Letters to Russ Feingold: Blessed Are the Merciful

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Blessed Are the Merciful

Everyone who has a heart and soul feels pain for the people of Haiti this week.

This doesn't include Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh whom, it is now more clear than ever, have neither hearts nor souls.

This says it with more class and calm than I can muster on the subject of these two hateful men:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPoWOw8Jm5w&feature=youtube_gdata

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Thoughts for Russ Feingold

When I moved back to Wisconsin three years ago, one of my delights was becoming a constituent of Senator Russ Feingold. I started this blog to speak to him somehow.

Since then, my perfect senator has been evicted from office by some know-nothing yokel with a fortune to spend on his ego. My state is run by people with no conscience or scruples, and my senators in Washington are either ineffectual or just plain stupid, but you guessed it: They're wealthy.

I'll just keep on writing anyway. It's the only thing that seems to make any sense to me right now.

Poem Corner

Yo Di
Author unknown

They say

human blood
enriches
soil

If that were true
If that were true
my friends

how rice
millet
and corn

would thrive
in
Haiti

*****************

Winter Syntax
by Billy Collins

A sentence starts out like a lone traveler
heading into a blizzard at midnight,
tilting into the wind, one arm shielding his face,
the tails of his thin coat flapping behind him.

There are easier ways of making sense,
the connoisseurship of gesture, for example.
You hold a girl's face in your hands like a vase.
You lift a gun from the glove compartment
and toss it out the window into the desert heat.
These cool moments are blazing with silence.

The full moon makes sense. When a cloud crosses it
it becomes as eloquent as a bicycle leaning
outside a drugstore or a dog who sleeps all afternoon
in a corner of the couch.

Bare branches in winter are a form of writing.
The unclothed body is autobiography.
Every lake is a vowel, every island a noun.

But the traveler persists in his misery,
struggling all night through the deepening snow,
leaving a faint alphabet of bootprints
on the white hills and the white floors of valleys,
a message for field mice and passing crows.

At dawn he will spot the vine of smoke
rising from your chimney, and when he stands
before you shivering, draped in sparkling frost,
a smile will appear in the beard of icicles,
and the man will express a complete thought.

***************************

Red Bird
by Mary Oliver

Red bird came all winter
firing up the landscape
as nothing else could.

Of course I love the sparrows,
those dun-colored darlings,
so hungry and so many.

I am a God-fearing feeder of birds.
I know He has many children,
not all of them bold in spirit.

Still, for whatever reason --
perhaps because the winter is so
long
and the sky so black-blue,

or perhaps because the heart
narrows
as often as it opens --
I am grateful

that the red bird comes all winter
firing up the landscape
as nothing else can do.

***************************

"To Those Without Pity"
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Cruel of heart, lay down my song.
Your reading eyes have done me
wrong.
Not for you was the pen bitten,
And the mind wrung, and the song
written.

Letters to Russ Feingold

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Blessed Are the Merciful

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