Help
Sign In
bill moyers
November 2008 
Finding Treasure
Posted on Aug 4th, 2006
by 
Metta
Metta
Browsing through my favorite local used bookstore, Tsunami Books, with my daughters this afternoon I got involved in a conversation with an employee about poetry as I was purchasing a book by Bill Moyers, Fooling With Words - A Celebration of Poets and Their Craft who asked if I had seen the new book of poetry by Robert Bly, My Sentence was a Thousand Years of Joy. I love Bly's translations of Kabir and have read a few poems of his own that I really liked so I picked up the book and began to read the first poem I opened to. I opened it to another page and another and within one minute I knew I couldn't walk out of the store without it.
While this wasn't the first poem I read, or the second or the third, and the book is not filled with poems like it (it says enough itself without having to be repeated again and again). It is a timely poem, has been a timely poem for a while now... it is a powerful poem.
Call and Answer
August 2002
Tell me why it is we don't lift our voices these days
and cry over what is happening. Have you noticed
the plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting?
I say to myself: "Go on, cry. What's the sense
of being an adult and having no voice? Cry out!
See who will answer! This is Call and Answer!"
We will have to call especially loud to reach
our angels, who are hard of hearing; they are hiding
in the jugs of silence filled during our wars.
Have we agreed to so many wars that we can't
escape from silence? If we don't lift our voices, we allow
others (who are ourselves) to rob the house.
How come we've listened to the great criers - Neruda,
Akhmatova, Thoreau, Frederick Douglas - and now
we're silent as sparrows in the little bushes?
Some masters say our life last only seven days.
Where are we in the week? Is it Thursday yet?
Hurry, cry now! Soon Sunday night will come.
Robert Bly www.robertbly.com
While this wasn't the first poem I read, or the second or the third, and the book is not filled with poems like it (it says enough itself without having to be repeated again and again). It is a timely poem, has been a timely poem for a while now... it is a powerful poem.
Call and Answer
August 2002
Tell me why it is we don't lift our voices these days
and cry over what is happening. Have you noticed
the plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting?
I say to myself: "Go on, cry. What's the sense
of being an adult and having no voice? Cry out!
See who will answer! This is Call and Answer!"
We will have to call especially loud to reach
our angels, who are hard of hearing; they are hiding
in the jugs of silence filled during our wars.
Have we agreed to so many wars that we can't
escape from silence? If we don't lift our voices, we allow
others (who are ourselves) to rob the house.
How come we've listened to the great criers - Neruda,
Akhmatova, Thoreau, Frederick Douglas - and now
we're silent as sparrows in the little bushes?
Some masters say our life last only seven days.
Where are we in the week? Is it Thursday yet?
Hurry, cry now! Soon Sunday night will come.
Robert Bly www.robertbly.com
Access: PublicTagged with: peace, poetry, war, voices, Bill Moyers, Robert Bly, Tsunami Bookstore, call and answer
Don’t you hate it when you just HAVE to have that volume of poetry that wasn’t what you came in for in the first place, were really just glancing completely innocently through, because some damn poem just jumps out and grabs you by the neck and won’t let go, because it’s got your soul in a stranglehold, because you just can’t POSSIBLY leave this book behind, abandoned, alone, forlorn, with this poem shining in it like a diamond, burning like a coal? You sneak to the cash register, feeling like you’ve been kidnapped, feeling like you’re committing a crime for sneaking off with this treasure. Will you get away before any one notices? Will it turn to ash before you can get it home and devour it? Hmm. Maybe it’s just me poetry has bankrupted in this way!
Actually, this post resonated with me on a variety of levels. I really, really adore the Bly you posted (as well as the one you sent… thanks!) Extremely powerful. It really called to mind Rumi's Cry Out In Your Weakness, which I believe I may have posted before on the Rumi pod?
It also called to mind Adrienne Rich's The School Among the Ruins, which I first read on Sam Hamill's Poets Against the War site (a powerful rallying site for those poets like Thoreau and Neruda: who went to jail and into exile, respectively, because of their powerful anti-war statements). It's first line runs 'Beirut.Baghdad.Sarajevo.Bethlehem.Kabul. Not of course here.' We've got to get over that temporal distortion, and realize it's here, now, and that if the only thing we can do is cry out, we cry out, and cut this gordian knot that has the well-wishing majority bound in its coils of intractable inaction. This poem is one of the strongest I've seen, along with the ones on the PAW chapbook (Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Hayden Carruth, W. S. Merwin were especially memorable). Thanks so much for posting it.
On a somewhat lighter note, I loved Fooling With Words. There are some good poems there, and an interesting look into the process of making poetry. I actually haven't finished it yet, because I set it aside to send YOU the poem I had mentioned many moons ago when you posted a blog on your father. It's by Deborah Garrison, called 'Father, R.I.P., Sums Me Up at Twenty-Three' and I could post it on zBooks, but then it would be attributed to Moyers (some work to do there). So I'll give you this lovely link I found to the PBS site which includes that poem, as well my favorite by her in the volume, 'Please Fire Me' - one of the best things I've read about office culture ever!
thank you for those links… and, your first reply… yes, I know… I know… oh, the excitement last night sitting and nibbling on those poems… reading them to my children who mostly responded to them with puzzled looks… but that is ok. I haven't tore into Fooling With Words yet (and I am going to have to learn how to do that linking thing)… but I am looking forward to reading it.
Speaking of Bill Moyers, I love his interview with Naomi Shihab Nye, who is one of my favorite poets. http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_nye.html
I enjoyed the interview with Naomi Shihab Nye… normally I can't stomach Bill Moyer's stupid questions, but they do seem to draw folks out… maybe like talking to a kindergartner would? Anyhow, he's effective as an interviewer, even when he sets my teeth on edge. I especially liked the tidbits 'you're not trying to proclaim things all the time, but you're trying to discover things' and 'what it means to be half and half, where love means you breath in two countries' and I loved the poem at the end, The Art of Disappearing. Good stuff.
Oh, and to add a link just highlight a word or words, right-click and select Insert/edit link (or select the little chain link icon from the tool bar above the text box), then enter the url in the top line of the little box that pops up.
Thank you!!! I did it! I updated the blog post with 3 links… I'm so excited!
Yes, I just love Naomi Shihab Nye. One of my dear friends here is one of her dear friends. I used to frequently share my poetry with my friend and one day she introduced me to Naomi's work. I was blown away and felt silly writing poetry and sillier for sharing it with my friend who was fed regularly on Naomi's words… I even wrote this poem about it:
On Reading Naomi Shihab Nye
before I throw in the towel
I will bury my face deep in it and weep
humbled by true art
broken by myself
what are these crippled shapes I cast onto pages
when this beauty exists
I can't touch it
but it imprisons me
This is one of my favorite poems by her:
The Words under the Words
(For Sitti Khadra, north of Jerusalem)
My grandmother's hands recognize grapes,
the damp shine of a goat's new skin.
When I was sick they followed me,
I woke from the long fever to find them
Covering my head like cool prayers.
My grandmother's days are made of bread,
a round pat-pat and the slow baking.
She waits by the oven watching a strange car
circle the streets. Maybe it holds her son,
lost to America. More often, tourists,
who kneel and weep at mysterious shrines.
She knows how often mail arrives,
how rarely there is a letter.
When one comes, she announces it, a miracle,
listening to it read again and again
in the dim evening light.
My grandmother's voice says
nothing can surprise her.
Take her the shotgun wound and the crippled baby.
She knows the spaces we travel through,
the messages we cannot send - our voices are short
and would get lost on the journey.
Farewell to the husband's coat,
the ones she has loved and nourished,
who fly from her like seeds into a deep sky.
They will plant themselves. We will all die.
My grandmother's eyes say Allah is everywhere,
even in death. When she talks of the orchard
and the new olive press,
when she tells the stories of Joha
and his foolish wisdoms,
He is her first thought, what she really thinks of
His name.
“Answer, if you hear the words under the words - otherwise it is just a world
with a lot of rough edges,
difficult to get through, and our pockets
full of stones.”
My friend has a picture of Sitti Kahdra in her home. I knew the picture before I knew the poem. I had seen the old womans shining eyes on numerous occassions before I read her story. She was a beauty before the words… and the words… well, the words make her almost unbearably beautiful…