🌊 Do You Haiku?

Wednesday, December 22, 2021

Welcome to the sixth quarterly issue of This Mortal Portal, coming to you on the second day of winter.

1. A microessay feat. original poems (!)

2. Vic's Picks (fall faves)

3. For the Record (things done)

Plus an apple-jugglin’ GIF and a strange cartoon. Merry Christmas and happy holi-days to you and yours!

-V

Do You Haiku?

Or There’s Something About Poetry

“Chap Vic,” he says to me, “you got an MP3 player I could hold to get me through blackout?”

“Not right now, man - sorry. But hey, poetry night’s tonight - you coming?”

“Nah, I don’t do poems,” he says, eyes dropping.

“Well,” says I, “do you like music? Same thing.” That night he came to the poetry meeting - and surprised himself with what he wrote.

Poetry is a prescription I never knew I needed. I’ve watched many men who “don’t do poems” put powerful words to paper. Aromas of love, anger, hope, fear, grace rise off the pages.

For 10 years now, men have been gathering in the HUM library to read and write poetry. Started by a guy named Bob, a lifelong poet whose mother was a city librarian and whose wife is a schoolteacher, this monthly meeting brings together a curious cross-section of men. A pale kid in black brings his goth epic. A thespian recites a melodramatic old Western poem from memory. A weathered Mexican elder shares a poem he wrote in Spanish, and writes his first-ever poem in English.

Bob and I do fairly little facilitating; we sketch out ground rules and open the floor. When everyone who wants to share has shared, we offer a theme or form as a prompt, and everyone writes. I've been part of these meetings for almost seven years now, and still every month I’m struck by what’s shared. A block north of the spot where Edgar Allen Poe was found delirious in a gutter, people are still painting with words.

Why do poems hit me like that? Partly because we live in a spoken world. The percussive power of spitfire syllables, the allure of alliteration, the pleasure of a rhyme pattern fulfilled - and the painful-pleasure when it's broken - all capture us in a way that everyday speech does not. And also, perhaps, the unfamiliarity of it all helps some of us open up in ways we wouldn’t otherwise.

I’d like to introduce you to two of the poets I’ve gotten to know - with several of their poems - and then I’ll share (with trepidation) two of my own.

Dale

Dale is a former lawyer, a towering man with a smooth bald head and a shelf of a white mustache that earned him comparisons with Mr. Clean and The Monopoly Guy. He wore wire-rimmed spectacles, and it wasn’t hard to imagine him rocking a monocle. While Dale was at the Mission, he was in the throes of grief and pain over a lost love.

In his first month there, he came to poetry night, and the form we offered as a prompt was the haiku... three lines of 5-7-5 syllables. The structure unlocked something in Dale, and over the next year he composed dozens, perhaps hundreds of the punchy little poems. I remember seeing him at his desk, fingers tapping out syllables as he mouthed lines to himself, silently writing and rewriting. Every month he would stand and deliver two or three of the saddest, simplest poems you ever heard. And then, slowly, some light began to creep in.

Eventually he assembled ten of his haiku into a cycle that he titled:

Baby Angel

Warning
They told me beware
She would give nothing to me
I lost all I had

Loyal
I stood by her side
When she was lost and dope sick
She paid me with pain

Hooked
I gave her my love
I wanted her to want me
She used me instead

Lie
She said she loved me
My sweet Baby Angel lied
I found out too late

Need
I just wanted love
Baby Angel knew my need
Never gave me love

Rejection
Living without love
Baby Angel rejects me
Loves another man

Despair
Why keep on living
Baby Angel has left me
No purpose to life

Death
Blue eyes to die for
My Baby Angel killed me
Emotions are dead

Renewal
Start living for me
Stop dying for my lost love
Get back on my feet

Hope
Coming back to life
Like flowers in the Spring
Blooming in the sun

Dale was able to move on, and was doing well last time we talked.

These and many more poems written at HUM are collected in Breathmarks: Poems by People Finding Their Voices. You can grab a paperback copy on Amazon for $5 or download a PDF for free.

Nelson

Nelson was a poet long before he set foot on the 1000 block of East Baltimore Street. A wiry frame, intense eyes, and hands that moved with every word, as if he was a conductor and the audience was his orchestra.  The room fell silent whenever he stood to speak, and his volume rose to match his intensity.

He started writing poetry shortly after his mother was killed, when he was 10 years old. He told me, “I couldn't quite understand it. I couldn't get in touch with my feelings... my grandmother raised me, and back then, people didn't know to take you to talk to a therapist or somebody to talk to. All they knew was pray about it. But I was hurting on the inside and I didn't even know it.

“So I was acting out a lot. I got in a lot of fights. This is way before I got into drugs, but it was something inside of me that I needed to release, and without having anybody to talk to, I spoke to the paper.”

Tears

Dear Lord I need you.. because I’m hurting here

I’m in need of a release... but where’s my tears?

I’ve shown you strength through all this death

My mother... my father... and now myself

I’m tired.... But Lord I have to ask you why

What is it about me that you won’t let me cry?

I must have a purpose, because you kept me here

So if you want me to live… then where’s my tears?

Some nights I can’t sleep because I’m trying to cry

And peace I can’t reach because I’m dying inside

So if you expect me to be alive and fly

Then please let these tears find my eyes

Where’s my tears Lord?! I need your help

How can I not cry if... Jesus wept?

Now I rely on your strength to make it through

But this pain plus these tears equals faith in you!

Where’s my tears?

So these eyes that you see, so filled with sorrow

Still search for a tear, because I fear tomorrow

So protect me Lord, and don’t let me die!

Unless it’s my time to go... but first... let me cry

Tears

Nelson’s such a performer, you’ve gotta see/hear him. He and I got together recently to record this and five other poems of his. (11 minutes)

Vic

These poetry nights are about the only time I try my hand at this kind of writing. Both of these poems share a common thread of homecoming.

This first one is from a recent meeting, when we were doing haiku again. Over the past two years, a lot of people I know have moved or significantly rearranged their lives because of the pandemic and the perspective it provoked. There were times when Joanna and I mulled over the various what-ifs. But we always came back to the love we have for our people and our place, and the sense of calling we feel to them.

I’ve also been thinking more about fathers and what it means to be one. I have a pretty great dad, and I want to keep that legacy going. So as I contemplated our differences, I found myself noticing deeper similarities.

Father and Son

He plants and harvests

Has since before I was born

Bored, I left the farm

I listen and talk

Swapped cornfields for rowhouses

A farmer of men

A seed from the ground

A soul becoming itself

Same work, different worlds

It’s harder to see

Souls grow more slowly than seeds

Some days I’m jealous

This land is our land

I grew out of this soil

Will I e'er return?

I composed this last one while we were living in Brooklyn, a forgotten neighborhood on the south side of Baltimore. I biked downtown and back every workday, whatever the weather. This filters that experience through the form of a sonnet:

Biking to Brooklyn in Winter

The bitter cold, it bites into my skin

as down the street I hurtle on my bike;

another day done, and I now begin

to pump and pedal through my five-mile hike.

Around the harbor, then south past the Hill,

across the bridge - the sunset on my right -

the colors blur and smear above the mill

as eager stars and headlights greet the night.

My breath turns into steam turns into frost

that settles and collects into my beard;

the remnants of the day’s pursuits are lost

like shards of glass and gravel scattered clear.

The next block up, a yellow porch light burns:

my daughters watch and wait for my return.

Vic’s Picks

Here’s a cross-section of what I’ve been diggin' this fall:

Music

Anita and Ben Tatlow assemble ethereal soundscapes that accompany my ‘deep work’ sessions. They make music under three monikers: Antarctic Wasteland, Salt of the Sound, and Narrow Skies.

Video

Nobody Stands Nowhere (2 minutes) A British think tank’s beautifully animated short to prompt reflection about where you stand at the end of this year.

Podcast

Business Made Simple (~30 minute episodes) I don’t follow gurus, and I’m not a big consumer of business schlock, but I rather like what Don Miller is up to here. He talks in plain language that is generally free of jargon. He’s come up with a governing metaphor of ‘business as airplane’ that makes sense to me. And although his enthusiasm feels a bit over the top at times, I have enjoyed listening in on the coaching calls that he turns into episodes.

Article Story

A Light In The Trees: A Christmas Survival Story “The moment when you know you’re lost – not merely disoriented or confused but truly, irrevocably lost – brings with it a sort of humiliating thrill. Can this really be? You’re alive, your brain is working, and you’re still the same person you were a moment earlier, but suddenly the world itself has changed. It is your foe, and you are not its equal. It requires your surrender. Silence falls.” The writer Walter Kirn (of Up in the Air, Thumbsucker, etc) tells of the time he almost froze to death while filching a Christmas tree from the side of an Idaho state highway.

Food

Honey Goat Cheese at Aldi

I thought I didn’t like goat cheese, partly because I know what goat pee smells like. But this little log won me over. The honey sweetens it just enough... Carve off a chunk on a pita chip and you’re transported to the seventh heaven.

Book

A Season of Life by Jeffrey Marx. It’s not just Ted Lasso; I’ve always believed in the magic of good coaching. And Joe Ehrmann is a giant. I know many men in Baltimore directly impacted by his work, and this book helped me understand why he’s been so effective.

Place

The Billy Goat Trail, Section A

More goat stuff... On the Maryland side of Great Falls National Park is a trail that’s not for the faint of heart. It was fun to see my four-year-old daughter look back down a 50-foot traverse at the grown men who were struggling to ascend it behind her.

For The Record

What I made or helped make this fall

Digital Thing:

Renee’s Story (52 minutes) is the first episode of A Shot of Hope to feature a graduate of the women's program at HUM. I'm so honored that Renee trusted me (and all of us) with her story. She's more than a survivor - give it a listen - the first 5 and last 5 minutes if you don’t have time for the full episode.

What Bee Colonies and Humans Have In Common (27 minutes) My mom, a retired pediatrician, has taken to beekeeping. She brings all of her clinical rigor to the hobby, and this fall I helped her record a talk she's given at several beekeeping societies. She explores the analogies between a bee colony (a “superorganism”) and the human body.

Physical Thing:

The Center for Women & Children

This is way more “helped make” than “made” - I had very little to do with the building project other than some fundraising videos I produced. But we finally cut the ribbon on a beautiful seven story building one block east of the men’s campus. Excited for what’s to come there.

Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear what stuck with you.

Esse quam videri,

Vic

#Longer