Poetry Day for Ukraine

April is National Poetry Month established by the Academy of American Poets in 1996 to remind the public that poets and poetry play an integral role in our national culture, and in others as well, and they have an important place in our lives, both in the USA and beyond, to give fresh recognition and impetus to regional, national, and international poetry movements.   

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) adopted March 21 as World Poetry Day during its 30th General Conference in Paris in 1999.  It was established to celebrate this unique cultural and linguistic expression.  “Every form of poetry is unique, but each reflects the universal nature of the human experience,” writes UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay; “Our aspirations of creativity that crosses boundaries and borders.”  This is the power of poetry!  This dialogue “enriches that catalyzes all human progress and is more necessary than ever in turbulent times.  She concludes: “Oral traditions and expressions are used to pass on knowledge, cultural and social values and collective memory. They play a crucial part in keeping cultures alive . . . [and] allowed people to escape temporarily from their fears and to find comfort at home with their loved ones.”

We continue to celebrate World Poetry Day "with the aim of supporting linguistic diversity through poetic expression and increasing the opportunity for endangered languages to be heard."  This year UNESCO marks the advent of the International Decade of Indigenous Languages, to affirm its commitment to indigenous peoples worldwide.  

This year World Poetry Day takes on a special significance and poets around the world have gathered to express their solidarity with the brave and heroic Ukrainian people as they defend their country from the savage and criminal war Russian president Vladimir Putin has unleashed on them for no other reason than to create a fascist state as the true and legal successor state of the brutal Russian empire and the former Soviet Union.

In celebration of World Poetry Day and standing in solidarity with sister Cities of Literature in Lviv and Odessa in Ukraine, several of UNESCO’s 42 Cities of Literature have joined together to present the poem, “So I’ll talk about it” by Serhiy Zhadan and translated by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin.  He is one of Ukraine’s best-known poets and novelists, who gathers crowds of thousands of people at his book launches and events.

https://www.calvertjournal.com/articles/show/12137/contemporary-ukrainian-poems 

Men that dance the way they quench

steppe-fire with their boots.

Women that hold onto their men in dance

like they don’t want to let them go to war.

As I celebrated my 71st birthday on Match 21 I joined poets and writers from around the world in support of the Ukrainian people in their brave stand against Putin's criminal war.  Who can forget the words of Yevgeni Yevtushenko’s poem “Babyn Yar”? 

O, Russia of my heart, I know that you

Are international, by inner nature.

But often those whose hands are steeped in filth

Abused your purest name, in name of hatred.

We recall these words as Russian missiles land close to the memorial to that past massacre just outside Kyiv, the besieged Ukrainian capital. 

Let these words and others ring again in our ears as we watch with heavy hearts the death and destruction visited on the brave Ukrainian people who only want to live in peace.

Слава Україні ! Героям слава !

 

An Eye on the World

“I don’t know what else to do, so I write. It’s my way of seeing the world.” -- Jim Harrison

Joyce Bahle, Harrison’s assistant for almost 40 years: “He set his life up that way. He didn’t have to think about a computer, a typewriter, anything. He just carries his pen — he’s constantly noodling with words and ideas. He has had that freedom.”

Harrison died five years ago -- on March 26, 2016 -- at his writing desk in Patagonia, Arizona. His stories, essays and poems will never die and we are free to roam his world forever.

Drew Parsons (1954-2021)

It was once said that the death of a dear friend is a strongest indication of the clarity of all of our futures. In a world that allowed Anne Frank to die, it is easier for us to lose interest and accept our own eventual demise.  Drew Parsons, who was among his many interests and accomplishments a student of the Holocaust, would understand that statement.  That said, Drew never lost interest and lived his life to the fullest in the time he was given. 

My friendship with Drew extends over nearly five decades; since that evening in September 1972 when I first met him in Florida Southern College’s Branscomb Auditorium.  He was an incoming freshman and I had just returned from a year studying abroad in Germany to begin my senior year.  It was at that same time that I met SallyAnn who two years later would become my wife.  We were both good friends with Drew’s brother Don - in fact, it was Don who first introduced SallyAnn to me - and we were both excited to have another Parsons among us.  It was the beginning of a long and beautiful friendship.  Drew, Don and I are fraternity brothers in Tau Kappa Epsilon and will always remain in that bond.  Drew, SallyAnn and I were members of The Vagabonds, the FSC theatrical troupe and we spent many hours together both on and off stage.  Drew and I shared the boards in The Crucible and The Merchant of Venice, and SallyAnn joined us in the cast of A Short Story Quartet.  It was in the Green Room where Drew and I engaged in what some will call “legendary” slow motion fist fights.  At least he and I thought so. 

Sadly, after leaving Florida Southern I tried to stay in touch as best I could but I did not get the opportunity to see Drew as often as I would have liked to.  I returned to Florida in December 1974 after my first year in graduate school in Tucson when SallyAnn and I married in Pensacola.  Several of our friends interrupted their holidays at home to share that special day with us.  Drew and Don came all the way from Pompano Beach to be there.

When our son Ian was born in November 1981 I contacted Drew, who at the time was pastor at the McCrea United Methodist Church in Fort Murray, New Jersey,  and I asked him if he would baptize him.  He agreed immediately and he and Sandy hosted our family and friends as we made the trip to rural northwestern New Jersey on March 20, 1982 . . . 39 years ago today . . . and on that day Drew became an important part of Ian’s life, too.

In the intervening years SallyAnn and I would return to Florida in the hopes of linking up with Drew and some of our other college friends.  Regardless of how long it had been, we always seemed to pick up right where we left off.  On one such trip, we attended the FSC 2010 homecoming festivities during which the Vagabonds paid tribute to the late Mel Wooten who had been our director and mentor during the budding of those early thespian careers.  It was a time of sadness but also a celebration as we fondly recalled those days together.  Drew and I were joined by one of our former “co-stars” for some slow motion fisticuffs.    

It was also during one of those returns to Florida when we were excited to meet Becky . . . another Parsons had come to Florida Southern College . . . and from that day on she became an important part of our lives.   I liked to kid with Drew that Becky is the daughter we never had, and as time went on we discovered how true this is.  We always love it when she flies up to Maine in the summer to share time with us at the lake cottage.

The last time I saw Drew was in February 2019 when we joined him and Sandy for a seafood dinner on the banks of the St. Johns River.  It was the first time since he began his struggle with cancer.  We jokingly remarked how we had not seemed to age, but certainly the past decade had taken its toll.  Still, Drew was just as I remember him.  That wry smile and that keen sense of humor.   Always quick with the puns.  We promised not to wait so long to get together again, but the ways of the world always seemed to get in the way. 

In early January we were saddened to learn that Drew had elected to enter hospice care.  He had come to terms with the realization that his long and brave battle was tightening its grip.  He had spoken with his God and his family and had made peace with the world and his time and place in it.  He wrote how much he hoped he would survive long enough to participate in the November 3rd election; the health of the American democracy was very important to him.  What incredible courage to face his personal struggle yet so concerned for the country he would leave behind for the rest of us.  And what humility as he asked his family and friends to forgive any pain or unkindness he knew he had inflicted.  He reminded us all that regardless of it all he was a happy man thankful for the fullness of the life he had enjoyed and shared with others.

I wrote my last letter to Drew on January 7 telling him how much he had meant to me since we first met.  As we grow older, and certainly in the autumn of our years, we cannot help but reflect on our own mortality and what we hope to accomplish in the time remaining to us.  I told him I could not even try to comprehend what he was going through but could only assure him that he was not going through it alone.  He had the love and understanding of his family and his friends.   I recall many of the times we had shared over these many years and what they meant to me and to SallyAnn; that he shared in our wedding and the baptizing of our son who has grown into a remarkable young man. And then there is Becky who is quite wonderful in her own special way. 

My last letter from Drew arrived on January 11.  His mind was still sharp, his wit dry as ever, and he assured me that he felt the best he had since he entered hospice in September.  He shared his own impressions of many of our shared memories and especially that connection through our children.  He also mentioned our shared interest in Holocaust studies and we both regretted that we never had an opportunity to work together after realizing how much we owed to each other without ever fully realizing it.  He sent me a copy of his doctoral dissertation which I read with amazement.  What a wonderfully analytical mind he had.  Drew and I were brothers in the bond, but I consider him much more than that. 

When word came that Drew had passed away I was not sure how to respond.  What does one say at a time like that?  Then I recalled a passage of Scripture – Romans 8:38-39:  
“Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.  For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality.  When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: ‘Death is swallowed up in victory.’”

I am sad that Drew has left us, yet out of grief comes the joy of the many memories we share and which will never be lost to time.  Drew is unforgettable and I will miss him always.  Mögest du in ewigem Frieden ruhen, mein lieber Freund und Bruder.
 

A Brief Berkshires Memoir

In memory of my dear friend, the Alaskan poet and essayist John Haines, who passed away ten years ago this month.

Every time I find myself driving Interstate 70 (the Mass Pike) through western Massachusetts I recall “a song they sing when they take to the highways.”   It is James Taylor’s 1970 “Sweet Baby James.”
    Now the first of December was covered with snow
    And so was the Turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston
    Lord the Berkshires seemed dream-like on account of that frosting
    With ten miles behind me and ten thousand more to go.
There was no snow on the mountains when my wife and I drove through the Berkshires, a southern extension of Vermont’s Green Mountains, in a late October after spending a couple of weeks at the lake cottage in Maine.  We decided to take a different route home to do a little leaf-peeping and enjoy the tint of autumn in western Massachusetts and through the Taconic Range across the border in Upstate New York.

But it was not just the rolling hills and autumnal colors that brought us to the Berkshires.  Our detour afforded us the opportunity to visit with a very dear friend – the former Alaskan poet laureate and essayist John Haines (1924-2011) who was in the midst of a writer residency in Lenox.  I brought along two bottles of good single malt Scotch I picked up at the state liquor store in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and I was looking forward to a long chat, that lovely usquebaugh properly loosening our tongues and inhibitions.

It was mid-afternoon when we arrived at 22 Nielsen Lane, just off the Old Stockbridge Road on the southern edge of Lenox and not far from Edith Wharton’s estate The Mount and the Tanglewood Music Center.  At first blush there was nothing exceptional about the house, a small Cape Cod bungalow built in 1941 and sheathed in clapboard painted a dull leaden blue.  What made this house special is that it was the last home of the American poet Amy Clampitt (1920-1994).  A native of Iowa, she had lived and worked most of her life in New York City, and in 1993 purchased this first house with funds awarded to her as a MacArthur Genius Grant the previous year.  Clampitt was first introduced to the Berkshires by Karen Chase, a local poet whom Clampitt met in Italy where both of them were residents at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, on Lake Como.  John had also been a resident there at another time.  Clampitt planned to use it as a summer get-away cottage. She and the NYU and Columbia University legal scholar Harold Corn, her partner of 25 years, lived in this house until her death from ovarian cancer.  They married here just three months before she died and he continued to live here alone until his own death, in 2001.  Before he died, Korn willed the cottage to the newly-established Amy Clampitt Fund to be administered as a writers residence by the Berkshire-Taconic Community Foundation.  It would be made available rent-free to selected poets who would have the time and solitude to work on a manuscript-in-progress while enjoying the tranquility of the Berkshires.  

William Spiegelman, Clampitt’s biographer and the cottage’s first writer-in residence, has called Clampitt “the patron saint of late bloomers.”  She attended Grinnell College, in her native Iowa, and later Columbia University, and worked as a secretary at Oxford University Press, an editor at E.P. Dutton, and as a freelance writer and researcher.  She was an avid birder and was also employed for a time as a reference librarian at the National Audubon Society.  She began writing unpublished fiction in the 1950s, and she released two poetry chapbooks in 1973 and 1981, but The Kingfisher, her first volume of poems published by Knopf did not appear until 1983 when she was 63.  Spiegelman wrote that her poems combine her Quaker austerity and the “luiciousness” of Keats, perhaps her favorite poet.  Clampitt’s career as a poet would only last eleven years during which she would publish five volumes of poems, the last being A Silence Opens published around the time of her death in 1994.  She had also served as a writer-in-residence at William and Mary, Amherst, and Smith College where she taught and instructed younger poets

John ambled out of the cottage into the front yard as we pulled into the driveway.  I admired the exterior admitting it was not quite what I had pictured in my mind although I cannot say for sure what I was expecting.  One conjures up all sorts of visions when one thinks of a writer’s cottage, especially one sequestered deep within the Berkshires.  Perhaps a small cottage set back in a copse of trees with ivy growing on its stone walls.  Instead it was one of eight modest homes with large yards situated on a quiet cul-de-sac and surrounded by autumn-colored woods.

John gave us a short tour of the property and I remarked on the size of the large backyard.  One side was lined with trees and shrubbery and I commented on the orange and yellow foliage of a stately beech tree.  I would learn later that evening that Ms. Clampitt’s small memorial service was held in the backyard and her ashes had been scattered under that very tree.

The neighborhood, and the cottage itself, both seemed very conducive to writing, offering solitude without being reclusive.  John was the fifth poet to enjoy the benefits of the Amy Clampitt Fund and to date 28 poets have spent months there working on their projects.  The cottage was simply furnished with many artifacts from Ms. Clampitt’s life and travels scattered throughout . . . her many hats and small collections of sea glass found during her summers spent in Corea, a tiny fishing village in Down East, Maine.  The walls were lined with books, many of them filled with Clampitt’s marginalia and with various ephemera employed as bookmarks.  Prominent among them were the collected works of her beloved Keats.

John had set up shop in Clampitt’s study to which her bed was moved during her final months so that she could watch her beloved birds flying to and from that stately beech tree in the backyard.  “What I like about the view is that there is so much going on.”  It was here she passed away on September 10, 1994 having lived in the cottage for only a year.  She would be pleased to know the tree and its birds were still there.  Her Olivetti typewriter sat nearby, a silent reminder of a stolen life.  Next to it were John’s notes and drafts for what he always referred to in his letters as his “big omnibus project,” a collection of essays that would eventually be published by CavanKerry Press as Descent in 2010 just months before his own death at age 86.  I was please to see that close by he had a copy of A Gradual Twilight: An Appreciation of John Haines, which I had edited and published with CavanKerry Press in 2003.

SallyAnn retired to the guest room upstairs and John opened one of the bottles of Scotch and we returned to the living room to chat.  Clampitt and Korn were married here and there was a photograph of them taken that day sitting next to one of her caches of sea glass.  It seemed that Ms. Clampitt’s spirit was everywhere watching over those who came to live and create in her cottage.  John and I discussed our respective projects and I caught him up on news of our mutual friends back home in Washington.  And there was also the upcoming off-year election and what it meant for our troubled country.  He and I never had a problem coming up with something to talk about.

SallyAnn rejoined us later and we invited John to join us for dinner at Bistro Zinc, on Church Street in the center of Lenox; it had been recommended to me by a friend back home who spends his summers in the Berkshires.  SallyAnn ordered the French onion soup and a small salad while John and I both selected the grilled flank of salmon served with couscous over a bed of crisp baby spinach.  John never considered himself a gourmand as such, yet having lived for so long in Alaska he found it hard not to appreciate a nice piece of salmon well prepared and beautifully plated.

Returning to the cottage, SallyAnn took her leave to read upstairs before turning in.  It was a very cozy space with bookcases lining the walls and a writing desk below a small window looking out toward the quiet street.  John and I retreated to the kitchen where we polished off the first bottle of Scotch before moving on to the second.  John may be considered taciturn by many; people he does not know.  But he and I had been good friends for almost two decades, having corresponded regularly and worked closely while I was editing A Gradual Twilight.  That night, with the skids properly greased, he was quite chatty and we talked long into the night on anything and everything.

When I finally went upstairs I found myself restless and unable to fall asleep.  I perused the book shelves and chanced upon a copy of Clampitt’s collected poems published in 1999.  I was particularly struck by the poems occasioned by her time in Down East Maine and also by the fact that none of the later poems, some of which may have been written in this cottage, made any allusion to the Berkshires or her time there. I also leafed through Clampitt’s guide to the English Lake District which she filled with notes on Wordsworth, his homes at Rydal Mount and Dove Cottage, and about her beloved Keats who traveled the region on foot in June 1818 hoping to visit Wordsworth there.

SallyAnn slept in the following morning but I arose early not surprised that Clampitt and her cottage had filled my Scotch-fuel dreams.  Before dressing I sat at the writing desk and sketched out some notes thinking they might some day give rise to a poem.  When I finally ventured downstairs I found John sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and writing down some of his own notes.  I poured some coffee and joined him, the two dead soldier Scotch bottles observing us from the far end of the table.  We talked about his plans to return home to Montana once his residency was over and we dredged up memories of our time together there in Big Sky a couple years earlier which was the last time we had spent any real time together.  

SallyAnn eventually joined us and John suggested that we drive down the Old Stockbridge Road to the nearby town of Lee for breakfast at Joe’s Diner.  It had been a local meeting place for locals and rusticators from away since 1955.  It served breakfast all day which was good because it was already approaching the noon hour.  Pancakes, eggs, bacon and sausage, and plenty of coffee was just the ticket.  While we were eating I noticed a framed copy of Norman Rockwell’s famous painting “The Runaway” hanging behind the counter.   Our server told us that Rockwell, who moved his home and studio to nearby Stockbridge in 1953, had used the diner as the setting for the painting although I would later learn that he had actually used the counter at the former Howard Johnson’s in Stockbridge.  Frankly, I think the painting more closely resembles Joe’s than any HoJO I had ever visited.  Doing some research later on I also learned that in the mid-1960s the downstairs portion of the building housing Rockwell’s Stockbridge studio was a small eatery known as the Back Room (aka Alice’s Restaurant) where you could get anything you want.  The same thing held true for Joe’s.   
After breakfast we dropped John back at the cottage and we loaded up the car and set out for home.   We had a long drive ahead of us.  The morning fog had lifted and it looked to be a beautiful day for some more leaf-peeping along the Taconic Parkway on our way toward New York City.  Before leaving Lenox, however, we stopped at a small bookstore we had spotted the previous evening.  It had a wonderful selection of poetry and I purchased a copy of Clampitt’s collected poems for my own library.  We also drove past the former site of Alice’s Restaurant in Stockbridge before we continued on our way . . . With ten miles behind me and ten thousand more to go.

In case you are wondering if those journal notes ever evolved into a poem . . . .Yes they did.

                     A Storm in the Berkshires

                                                      For Amy Clampitt (1920 - 1994)

            Perhaps it was only a dream, a violent autumn storm
            wrawling through darkness and raking the Berkshire hills;
            maple and oak riven from deep ancestral earth,
            and with them your beloved beech tree beneath
            which your ashes have reposed for many years.

            Branches stripped of leaves now broken and lying
            sprawled across the lawn, bird feeders tossed and shattered,
            their seed scattered far and wide in a tempest rush.
            Gone, too, the many birds, their homes and fodder
            carried by the winds to every near compass point.

            The storm has dissipated as I sit silent in your study
            where your breath quieted watching your birds on the wing.
            Drinking coffee I stare out at what nature has wrought,
            a gentle breeze blowing through an open window,
            a cadence your body followed to its early extinction.

The Mingling of Souls - Why I Write Letters

 

My essay "The Intermingling of Souls: Why I Write Letters" appeared today in the Winter 2021 ASP Bulletin.  It includes poetry and prose written during the COVID-19 pandemic.   My thanks to the editorial board at Allan Squire Publishing, an independent publisher based in Bethesda, Maryland, for allowing me to be a part of this interesting collection. 

  https://alansquirepublishing.com/winter-bulletin-2021/

 © 2021 Alan Squire Publishing.  All Rights reserved.  
Website designed by Sara Chandlee  / Graphic Design by Dewitt Design

Rage Against the Light - The End of a Four Year Nightmare

I can no longer recall who posted this cartoon but it captures what it has felt like to live in Trump’s America (and especially here in Washington, DC) since the November election . . . perhaps even before that when it became clear that should he lose the election he would not be going gently into that good night.  Despite the fact that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had won the popular and the electoral vote with a comfortable margin, the candidate who clearly lost refused to accept the results or to concede the election.  He chose instead to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”  Of course Dylan Thomas was writing about confronting death which none of us can escape when the time comes.  Still his words capture the essence of a president who could not bring himself to face the obvious, of a four year nightmare that just would not end.

Instead the former president sent his lawyers forth to contest the election results in courts across the nation while claiming that the election was from the outset rigged against him and that he had won a landslide victory without providing a shred of evidence to support his claim.  All but one of these court challenges failed.  Still he would not concede.

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

When all else failed the former president (how wonderful these two words sound) called upon his Republican allies in the US Congress to stand in his defense; to question the reliability and veracity of the electoral process and to refuse to certify the votes of the Electoral College.  Over a quarter of the members of the US House of Representatives and thirteen US Senators rose in support of this challenge.

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

On January 6, the day of the certification vote at the Capitol, the former president spoke to his supporters at his “Save America” rally on the Ellipse outside the White House and he urged them to march on the Capitol to support the vice president and those Republicans he believed were willing to challenge the results of the election.

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. After this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down. We’re going to walk down any one you want, but I think right here. We’re going walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators, and congressmen and women. We’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

We must stop the steal and then we must ensure that such outrageous election fraud never happens again, can never be allowed to happen again, but we’re going forward. We’ll take care of going forward. We got to take care of going back. Don’t let them talk . . . As this enormous crowd shows, we have truth and justice on our side. We have a deep and enduring love for America in our hearts. We love our country. We have overwhelming pride in this great country, and we have it deep in our souls. Together we are determined to defend and preserve government of the people, by the people and for the people.

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

We’re going to the Capitol and we’re going to try and give… The Democrats are hopeless. They’re never voting for anything, not even one vote. But we’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help, we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

And so these supporters marched on the Capitol while the former president retreated to the warmth of the White House to watch on TV what he had wrought.  The crowd confronted and fought the assembled law enforcement officers responsible for protecting the building. They broke down doors and smashed windows.  They shouted obscenities.  They wore clothing with racist and anti-Semitic messages.  They beat police officers with American flags.  They roamed the halls of the Capitol leaving behind graffiti, puddles of piss and piles of shit.  They breached and trashed the Senate chambers, the offices of the Speaker of the House and others.  They looted.  And five people died.  The former president could have stopped all of this had he chosen to do so. He could have called up the National Guard to restore order.  He refused.  Instead he told the terrorists he had been wronged and that he loved them.

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

For over a week downtown Washington, DC was a virtual ghost town as businesses shuttered and streets were closed to all but authorized traffic.  The National Mall was sealed off and closed to the public.  Over 20,000 heavily armed National Guard troops were deployed throughout this city.  Helicopters cris-crossed the skies.  They were  there not to fend  off a foreign threat but to protect our democratic institutions from organized domestic terrorists bent on sedition and treason.  Most of us have longed for the end of a four year nightmare. We did not imagine it would end like this.

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Thankfully the terrorists were subdued.  Many have been arrested and will be called upon to answer for their crimes.  True to form, the former president took no responsibility for what he had wrought and he has been impeached a second time.  His supporters vowed to continue to fight yet the new administration assumed office yesterday without any further rancor or violence.  Like all bullies, the former president and his enablers and sycophantic supporters are bullies who do not have the courage of their convictions. 

It was not the dying of the light the former president was actually raging against for his interregnum was not enlightened but cloaked in a darkness, in an iniquity and an immorality engendered by ignorance and greed and resulting in chaos and debasement.  There was no good night for him to go into.  In the end, there was nothing left to rage against.   His time was up, his power gone.  He is an empty shell with nothing left to do or say.  A hollow man.  A broken and lost soul.  A hollow sham.  A straw man who failed to destroy the institutions of the American democracy.

Instead of Dylan Thomas’s poem perhaps T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” captures the pith of this nightmare’s end.  His hollow men fail to do what they promised and there is nothing left for them to say or do.  To paraphrase Eliot:  This is the way his world ends.  This is the way his world ends.  This is the way his world ends.  Not with a bang but a whimper.

The light was not there yesterday morning at Joint Base Andrews as the former president and his entourage slipped away almost unnoticed.  The real light was to be found a few miles away, on the same steps of the Capitol where the former president’s terrorists brought shame on this country.  It was found in the words of Amanda Gorman, a 22 year old poet from Los Angeles who asked:  “When day comes we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade?”  We found the answer as the true face of America shone forth as President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took the oaths of their offices . . .  “when the day comes we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid, the new dawn blooms as we free it, for there is always light if only we’re brave enough to see it, if only we’re brave enough to be it.” 

Forget Me Not

 

                                 Forget Me Not

                        For God so loved the world,
                        that he gave his only begotten Son,
                        that whosoever believeth on him
                        should not perish, but have eternal life.
                                                           - John 3:16

            Bay waters a constant gnaw at it peripheries,
            a little more land disappears with every tide
            and with it what remains of those who stayed,
            those who called it home and now their bones
            lie nestled deep in the spongy marsh land,
            their names and dates and final wishes etched
            into stones weathered white and now toppling.
                Forget me not, is all I ask
                I could not ask for more,
                Than to be cherished by my friends
                So loving and so dear.* 
            The stones sink beneath spartina grass
            to mingle with those whose names
            they memorialize for none to see.
            They are the only ones who remain here
            as the Bay steals away another foot or two
            and the lost Island sinks from sight forever.

* A portion of the epitaph of Effie Wilson (January 16, 1880 - October 12, 1893). Holland Island, Maryland.

Merry Christmas!

Wishing all of my Christian friends a very Merry Christmas and a Peaceful New Year. I hope that your holiday is a festive one and that you and your families remain safe and healthy. May your days ahead be blessed with much happiness and fulfillment. Let us reflect wisely and grow spiritual to become better individuals and caring communities.
 

A Storm in the Berkshires

 

                   View in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, Clearing Off after a September Storm -  George Inness (1825-1894)

                                                   A Storm in the Berkshires

                                                      For Amy Clampitt (1920 - 1994)

            Perhaps it was only a dream, a violent autumn storm
            wrawling through darkness and raking the Berkshire hills;
            maple and oak riven from deep ancestral earth,
            and with them your beloved beech tree beneath
            which your ashes have reposed for many years.

            Branches stripped of leaves now broken and lying
            sprawled across the lawn, bird feeder tossed and shattered,
            their seed scattered far and wide in a tempest rush.
            Gone, too, the many birds, their homes and fodder
            carried by the winds to every near compass point.

            The storm has dissipated as I sit silent in your study
            where your breath quieted watching your birds on the wing.
            Drinking coffee I stare out at what nature has wrought,
            a gentle breeze blowing through an open window,
            a cadence your body followed to its early extinction.

Reading Poetry at the Crown & Crow in Washington, DC

The Miracles of Art: Remembering Donald Hall

Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon - Eagle Pond Farm - 1993

Credit: New Hampshire Public Radio

I believe in the miracles of art but what
prodigy will keep you safe beside me.

These words are inscribed on a polished black granite stone shaded by oaks and birches on the edge of Proctor Cemetery, in Andover, New Hampshire.  They were penned by the late poet Jane Kenyon (1948-1995), when Donald Hall, her husband and fellow poet, was diagnosed with liver cancer.  Remarkably, he recovered only for Kenyon a short time later to be diagnosed with leukemia to which she succumbed in 1995 at age 47.  She believed the miracles of art might save her husband.  The doctors saved him only so he could watch her die.  Hall had this epitaph chiseled onto the granite stone along with Kenyon’s name and dates, and his own name and 1928, his year of birth.   One date was omitted.  For years Hall would visit Proctor Cemetery and dream of the days they shared in Ann Arbor, and since 1975 at Eagle Pond Farm.  Those lost days.  And he dreamed of the time he would finally lie safe beside her.

A week ago a dear friend messaged me to inform me that Donald Hall, one of my favorite poets, had passed away the previous evening at his ancestral Eagle Pond Farm, in Wilmot, New Hampshire.  He was 89 and in failing health for some time.  So I cannot say I was shocked by the news, but I am nevertheless devastated by the loss of this New England, this American icon, who had reached the pinnacle of his profession of poet, essayist, and dare I say, a definer of American culture.  He would be named US Poet Laureate in 2006-2007. 

There have many tributes to Mr. Hall since his passing; extensive obituaries recounting his life and career in literature and letters have appeared in newspapers and journals  across the country.  I doubt I can say anything about his life and writings that have not already been said many times over.   So permit me to share a few personal notes about the times his and my orbits intersected.

I had been reading Hall’s poems and essays for many years when I first wrote to him in 1998 asking if he might contribute a poem or an essay for an anthology I was editing to commemorate the life and works of my dear friend John Haines, a former poet laureate of Alaska.  I had first met John a few years earlier when he was the writer in residence at the George Washington University, in Washington, DC, and when he had invited me to participate in a workshop he was leading.  We became good friends after that and frequently corresponded after his return to Alaska.  So I wanted the anthology to include offerings from friends and contemporaries who knew John.  Donald  Hall was at the top of the list. 

I received a very nice letter from Hall congratulating me on my project yet he regretted that he had nothing he could contribute; his time was then devoted to the writing of elegiac verse (“poetry begins with elegy”) and prose while trying to come to terms with Kenyon’s premature death, as well as his own mortality. I then wrote back to him inquiring whether I might have permission to use “Stony John Haines” (1990), a short commentary which appeared in Death to Death to Poetry published by the University of Michigan Press, in 1994.   Hall was more than gracious and happy to allow me to include it in A Gradual Twilight: An Appreciation of John Haines published by CavanKerry Press, in 2003.

I met Hall for the first time when he read with Charles Simic at the Library of Congress in early March 1999.  We spoke after the reading and he asked how the Haines anthology was coming along.   After that we continued to correspond until we met again in the autumn of 2000 when he gave a reading from Kenyon’s posthumous collection, One Hundred White Daffodils, at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University.  I was there doing literary research at the Houghton Library and saw an announcement for the reading on a kiosk in Harvard Yard.   That evening I wandered over to the museum after the library had closed and once again I enjoyed a nice conversation with Hall as he inscribed Kenyon’s book to me as “Jane’s remains.”   The next day we bumped into each other at the minuscule Grolier’s Poetry Bookshop near Harvard Yard.  Hall used to hang out there during his undergraduate days and was making a few purchases before returning to Eagle Pond Farm.  

Our correspondence continued for many year after that as age and infirmities began to take their toll on Hall’s body although he continued to reside at his ancient farm up until his death.  His mind remained sharp when the well of poems eventually dried up eight years ago.  He nevertheless continued to write essays in which he described the afflictions of age.  Essays After Eighty appeared in 2014 and he recognized that his own mortal coil was quickly shuffling off.  “In a paragraph or two, my prose embodies a momentary victory over fatigue.”  Still he kept writing. 

Last year I received a nice letter from Hall informing me that he was assembling yet another collection of essays.  He included a mock up of the proposed cover - A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety - along with a couple brief excerpts. “In your eighties you are invisible. Nearing ninety you hope nobody sees you.”  Just a few days before his passing I wrote to Hall telling him how much I was looking forward to the publication of the new book in July.   Unfortunately I doubt he saw my letter, and it is sad to think he will not see the publication of his last book and revel in its success.   It will be hard to read knowing Hall is no longer among us.  Writing about his friend Richard Wilbur, who died last year at age 96: “In his work he ought to survive, but probably, like most of us, he won’t.”  I disagree.  I am certain Hall’s legacy will live beyond my own years.  

Today Donald Hall was buried beside his beloved Jane in Proctor Cemetery, sharing the “double solitude” they experienced together for two decades at nearby Eagle Pond Farm.  But his poetry and prose will remain with us as we carry on - Don’s remains.   They are his prodigy, his miracles of art.

Frustrated

To the followers of my two blogspots . . . I apologize for my long absence, but I am dealing with some nagging health issues that have dominated my time, wrecked my routine, zapped my energy levels, and distracted me from my thoughts and my ability to express them as I would like. I look forward to a quick recovery from what I hope is only a temporary yet exasperating set of circumstances.

A Lake For All Seasons

The following is the text of a guest blog posted today at Coös Networks, – www.groupsite.com – a community website serving the far northern precincts of New Hampshire. Coös Networks has become an important meeting place for the exchanging ideas, sharing information, while "deepening relationships across disciplines and geography, and building regional vitality." I thank Coös Networks for giving me an opportunity to contribute this guest blog. 
 
In the 1989 film "Field of Dreams," a disconnected voice instructs an Iowa farmer played by Kevin Costner to mow down part of his corn crop and construct a baseball diamond. "If you build it, he will come." I won’t spoil the film for any of you who may not have seen it yet (you should). Suffice it to say, he does . . . . and he does. The film’s tag line states it plainly. "All his life, Ray Kinsella was searching for his dreams. Then one day, his dreams come looking for him. Like Kinsella, I went looking for a dream on my first visit to northern New Hampshire over twenty years ago. I was not sure I knew what I was looking for, but I knew I would know it if and when I found it. And I did. This dream came to me in the form of a small 231-acre lake nestled just below Prospect Hill and the height of land that forms the headwaters of the mighty Connecticut River and demarcates the US-Canadian (Québec) border.

On that first trip to northern New Hampshire in early 1994 I drove the 18 miles of macadam that is US Highway 3 as it bisects northern Coös County between Colebrook and the peaceful hamlet of Pittsburg where Lake Francis is impounded behind the 117-foot earthen Murphy Dam built in 1940 as part of a flood control project. From there for a distance of 14 miles I continued to follow the forest-fringed highway roughly paralleling the Upper Connecticut River and the three Connecticut Lakes.

First Connecticut Lake (ca. 3,000 acres at 1,638 feet above sea level) and Second Connecticut (ca. 1,100 acres at 1,866 feet above sea level) two miles upstream are also both impounded behind large concrete dams with flood gates. The Connecticut River connecting these two lakes and Lake Francis is considered some of the best trout and landlocked salmon waters in New England, if not the United States. The river narrows the farther north one travels and it is fed by several small tributaries. Five miles above Second Lake, and just north of a marshy area known as the Moose Flowage, is Third Connecticut Lake (2,188 feet above sea level), the lake of my dreams. One mile beyond that lake is the international border and the terminus of US Highway 3.

On that first visit I pulled off the highway at the small gravel boat landing - the only mark of man on the entire lake - and parked in the shade of two ancient trees near the water’s edge. From there I could survey almost the entire surface of the lake and the surrounding hills. Somewhere just below the height of land beyond the far shoreline is a small two acre pond - Fourth Connecticut Lake - the actual headwaters of the Connecticut River situated at 2,670 feet above sea level. I was the only one there and I felt that in some small way I had arrived at a place I had to share with no one. The lake was quiet. Just a couple of loons out in the middle minding their own business. The only sound was the wind rustling the leaves as I watched clouds scud over the distant ridge line. This was the spot I hoped and dreamed I would find.

I have returned to this spot dozens of times over the intervening years. At all hours of the day and night and during every season. I would go there to just be alone with my thoughts. I have sat there and watched storms brew with lightning stabbing the roiling lake as thunder echoed through the hills. I have gone there to revel in the myriad autumn colors as I fished for lake trout. I have parked my car above the lake in the dead of winter when the ice is thick and snow covered as are the surrounding forests; my car buffeted by the wind as snow dervishes terpsichored across the ice, or as a blizzard slowly arrived over the ridge line from Canada. I have returned at the height of spring which comes late in this northern country. The winter ice rotten and soon to sink to the depths of the lake. The loons had returned and it was time to dream of a quiet evening fishing for trout.

All of my life I had searched for just such a special place. I can’t help but think this lake was created solely for my enjoyment and peace of mind as I always enjoy it in solitude. It is the only way I can imagine it, either when I am there or when I dream about it and wonder what I will see and feel upon my next visit. A disconnected voice comes to me. "If it is there, you will come." I always do. I always will.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas – More Than a High School Atrocity

The February 21, 2018 edition of the New York Times ran an interesting essay by Mary Lou Foy of The Miami Herald via Reuters on the woman for whom the high school in Parkland, Florida is named.  I am guessing those who never spent much time in Florida have ever heard the name Marjory Stoneman Douglas (1890-1998) until it was connected to the second most lethal school shooting in US history on February 14.

Despite many visits to Florida over the years, including the three years I spent there as an undergraduate in college, I am sad to admit that I had never heard of her either until the spring of 1994 when I presented a paper at the annual meeting of the Florida Historical Society in Fort Myer.  Sitting in a beach tiki bar one evening a colleague who was an authority on Ms. Douglas brought me up to snuff on this fascinating woman.  I don’t want her name to only be associated with a needless and senseless atrocity, one more in a long string of school shootings which our leaders, our government, wants to do nothing about as it would interdict the ready and steady flow of cash flowing into their coffers from the National Rifle Association.  I am proud to see and hear the surviving students in Parkland, and others joining them around the United States, learning an important lesson in activism from Ms. Douglas.   That is perhaps a greater tribute to her memory than any other than can be afforded her. 

Marjory Stoneman was born in 1890 in Minnesota where she was raised.  Her father was a judge and her mother a concert violinist.   She went East in 1908 and graduated from Wellesley College, near Boston, in 1912.   She married Kenneth Douglas, a local newspaper journalist, in 1914 but she soon realized this was a mistake and in the autumn of 1915 an uncle encouraged her to make the move south to Miami where fewer than 5,000 people lived there.   She joined her father Frank Stoneman, who in 1903 became the first publisher of the Miami Evening Record, the newspaper that would in 1910 become The Miami Herald.  Marjory worked for a time as a reporter for the paper before going overseas during World War I, serving with the American Red Cross in France, Belgium, Italy and in the Balkans.  She returned to the paper after the war and worked for a time as an assistant editor.  She eventually left the paper in 1923.

During her early years in South Florida, Douglas took up the activist cause of responsible urban planning as the population grew by more than 100,000 inhabitants over the course of a single decade.   She opposed the policy instituted by Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, the former Florida governor (1905-1909), to drain the Everglades in order to reclaim land for agricultural cultivation in South Florida.  This advocacy would continue long after she gave up newspaper journalism.

From 1920 until her centenary in 1990, she wrote and published dozens of articles, young adult fiction stories, and numerous book reviews.  The natural South Florida landscape, especially the Everglades, and its animal inhabitants were recurring themes in her fictional stories while she continued to write on environmental issues and in support of the women’s suffrage movement, civil rights and the revocation of Prohibition.  She served on the editorial board of the new University of Miami Press, and supported the Junior Museum of Miami and slum clearance in Coconut Grove where she lived in an English-styled cottage from 1926 until the end of her life.

Douglas continued to oppose the draining of the Everglades while advocating for its preservation.  She lead the campaign to have the central core of the Everglades preserved as a

national park in 1947, the same year her seminal book, The Everglades: River of Grass, was published by Rinehart & Company as part of a book series focusing on US rivers.  It remains in print 70 years after its publication and it has become a classic treatise on the importance of US wetlands; the Everglades being the largest.  They are not useless swamps, but rather a complex system of tenuous ecosystems.  The Everglades is actually no swamp at all, but a 60 mile wide, 100 mile long shallow river running from Lake Okeechobee in the north to Florida Bay in the south.  Even today the Everglades are continually subjected to over-drainage, pollution from adjacent agriculture, and the encroachment of urban sprawl along its eastern margins.  The population of what is now the Miami metropolitan area has grown from 100,000 to over six million in the past century roughly coinciding with Ms. Douglas’ lifetime.  Who can deny the Everglades are under assault and require protection?  I saw this damage up close during my own first visit to the Everglades in 2010.  Ms. Douglas understood this threat perhaps better than anyone.  I read her book while I was there.  The first sentence says it all.  ''There are no other Everglades in the world.''

Douglas was one of the founders of the Friends of the Everglades in 1969 and today it has over 5,000 members . . . the population of Miami when she first arrived there.  The organization has at its goal that this “vast, magnificent, subtle and unique region of the Everglades may not be utterly lost.''  She continued to speak out against those who plundered the Everglades wishing that one day the message would get through to those who refused to recognize the importance of this valuable and irreplaceable ecosystem.  ''I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. I say it's got to be done.''

In the mid-1990s the Clinton administration endorsed efforts during Douglas’ lifetime to stop this plunder and to restore the Everglades’ natural water flow.  Naturally this was opposed by agribusiness, especially the sugar industry, which claimed that the damage to the Everglades was the result of urban sprawl.  The battle continues to this very day.

During the 2016 election campaign our current president [#NotMyPresident] stated that, if elected, his administration would cooperate in efforts “to restore and protect the beautiful Everglades.”   During a campaign visit to South Florida he flew over the Everglades; “ let me tell you when you fly over the Everglades and you look at those gators and you look at those water moccasins, you say, I better have a good helicopter.”   Sure, that’s what’s most important.  His well being and not that of the Everglades.  He promised to “help you upgrade water and wastewater — and you know you have a huge problem with wastewater — so that the Florida aquifer is pure and safe from pollution. We have to do it.”  Unfortunately these claims and promises have proven to be typical Trump claptrap.  He has also made it clear he plans to gut the Environmental Protection Agency and scale back environmental regulations which would protect the Everglades.  Florida Senator Bill Nelson points to Trump’s appointments, including Scott Pruitt at EPA.  “You can tell a lot about a fella by the company he keeps and you can tell a lot about a president by the appointment that he makes, and here’s a good example.”  Some battles have been won over the years, but the war to save the Everglades still wages at the state and federal levels.  Marjory Stoneman Douglas’ vision is still alive and cannot be ignored or forgotten. 

Ms. Douglas’ name has become synonymous with environmentalism and efforts to protect Florida’s Everglades.  In May 1998, following her death at age 108, her ashes were scattered over the portion of Everglades National Park that bears her name.  The building in Tallahassee, the state capital, that houses the state Department of Environmental Protection is named in her honor as is a nature center on Key Biscayne, near Miami.  Several parks and schools throughout the state bear her name, including the high school where the recent atrocity took place.  The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School was established in Parkland, east of Pompano Beach, in 1990 to commemorate her centenary.  Ironically, Parkland is a relatively newer community in the ever-expanding urban sprawl fast encroaching on the Everglades from the east. 

Her name has been associated with environmental activism throughout the 20th century and beyond, yet it is now unfortunately married to one of the most deadly school shootings in US history.   The people of Florida have long known the name of Marjory Stoneman Douglas and what it has come to represent. Everyone should know.  If you have never read her book, you should take the time to do so.

“Leaving the Highway” - A Dispatch from the Sunshine State

Dateline: Gainesville, Florida

Florida has always been a big part of my life having vacationed here with my family when I was young. I spent my undergraduate college years at Florida Southern College, in Lakeland, if for no other reason than I was quickly growing tired of those cold and dreary Midwestern winters. It was in Florida where I met and married my wife of 43 years, a native Florida gal. I still have family and friends here. My father is buried here.
Many of us, including my younger self, think of Florida as a place of sun and fun, a place to escape to when life elsewhere in America has grown old and tiresome. Yet for some of the natives, Florida can become just as old and tiresome . . . just a place to be. My wife has felt this way having grown up here although nostalgia and thoughts of family and friends still here have tempered this a bit over the years. "Florida is a transient state in which too many rootless people dare nothing for the past nor this state’s future," writes Floridian novelist Randy Wayne White in Ten Thousand Island (2000). "Florida is a vacation destination or a retirement place, as temporary as time spent in a bus station . . . Like a bus station, Florida attracts con men and predators. It always has, Florida always will."

I am quite certain this is true. When you get right down to it, Florida is really no different from any other state. There will always be those who sing its praises while others disparage it every chance they get. Florida is certainly not the state I expected to find the first time I visited here in December 1962. There was a lot more to the place than the beaches and palm trees I had seen in photographs and on postcards. I have always enjoyed the beaches, but I am strongly drawn to the less visited hinterlands, especially the inland scrub of central North Florida. Ocala north to the Georgia border, along with the Panhandle, resembles southern Georgia more than it does peninsular Central and South Florida. To quote an old adage: "In Florida, the farther north you go, the farther south you are." And this is truer than one might think for North Florida still retains its strong Southern roots.

For over five decades I have been a regular visitor to Florida - mainly to the Gulf Coast where my family vacationed when I was young and where my parents retired in 1984. There were my three years of college in Lakeland (a year was also spent in Germany), and now there is my in-law’s home in Gainesville, the county seat of Alachua County in central North Florida about an hour and a half southwest of Jacksonville and two hours north of both Orlando and Tampa. For several years now Gainesville has been ranked high on the list of the best places to live in the USA. Driving across town one is struck by the large variety of trees; despite development the city has been careful to preserve its urban forest. I have always felt very much at home here. It feels like home away from home.

Alachua County today is somewhat of an anomaly, tending to be more liberal than the rest of North Florida due in large part to the presence of the University of Florida campus (the fifth largest in the USA in terms of enrollment) and the diversified community that supports it. There are world famous medical facilities. There is a thriving cultural scene in the area with several museums and performing arts venues. Gainesville is the home of the late Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Stephen Stills lived here as a boy, as did Don Felder and Bernie Leadon of The Eagles. They, along with Petty, all attended Gainesville High School. And one cannot overlook sports (GO GATORS!!) The University is by far the largest employer in the area and locals wear the Orange and Blue everywhere you go.

That said, Alachua County was not always this forward thinking. According to the county’s Historical Commission it was the site of at least 21 documented lynchings of African Americans between 1877 and 1950, including at least ten in Newberry, just a few miles west of Gainesville. In 2017, Alachua County announced plans to place markers at the sites of every extra-judicial killing in the county along with a memorial plaque in Gainesville listing all of the victims. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center there are still several Ku Klux Klan entities, as well as other white supremacist and separatist organizations, operating throughout Florida. How can we overlook the fact that a self-proclaimed white supremacist murdered 17 high school students and faculty in South Florida just a week ago? So Randy Wayne White was perhaps not too far off the mark with his views on modern Florida. It is still a very edgy state in so many ways, especially when one ventures into the rural interior.

I choose, however, not to dwell on all of this, but to celebrate this inland North Florida scrub land I have come to love over the years. This brings me back to my own "small place of enchantment" as Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896-1953) called rural Alachua County southeast of Gainesville. Rawlings, a 20^th century American author, moved south to Florida in 1928 and purchased a 70-acre farm and orange grove in Cross Creek where she lived until her death in 1953. There she wrote novels set in the Florida scrub, the most famous of these being The Yearling which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, in 1939.

It is to this little corner of Alachua County that I return to

every time I come to Florida. A visit would not be complete without a trip to Cross Creek and the Florida scrub, roaming the back roads over by Cross Creek, Micanopy, Island Pond, and Hawthorne. The narrow country roads pass under canopies of live oak festooned with long gray beards of Spanish moss. This year, in the wake of last autumn’s Hurricane Irma and its torrential rainfalls, there is plenty of water in Cross Creek, connecting Orange and Lochloosa lakes, and in the River Styx which is only a few miles long and more a swampy creek than a formidable river. It connects Newnan's Lake with Orange Lake. This is not always the case and I have visited this area there was no water in them or in the lakes they connect. But this year there are white herons and egrets wading the sedgy sloughs looking for their next meal. An alligator was resting on the bank as if he had not a care in the world. This entire area is a high-quality bald cypress swamp forest surrounded by Southeastern conifer, sand pine scrub, saw and scrub palmetto and swamp tupelo . . . part of the extensive Ocala National Forest, the southernmost in the USA and one of the largest east of the Mississippi.

Again, I am reminded why I like to come back to this special part of Florida. Perhaps Miss Rawlings said it best when surveying her home and farm at Cross Creek. "It is necessary to leave the impersonal highway, to step inside the rusty gate and close it behind. One is now inside the orange grove, out of one world and in the mysterious heart of another. And after long years of spiritual homelessness, of nostalgia, here is that mystic loveliness of childhood again. Here is home."

Called By No Name Except Deportees

The crops are all in and the peaches are rott'ning,
The oranges piled in their creosote dumps;
They're flying 'em back to the Mexican border
To pay all their money to wade back again

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won't have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be "deportees"  

My father's own father, he waded that river,
They took all the money he made in his life;
My brothers and sisters come working the fruit trees,
And they rode the truck till they took down and died.
   
Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,
Our work contract's out and we have to move on;
Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.  

We died in your hills, we died in your deserts,
We died in your valleys and died on your plains.
We died 'neath your trees and we died in your bushes,
Both sides of the river, we died just the same.
 
The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, "They are just deportees"  

Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil
And be called by no name except "deportees"?                                – Woody Guthrie

Seventy years ago, on a winter morning in late January 1948, a DC-3 aircraft chartered by the former US Immigration and Naturalization Service [INS] departed an airport in Oakland, California bound for El Centro, just a few miles north of the US-Mexican border after a brief refueling stop in Burbank, the plane’s home near Los Angeles. On board was a three-person flight crew and an INS agent. Some of the remaining 28 passengers were bracero guest workers returning to Mexico at the end of their contract in the fruit groves. Some were undocumented aliens being deported by INS.

Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,
Our work contract's out and we have to move on; Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.
 
Approximately 150 miles south of Oakland a fire broke out in one of the plane’s two engines. As the fire spread one of the wings sheared off and the aircraft spiraled into Los Gatos Canyon some 20 miles from Coalinga near Fresno, crashing in a massive fireball. Despite attempted rescue efforts, everyone on board was killed instantly.  

We died in your hills, we died in your deserts,
We died in your valleys and died on your plains.
We died 'neath your trees and we died in your bushes,
Both sides of the river, we died just the same.
 
Media reports at the time would identify the flight crew and the INS agent and their bodies were eventually returned to

their families for burial. The remaining victims were identified only as "deportees." Not all of them were. In fact, one of the victims was born in Spain and was not a deportee or a Mexican national. Nevertheless, he was buried anonymously with the others in a mass grave on the fringes of a cemetery in Fresno. "Here lies 28 Mexican nationals."

This incident would have passed into a distant and soon forgotten memory had it not been for Woody Guthrie who penned the above poem – "Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos") – to retell the story of the crash and the sad fate of the mostly anonymous victims who died violently and were buried without their names. Very few of their families ever learned what happened to their loved ones until much later. Guthrie’s poem condemned the treatment of those who came to this country to help harvest our crops.
 
They're flying 'em back to the Mexican border
To pay all their money to wade back again

The poem was eventually set to music by Martin Hoffmann, and Guthrie’s friend Pete Seeger began performing it at concerts. Over the past seven decades it has been covered by numerous and varied musical artists, including this beautiful cover by Woody’s son Arlo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2eO65BqxBE

In the years since this song was written the plight of the Mexican field workers has improved only slightly. Those who have remained in this country to work the fields live mostly in poverty. Those who are here illegally always live with the threat of deportation. And still they come to America to what they hope will be a better life for them and their families. They do work many Americans feel is beneath them. Today there is a border wall and our current so-called leaders want to build a bigger and better one. In Woody Guthrie’s time the Mexican workers were treated "like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves." Our current president added "rapists" and believes America can only be great again if this country rids itself of undesirable foreigners, be they Mexicans . . . or Muslims . . . and whoever he decides to add to the list. To him they are not immigrants yearning to be free. They are not field workers, students, teachers, doctors, lawyers, inventors, veterans who served this country in combat . . . this list goes on. Dreamers all.
 
You won't have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be "deportees"