Sandburg for Easter—National Poetry Month 2025

 

 

Carl Sandburg's contemporary, the Socialist cartoonist Art Young, shared his understanding of Jesus.

It’s Easter, the holiest day of the Christian year. Anyway, blessings on all who hold this day in their hearts. But if you checked in at this blog today for the whole Easter story, you will be disappointed. You can find that plus lots of commentary this morning at any of the churches meeting today. 

 

 

                                        Carl Sandburg in Chicago.  He knew whereof he wrote.

 

Instead we are going to hear a different perspective by my favorite American poet—Carl Sandburg. The small town son of Swedish immigrants, Spanish American War vet who never got to Cuba, sometimes hobo, Universalist, Socialist, and Chicago newspaper reporter was mightily put out by the shenanigans of Billy Sunday, the former baseball player and hair-on-fire tent show Evangelist. He was even more outraged at the capitalist bosses and their bought-and-paid-for politicians who benefited from a Sunday side show freak distraction. 

 

 

Billy Sunday doing his schtick.

 

Sandburg let loose a volcanic eruption of a poem. If the old poet was still with us today he would have no problem recognizing Billy Sunday’s heirs—Franklin Graham and a gaggle of others, or the evil oligarchy that uses them and their clownish front man, the Cheeto-in-Charge. 

 

Have at ‘em, Carl! 

 

To A Contemporary Bunkshooter

You come along. . . tearing your shirt. . . yelling about
Jesus.
Where do you get that stuff?
What do you know about Jesus?
Jesus had a way of talking soft and outside of a few
bankers and higher-ups among the con men of Jerusalem
everybody liked to have this Jesus around because
he never made any fake passes and everything
he said went and he helped the sick and gave the
people hope.

You come along squirting words at us, shaking your fist
and calling us all damn fools so fierce the froth slobbers
over your lips. . . always blabbing we're all
going to hell straight off and you know all about it.

I’ve read Jesus words. I know what he said. You don’t
throw any scare into me. I’ve got your number. I
know how much you know about Jesus.

He never came near clean people or dirty people but
they felt cleaner because he came along. It was your
crowd of bankers and business men and lawyers
hired the sluggers and murderers who put Jesus out
of the running.

I say the same bunch backing you nailed the nails into
the hands of this Jesus of Nazareth. He had lined
up against him the same crooks and strong-arm men
now lined up with you paying your way.

This Jesus was good to look at, smelled good, listened
good. He threw out something fresh and beautiful
from the skin of his body and the touch of his hands
wherever he passed along.
You slimy bunkshooter, you put a smut on every human
blossom in reach of your rotten breath belching
about hell-fire and hiccupping about this Man who
lived a clean life in Galilee.

When are you going to quit making the carpenters build
emergency hospitals for women and girls driven
crazy with wrecked nerves from your gibberish about
Jesus—I put it to you again: Where do you get that
stuff; what do you know about Jesus?

Go ahead and bust all the chairs you want to. Smash
a whole wagon load of furniture at every performance.
Turn sixty somersaults and stand on your
nutty head. If it wasn’t for the way you scare the
women and kids I’d feel sorry for you and pass the hat.
I like to watch a good four-flusher work, but not when
he starts people puking and calling for the doctors.
I like a man that’s got nerve and can pull off a great
original performance, but you—you’re only a bug-
house peddler of second-hand gospel—you’re only
shoving out a phony imitation of the goods this
Jesus wanted free as air and sunlight.

You tell people living in shanties Jesus is going to fix it
up all right with them by giving them mansions in
the skies after they’re dead and the worms have
eaten ‘em.
You tell $6 a week department store girls all they need
is Jesus; you take a steel trust wop, dead without
having lived, gray and shrunken at forty years of
age, and you tell him to look at Jesus on the cross
and he’ll be all right.
You tell poor people they don’t need any more money
on pay day and even if it’s fierce to be out of a job,
Jesus’ll fix that up all right, all right—all they gotta
do is take Jesus the way you say.
I’m telling you Jesus wouldn’t stand for the stuff you’re
handing out. Jesus played it different. The bankers
and lawyers of Jerusalem got their sluggers and
murderers to go after Jesus just because Jesus
wouldn't play their game. He didn’t sit in with
the big thieves.

I don’t want a lot of gab from a bunkshooter in my religion.
I won’t take my religion from any man who never works
except with his mouth and never cherishes any memory
except the face of the woman on the American
silver dollar.

I ask you to come through and show me where you’re
pouring out the blood of your life.

I’ve been to this suburb of Jerusalem they call Golgotha,
where they nailed Him, and I know if the story is
straight it was real blood ran from His hands and
the nail-holes, and it was real blood spurted in red
drops where the spear of the Roman soldier rammed
in between the ribs of this Jesus of Nazareth.

—Carl Sandburg

 

 

Three on Good Friday—National Poetry Month 2025

 

Crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, a Medieval illustration from the 12th century Hortus deliciarum of Herrad of Landsberg.

 

Good Friday is the most somber day of the Christian liturgical calendar it is the bleak but necessary set up to Easter and the celebration of the resurrection of Christ.  It seems not to have been central to worship in the earliest centuries of the Church.  It took generations for the central symbol of the day—the cross and later the crucifix with the hanging body of Jesus—to replace the fish as the universal icon of Christianity.  

By the early Medieval period art depicting the crucifixion displayed the shift to concentrating in often ghastly detail the suffering of Jesus paying with his pain for the sins of humanity.  Penitent Christians were expected to feel the prick of the thorns on Christ’s brow, the lashes, the weight of the burden of his own instrument of doom, the terrible thirst, the driven spikes through his flesh, the pierce of the Centurion’s lance, and the long agonizing death of suffocation.

No wonder that many pagan peoples regarded Christianity as a death cult. 

Today we will feature three contemplations on Good Friday by observant and orthodox Christians.

This excerpt from The Dream of the Rood comes from the 8th Century Anglo-Saxon and is the earliest known example of Christian poetry in Old English.  The verse spoken in the voice of the tree from which the Cross was made shows and interesting blend of the pagan beliefs of both the Germanic tribes and Celtic Druids which made trees central to their worship with Christianity.

A modern illustration of The Dream of the Rood by Angela Lemaire.

From the The Dream of the Rood

The Rood (cross of Christ) speaks:

“It was long past – I still remember it –
That I was cut down at the copse’s end,
Moved from my root. Strong enemies there took me,
Told me to hold aloft their criminals,
Made me a spectacle. Men carried me
Upon their shoulders, set me on a hill,
A host of enemies there fastened me.

“And then I saw the Lord of all mankind
Hasten with eager zeal that He might mount
Upon me. I durst not against God’s word
Bend down or break, when I saw tremble all
The surface of the earth. Although I might
Have struck down all the foes, yet stood I fast.

“Then the young hero (who was God almighty)
Got ready, resolute and strong in heart.
He climbed onto the lofty gallows-tree,
Bold in the sight of many watching men,
When He intended to redeem mankind.
I trembled as the warrior embraced me.
But still I dared not bend down to the earth,
Fall to the ground. Upright I had to stand.

“A rood I was raised up; and I held high
The noble King, the Lord of heaven above.
I dared not stoop. They pierced me with dark nails;
The scars can still be clearly seen on me,

The open wounds of malice. Yet might I
Not harm them. They reviled us both together.
I was made wet all over with the blood
Which poured out from his side, after He had
Sent forth His spirit. And I underwent
Full many a dire experience on that hill.
I saw the God of hosts stretched grimly out.
Darkness covered the Ruler’s corpse with clouds
His shining beauty; shadows passed across,
Black in the darkness. All creation wept,
Bewailed the King’s death; Christ was on the cross….

“Now you may understand, dear warrior,
That I have suffered deeds of wicked men
And grievous sorrows. Now the time has come
That far and wide on earth men honor me,
And all this great and glorious creation,
And to this beacon offers prayers. On me
The Son of God once suffered; therefore now
I tower mighty underneath the heavens,
And I may heal all those in awe of me.
Once I became the cruelest of tortures,
Most hateful to all nations, till the time
I opened the right way of life for men.”

—Translated by Richard Hammer

Ecce Ancilla Domini (Behold the handmaid of the Lord.)  Dante Gabriel Rossetti used his sister, Christina, as Mary and his brother William Michael as the Archangel Gabriel.

 

Christina Rossetti, 1830-1894, was a prolific English poet and Anglo-Catholic mystic.  She was the daughter of Italian poet and political refugee Gabriele Rossetti  and sister of ‎ Pre-Raphaelite painter  Dante Gabriel Rossetti who often used her as a model.

Good Friday

Am I a stone, and not a sheep,
That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross,
To number drop by drop Thy blood’s slow loss,
And yet not weep?

Not so those women loved
Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;
Not so fallen Peter weeping bitterly;
Not so the thief was moved;

Not so the Sun and Moon
Which hid their faces in a starless sky,
A horror of great darkness at broad noon –
I, only I.

Yet give not o’er,
But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;
Greater than Moses, turn and look once more
And smite a rock.

—Christina  Rossetti

John Masefield, long-time Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom.

John Masefield, 1878-1967 was an English poet and writer, and the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1930 until his death. Among his best known works were the children’s novels The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights, and the poems The Everlasting Mercy and Sea-Fever.  In the United States he is often misidentified and his poems attributed to John Mansfield.

From The Everlasting Mercy

O Christ who holds the open gate,
O Christ who drives the furrow straight,
O Christ, the plough, O Christ, the laughter
Of holy white birds flying after,
Lo, all my heart’s field red and torn,
And Thou wilt bring the young green corn
The young green corn divinely springing,
The young green corn forever singing;
And when the field is fresh and fair
Thy blessèd feet shall glitter there,
And we will walk the weeded field,
And tell the golden harvest’s yield,
The corn that makes the holy bread
By which the soul of man is fed,
The holy bread, the food unpriced,
Thy everlasting mercy, Christ.

             —John Masefield

Entering Jerusalem on an Ass—Palm Sunday Verse for National Poetry Month

 

                                  A Sunday School illustration of Jesus on his his entry into Jerusalem.

This is Psalm Sunday and the beginning of Holy Week for Christians, the last week of Lent that runs through Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. 

To review in case you missed the book, the itinerant preacher known to us as Jesus of Nazareth, decided to return to Jerusalem for the first time since he took up his tour of dusty provincial villages and towns less than two years earlier.  Evidently this was his first visit since he had lectured the Pharisees and scribes at the Temple when he was 13.  While wandering the countryside the former carpenter had been picking up disciples and speaking to ever larger crowds impressed by the miracles—or sorcery to hear some speak of it.  Rumors were flying that he might be the long promised Messiah come to save the Jewish people.

This prospect carried not only a religious promise, but a political one.  It came as rebellion was brewing against Roman occupation, and the imposed rule by the Herodian Dynasty in Judea.  Rumors of Jesus’s arrival, just days before Passover, evidently stirred excitement in the city.  Likely one of the Disciples entered the city ahead of him as some sort of advance man, because when he appeared at a city gate, throngs were there to meet him.

Jesus chose to enter the city riding on an ass, a common conveyance and beast of burden in that part of the world.  Nothing particularly unusual about it.  Hundreds probably passed through the gates every day in just such a manner.  And his story had long been associated with the beast from the journey of his mother Mary and her husband Joseph to Bethlehem for a census, to his birth in a stable and the family’s flight to Egypt to avoid Herod’s slaughter of the innocents.

Riding the ass would become a symbol of humility, although it should be noted that Jesus’s disciples and other followers evidently entered the city with him on foot, so that he had some elevation of status. 

The story goes that as he entered the city throngs surrounded him waving palm fronds and casting their garments before the feet of the ass as carpet and they cheered him as the King of the Jews.  It seems that the Prophet Zechariah had foretold, “See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”  Local authorities, both Jewish and Roman, took a dim view of the hoopla and set in motion a chain of events that would lead to the Cross and if you are an orthodox Christian, the Resurrection.

Jesus himself seemed to be ambivalent about the proclamation of his kingship. He would not exactly renounce it, but later say that “My Kingdom is not of this World.”

As interpreted later by the Greeks and the Latin Church, the entry on the ass was especially contrasted to riding a horse, a symbol of earthly power and war.

As you can see, the story of Palm Sunday contains a veritable Russian nesting doll of symbolism within symbolism, the very stuff poets cut their teeth on.  So it was with high hopes that I embarked on a search for great poetry for the occasion.  Sadly, there is far less than you would imagine.  Oh, I could find tons of poetry for children retelling the tale in simplified form.  If you went to Sunday School, you probably got some on handouts or had to learn to recite some for a pageant.  And there is also a lot of very earnest and very bad poetry.  The good stuff, harder to find.  But I plucked three for your consideration.

 

                                                                        Henry Vaughn.

Henry Vaughan was a 17th Century Welsh physician and metaphysical poet.  He was not a native English speaker but evidently learned in college.  He experienced a great religious epiphany in middle age and became famed for his spiritual work.  His short poem is both evocative and joyful.

Psalm Sunday

Hark! how the children shrill and high
Hosanna cry,
Their joys provoke the distant sky,
Where thrones and seraphims reply,
And their own angels shine and sing
In a bright ring:
Such young, sweet mirth
Makes heaven and earth
Join in a joyful symphony.

—Henry Vaughan

 

Probably the best known modern Palm Sunday poem was written by the leading English writer G. K. Chesterton, lay theologian, poet, philosopher, dramatist, journalist, critic, and Christian apologist.  A self-described orthodox Christian, he composed this poem, rife with the irony and paradox for which he was best known, shortly before abandoning High Church Anglicanism for Catholicism.  

 

                                                                                            Jesus, the Donkey, and her foal.

 

The Donkey

    When fishes flew and forests walked

    And figs grew upon thorn,

    Some moment when the moon was blood

    Then surely I was born;

    With monstrous head and sickening cry

    And ears like errant wings,

    The devil’s walking parody

    On all four-footed things.

    The tattered outlaw of the earth,

    Of ancient crooked will;

    Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,

    I keep my secret still.

    Fools! For I also had my hour;

    One far fierce hour and sweet:

    There was a shout about my ears,

    And palms before my feet.

   —G.K. Chesterton 

                        Elena Green.

My search for a contemporary poem was the hardest.  I could not find something that did not take the story literally.  I yearned for a poet who would dig deeper and find a personal understanding in the story.  I finally found one on Poetry.com, a site where amateur poets post their work in hopes of recognition.  It is filled with tens of thousands of submissions, most exactly what you might expect.  Luckily they are searchable by subject.  This poem finally turned up.  I know absolutely nothing about Elena Green other than that her posted photo shows a woman in early middle age.  Unlike other posters, she offered no personal information or any explanation of her work.  A further search on the web under her name turned up nothing.  But clearly, she has some gifts.

Palm Sunday I

Search my heart
This blessed wilderness
Search the avenues of my soul.

Call the wind to witness
That promises are met.
I miss you in daylight
Your glowing skin everywhere.

Your verdant tresses covering me.

I hide in corners of your garden.

Paradise inside me
On this temperate day.
Children running free
Yet my hearts still in captivity.

Free me from myself
O Blessed landscape
Free me from the bonds of love.

Let me wander like a wild rose—

Let loose my spirit softly
Like a petal on a breeze.

—Elena Green

 

To a Contemporary Bunkshooter by Carl Sandburg—National Poetry Month 2023

                            Carl Sandburg--the Chicago years.

Dead White guys have taken a backseat to lots of fresh and diverse voices so far in our National Poetry Month series.  But we can’t ignore one of my favorite poets and personal inspirations—Carl Sandburg.  The old  Universalist, socialist organizer, Chicago reporter, folk singer and song collector, and Lincoln biographer remains fresh and topical.

Sandburg was mightily put out by the shenanigans of Billy Sunday, the former baseball player and hair-on-fire tent show Evangelist.  He was even more outraged at the capitalist bosses and their bought-and-paid-for politicians who benefited from Sunday’s sideshow freak distraction.  Sandburg let loose a volcanic eruption of a poem.

                          Billy Sunday doing his schtick.

If the old poet was still with us today he would have no problem recognizing Billy Sunday’s heirs—Franklin Graham and a gaggle of others, or the evil oligarchy that uses them and their clownish front man, the former Cheeto-in-Charge.

Have at ‘em, Carl!

                                    Carl Sandburg's contemporary, the Socialist cartoonist Art Young, shared his understanding of Jesus.

To A Contemporary Bunkshooter

You come along. . . tearing your shirt. . . yelling about
Jesus.
Where do you get that stuff?
What do you know about Jesus?
Jesus had a way of talking soft and outside of a few
bankers and higher-ups among the con men of Jerusalem
everybody liked to have this Jesus around because
he never made any fake passes and everything
he said went and he helped the sick and gave the
people hope.

You come along squirting words at us, shaking your fist
and calling us all damn fools so fierce the froth slobbers
over your lips. . . always blabbing we're all
going to hell straight off and you know all about it.

I’ve read Jesus words. I know what he said. You don’t
throw any scare into me. I’ve got your number. I
know how much you know about Jesus.

 

He never came near clean people or dirty people but
they felt cleaner because he came along. It was your
crowd of bankers and business men and lawyers
hired the sluggers and murderers who put Jesus out
of the running.

I say the same bunch backing you nailed the nails into
the hands of this Jesus of Nazareth. He had lined
up against him the same crooks and strong-arm men
now lined up with you paying your way.

This Jesus was good to look at, smelled good, listened
good. He threw out something fresh and beautiful
from the skin of his body and the touch of his hands
wherever he passed along.
You slimy bunkshooter, you put a smut on every human
blossom in reach of your rotten breath belching
about hell-fire and hiccupping about this Man who
lived a clean life in Galilee.

When are you going to quit making the carpenters build
emergency hospitals for women and girls driven
crazy with wrecked nerves from your gibberish about
Jesus—I put it to you again: Where do you get that
stuff; what do you know about Jesus?

Go ahead and bust all the chairs you want to. Smash
a whole wagon load of furniture at every performance.
Turn sixty somersaults and stand on your
nutty head. If it wasn’t for the way you scare the
women and kids I’d feel sorry for you and pass the hat.
I like to watch a good four-flusher work, but not when
he starts people puking and calling for the doctors.
I like a man that’s got nerve and can pull off a great
original performance, but you—you’re only a bug-
house peddler of second-hand gospel—you’re only
shoving out a phony imitation of the goods this
Jesus wanted free as air and sunlight.

You tell people living in shanties Jesus is going to fix it
up all right with them by giving them mansions in
the skies after they’re dead and the worms have
eaten ‘em.
You tell $6 a week department store girls all they need
is Jesus; you take a steel trust wop, dead without
having lived, gray and shrunken at forty years of
age, and you tell him to look at Jesus on the cross
and he’ll be all right.
You tell poor people they don’t need any more money
on pay day and even if it’s fierce to be out of a job,
Jesus’ll fix that up all right, all right—all they gotta
do is take Jesus the way you say.
I’m telling you Jesus wouldn’t stand for the stuff you’re
handing out. Jesus played it different. The bankers
and lawyers of Jerusalem got their sluggers and
murderers to go after Jesus just because Jesus
wouldn't play their game. He didn’t sit in with
the big thieves.

I don’t want a lot of gab from a bunkshooter in my religion.
I won’t take my religion from any man who never works
except with his mouth and never cherishes any memory
except the face of the woman on the American
silver dollar.

I ask you to come through and show me where you’re
pouring out the blood of your life.

I’ve been to this suburb of Jerusalem they call Golgotha,
where they nailed Him, and I know if the story is
straight it was real blood ran from His hands and
the nail-holes, and it was real blood spurted in red
drops where the spear of the Roman soldier rammed
in between the ribs of this Jesus of Nazareth.

 

—Carl Sandburg