Penultimate Poems, Two More from Jerry Pendergast--—National Poetry Month 2021

Jerry Pendergast.

National Poetry Month is winding down but today for the first time we are featuring a living poet for the second time.  Chicago poet Jerry Pendergast’s consideration of the revolutionary singer/poet/god father of rap Gil Scott Heron appeared earlier.  But I still have two more strong efforts in my file that I cannot pass up passing on.

Sadako Sasaki was a Japanese girl who was a victim of the Atomic bombing of Hiroshima when she was two years old. Though severely irradiated, she survived for another ten years, becoming one of the most widely known hibakusha—bomb-affected person. She is remembered through the story of the one thousand origami cranes she tried to fold before her death.

Sadako Sasaki shortly before her death from radiation poisoning. 

Open Letter to Sadako Sasaki

1.

The August that you were 2

a large hunk of metal with a tail

called Little Boy

hit your city

tossed you out of your bedroom window

three days before Fat Man

hit Nagasaki.

 

But you lived to run

fastest in your school

when you were 10.

 

Lived to feel your blood turn pale

Legs turn purple.

Fold paper cranes

before your last meal

with family and friends

by your hospital bed,

The October you were 12.

and I was 7 months.

 

Your statue holds a metal crane

In your raised arms

Standing on stone structure

taller than an Olympic Podium.

hollow in the middle

in Hiroshima Peace Park

Dedicated in 1958.

 

I see you sculpted in metal

in Seattle Peace Park

Dedicated Hiroshima Day 1990

You raise a crane in right hand.

Leaning forward, left hand pulled back

as if you were taking a stride.

Someone hung a string of paper cranes,

a rainbow of colors

on your shoulder.

 

If I were a sculptor

A track meet medal

would drape your neck

that a lump grew on

when you were 11.

I mentally place Olympic rings

and a question mark

among the flowers.

 

2.

 

My first Summer Games memory

is from Rome 1960

Long jumpers

landing in sand.

I wonder now

if a jumper's imprint

is like one left by a vaporized body

if the stadium were ground zero.

for a nuclear attack.

You would have been 17.

I wonder, would you have been there?

 

I remember Tokyo 1964

October, the month you died

Gary Gubner from NYU

Arms raised in completed clean and jerk

Shot-put sailing from his shoulder.

 

I imagine you at age 21

running in the same stadium.

If I were a painter

I would portray you

in a lighter, shadowy image

on a track with opponents and team mates.

A crane flying above the shot put.

 

If I could paint a portrait of

of Mexico City, Summer Games 1968

I would shadow you in

as I imagine you at age 25.

Wearing a medal

made of iron shrapnel

Glass from a shattered window

and hint of blood,

and an eye of a gunned down marcher

in the middle.

 

You approach the podium

Where Tommie Smith, John Carlos

and Peter Norman stand.

All of you wear

Olympic Project for Human Rights buttons.

 

3.

 

Fukushima

quake, tsunami

power plant explosion

images on my TV screen.

 

I see a young girl

running through streets

Near Fukushima

Another near Chernobyl

Are T-cells growing inside their bodies?

Can any kind of treatment defeat them?

Is your spirit with them?

 

Will they be nameless

because these disasters

were from sort of

accidental explosions?

 

—Jerry Pendergast

Music, especially jazz often inspires Pendergast.  In this verse it is the soundtrack to a mundane task and a haunting reminder of a terrible tragedy and injustice.

An urban laundromat.

Cleansing

1.

Steady piano

and bass

Low range

quiet intensity

like humming or droning

before the first verse of a hymn

Drums intensify abruptly.

tenor sax starts dirge.

Tune called ALABAMA

on the radio

I sort my laundry.

Piano descending in pitch.

short pauses

drummer

lightly hitting symbols

A whole note pause.

Sax dirge returns

I lift my laundry sack

over my shoulder.

 

2.

 

At the matt next door I wonder

“should I wash my loads clean and bright

with Blue Cheer

or Blue Tide?”

Or do I need another cleanser?

Sax and drum flurry

still playing inside me

Something vocal from the drummer

don't think it has

 any words

I load the machines

Proud that no one

burns or bombs churches

in my neighborhood.

Why can’t the drummer’s chant

have words?

I pour in the soap, see

two young Women

folding a sheet

I feel some pride

That no one walks around

with sheets over heads

in my neighborhood, and that

I live on the Civil War’s

Winning side.

Why can’t the drummers chant

Why ca’ ca’ can’t the drummer’s chant

have words?

 

3.

 

My cross hall neighbors

Unlock their door when I lock mine.

We greet

One is a girl I guess to be 9 or 10

Looks like she’s been crying.

Not sure what’s making her sad.

“Could anyone hear

the four girls cry

or shout?”

I wonder

while pouring in fabric softener

Or did the explosion

silence them instantly?

Leave a scream somewhere

Between the gut

and the throat

of Addie or Denise?

Carole or Cynthia?

The DJ’s voice

quoting Dr. King

“They had something to say

to us all”

Blends in

with the drum and sax

intensifying.

Were there any words

I wonder

stuck in the chest

or the throats

of friends or family?

 

4.

 

A black woman

I guess about age 30

enters the laundry matt

The manager focuses on her

from his office.

I sling my laundry

clean and dry

over my shoulder

Sound of the sax and drums

saturate my blood stream

I trade greetings

with cross hall neighbor

He turns

Opens detergent

I push door to exit.

I tell myself it’s good

to live close to a laundry matt.

And I tell myself it’s good

that no church explodes

or burns

in my neighborhood.

 

—Jerry Pendergast

Obituary New Murfin Verse—National Poetry Month 2021

Short and maybe not so sweet.  The concluding words of this piece came to me in a dream and were only preserved because I woke and scrawled them on a bedside scrap of paper before they evaporated as most dreams do.  The words were maybe better suited for the lyrics of a George Jones song than a poem. 

For months my dreams have flirted around with the Coronavirus pandemic, but this apparently had nothing to do with those.

I do not know a Billy James, or anyone quite like him, but I knew what this imagined notice told me.  I do know that despair, alienation, addiction, and suicide take far too many young lives.

Obituary

 

There it was

            crowded in a bottom corner

            of the obit page

            lost amid the septuagenarians

            and former pillars

            of the community.

            No picture.

 

“William (Billy) James, 23     

            died unexpectedly Monday.

            no arrangements pending.”

 

Died unexpectedly—

            code words for suicide

            or O.D.

 

No family acknowledges him,

            estrangement now permanent.

 

No alma mater, service flag

or accomplishments,

 

Billy lost his last battle

            with loosing.

 

—Patrick Murfin

  

Poetry on the Side—Ernest Hemingway—National Poetry Month 2021

Ernest Hemingway at his trusty Underwood #5 portable hunt-and-peck typing in the great outdoors with a pile of already completed pages on his make-shift desk.  Just as he imagined himself--the writer as hero. 

PBS ran Ken Burns’s new four hour documentary about Ernest Hemingway the last two evenings.  I have to admit that as much as I admire Burns’s work, I haven’t seen it yet.  I have recorded it but will have to wait for chunks of time when my wife Kathy doesn’t want the TV set.  She would never sit down that long for an examination of figure who she has never read but thinks of as a misogynistic, macho creep. 

And that has been Hemingway’s problem. Once considered the most important American novelist of the 20th Century—and there was plenty of competition for that honor—widely read and the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature.  He has fallen deeply out of favor in more recent decades.  That has been due as much as anything to his carefully constructed public image as a rugged he-man adventurer, a lover of war and blood sports, a two-fisted drinker, and a man who carelessly used women.

His forthright, Spartan, and straight forward style once considered a revolutionary liberation from ornate prose and sentimentalism is now viewed by modern critics as too anchored in time and place, too bland, and worst of all lacking introspection.  Feminists set him up to be an idol of patriarchy to be brought crashing down.

There is truth to all of that, of course.  But it also is not always supported by either his life or work.  Seen by modern conservatives as a model of masculinity and a lover of guns and glory, he was a life-long leftist and often wracked by the depression and self-doubt that lead him ultimately to swallow a shotgun blast.  He admired and loved strong women and his female characters were well developed and usually the moral superior to the flawed men who loved them.  For every drop if heroism in his male protagonists there was plenty of ambiguity and angst.

Hemingway, no matter what we think of him, is so identified as a novelist, short story writer, reporter, and essayist that it may come as a shock that he also wrote poetry.  He wrote verse his entire life but most frequently in his younger years spanning his Nick Adams in the woods days, World War I, and jazz age Paris.  88 of those poems were included in Hemingway’s first privately printed book along with short stories.  Those poems were well served by the same economy of style and clarity as his prose.  They have stood up very well.

Along With Youth comes from those days when Hemingway was escaping the “broad lawns and narrow minds” of his native Oak Park, Illinois by tramping around the woods and streams of Michigan fishing, hunting, and trapping.

Along With Youth

A porcupine skin,

Stiff with bad tanning,

It must have ended somewhere.

Stuffed horned owl

Pompous

Yellow eyed;

Chuck-wills-widow on a biassed twig

Sooted with dust.

Piles of old magazines,

Drawers of boy’s letters

And the line of love

They must have ended somewhere.

Yesterday’s Tribune is gone

Along with youth

And the canoe that went to pieces on the beach

The year of the big storm

When the hotel burned down

At Seney, Michigan.

 

—Ernest Hemingway

 

Hemingway in an Italian military hospital in his Red Cross ambulance corps uniform with Agnes von Kurowsky, the lovely nurse eight years his senior he fell madly in love with.

Champs d’Honneur was written after the Great War where Hemmingway served as an ambulance driver in Italy and was gravely wounded.  Not much glorifying war here,

Champs d’Honneur

Soldiers never do die well;

         Crosses mark the places—

Wooden crosses where they fell,

         Stuck above their faces.

Soldiers pitch and cough and twitch—

         All the world roars red and black;

Soldiers smother in a ditch,

         Choking through the whole attack.

 

—Ernest Hemingway

 

“All Armies are the Same” is another bitter anti-war verse.

 

“All Armies are the Same”

 

All armies are the same

Publicity is fame

Artillery makes the same old noise

Valor is an attribute of boys

Old soldiers all have tired eyes

All soldiers hear the same old lies

Dead bodies always have drawn flies

 

—Ernest Hemingway

                                    Hemingway outside his Paris apartment about the time he wrote these short poems.

The Age Demanded was written in post-war Paris.  The iron pants in the verse referred to the braces he had to wear on his legs in his long recovery from his war wounds.

The Age Demanded

 

The age demanded that we sing

And cut away our tongue.

 

The age demanded that we flow

And hammered in the bung.

 

The age demanded that we dance

And jammed us into iron pants.

 

And in the end the age was handed

The sort of shit that it demanded.

 

—Ernest Hemingway