calendar of praise, a by-city video poem project

8/6/2019 Calendar of Praise, a by-city video poem project

1/15

A Calendar of Praisefor multiple voices

To become part of the calendar of praise video project,

[email protected].

In January, Praise

For between the rows of cut corn, gullies of soft snow

For on the river high-water ice like lacy skirts engirding the larger rocks

For on one bank orchards and on the other fields

For Kings dream speech read and heard and in a handful of cities half realized

For an unprecedented alignment of Saturn and Uranus

For a comet approaching, some seeing or thinking they see

through telescopes, through third eyes, a crucifix or an alien ship beside it

For those who with seriousness undertake inner work

For the rucked and frozen river

For noon glare like a bridge across it

For the brown bear tramping down it, like a ship growing large,

Like a ship or a comet watched from afar

Like a dream, like a year, like a leader knowing ice

is a path and death is a start

New Paltz, New York
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]


2/15

In February, Praise

For the plain black birds who stay

For the song of the plain black birds

For daffodils, fake or not,

on the porch of the yellow house

For the bright five o'clock

For a gray dog squatted on snow-locked grass

For spokes of bootprints out the doors of the junior high

For church bells and the quiet after

For the boys at hockey, the crack of their sticks on the skidding puck

For the hatless gloveless girls watching

For under the frozen the unfrozen pond

(thinking of it while walking on it)

For the sapling bent like an arch

For sleeves of bark where the stacked cord stood

For oil delivered and gas delivered to accounts past due

For kerosene in red plastic containers retrieved

For sunlight profligate and uncontained, forever retrieved

For sunlight later on the floor of the ward where the son or the daughter mourns

For March impendent and the rumored crocus

For whatever weather every February (each one minutes longer) day

Pittsfield, Massachusetts


3/15

In March, Praise

For road crews unclogging our culverts

For chipmunks up from hibernation

For under the black mulch of layered leaves, green shoots

For seed packets spread like cards across a table

For in a shack in Appalcahia a palmful of seeds

harvested by hand the year before

For on laundrymat bulletin boards the one word "Rototilling"

with a number and a reasonable price

For magnolias fat braggadocio

For cats so obviously happy

For the earlier and the later sun

For after her last radiation treatment a motherlifting her face to the sun

For the run-off roaring beneath our streets

For farther away brooks and streams overflowing their banks

and farther still the river

urging its ice to the sea

New Paltz, New York


4/15

In April and May, Praise

For spears of onion scent along the rail-trail path

For orange and yellow songbirds passing through from Costa Rica

For horses in a field, their comfortable gait

For three goats grazing near

For sycamores so late to give their leaves, giving their leaves

For apple orchards like symphony orchestras on the downbeat beginning to bloom

For a wild pear beginning

For worms at work in the compost heat

For leaves of lettuce up so soon and so soon peas

For the grave marker of a winter death finally and carefully placed

For the workers of the world revered and remembered

comradeship a dream, a destiny not dead

For the dead of America's wars revered and remembered

freedom a dream, a destiny not dead

For in one day dandelions painting a field

For the windows of the school bus open

For the boredom of school soon over

For the prisoners who pray

For the lilacs that reach

For the river so recently flooded flowing evenly between rich fields

For mustard blooms like yellow roads between the orchard rows

For the new green of maples. We may not see it again

For graduation speakers, those who inspire and those who are brief


5/15

For tulip heads eaten by browsing deer

For the one head left, the one red flower

as after a daughter's sudden death the widow's one daughter left

For wild herbs offering their salves

For true love

For young love flowering

and seeing in itself a symbol of all else

and seeing in all else a symbol of itself

For the celibate man or woman seeing in the self the Source, unsymbolic

For the old

For the young

For the middle-aged laboring and unresentful

For resentments released

For the energy of Easter and the energy of Passover and the energy of the Spring Equinox

For those who are depressed nevertheless loving a breeze, a blade, a hue

For those in despair nevertheless choosing another day

as the ash tree thought dead springs sparse green in its uppermost crown

For the woodsman who in November said No

I will not cut it down

I will not cut the old ash down.

New Paltz, New York


6/15

In June, Praise

For from every gully and level stretch hip-high the lushness leaning . . .

chicory weed in Queen Anne's Lace . . . the endless thickly seeded heads of grain

For beneath their leaves the wild strawberries dangling

(to lean and tongue the softest seems a sexual thing)

For between mowings the grasses lifting their seeds

upwards on delicate stalks

For the black-white soccer ball deflating in a field

For the seventeen-year cicadas, their mating noise a torrent

litter of their exoskeletons amazing

Do we love them less than we love the salmon?

For brides as for red-winged blackbirds

For blackbirds as for wild asparagus

For asparagus as for the last dandelions

For the national parks

For the current of the rivertaut as plastic-wrap

then crimped by rocks

For in their scorched grid the orchard trees

submitting to Alar, to Malathion, submitting in order to give

For in a sudden downpour laughter from the awnings and doorways of Main Street

For at dusk trunks and leaves mirrored in the still creek

For where the still creek meets the river lovers laughing and deciding

For the farmer of a long drought who on network news

kneels between the rows of winter wheat to show us

what drought has done to the winter wheat

For barbecues, for pot-lucks, for the covered-dish

For bees with their mouths deep in the sex of the flowers


7/15


8/15

In July, Praise

For goldenrod beginning again and loosestrife taking a field

For black raspberries ripe and over-ripe

For the black dragon fly

For the coppery frog and its throbbing throat

For the liquid-orange salamander

For in the apple orchard a red blush

For the fourth of July

for having forgotten it to see green fountains in the sky and remember

For the Olympics, for symbols violated yet still symbolic

the torch and the dove and the rings interlocked

For athletes from nations where children are starving saying into the camera Children are

starving

For the jointed legs of the daddy-long-legs quick over dappled leaves

For Sirius so bright before the dawn. Some say it is the sign of Isis,

who floods the Nile. Some wake to see it rise

For a five-foot high Queen Anne's Lace lifting its intricate white

For overhead the heron and the hawk

and on an island in the river a sandpiper

standing alone then flying off

New Paltz, NY


9/15

In August, Praise

For apple crates stacked in the orchards

For from the pointed ladders voices

Central American songs

For the songs of Jamaica, Guatemala and Chiapas

For the songs of Mississippi and Georgia

(more than Malathion what coats our fruit)

For sunflowers bordering the corn

For cornfields bordering the river

For the Perseus meteor shower

For theme parks and water parks and bunjie jumps, that fun

For in the cellar of a gutted house mattresses stacked

and the daredevil children jumping from the secondno watch

the third floor!

For the sincere and forthright convention delegate

For the African American baby asleep on a lap

his destiny to one day accept the nomination of his party

And his name shall be peace

his harvest forgiveness

and America will know again the simplicity of its fields

New Paltz, NY and North Philadelphia


10/15

In September, Praise

For a spray painted wordthe word or name Tokay

For Betina and Porsha like twins for the first day of school

For two boys playing catch and a yellow butterfly passing through

For a cobalt blue trash barrel

For in the night a car alarm calling "I have been tampered with, I have been tampered with"

For the sullen look of a passing youth, for the appeal beneath the sullen look

For sneakers dangling by their laces from telephone wire, turning like a wind vane in the

wind

For sycamores with dignity lining a street

For a ginkgo in its bracelet of red brick

For a recitation in Spanish from the prophet Jeremiah

For the Spanish wordZion, so much gentler than the English Zion

For a pigeon grooming itself on a wire, pulling me as ably as did the great blue heron

down the groove of tension into immanence

For a mother calling Hakim, Hakim

For the surf of sound around homes as around homeless shelters

around the sullen youth sitting on a cement wall

in the dapple of late afternoon, North Philadelphia, early fall

North Philadelphia


11/15

In October, Praise

For ash leaves turned that yellow that even on the rainiest days

mimes sunlightsunlight through trees

For Nareida feeding pigeons polenta from an iron skillet

For an orange bow flapping on a brown door

For the sun setting red over superstore roofs

For the gravel of bottleglass in sidewalk cracksclear, brown and bright green

For headlines with a Hubbel photographCollided Galaxies

(such collision understood as unexplosive intermingling

so great are the distances)

For the million woman march

and after it behind the counter at McDonald's

a teenager flaunting her beaded braids

For Christ in labor, Christ in the E.R. untreated

For Allah

For prayer

For the resolve prayer brings

For candlelight in the cavern of a Jack-o-lantern

sweet smell of pith and seeds

For the light in the eyes of the costumed children

ninjas, draculas, Disneywomen and witches

For the light in the eyes of us all

North Philadelphia


12/15

In November and December, Praise

For hummocks of ice down-slope from the culvert pipe

For brown and gray through slow November by first snowfall abated

For more running water than January will give us

or any month until April or March

For icicles examined and tossed high to shatter, the shards compared

to consciousness, to light, to laughter (the tosser unaccountably happier)

For birch trees bright in the four o'clock dusk

like dancers posed pulse ecstatic

bright in the four o'clock dusk

For Venus before dawn on a violet horizon

For so soon the strings of colored lights along the eaves of homes

with staple guns to doorjambs fixed and by extension cord to reach the very shrubs

For alone in a level field the large blue spruce by blue unblinking bulbs sparsely lit

For window squares through thin straight saplings seen

For the eight days of rededication and the girl or the boy in the temple praying

For the human voice alone or in chorus

For the winter solstice, and women night-long 'round a fire dancing

For the ceremonies of Native America at last reanimant

For of all ceremonies those that accelerate worship

For worship understood as increase

For the instant on waking when Christmas day is recalled

For the widow or widower who wakes alone but anyway (or because) recalls

For the neighbors who form to say Yes, Build the shelter here

For Umoja, Ujima, Kujichagulia and the rest


13/15

For the lights of the kenara sparkling on the fresh fruit

For under the roadway the river changing course

the turbulence and boulders of it from steel bridges glimpsed

For the one who kneeling asks to change and does(choice or miracle or both choice and miracle)

For the food convoy let through

For ancient and modern the hatreds ending

(you may say they continue but I say they end)

For those of each race who undertake healing

For the improbable peace

For leafy and crimped the dark green kale in a careful garden yet

For the star in the east (supernova or sign or both supernova and sign)

For the infant and the mystery incipient

For patience

For patience understood as faith

For faith

For three apple trees after freezing rain

their branches to the very twigs bulkened and emblazoned

scintillate in the breeze (the seer forever after forbearing decoration

whose poverty is less for thatis not)

For the plumber who Sunday agrees to solder the burst and spraying pipe

For outside Port Authority with awkwardness or ease

brotherhood expressed

For the buck spared and the shot buck hung proudly from the tree of an upstate town

For the delicate and cherished ornament from a low branch hung

that the grandchild may lie looking up to see his face or hers

among packages and tinsel-light intriguingly transformed

For expectation greater than can be explained by packages


14/15

For resolution greater than can be explained by guilt

For charity greater than can be explained by taxes

For grace

For the turn of the world on its imagined and reliable axis

For the gift of beginning again what we failed at before

For the gift offered and rejected and offered a second time

For the gift accepted

For the giver of all gifts

For the thoughtful death, attended or not

For song

For birth

For Christ

For breath

For whatever debt or depression belabors our praise, our pleasureDecember, with light

__________________________________

About the Calendar of Praise

In February of 1994 I moved to Pittsfield, Massachusetts to live with my mother, who

had been diagnosed with cancer. Many days I walked from her house to a small park

nearby, winding through the streets of the neighborhood and the fields behind the

middle school. One afternoon the low sun swept across the winter landscape and

everything my eye fell on seemed luminous. I was filled with gratitude and praise. I

began to string together words in my mind, feeling praise for the daffodils, fake or

not, on the porch of the yellow house, and many things more. Id add a line and thengo back to the start, memorizing as I walked. Indoors, I rushed for a pen and

remembered what I could, revising a little for rhythm.


15/15

A few years later in March, in New Paltz, New York, the same thing happeneda

luminous walk. Over the next eight years, the litany of praise would come to me one

or two months a year. When I moved in 1997 to North Philadelphias Badlands, I

didnt think any more poems would come. I thought I had to be steeped in nature.But they did come. Everywhere there is beauty worthy of praise. There, with my first

September and October in the city I finished the calendar of praise. April and Mayare combined in one poem, as are November and December. Im not sure why;perhaps spring and the Holiday season are units that span two months or more.

Recently, in 2011, a vision came to me in meditation of people reading lines from the

months on videotape, to be shared with a world so in need of gratitude and of a spirit

of praise for the small, easily overlooked gifts and graces. This is the beginning of

that. If youd like to take part, contact me or just send video of yourself reading your

favorite month. I hope to begin sharing the praise in late 2012.

The lines are meant to be read slowly, with a savoring of the details as you picture

(in your own way with your own images) whats being praised.

To become part of the calendar of praise video project,

email [email protected].
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]

calendar of praise, a by-city video poem project

Documents