A migrant wrapped in a blanket to keep warm waits at a registration
camp in southern Serbian town of Presevo on Friday, after crossing the
Macedonian border: photo by Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP, 22 January 2016
Joseph Ceravolo: Starvation
.......................................December 6, 1987
For the new crusaders tired and dusty
from the trek across the Dardanelles
felt diseased and lost
abandoned and tricked
by the Holy of the Empire.
Empire upon empire
death upon death
Lord upon Lord
the holy children wept.
While an ailanthus tree crushes
its way between 2 close buildings
the space between an alley and a dream.
Saints martyred
find their way through dead forests
Holy bridges span the straits
bound for the change
and the chance to begin another life.
Joseph Ceravolo (1934-1988): Starvation (December 6, 1987), excerpt, from Collected Poems, 2013
"Si estuviéramos a salvo en Siria, no estaríamos aquí congelándonos”.: image via El Español @elespanolcom, 22 January 2016
Joseph Ceravolo: December
.......................................December 1, 1987
The trees have no more leaves
except the pin oak, still hanging on
except the evergreens, pines, spruce,
green as shadows behind
the pin oak's brown leaves.
Joseph Ceravolo (1934-1988): December (December 1, 1987), from Collected Poems, 2013
#snow #migrants and refugees cross the Macedonian border into Serbia, near Miratovac. #AFP Photo by @dilkoff: image via Aurelia BAILLY @AureliaBAILLY, 19 January 2016
Joseph Ceravolo: ["Resurrect, reserve, resound"]
.......................................November 25, 1987
Resurrect, reserve, resound. Winter ice
is always there. Striations, scratched
down the mountain faces, winds
like torches of burning oil, acetylene
frozen deep in the woods.
Joseph Ceravolo (1934-1988): untitled ["Resurrect, reserve, resound"], from Collected Poems, 2013
'Panic' as Europe faces demise over refugees, top officials say: image via AFP news agency @AFP, 23 January 2016
#migrants wait for a bus at at a registration camp in Presevo #Serbia #AFP Photo by @dilkoff: image via Aurelia BAILLY @AureliaBAILLY, 19 January 2016
Austria to cap asylum-seeker claims, deepening EU migrant rift as charities warn of winter: image by AFP news agency @AFP, 20 January 2016
Austria to cap asylum-seeker claims, deepening EU migrant rift as charities warn of winter: image by AFP news agency @AFP, 20 January 2016
Macedonia closes border with Greece to migrants, police say: image by AFP news agency @AFP,
20 January 2016
Migrants walk through a frozen field after crossing the border from Macedonia, near the village of Miratovac, Serbia. Photographer Marko Djurica said: “Since the beginning of the migrant crisis, my colleagues and I asked ourselves the same question: what will happen when the winter comes? We were thinking of a Balkans winter: -20ºc and wind so strong that you have to walk backwards into it. Snow was falling and I headed to the Serbia-Macedonia border. The wind was so noisy that the migrants weren’t able to talk to each other. Many of them were crying from the cold. I was speechless.”: photo by Marko Djurica/Reuters, 23 January 2016
Another migrant is photographed in Miratovac by Marko Djurica, who added: “A migrant approached me, ‘how much further do we have to walk?’ About 5km, I said. He pointed to a group some 50m behind. ‘That’s my family. The one who is walking in pain is my sister. She broke her leg in Aleppo last year, I am afraid for her.’ I tried to calm him down, saying that there were people here to help. I explained that they had to catch a train to Croatia, then Slovenia and Austria before reaching Germany. ‘Six of us have €60 left. Will it be enough for us to finish our journey?’ I was speechless again.” photo by Marko Djurica/Reuters, 23 January 2016
Vuelve la nieve y el frío a los #Balcanes para miles de niños y niñas #refugiados sin más abrigo que lo puesto.: image via Jesús Gabaldón @jangelgabaldon, 17 January 2016
Eso es el mar
Amanecer en #Lesvos porque, aunque se nos olvide, estamos en una isla griega preciosa: image via Voices on-site @Voicesonsite, 21 January 2016
Desde #Siria, 4 años. Le encantan los perros, reía todo el tiempo. Y aunq el idioma era distinto nos entendimos genial.: image via BCG @BCarilloG, 18 January 2016
Otras dos. Lloviendo, con niebla y frío. Niños llorando, hombres y mujeres conmovidos por el pánico. Eso es el mar.: image via Voices on-site @Voicesonsite, 20 January 2016
Si no hubiese estado @Gfireinfo no sé q hubiese pasado. Zona llena d rocas y con 4 voluntarios. Todos a salvo! Gracias.: image via Voices on-site @Voicesonsite, 20 January 2016
Desde ayer a las 12 d la noche hasta ahora mismo aprox. 14 barcas han llegado. Y siguen.."Buenos días" desde #Lesvos: image via Voices on-site @Voicesonsite, 19 January 2016
Alemanya confisca diners i béns a les refugiades. La policia requisa actius que superen 350€: image via Roger Suso @eurosuso, 21 January 2016
15+ boats arrived today in #Sykamnia with many children.. All safe. #refugeesGR #safepassage (photo Dora Halari): image via Team Platanos @team_platanos, 21 January 2016
122 muertos en 21 días. El Egeo la fosa común de la Europa fortaleza. #WelcomeRefugees #refugeesGr: image via Dabidik @Dabidik, 22 January 2016
We deeply deplore loss of life in the Aegean Sea, as weather worsens. More legal avenues are urgently needed.: image via UNCHR Greece @UNCHR Greece, 23 January 2016
Survivors after a rescue operation on Friday, when two boats of migrants sank near Greek islands in the eastern Aegean Sea: photo by
Giorgos Drosos/Kalymnos-News.gr, via Associated Press, 22 January 2016
A problem for which a solution can be found is not a philosophical problem; a philosophical problem is a problem for which no solution can be found
A Yemeni girl watched women protest Saudi airstrikes in front of the office of the United Nations in Sana, the Yemeni capital: photo by Mohammed Huwais/Agence France-Presse, 23 January 2016
Israeli settlers stood by after dozens of Israeli Jews entered two homes in the Palestinian city of Hebron, in the West Bank, setting off violent clashes over claims of ownership: photo by Hazem Bader/Agence France-Presse, 23 January 2016
Relatives mourned at the funeral for Saeed Jawad Hossini, 29, who was killed in a suicide attack on a bus in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Wednesday. The attack targeted employees of the media company Tolo TV.: photo by Shah Marai/Agence France-Presse, 23 January 2016
A brother of one of the people killed in the bus bombing in Kabul mourned at a cemetery in the Afghan capital: photo by Ahmad Masood/Reuters, 23 January 2016
Poll: Trump in lead at 40.6 percent. @AFPphoto: image via Reuters Top News @Reuters, 23 January 2016
El caos
Migrants fled tear gas fired by the police near the Channel Tunnel in Calais, France, where hundreds of migrants are living in a camp: photo by Michel Spingler/Associated Press, 23 January 2016
Camión con madera llega a #Dunkerque. El caos x coger unos trozos y así poder calentarse. Foto: Jordi Oliver #Calais: image via Fotomovimiento @Fotomovimiento, 21 January 2016
A man walks in a makeshift camp known as “the jungle” in Calais. The
residents of the camp in the northern French port of Calais are in a
desperate race to save their makeshift homes from the bulldozers. Local
authorities warned them earlier this week that they had just a few days
to clear hundreds of shanties made from wooden planks and tarpaulin from
the edge of the road that borders the camp.: photo by Philippe Huguen/AFP, 18 January 2016
Precarity
Syrian refugee Bissan Alabdullah smiles while standing next to her
family’s laundry outside their tent at an informal tented settlement
near the Syrian border on the outskirts of Mafraq, Jordan, Wednesday: photo by Muhammed Muheisen/AP, 20 January 2016
Syrian refugee girls play at an informal settlement on the outskirts of Mafraq, Jordan. #APPhoto by @Muheisen81 image via AP Images @AP_Images, 22 January 2016
A child from the Abu Sleiman family has a lunch at his house in the Syrian town of Beit Nayem, in the rebel-held Eastern Ghouta region on the outskirts of the capital Damascus: photo by Amer Almohibany/AFP, 14 January 2016
A Syrian woman and her children take shelter on the deserted Greek island of #Pasas. #APPhoto by @PGiannakouris: image via AP Images @AP_Images, 20 January 2016
GREECE-A boy plays football as he waits to cross the Greek Macedonian border near Idomeni. By @SakisMitrolidis #AFP: image via AFP Photo Department @AFPphoto, 14 January 2016
syria aleppo 19-1-2016: image via baraa al halabi @baraaalhalabi, 19 January 2016
Migrants and refugees walk after crossing the Macedonian border into Serbia, near the village of Miratovac. @AFPphoto: image via AFP news agency @AFP, 23 January 2016
8 comments:
Joe's work, especially when you juxtapose his words with all these pictures from the world, is so revelatory.
Terry,
Yes, for sure... the humanity, sympathy and expressiveness in Joe's poems have made them now begin to come into their own, their uniqueness standing out more than ever as distinguished from the carefully affect-free production of the triumphal ward-heeling "avant" (institutional academic / culture industry). Terms like "timeless" and "universal" are not thought to apply to poetry any more -- because they make people nervous, I guess. But nobody else's poems seem to have that kind of general applicability. Why is that, I wonder? Too many launches, tours, conferences, professorships -- too much officious "importance" -- could it be?
In any event, they say and are right in saying that a picture is worth a thousand words, so that these pictures, like these poems, speak for themselves, but also to themselves, and with each other, and not so much to us as in our presence, as we eavesdrop and peep on them, and learn that much more about the world and its suffering every day.
In the back of the belfry here was the memory of a couple of essays on Precarity and Poverty by Dorothy Day from the Catholic Worker in the early 1950s, written at a time when she'd been hard at the struggle for almost two decades at the Chrystie Street shelter in NYC.
It's not too difficult to imagine what Dorothy might have thought about, or said about, or to, for example, the Big Dumper with the Comb-Over, or Squarehead Teddy the Cruz Missile, or for that matter even The Hildebeest... none of them with a whole lot of experience of precarity in the resumé.
Rather than even consider that thought, though, let me now simply give Dorothy Day the, er, floor... with a bit of the first of the two essays I've mentioned.
__
Poverty and Precarity
By Dorothy Day
The Catholic Worker, May 1952, 2, 6.
Poverty is a very mysterious thing. We need to be always writing and thinking about it. It would seem strange that we must strive to be poor, to remain poor. “Just give me a chance” I can hear people say, “Just let me get my debts paid. Just let me get a few of the things I need and then I’ll begin to think of poverty and its pleasures. Meanwhile, I’ve had nothing but.”
This last month I have talked to a man who lives in a four room apartment with a wife and four children and relatives besides. He may have a regular job and enough food to go around, but he is poor in light and air and space. Down at the Peter Maurin farm each of the corners of the woman’s dormitory are occupied, and when an extra visitor comes she must live in the middle of the room. During a visit to Georgia and South Carolina I have seen the shacks Negroes are living in, and the trailer camps around Augusta, Georgia, where the Hydrogen Bomb plant is under construction. They may have trailers but they are also poor, physically speaking, in the things that are necessary for a good life. Trailers cost money, so do cars, and food is high and no matter how high wages go, a sudden illness, and accumulation of doctor and hospital bills may mean a sudden plunge into destitution. Everybody talks about security and everybody shudders at the idea of poverty. And in fear and anguish people succumb, mentally and physically, until our hospitals, especially our mental hospitals, are crowded all over the country.
I am convinced that if we had an understanding and a love of poverty we would begin to be as free and joyous as St. Francis, who had a passion for Lady Poverty and lives on with us in joyous poverty through all the centuries since his death.
[Dorothy Day continues:]
It is hard to write about poverty. We live in a slum neighborhood that is becoming ever more crowded with Puerto Ricans who are doubling up in unspeakably filthy, dark, crowded tenements on the lower east side and in Harlem, who have the lowest wages in the city, who do the hardest work, who are little and undernourished from generations of privation and exploitation by us. We used to have a hard time getting rid of all the small sized clothes which came in to us. Ladies who could eat steak and salads and keep their slim figures, contributed good clothes, small sized shoes, and I can remember Julia Porcelli saying once, “Why are the poor always fat. We never get enough clothes to fit them.” The American poor may be fat with the starches they eat, but the Puerto Rican poor are lean. The stock in the clothes room at Chrystie street moves quickly now.
It is hard to write about poverty when a visitor tells you of how he and his family all lived in a basement room and did sweat shop work at night to make ends meet, and how the landlord came in and belabored them for not paying his exorbitant rent.
It is hard to write about poverty when the back yard at Chrystie street still has the stock of furniture piled to one side that was put out on the street in an eviction in a next door tenement.
How can we say to these people, “Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven,” when we are living comfortably in a warm house, sitting down to a good table, and are clothed decently. Maybe not so decently. I had occasion to visit the City Shelter last month where families are cared for, and I sat there for a couple of hours, contemplating poverty and destitution, a family of these same Puerto Ricans with two of the children asleep in the parents’ arms, and four others sprawling against them; a young couple, the mother pregnant; and an elderly Negro who had a job she said but wasn’t to go on it till next night. I made myself known to a young man in charge (I did not want to appear to be spying on them when all I wanted to know was the latest in the apartment-finding situation for homeless families) and he apologized for making me wait saying that he had thought I was one of the clients.
We must talk about poverty because people lose sight of it, can scarcely believe that it exists. So many decent people come in to visit us and tell us how their families were brought up in poverty and how, through hard work and decent habits and cooperation, they managed to educate all the children and raise up priests and nuns to the Church. They concede that health and good habits, a good family, take them out of the poverty class, no matter how mean the slum they may have been forced to inhabit. No, they don’t know about the poor. Their conception of poverty is something neat and well ordered as a nun’s cell.
And maybe no one can be told, maybe they will have to experience it. Or maybe it is a grace which they must pray for. We usually get what we pray for, and maybe we are afraid to pray for it. And yet I am convinced that it is the grace we most need in this age of crisis, at this time when expenditures reach into the billions to defend “our American way of life.” Maybe it is this defense which will bring down upon us this poverty which we do not pray for.
[Dorothy Day continues:]
I can remember our first efforts nineteen years ago. (With this issue we start our twentieth year.) We had no office, no equipment but a typewriter which was pawned the first month. We wrote the paper on park benches and at the kitchen table. In an effort to achieve a little of the destitution of our neighbors we gave away even our furniture and sat on boxes. But as fast as we gave things away people brought more. We gave away blankets to needy families, started our first house of hospitality and people gathered together what blankets we needed. We gave away food and more food came in. I can remember a haunch of venison from the Canadian Northwest, a can of oysters from Maryland, a container of honey from Illinois. Even now it comes in, a salmon from Seattle, flown across the continent; nothing is too good for the poor. There is no one working with The Catholic Worker getting a salary, so no one is bothered with income tax, and since all of the leaders of the work give up job and salary, others of our readers feel called upon to give, and help us keep the work going. And then we experience a poverty of another kind, a poverty of interior goods of reputation. It is said often and with some scorn, “Why don’t they get jobs and help the poor that way? Why are they living off others, begging?” Just this last month a long letter came in along these lines, and another group in St. Louis emphasized that they didn’t live by begging.
It would complicate things rather, I can only explain, to give Roger a salary for his work of fourteen hours a day in the kitchen, clothes room and house; to pay Jane a salary for running the woman’s house, and Beth and Annabelle for giving out clothes; for making stencils all day and helping with the sick and the poor; and Bob and Tom for their work–and then have them all turn the money right back in to support the work. Or to make it more complicated, they might all go out and get jobs, and bring the money home to pay their board and room and the salaries of others to run the house. It is simpler just to be poor. It is simpler to beg. The thing to do is not to hold out on to anything. That might smack of the Ananias and Saphira act.
But the tragedy is that we do, we all do. We hold on to our books, our tools, such as typewriters, our clothes, and instead of rejoicing when they are taken from us we lament. We protest at people taking time or privacy. We are holding on to these goods. It is a good thing to remember.
Occasionally, as we start thinking of poverty, usually after reading the life of such a saint as Benedict Joseph Labre, we dream of going out on our solitary own, living with the destitute, sleeping on park benches or in the Shelter, living in the Churches, sitting before the blessed Sacrament as we see so many doing, from the Municipal lodging house around the corner. And when these thoughts come on warm spring days when the children are playing in the park, and it is good to be out on the city streets, we know that this too is luxury and we are deceiving ourselves, and that it is the warm sun we want, and rest, and time to think and read, and freedom from the people that press in on us from early morning until late at night. No it is not simple, this business of poverty.
“True poverty is rare,” a saintly priest writes to us from Martinique. “Nowadays communities are good, I am sure, but they are mistaken about poverty. They accept, admit on principle, poverty, but everything must be good and strong, buildings must be fireproof, Precarity is rejected everywhere, and precarity is an essential element of poverty. That has been forgotten. Here we want precarity in everything except the church. These last days our refectory was near collapsing.
[Dorothy Day continues:]
"We have put several supplemental poles and thus it will last, maybe two or three years more. Some day it will fall on our heads and that will be funny. Precarity enables us to help very much the poor. When a community is always building, and enlarging, and embellishing, which is good in itself, there is nothing left over for the poor. We have no right to do this as long as there are slums and breadlines somewhere."
Really, though, on second, third, fourth thought... entering a text like that one in a time when the beast-of-all-nations conductors of the massive sport utility vehicles barreling up and down the freeway feeder out front are thinking about nothing but immediate getting and spending, and before and after that dropping off and picking up their very special offspring on the way to and from... well, everything... all in the interests of being secure, feeling secure, eliminating all doubt and risk... feels pretty... what would be the word? unrealistic? naive? oblivious? just plain country foolish?
Dorothy Day was an extraordinary woman. She was certainly an inspiration to us all back in the '60s and '70s. I'm glad Pope Francis has drawn attention to her. It's depressing to think about all the money that corporate greed is sucking out of the economy at a time when so many are in need. I remember meeting Michael Harrington sometime around 1964, when he visited my college campus. I guess he was promoting The Other America, his landmark book on poverty in the U.S. I think he helped spur LBJ's "War on Poverty." Now it's more like a War against the poor.
Tom,
"While an ailanthus tree crushes
its way between 2 close buildings
the space between an alley and a dream."
-- beautiful JC poems, so powerful next to all these photos, coupled to all that Dorothy Day has to say here (for which all thanks) together with those "massive sport utility vehicles barreling up and down the freeway feeder," which bring to mind --
"Getting and spending, we lay waste our time . . ."
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