Since we’ve had two readings this morning - the story of the three myterious visitors who come to Abraham sitting in front of his tent and the Gospel story of Mary and Martha - that concern unexpected guests, I thought I’d begin with a poem that also came unexpectedly, unbidden by me.

Rain Dance

 

 

The rain today comes unbidden

as it always does,

regardless of what we will,

an endless sequence of notes

from the oldest piece of music

ever composed.

I see it peck the dust

with one-toed prints.

I feel it fall on me from above,

furling dark wings

on my shoulders,

eyeing the watery elements

it plans to carry off some day,

rain that returns

our sulphur dioxide,

our strontium-90,

the ash and soot of buildings

we’ve set ablaze,

the cities we turn

into clouds of smoke, the flesh

of those we tried to discard,

all come back to us

with a hushed, No thank you,

the sacrifice of Cain

refused once more,

rain that leaves a dry outline

beneath my feet

like the rim of a hole

dug in the ground,

that marks and then yields the path

when I finally move,

rain that lifts from the trees

like a flock of invisible birds,

that fishes the river,

that glistens like a blade

on the turning whetstone,

rain that whispers and whispers

this mild spring day

in a disembodied voice

that makes me shiver.

 

Rain Dance” came to me during a time when I was trying to write another poem about a phrase I’d heard, “Man Dancing,” in a radio documentary about private security contractors working in Iraq. I still haven’t written that poem, but did manage to capture the poem I read to you when it came to me unbidden, like the rain in the opening lines. Fortunately, when that happened, I had the good sense to sit down and listen to the voice of inspiration, like Mary when Jesus came to her house, rather than to go on busying myself with the activities I felt I ought to attend to.

 

This process - of paying attention to the voice of inspiration, rather than the preemptory demands of the will,-- goes to the heart of what I want to talk about today. These are matters I’ve reflected upon a lot in the course of my writing life, but even more in the past couple of years as a result of my work with Minnesota Poets Against War. Why is poetry so often endowed with a prophetic voice? Why does prophecy - Isaiah, Jeremaiah, Jesus -- so often poetic? Is there some relationship between poetry and prophecy, between the Word of God and the words of the poet? Do they emanate from the same place?

 

I believe the answer is yes. Both arise from the same human faculty, the imagination. I know that may sound strange. Poetry, yes, clearly is an expression of the imagination. But prophecy? Did the Prophets “imagine” the words they spoke?

 

I think they did - and continue to do so. And if we examine this fact, we find important lessons about the uses of imagination and about how a willingness to heed the voice of imagination can help us in our efforts to bear witness to injustice and oppression. For I want to stress at this point that everything I am about to say about poets and prophets can just as easily refer to anyone here today, not just those designated as “poet” or “prophet.”

If it sounds odd to link prophecy with imagination, it’s only because we tend in our culture to denigrate the word “imagination,” making it synonomous with “making things up.” Or “fantasizing.” And yet, far from an act of will - of projecting our subjective desires and preconceptions upon the world, which is what we mean by “fantasizing” - true imagination is a giving way, a yielding. An opening of ourselves to a deeper reality, allowing words and images from thaa reality to take root inside of us.

 

If we look closely at the words of the prophets, or at the prophetic poetry of a Pablo Neruda or a Mahmoud Darwish or a Tom McGrath or Robert Bly or an Adrienne Rich we find an inspired apprehension of the foundational crises facing the societies in which they live or lived. Crises whose chief characteristic is to blind members of society - and particularly its leaders and elites - to the true nature and cause of the crises. Prophetic utterance pierces the veil of illusion created by the social construct, that projection of our assumptions, fears, prejudices, ambitions, greed, and selfishness, which, in ordinary times, we tend to think of as the “real world,” enabling us to glimpse into the heart of Reality itself.

 

Considered in this light, prophetic utterance is clearly not about predicting events. And since prophetic utterance always points out the gap between reality and the social construct, it is always political, always speaks truth to power, even if the power in question is often the subtler forms of social power of class, convention, bigotry, and fear of change that hold us in thrall as much as naked military or political power. Small wonder that in oppressive societies poets and prophets are so often marginalized, imprisoned, exiled, and even murdered.

 

But even those who thinks of themselves as “enlightened” are usually discomfited by prophecy and prophetic poetry. Why? Imagination rejects the smug categorizations of judgement and self-righteousness and insists on reminding us that the problems in the world are not caused by “them,”but by all of us, whether directly by our participation or indirectly, through our complicity in benefiting from the fruits of us oppression and injustice. “Only a few are guilty,” Dosoyevski said. “All are responsible.” This is the message the prophetic imagination keeps delivering to us.

I’d like to turn now to try to see how this all plays itself out in a poem with a consciously propethic message.

 

At the beginning of the service today, you heard “Black Flags over Fallujah.” Obviously, it’s immediate inspiration was the killing and mutilation of four American mercenaries in Fallujah on the last day of March. But it’s real origins reach back several years earlier, to 2001 in fact and a comment George Bush made that summer. “America’s high consumption lifestyle,” the President said, “is a blesséd lifestyle and I intend to protect it.”

 

Given what happened only a couple of months later, we probably should have ducked the moment he said that. But because of what happened that fall, and since then, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about his comment, trying to tease out its deeper meaning, especially in light of his Administration’s increasingly warlike tendencies.

 

And what I came up with was this: by “blesséd lifestyle,” Mr. Bush was not simply referring to America’s obvious material abundance. No. He meant that America is so rich, so powerful, and so isolated from the problems of the rest of the world that we are able, as a nation, to escape the consequences of our own actions and of our “high consumption lifestyle.” We are able - or have been able - to offshore the real cost of maintaining our unprecedented levels of material comfort and economic growth.

 

Phrased in that fashion, it’s clear that what Mr. Bush called a blessing is not a blessing at all. It’s a curse. A prescription for finding ourselves trapped in an endless cycle of self-destructive behaviors. And yet the idea that he expressed - however much we might take issue with the exact words he used - is not some wild-eyed Rightwing concept. It is a variation on perhaps our most important foundational myths -- the myth of American exceptionalism. It is the widespread, almost unconscious embrace of this myth by most Americans, that is at the heart of the foundational crisis facing us today. At the deepest level, it was this myth that traduced us into invading Iraq. In”Black Flags,” I tried, whether successfully or not, to link the myth with the murders in Fallujah, not through rational discourse and argument, but through the impact of image and sound.

 

If nothing else, a poet should not be long-winded. So I’m going to close here with another poem that looks at yet another foundational myth, one that’s very widespread and the source of some of th most horrific conflicts in the world today. This is the myth of “The Promised Land”-the lost homeland that a people is determined to regain. Instead of writing directly and judgementally about this myth, in an essay or lecture, I tried instead to enter imaginatively into the psyche of those, like the Israeli and Palestinians or the Serbs and the Croats, who carry out the most appalling atrocities in the name of what they believe is the highest ideal. The poem is called “Unfortunately, It Was Paradise.”

 

Unfortunately, It Was Paradise

 

for Mahmoud Darwish

 

Returning to the garden we were struck

by how much smaller it was than we remembered.

Could the olive tree that seemed to touch

the heavens themselves and whose lowest branch

we could not reach even when we stretched on tiptoes

really be this unprepossessing growth not much taller

than a shrub in the center of a little clearing?

 

Could the mountain that once took us half a day

to climb and whose summit commanded

a sweeping view of the countryside for miles around

prove to be nothing more than this hillock

looking out over a few acres of wooded parkland

like those we’ve passed through countless times

in our travels without a second glance?

 

Could the two rivers that water the garden

and that in memory sweep along faster

than the swiftest horse, the silhouette of their far banks

barely visible in the distance, truly be this pair

of pleasant but by no means impressive streams

whose deepest pools barely reach our ankles now

and whose width we can cross dry shod

by the end of summer?

 

It’s true, the caretaker who stayed behind to keep

an eye on things when we were asked to leave

has done a wonderful job - what an angel!

Everything has been maintained exactly as it was

the day we departed like the room of a child

whose parents cannot accept his death.

 

But we must admit now

that we regret, a little, all the fighting and all the killing,

all the young men maimed in body and spirit

during our great military campaigns,

the multitude of failed marriages, the neglected children,

the drinking and lynchings and midnight barn burnings,

the insomnia and depression, the lying and infidelity,

the years of therapy, the lack of love,

the kind word that might have made all the difference

if only we’d spoken it, the bitterness

of broken promises, the years spent nursing grudges,

 

the lifetime of happiness foregone in the name

of that day when we would finally reclaim

our birthright, recapture our homeland

and return in triumph to dwell once more

in a garden that, it so happens, is a nice enough spot

but hardly Paradise.