Revisiting All the President's Men

I watched this movie again tonight.  It may be the sixth time I've seen it.  I liked it so much I actually purchased it on iTunes.

As I watched it tonight, I became sharply aware of the similarities between the Watergate story and our present situation with the present president.

The lies
the secrecy
and especially... the money!!!

I was also painfully aware of the limitations under which those young Washington Post reporters labored: the technology that wasn't in existence in 1972.

The film of the book was made in 1975, so the portrayal of the technology was very accurate.

Here are the reporters listening in on a phone call to one of the three.

So much of their investigative reporting was done on the hoof. Here is one of the women interviewed over lunch on the roof of the Kennedy center.

Here are Woodward and Bernstein reading all the index card sized handwritten requests for books.
No online catalogue!  No  Google!

and the lovely way the camera pulls back to show a view from the ceiling of the Library of Congress.


The present investigators have it so much easier in some ways, and so much harder in others.

But the obfuscation and the coverup are still the same.

I am haunted by the worry of how this one will end.

April still comes

This is how it looks where I live.    Even with all the hatred and suicide bombings and catastrophes,
April still endures.


Yesterday was my birthday. I turned 71.  I still can't believe I am this old.

Aren't I still this person?

1976

 The years seem to have been gobbled up in a whirlwind of busyness and activity, especially all the years of the 1980's and 90's.   Even the first fifteen years of the 2000's.    I don't have any wisdom to impart on this observation.

I can't get down to writing in these months, sad to say.  I keep falling into new addictions: Playing Solitaire, and watching/reading about "Game of Thrones" which I have very recently come to.
It's even worse than "Breaking Bad" because the story is so much more complex.

                                                    1964

Lilacs

I haven't done well with poetry this month.... it just hasn't been coming... or I haven't given it enough time.

Sigh.

I've spent my concentration and energy on thoughts of the courtyard garden.

Anyway, the lilacs are blooming here, though I don't have any bushes in the courtyard garden.

Here's a poem by Amy Lowell:

"Lilacs, False Blue, White, Purple,
Colour of lilac,
Your great puffs of flowers
Are everywhere in this my New England ...
Lilacs in dooryards
Holding quiet conversation with an early moon;
Lilacs watching a deserted house; ...
Lilacs, wind-beaten, staggering under a lopsided shock of bloom,
You are everywhere."

-  Amy Lowell 

National Poetry Month - Day 21

Which is also Easter...

Here's a poem by Emily Dickinson:


"An altered look about the hills;
A Tyrian light the village fills;
A wider sunrise in the dawn;
A deeper twilight on the lawn;
A print of a vermilion foot;
A purple finger on the slope;
A flippant fly upon the pane;
A spider at his trade again;
An added strut in chanticleer;
A flower expected everywhere ..."


-  Emily Dickinson, Nature: April

National Poetry Month Day 13

April is here and I am out and about...missed a few days.

Here are some words - not by me- about April:

from D.H. Lawrence:

"This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green,

Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes,

Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between

Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes.

I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration

Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze

Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration,

Faces of people streaming across my gaze."

-  D. H. Lawrence, The Enkindled Spring

from Rainer Maria Rilke:


"Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night." 
-  Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke    

The Pink Trees of Emmitsburg

This past weekend I took part in the annual Saint Joseph College Alumnae Reunion. This was the small women's college I attended fifty years or so ago.  It's been closed since 1973, but we still meet each year.  What does that say about the bonds we made in that little college out in the country so many years ago?

Here are two poems I wrote about the place:

The Pink Trees of Emmitsburg

 

 

It is the first of all mornings.

The curtain rises,

the mountains bow,

extend pointy fingers

to a huddle of pink trees,

tulle ballerinas

in a world of black tights.

The audience,

hitherto numb and slumped,

gasps.

 

The outlandish pink trees

shake their stiff crinolines

and the whole theater stirs.

The audience feels

loved like brides

in a world of divorces.

 

Too  frilly,

too old-fashioned,

the critics huffed.

The management closed the show,

closed the whole theater.

 

Only the caretaker

sees the pink trees dance.

They still dance,

so out of hand,

so outlandishly beautiful,

to the wind’s applause.

 

 

 This one was written 25 years after I graduated, about the Sister who was the president of the college:

 

Margaret

 

 

Her black Irish eyes,

practical as tile,

suddenly open like onyx wells

as she snaps out of sleep.

The ragged breath

slips and then catches

on the edge of the cliff

from which she hangs,

and she’s back in the bed, saying

What day is it?

What day?

 

It’s the cusp of October,

humid, tropical, storming through the long afternoon.

Delirious, she’s letting old secrets

slip out around the oxygen mask.

She’s emptying the last closets

 

where worries of the details of graduations,

anguish of lost colleges,

irreplaceable keys

quiver in the corners.

 

If the moon answers to the name

Old Woman Who Never Dies,

What should I call her,

whose waning hand holds mine

as she pulls away from me

into the air of the clean cold Sunday morning?

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the hand of the bander

 

 

Here's a poem from my 2009 chapbook   How the Hand Behaves:

In the hand of the Bander

 

 

 

Not named for the coarse open fabric of flags,

but named after sifting seeds,

after  blue dye from hairy blooms of the legume family

in India, Indigo Buntings flash,

hue of the portion of the visible spectrum from blue to violet

evoked in the human observer

by radiant energy,

by iridescence in flight.

Female Indigo Bunting

in the hand of the bander,

more subtle than your glorious mate,

deceptively brown,

outraged at your capture,

you biting the hand of the bander,

fierce as a falcon.

 

 

 

 

 

Saying the Rosary

Here's a poem from my 2010 book  Digging for God :

 

Saying the Rosary

 

I used to say it on St. Paul Street

In bed, to go to sleep,

That small brown rosary

From the souvenir store at the catacombs in Rome…

Cecilia lying on her side, her hair swept back,

the slice in her neck..

How I used to fall asleep saying it,

lying on that sofa bed in the octagonal living room,

In my light night gown,

With the traffic pouring by outside,

And the window fan on,

In the heat of the summer night,

Praying to be spared from robbers

And rapists,

Praying for sleep

To pull me quickly and safely to the morning.

And he filled me with a song I never sang,

A rose I never saw,

Waves too distant for birds.

 

 

 

Vineyard Stories

For Day 2 of National Poetry Month, here is a poem from my fifth book  Digging for God :

Vineyard Stories

 

One son was invited and he said yes

and he did not come.

The other one said no

and regretted it

and came.

Was that the same son

who was killed by all those

tenant farmers?

Were those farmers

the ones

who worked all day

and got the same pay

as the ones who came

at the last horn’s blow?

Did all this happen

in the same vineyard

that glistens in the evening sun

where the lovely macramé of

green strings

reaches out

for the anchoring pole?

Grapes are heavy in the

September air.

Here is a place for

the liar and the rash.

Here is time to say no

and change your mind.

Here, also,

the jealous

and the killer.

Here, harvest.

 

 

So happy it's April

I thought April would never arrive...

It's also National Poetry Month, and I am attempting to write a poem a day ( actually, a first draft a day.)  But I am not posting it here because then I wouldn't be able to send it out for publication.

So instead I will post one of my poems which has already been published.


Here is one:

How the Hand Behaves

 

How the hand behaves in times of threat:

sweat springing out,

cooling palms to silence, to clams,

or shrinking to shrimp,

shaking, pink,

or clenching

like a lobster claw,

fingers like teeth,

chomping in on themselves.

 

 

 

 

This was the opening poem in my chapbook  How the Hand Behaves,  Finishing Line Press 2009

 

 

 

 

 

Sunday in Spring

painting: Creek in March on a blustery day   by  Hilary England





Two poems for the last day of March

 

"Each leaf,
each blade of grass
vies for attention.
Even weeds
carry tiny blossoms
to astonish us."

- Marianne Poloskey, Sunday in Spring 





What I Pray For
 by Dennis O’Donnell

Sacks of rocks
I have gathered from the beach,
 some of which I used to toss
my own I Ching,
 stones representing
fire, water, wind, and the rest,
 some of them with strange,
man-like markings, like circles,
probably formed by little pools of sea water,
 dried by the sun,
 leaving behind a round stain of salt.

 Stacks of poems,
sacks of rocks,
 milk crates full of books
full of baloney:
I can’t let them go, not yet,
 but I lie in bed and plead with God
 to empty out my past, all of it,
 at least all of the bad,
set me free,
flush out
all the shame and rage and heartache,
 but please, not the finger-paints,
 not baseball and my best friends.

 Deal, He says,
 but all the rocks must go.
 No tarot cards, and no metaphysical bull.

 Fine, I say.
 I have a look at my bookcase.
 I see Rumi, Suzuki, Lao Tzu, and two Bibles.
So: who will throw the first stone?


Source:  “What I Pray For” by Dennis O’Donnell from America Magazine

A Tattered Penitence

Black Bowl   by George Seeley



.Here's a wonderful poem for Lent, by William F. Bell:



Night Thoughts         by William F. Bell

 It is our emptiness and lowliness that God needs, and not our plenitude. —Mother Teresa

Somehow by day,
no matter what,
 I patch myself together whole,
 But all my effort can’t offset
 The nightly nakedness of soul
 When angels in a dark descent
 Strip off my integument.

 I am a cornered rebel pinched
Between night’s armies and my lack,
 And when inside the bedclothes hunched
 I feel the force of their attack,
 I hardly know what I can do,
 Exposed to God at half-past two.

 I once believed my being full,
But night thoughts prove that it is not.
Waking scared and miserable,
 I scrape the bottom of the pot
 And then must bow down and confess
 Totality of emptiness.

Kings once ventured, it is said,
To offer gold and frankincense,
 But I send nothing from my bed
Except a tattered penitence,
 So very little has accrued
From years of doubtful plenitude.
 God who tear away my cover,
 Oh, pour your Spirit into me
 Until my emptiness runs over
 With golden superfluity,
 And I bow down and offer up
 Yourself within my earthen cup.


Source: “Night Thoughts” by William Bell from America Magazine,  Vol. 187 No. 18

Distraction

I am increasingly convinced that email , Facebook, and my iPhone use are shortening my attention span and making me even more prone to distractibility.  This must be true of many Americans.
The memes are funny, but the effect on citizenship are frightening.

Here is an essay about distraction from the Washington Post from the summer of 2017.  I think it still applies:

Everything is a distraction from something much, much worse

 

By Catherine Rampell Opinion writer    Washington Post

Opinions

July 13,2017

"Americans, you need to start paying attention. Like, really paying attention — to the issues that actually matter.

Stop getting distracted!

Take this Russian collusion nonsense. Lots of Americans are obsessed with it, but it’s just a shiny distraction.

Yeah, sure, it looks as though members of the Trump campaign lied repeatedly, including on live TV and in Senate testimony and on security clearance forms, about their contacts with Russians. It looks as though they may have been eager to get their hands on possibly illegally obtained information from a hostile nation. “I love it,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote when offered dirt on Hillary Clinton explicitly offered as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

But that’s merely what the nine-dimensional-chess players in the White House want you to be obsessing over.

Focusing on the terrible things Team Trump did during the campaign and transition conveniently distracts you from all the terrible things Team Trump is doing during the presidency.

The administration is repealing consumer and environmental protections left and right. The Education Department is making it easier for for-profit colleges to defraud students. The Environmental Protection Agency has delayed an air pollution rule that the agency had determined would likely prevent the poisoning of children.

The Trump deregulatory team is rife with former lobbyists and others who have conflicts of interest. President Trump and his family members likewise appear to be financially benefiting from his role in the White House.

 

Yet fussing over regulatory decisions and vaguely sleazy behavior is itself a distraction from an even more important issue: the fact that Republicans are trying to remake one-sixth of the U.S. economy, largely in secret, while ripping health insurance away from 22 million Americans.

 

They’re laying out changes opposed by insurers, providers and patient advocacy groups.  They are doing so with no hearings and no expert input, and reportedly with a scheme to sideline the one neutral referee of the law’s potential impact, the Congressional Budget Office. Attention must be paid!

 

However, all the noise over “health-care reform” is itself a ruse intended to distract voters from Republicans’ real policy agenda: tax cuts for the rich.

 

The entire point of the Obamacare repeal, at least for House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), is to pave the way for tax cuts. Slashing Medicaid and tax subsidies for people on the individual insurance market would help offset the costs of repealing taxes on rich people imposed by the Affordable Care Act.

 

The latest Senate health-care bill has complicated that plan somewhat, but plans for major tax cuts for rich people and corporations are still advancing behind the scenes and garnering precious little news coverage.

 

What scant awareness is being given to tax cuts, however, is diverting the public’s deficient attention from a far more insidious scheme: efforts to systematically undermine democratic values and institutions.

 

There’s the Election Integrity Commission’s fishing expedition for state voter data — which may have been deliberately bungled in an attempt to distract voters from Republicans’ real, secret goal of dismantling the National Voter Registration Act, or “Motor Voter” law.

 

There are also the unending attacks on freedom of the press and other First Amendment rights. This includes a fight picked with MSNBC hosts, which White House aides lamented as a distraction from the far more important fight with CNN.

 

But wait. All of this silliness is really a form of misdirection so that Americans will forget North Korea recently fired an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of hitting Alaska. And that no one is even nominated for critical diplomatic and national security posts, such as ambassador to South Korea and assistant secretary of state for international security and nonproliferation.

But worry about such personnel vacancies is of course a distraction from the fact that the man at the top of the food chain is impulsively tweeting out provocations to both enemies and allies.

 

And Trump’s tasteless Twitter feed is also cleverly designed to distract you from noticing that an iceberg nearly the size of Delaware just broke off Antarctica.

 

Getting drawn into a debate about whether climate change is to blame, and whether American global leadership could make a difference either way, would surely sidetrack us from the vital question of whether our president is in hock to Russia.

 

And second verse, same as the first.

 

Welcome to 2017, the ouroboros of distractions, where every terrible thing is a head-fake for a ruse for a diversion for a misdirection from something else much, much worse."

next to of course god

This poem, written in 1926 by e e cummings, reminds me of Donald Trump:


 "next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn's early my
country 'tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

These are just a few of the great political cartoons.

Forty feeding like one

I am depressed today because Donald Trump is gloating over his seeming reprieve from the Mueller report, and because he is planning so many life-destroying actions which will benefit the rich and make life so much worse for the poor.

I pray for his conversion and for our country.

In the meantime, though, it is Spring...   and here are two more March poems. This first one is from
William Wordsworth:

"The cock is crowing,
The stream is flowing,
The small birds twitter,
The lake doth glitter,
The green field sleeps in the sun;
The oldest and youngest
Are at work with the strongest;
The cattle are grazing,
Their heads never raising;
There are forty feeding like one! 
Like an army defeated
The snow hath retreated,
And now doth fare ill
On the top of the bare hill;
The Plowboy is whooping-anon-anon:
There's joy in the mountains;
There's life in the fountains;
Small clouds are sailing,
The rain is over and gone!"

-   William Wordsworth, March

and this one, from Rilke:
 
 

"Harshness vanished. A sudden softness
has replaced the meadows' wintry grey.
Little rivulets of water changed
their singing accents. Tendernesses,

hesitantly, reach toward the earth
from space, and country lanes are showing
these unexpected subtle risings
that find expression in the empty trees."


-  Rainer Marie Rilke, Early Spring  
 
 

 

 

  

A light exists in Spring

photo by Martin Dolan

Two more March poems, the first, by Emily Dickinson:

 

"A light exists in Spring
Not present in the year
at any other period
When March is scarcely here."
-  Emily Dickinson 

The second one, by Christina Rossetti:


Gone were but the Winter,
Come were but the Spring,
I would go to a covert
Where the birds sing;

Where in the whitethorn
Singeth a thrush,
And a robin sings
In the holly-bush.

Full of fresh scents
Are the budding boughs
Arching high over
A cool green house:

Full of sweet scents,
And whispering air
Which sayeth softly:
We spread no snare;

Here dwell in safety,
Here dwell alone,
With a clear stream
And a mossy stone.

Here the sun shineth
Most shadily;
Here is heard an echo
Of the far sea,
Though far off it be."
-  Christina Rossetti, Spring Quiet 

The month of expectation

Two more March poems, the first, from Emily Dickinson:

 

"March is the month of expectation,
The things we do not know,
The Persons of Prognostication
Are coming now.
We try to sham becoming firmness,
But pompous joy
Betrays us, as his first betrothal
Betrays a boy."



-  Emily Dickinson, XLVIII

 

 the second, from Grace Paley:

"This hill
crossed with broken pines and maples
lumpy with the burial mounds of
uprooted hemlocks (hurricane
of ’38) out of their
rotting hearts generations rise
trying once more to become
the forest

just beyond them 
tall enough to be called trees 
in their youth like aspen a bouquet 
of young beech is gathered

they still wear last summer’s leaves  
the lightest brown almost translucent 
how their stubbornness has decorated  
the winter woods"



-  Grace Paley, A Walk in March

 

Art:   Moon Tree  by Lupi

Scarcely the day to take a walk

photo by Chris Cheadle


Two more March poems, this one by John Clare, many centuries ago:


"The spring is coming by many a sign;
The trays are up, the hedges broken down
That fenced the haystack, and the remnant shines
Like some old antique fragment weathered brown.
And where suns peep, in every sheltered place,
The little early buttercups unfold
A glittering star or two- till many trace
The edges of the blackthorn clumps in gold.
And then a little lamb bolts up behind
The hill, and ways his tail to meet the yoe;
And then another, sheltered from the wind,
Lies all his length as dead - and lets me go
Close by, and never stirs, but basking lies,
With legs stretched out as though he could not rise."

-  John Clare, Young Lambs

and this one, much more like the weather today, by Elizabeth Bishop, from the 20th century:



 

"It was cold and windy, scarcely the day
to take a walk on that long beach
Everything was withdrawn as far as possible,
indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken,
seabirds in ones or twos.
The rackety, icy, offshore wind
numbed our faces on one side;
disrupted the formation
of a lone flight of Canada geese;
and blew back the low, inaudible rollers
in upright, steely mist."



-  Elizabeth Bishop, The End of March 

 

photo by Martin Ruegner

 

Equal Dark, Equal Light

full moon March 20



"Equal dark, equal light
Flow in Circle, deep insight
Blessed Be, Blessed Be
The transformation of energy!
So it flows, out it goes
Three-fold back it shall be
Blessed Be, Blessed Be
The transformation of energy!"
-   Night An'Fey, Transformation of Energy 

"The word 'March' comes from the Roman 'Martius'. This was originally the first month of the Roman calendar and was named after Mars, the god of war.  March was the beginning of our calendar year. We changed to the 'New Style' or 'Gregorian calendar in 1752, and it is only since then when we the year began on 1st January. The Anglo-Saxons called the month Hlyd monath which means Stormy month, or Hraed monath which means Rugged month. All through Lent the traditional games played are marbles and skipping. The games were stopped on the stroke of twelve noon on Good Friday, which in some places was called Marble Day or Long Rope Day.  The game of marbles has been played for hundreds of years and some historians say that it might have been started by rolling eggs. In the past, round stones, hazelnuts, round balls of baked clay and even cherry stones have been used."
-  Facts About March