian Romantic with a passion to develop a truly American literature.  Longfellow was born on February 27, 1807 in Portland, Main from a long line of New Englanders, including on his mother’s side the Pilgrims John and Priscilla Alden.  Beginning school at the age of three, he captivated his teachers with his brilliance.  His literary minded mother entertained him and his siblings with regular reading of works of high romance like Ossian, the tale of a legendary Gaelic hero, and Don Quixote.  His first and greatest influence, however, was Washington Irving’s Sketch Book which used American tales and legends as inspiration.  By the time he graduated from Bowdin College at age 19, the school offered him its first professorship in modern language.  The proposed course was without precedent in American academia, which was tied to the Latin and Greek classics to the exclusion of modern literature.  Longfellow traveled to Europe from 1826-29 collecting material for the course.  He had the usual letters of introduction to great men, but also conducted a walking tour of the continent stopping at country inns and peasant homes.  He returned to launch his revolutionary course of study.  In 1831 he married his childhood sweetheart and built a reputation translating European literature and publishing travel sketches in The New England Magazine.  In 1834 he was appointed the first professor of modern languages at Harvard.  Again he traveled to Europe, this time with his wife, to prepare for his new responsibilities.  Mary Longfellow died suddenly in Rotterdam and Henry came to Cambridge to take up his duties with a broken heart.  That heart was mended seven years latter when he married Frances Appleton, the daughter of his landlord.  His longtime home, Craigie House was given to the young couple as a wedding gift.  Now comfortably ensconced Longfellow began the production of poetry.  His first collection was published in 1843.  The Children’s Hour reflected his domestic happiness in the bosom of his growing family.  Nathaniel Hawthorne first gave Longfellow the basic outline for the story of Evangeline, the outcast Arcadian wandering in search of her lover.  Its publication in 1847 earned him immediate fame.  By 1854, he felt his teaching duties interfered over much with his writing.  He resigned and began work on The Song of Hiawatha.  Tales from the Wayside Inn followed which included his Courtship of Miles Standish.  His domestic bliss ended tragically in 1861 when his wife died when her dress caught fire as she was sealing clips of their children’s’ hair into packages with wax.  He never fully recovered from the blow, but settled into life rich with honors.  When the “spreading chestnut tree” of The Village Blacksmith was removed as a hindrance to traffic, the children of Cambridge raised a fund to build a chair for Longfellow from the tree’s wood.  He died a month before Emerson on March 24, 1882.  He was, bar none, the most popular and publicly revered American poet and would remain so into the Twentieth Century.  Generations of American school children would learn to recite his works by heart.  Longfellow has suffered at the hands of academic critics in the last fifty years.  They deride his sentimentality and his simplicity.  Yet they overlook his genius for rhyme and the easy, flowing cadence of his work which made it so recitable.  And he succeeded in giving America a true national epic literature.
                                                                          
                                                                                Samuel Longfellow

SAMUEL LONGFELLOW (1819-92)  Born in Portland, Maine ten years younger than his brother Henry Wadsworth, Samuel embarked on a long and successful career as a Unitarian minister.  He served congregations in Fall River, Massachusetts; Brooklyn, New York; and Germantown, Pennsylvania.  Although he enjoyed success as a poet, he gained lasting fame as a hymnist.  He compiled four popular volumes of hymns and penned many original contributions.  His hymn lyrics are noted for broadminded spirituality, optimism, and a minimum of sectarian cant.  His influence remains strong today.  He has more entries in the contemporary Unitarian hymnal, Singing the Living Tradition, than any other author.  His work can also be found in the hymnals of most mainstream Protestant denominations.  Samuel was never jealous of his brother’s broader success, but was his greatest admirer.  After Henry’s death, Samuel completed a massive two-volume biography that remains the standard reference today.

            My own contribution to the proceeding will be a poem from my collection WE BUILD TEMPLES IN THE HEART.   Resurrection was originally written, despite it title, not as an Easter poem, but as a meditation on the earliest omens of an approaching spring—the cardinals that begin their dawn singing in late February or early March in these parts.  But, inevitably, it became a rumination on re-birth and thus resurrection.  This is what I will read.

RESURRECTION

From that frigid morning

            when the fog of humanity

            hangs palpable before our faces

            and that fat red sun pops           

            before our eyes at the far end of           

            the reaching blacktop

Then, when from the highest,

            barest twig the cardinal sings

            his whistle in the graveyard,

Our hearts know resurrection and murmur—

            Yes, yes.

We are a cold people in a cold land

            and every creeping inch

            of yellow willow hair,

            every footprint

            in newly giving earth,

            every ratchet tap of woodpecker

            on lifeless wood

Resonates with resurrection and nods recollection.

There is no wonder that in hot lands,

            perpetual in green,

            moist and ever fertile,

The natives snickered at tales

            of a hanging god,

            turned on naked heels

            and ran to sensible deities

            who would not abandon them

            only to hound them on return

            with foolish promises.

But here, at turning time,

our arctic hearts surrender

            to the sureness of the resurrection

            that surrounds us,

Embrace the fabulous

            as confirmation of the fact

            made real around us,

And in the echo of this miracle

understand redemption, too,

            in the merciful thaw

            of our glacial souls.

--Patrick Murfin

            Between the previous posting and revisiting a long ago worship service that I did on IMAGES OF JESUS OVER TIME AND CULTURE in preparation for discussing the traditional Christian windows in the sanctuary of the             CONGREGATIONAL UNITARIAN CHURCH at another service in a couple of weeks, I have been giving thought to what I think about this JESUS OF NAZARETH guy.

            My thoughts are complex, inexorable tied up to growing up in pervasively CHRISTIAN, culture, challenged by skepticism and doubt, but drawn to the simple message of love, forgiveness and justice that I find in the reputed words of that shadowy character.

            Some of what I feel was reflected in poems published in my collection WE BUILD TEMPLES IN THE HEART, available from the UUA BOOKSTORE.  Here are a couple of samples.

WWJD

Outside the bakery in clear winter sunshine

     on the Saturday before Fat Tuesday,

     the license plate

     of a sleek deep blue sedan

     asked the question--           

          WWJD?

Indeed, what would he do?

The son of sweet, foolish Mary,

     who heard voices,

     and that clueless cuckold, Joseph,

The boy, sawdust in his hair,

     hands callused in his father’s service,

     who lectured the sages of the age

     as if they were children,

A known associate of that John, the Baptist,

     who, despite spending half his life

     knee deep in the Jordan

     unaccountably stank

     and roamed the dusty streets,

     hair and beard matted,

     a famous madman,

The slacker who left his employment

     to wander in the desert

     and hallucinate with hermit outcasts

     who dwelt in caves

     babbling about Light and Dark,

The would-be preacher

     who gathered a pathetic cult

     to follow him from town to forlorn town,

     by turns begging and giving alms,

          who fed the multitude,

          embraced alike leper,

               the unclean woman,

                    the mad,

          who walked with whores and taxmen

               yet spat defiance       

               at the Temple itself,

And who, at the end,

     was condemned and abandoned,

     put to disgraceful death

     with common criminals.

Yes, what would Jesus do

     if he came here today?

I can’t say as I know, ma’am,

     but I don’t think he would

     be driving your plush ride.

COME TO ME, SWEET JESUS

“Come to me, Sweet Jesus!”

The TV preacher shouts,

     thumping his chest,

     waving his arms

     with the urgency and passion

     of a man whose toes

     have tapped on brimstone.

Which Jesus, I wonder casually,

     My thumb hovering over the remote

     eager to find the ballgame.

The Jesus on my childhood wall

     Wore long blonde hair

     tumbling shining to his shoulders

     like a Breck ad, gentle blue eyes,

     aquiline nose, a Nordic Jesus

     come to life in Jeffrey Hunter

     waiting the piercing stab

     of John Wayne’s Centurion lance.

I have since seen a Jesus

     of every imaginable sort—

          African Jesus dashikied in splendor,

          beardless Blackfoot Jesus in eagle feathers,

          Jesus with breasts and womb,

          American Guy Jesus,

          neat trimmed beard and curling hair

          like the Little League coach down the block.

What Jesus does this sweating man summon

     with his electronic worship music band

     and cathedral in the parking lot,

     pews filled with rapture

     in sports shirts and sundresses?

And who, when I shut my eyes,

     do I beckon when I murmur,

     “Come to me sweet Jesus?”

           A swarthy man,

                stocky built, barrel chested,

                muscular forearms bulging

                from the swing of the hammer

                matted with  a thick curling pelt,

                nose large, lips fleshy,

                burnoose over raven hair,

                wrapped in dingy course cloth,

                callused bare feet

                black with the dust of the road.

I see a man.

Come to me, sweet Jesus,

     Let me wash your feet.

--PATRICK MURFIN

It’s VALENTINE’S DAY.  Convention requires acknowledgment.  And what better than poetry.  And as a renown half-assed poet, who better than I to provide the doggerel? 

First the dewy eyed love stuff.  

The following poem is all that is left of a fantasy novella that I was working on thirty years ago.  In it Merlin awoke in the Crystal Cave in 1940, shaken to consciousness by German bombs.  His adventures in war time Britain and thence to America to be discovered by me (the character me of the story) perched on a stool down the bar in my favorite shot-and-beer saloon.  The manuscript of that opus, scribbled in ball point in a spiral notebook (I was too poor at the time to even own a typewriter) disappeared after a fire in the cockroach infested, stinking-toilet-down-the-hall rooming house I inhabited at the time.  No great loss to Western Literature I assure you.  But an earlier version of the following piece survived because it was folded in my shirt pocket the night of the fire.   It appeared in the present version in my 2004 collection WE BUILD TEMPLES IN THE HEART, and reportedly has become a favorite reading at some UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST Valentine services, weddings, and other occasions celebrating love.

 MERLIN SAID

Love is the only magic—

It enriches the giver

     as it nourishes the object.

It serves the instant

     and washes over the ages.

It is as particular as the moon

     and as universal as the heavens.

If returned it is multiplied

     yet spurned it is not diminished.

It is as lusty as the rutting stag

     but as chaste as the unicorn’s pillow.

It comes alike to the king on his throne

     and the cut purse in the market.

If you would have magic,

     place faith in love or nothing.

Then the other side of love.

The following poem did not make my book.  My editor didn’t think it was uplifting enough.  It began, strangely enough, as a verbal communications exercise at a Men’s Retreat.  It was also the year that Comet Hale-Bopp made its impressive appearences in the evening skies.  While not written in response to a particular romantic failure, who among us can honestly say we have not been there.

RELATIONSHIP IN SPACE

Our relationship was like the Comet

    That swings around the sun

     burning as it nears,

     casting its tail away

     from its attraction

     before being sling shot

     into deep, dark, frozen

     and intractable space.

There you have 'em.  Take your pick.  Happy Valentine’s Day

MIRACLE OF LIGHT

When the sky has swallowed the sun,

     left us in icy darkness

     save the brief gray memory of light

     escaping from its stifled yawn.

 

When hope and heat and harvest

     have been banished into night

     and dread, despair and death

     grip our forlorn hearts—

          Then, just then a light returns.

 

Druidic fires tor to hillock

     call again the sun

     and shyly does it come once more.

 

The awful gloom of tyranny

     is banished by a zealous few

     so that a Temple drop of Macabean oil

     may burn a mystic week.

 

Some account a sudden brilliant star,

     a nova in Judean skies

     to mark a coming messenger

     of hope and faith and love.

 

And though the gloom may crowd us still

     the light may lift our hearts

     until this spinning, turning ball

     we ride around the sun.

          brings us again to Spring.*

 

--Patrick Murfin

Celebrate the Season of Light

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year,

Happy Chanukah.

Joyous Solstice

 

 

 

From the Murfin Household

Patrick, Kathy, Maureen, and Nick

 

 

 

*A version of this poem appeared in WE BUILD TEMPLES IN THE HEART, published in 2004 by Skinner House Books of Boston.  Copies can be ordered from the UUA Bookstore for $8.00 plush shipping

 

 

In honor of the 5th  anniversary of the 9/11 horror, I thought I would resurrect the poem I wrote on the first anniversary.  I had promised to say something at a memorial vigil that the McHenry County Peace Group planned for Woodstock Square.  I had wrestled with it for over a week, but could not come up with anything that did not seem obvious, maudlin, or hackneyed.  And the horror of that day was already being tainted by the cynical manipulations of the administration. 

I was still working as an elementary school custodian in Cary.  After work, I hopped on a train to Woodstock, still unsure of what to say.  On the back of a flyer advertising a local fall festival, I began scribbling notes.  When I got off the train I had a poem to read.

It was included in my 2004 collection WE BUILD TEMPLES IN THE HEART, published by Skinner House Books (available from the UUA Bookstore.)  My editor made me change the title, fearing it was too political attack on the President.  I have restored the original title and am including it in the manuscript I am preparing of anti-war and “political” poems.

Once again, in memory of that awful day, here it is.

THE DEAD OF 9/11 LEAVE A MESSAGE ON GEORGE W.’S VOICE MAIL

The Dead cry out—

It is not lonely here!

            They come by the scores

                        and by the thousands

                        every day,

                        as they have always come,

                        each arrival here

                        a wrenching loss below.

            They come as they have always come,

                        each death the completion of a journey,

                        the closing of a hoop of life.

            And we welcome each of them.

But we are not lonely here.

            We do not wander silent corridors

                        our footsteps echoing,

                        yearning for a voice.

            We are not lonely

                        for we are the Dead

                        and we are everywhere

                        united in that last breath

                        and in eternity.

But You—

You make haste to fill the unfillable,

            to send us more,

            many more,

            out of their own time

            as we were out of ours,

            yanked here in violence and hatred.

Let them be.

They will come in their own time.

We who know death

            do not cry out for revenge.

We are not lonely here.

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Ok.  It’s been a while.  No verse on a blog that promised poetry before bloviating in its tagline.  So today, here is a brand new one, fresh from my fevered pen.  It is (gasp!) not political.  Nor is it religious except in that broad sense that all things are Holy.  It’s a nature observational, a genre of poetry more out of fashion than wing-tip shoes and double breasted suits with enough material to tent a refugee camp.  Worse yet, it is short enough for a greeting card.  None the less, here it is.

HIGH SUMMER

The day lilies—

               you know the ones,

                              crowding corner patch      

                              across from the Church,

               lean into the morning sun,

                              yearning nestlings,

                              orange maws wide,

                              insist on that next fat worm.

--Patrick Murfin