Lord Buckley

 

THE OPEN ROAD

peace, love, happiness & understanding

 

 

October 29, 2020

 

Last week I was thinking about loving the Earth. (Why is Earth Day just one day out of the year? Shouldn’t every day be Earth Day?) Kim sent a poem, but it arrived a little too late to be included in last week’s issue. Here it is:

 

Revising Genesis 

 

And God said, Rest here in the garden 

where you belong, where now you know 

the good from evil, and so the good may be 

your calling. Be home here in beauty and bounty, 

and by salt sweat of your close devotion, make Earth 

your wise guide, each creature teaching miracles of being 

in wing and song, in blurred heart of hummingbird

and deep thump of whale, counting nights 

in peace and days in blessing, as you

raise your arms in praise. 

 

—Kim Stafford

*

 

And he recommended this poem by Gary Snyder:

 

For All

 

Ah to be alive

       on a mid-September morn

       fording a stream

       barefoot, pants rolled up,

       holding boots, pack on,

       sunshine, ice in the shallows,

        northern rockies. 

 

Rustle and shimmer of icy creek waters

stones turn underfoot, small and hard as toes

       cold nose dripping

       singing inside

       creek music, heart music,

       smell of sun on gravel. 

      

        I pledge allegiance 

 

I pledge allegiance to the soil

       of Turtle Island,

       and to the beings who thereon dwell

       one ecosystem

       in diversity

       under the sun

With joyful interpenetration for all.

 

—Gary Snyder

*

 

Katie sent this poem of Deborah’s:

 

The Color of Eyes 

 

The glacier weeps

icicles, weeps shades

of sky and azure sea.

 

Blue, blue of the waves,

rippling along sand, 

coral, and melting ice.

 

Cornflowers in summer,

blue among the fields

of green and gold.

 

Flashing blue eyes

beckoning with silence.

 

Color of a morning, 

color of time,

of mourning.

 

Blue the song of sadness, 

smoky grey in the early hours

blue the color of words.

 

Oh, blue dripping

over ears, into eyes, 

water molecules separating,

 

then vanishing, atoms alone. 

 

—Deborah Buchanan

*

 

Robin Schauffler wrote:

 

Hey Johnny,

 

Thank you for the ongoing peace-love-and-happiness! We’re all depressed and hysterical, if one can be both at once, but we have to, have to keep remembering what’s good. 

 

And here’s another poem you might want to share:

 

The poet, Derek Mahon, had just died (October 1), and this poem of his was read by another Irish poet on NPR. He wrote it in 2012, but it feels like today. As soon as I heard it I decided to commit it to memory, and I’m working on that. It helps me go to sleep at night. Everything is thoroughly fucked up, but still, on some most basic level, we will manage.

 

Love,

Robin

 

Everything is Going to be All Right

 

How should I not be glad to contemplate

the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window

and a high tide reflected on the ceiling?

There will be dying, there will be dying,

but there is no need to go into that.

The poems flow from the hand unbidden

and the hidden source is the watchful heart.

The sun rises in spite of everything

and the far cities are beautiful and bright.

I lie here in a riot of sunlight

watching the day break and the clouds flying.

Everything is going to be all right.

 

—Derek Mahon, from Selected Poems

*

 

I was listening to an audio book by David Whyte called What to Remember When Waking. He read this poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, which fits our Earth-loving theme. As always, with his poems, be sure to read it aloud:

 

Inversnaid

 

This darksome burn, horseback brown,

His rollrock highroad roaring down,

In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam

Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

 

A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth

Turns and twindles over the broth

Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,

It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

 

Degged with dew, dappled with dew

Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,

Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,

And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

 

What would the world be, once bereft

Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,

O let them be left, wildness and wet;

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

 

—Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

[Word notes. Inversnaid is a little village on the shores of Loch Lomond, in Scotland. A burn is a mountain stream. Coop and comb are the high and low parts of the water. Flutes are grooves. He made up the word twindle. Fells are hills. Degged means sprinkled. A brae is a hillside.]

 

This is a charming excerpt from a brief biography on the Gerard Manley Hopkins official website:

 

He was a man of passion and he was a lover, this poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. As a boy he loved to climb a tree in his family garden in London and look up at the sky and down at the earth. At Oxford University he loved his studies in Greek and Latin and won a brilliant “First” in his final examination. He loved his family and friends and God, he loved music and sketching, he loved hiking and swimming, and he loved beauty, nature, and the environment. As a priest he loved his fellow Jesuits, his students, and his parishioners, and as a poet he loved his creativity and the words and images and rhythms and sounds of his poems.

*

 

Kim has revised the Gettysburg Address as well as Genesis:

 

Abe & I

 

Four score and seven years from now our descendants will inherit on this continent an older earth conceived in diversity and dedicated to the recognition that all creatures live as one. Now we are engaged in a great struggle, testing whether this creation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met in a great community for that struggle. We have come to dedicate a portion of our grief as a final resting-place for those creatures who gave their lives departing from this creation. It is fitting and proper that we should do this. In a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this creation. The desperate creatures, neglected children, vibrant cultures and local ways of being, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The whole earth will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what we now choose to do. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated to the unfinished work which they who struggled and lost here have thus far so painfully clarified. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these tattered beauties we take increased devotion to that cause for which they lost their last full measure of living witness and of song—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not be joined by an endless parade of others long in splendor, suddenly gone, that this whole earth shall have a new birth in welcome to its own, and that reconciliation of all creatures, by all creatures, for all creatures shall not perish from the earth.

 

—Kim Stafford

*

 

Somebody else who wrote their own version of the Gettysburg Address was the astonishing beatnik-poet-philosopher-saint-comedian Lord Buckley. He said, “I’m a people worshipper. I think people should worship people.” Just for fun, here’s his version:

 

The Gettysburg Address

 

Milords and Miladies of the world of people 

most restfully and most humbly 

and with the deepest reverence 

for the great and precious American Saint Abraham Lincoln.

I shall translate in the modern semantic of the hip, 

this new zig-zag semantic, 

his beloved Gettysburg Address….

 

When dey called old Lanky Linc up to de podium 

and he dug all dem cats and kiddies swingin’ on the green sward, 

great love look come on his Saint face, 

and he put dis issue down to ’em, he say:

 

Four big hits and seven licks ago, 

our before-daddies swung forth upon this sweet groovey land 

a jumpin’, wailin’, stompin’, swingin’ new nation, 

hip to the cool sweet groove of liberty 

and solid sent upon the Ace lick dat all cats and kiddies, 

red, white, or blue, is created level in front.

We are now hung with a king size main-day Civil Drag, 

soundin’ whether this nation or any up there nation, 

so hip and so solid sent can stay with it all the way.

We have stomped out here to the hassle site 

of some of the worst jazz blown in the entire issue.

Gettys-mother-burg.

We are here to turn on a small soil stash 

of the before-mentioned hassle site 

as a final sweet sod pad for those 

who laid it down and left it there 

so that this jumpin’ happy beat might blow forever-more.

And we all dig that this is the straightest lick.

But diggin’ it harder from afar we cannot mellow, 

we cannot put down the stamp of the lord on this sweet sod 

because the strong non-stop studs, 

both diggin’ it and dug under it, who hassled here 

have mellowed it with such a wild mad beat 

that we can hear it, but we can’t touch it.

Now the world cats will short dig nor long stash in their wigs 

what we are beatin’ our chops around here, 

but it never can successively shade what they vanced here.

It is for us the swingin’ to pick up the dues 

of these fine studs who cut out from here 

and fly it through to Endsville. 

It is hipper for us to be signifyin’ to the glorious gig 

that we can’t miss with all these bulgin’ eyes, 

that from all these A-stamp studs we double our love kick, too, 

that righteous line for which these hard cats sounded 

the last nth bone of the beat of the bell.

That we here want it stuck up straight for all to dig 

that these departed studs shall not have split in vain, 

and that this nation under the great swingin’ Lord 

shall swing up a whopper of endless Mardi Gras, 

and that the big law by you straights, 

from you cats, 

and for you kiddies, 

shall not be scratched from the big race.

 

—Richard “Lord” Buckley  (1906-1960)

*

 

Here’s a link to a performance by Lord Buckley:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuQ-Xt-pDbk

*

 

I guess while we’re at it, we should include the original:

 

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

 

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

 

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

 

—Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863

 

peace & love, y’all

Johnny