Recent Posts

Most Used Categories

Tag: Poetry

You are Here :
Christian Witness, Perspective, Poetry,

God on 9/11

From John Guzlowski at Everything’s Jake: Poems about God after 9/11

The following is the preface I wrote to a gathering of poems about God written in the aftermath of September 11. The preface and the poems by American, Polish, and Hungarian poets were published in the Scream Online in 2005:

Before 9/11, I didn’t think much about God, and I hadn’t thought much about Him for a long, long time.

Oh, of course, I thought about Him on occasion. I thought about Him at Christmas time when my daughter Lillian was young and she’d ask me about who baby Jesus was. And I thought about God when I got interested in Isaac Bashevis Singer and started writing a series of articles about him. You can hardly write about Singer without writing about God—but there, I was thinking about God in a different sort of way. It was the way I thought about Him when I taught the great religious writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and T. S. Eliot and Fyodor Dostoevsky. God was an idea, a concept, that I was seeing through a lens and trying to make intellectual and academic sense of.

After 9/11, all that changed. When the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center came down, I discovered that God was no longer academic. He suddenly became important in my world. Not in the sense that I’ve come to believe what my father believed when he knelt every night and prayed in the darkness, nor in the sense that I came to believe what the Sisters of St. Joseph and the Christian Brothers taught me as I was growing up and attending grammar school and high school.

God became important in the sense that my world was suddenly touched and continues to be touched by those who believe in him firmly and absolutely…

In reflecting on this solemn day, we should recognize that the God we represent is more than our feeble attempts, and a greater sum of love than all our petty squabbles, and dangerous hatreds. We should recognize that He is not the God of the U.S., or of Israel, or Mecca, or Rome, but of every nation, and ultimately, of His heavenly Kingdom. We all belong to the same call, His call. His call leads to the cross, to service in the here and now, and to a resurrected life that surpasses today to eternity. If we place our desires and demands before His, and want it all now, and need our pound of flesh now, we will reap only the fruit of our faulty humanity. We will only blaspheme His call to love.

Perspective, Poland - Polish - Polonia, Political,

War through women’s eyes

From poet John Guzlowski: What the War Taught Her

I recently received a list of Classic War Quotations from Simran Khurana at About.com and wasn’t surprised that all of them were by men. War seems to be the special province of men.

But while we think about war and read about war, we should never forget that a lot of times the people who suffer most are the civilians, the people left behind while the men are fighting. These are generally women and children. War hurts them in profound and lasting ways…

He includes his poem “What the War Taught Her,” his exploration of his mother’s experiences in the midst of war.

Christian Witness, Perspective, Poland - Polish - Polonia, ,

On Veterans Day (Rememberance Day)

A World War I veteran at work
(A World War I veteran at work)

Prayer of a Soldier in France
Alfred Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918),

My shoulders ache beneath my pack
(Lie easier, Cross, upon His back).
I march with feet that burn and smart
(Tread, Holy Feet, upon my heart).

Men shout at me who may not speak
(They scourged Thy back and smote Thy cheek).

I may not lift a hand to clear
My eyes of salty drops that sear.

(Then shall my fickle soul forget
Thy Agony of Bloody Sweat?)

My rifle hand is stiff and numb
(From Thy pierced palm red rivers come).

Lord, Thou didst suffer more for me
Than all the hosts of land and sea.

So let me render back again
This millionth of Thy gift. Amen.

Everything Else, ,

Poetry Out Loud

Invite Poetry Out Loud: National Recitation Contest into Your High School’s ELA Classrooms!

Register your school to participate in Poetry Out Loud!

Poetry Out Loud is a national program that encourages the study of great poetry by offering educational materials and a dynamic recitation competition to high schools across the country. Poetry Out Loud uses a pyramid structure. Beginning at the classroom level, winners will advance to the school-wide competition, then to the state capital competition, and ultimately to the National Finals in Washington, DC. More than 100,000 students are expected to take part in Poetry Out Loud this year!

Upon registration, teachers will receive dynamic teaching tools that will invoke students’ excitement about literature and poetry recitation, including sample lesson plans, audio CDs of poets reciting their own famous works, publicity materials for school competitions, and a DVD of winning student performances from the 2007 Poetry Out Loud National Finals.

If you would like to bring Poetry Out Loud to you school, download a registration form.

Registrations must be received by October 31st!

For more information about registration, contact Sharon Scarlata.

Christian Witness, Perspective, , , ,

Language and loss – my reflection

I have been following a series of posts by John Guzlowski on language and loss. His reflections were spurred on by the untimely death of novelist David Foster Wallace.

You can read his posts: At Everything’s Jake: re: David Foster Wallace and Suicide and The Deaths of Writers and at Lighting and Ashes: Language and Loss and Language and Loss: Some More Thoughts.

While reading his posts the verse from Romans 8:26 kept jumping out at me:

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.

This verse is comforting in those moments when words, poetry, art, and even tears are too little. God is connected to us in our sorrows and our joys. He understands and speaks in a language we cannot comprehend, but a language that gives peace.

Christian Witness, Poland - Polish - Polonia

What My Father Believed

Garrison Keillor’s reading of John Guzlowski’s poem “What My Father Believed,” from his book Lightning and Ashes, is now available at the Writers Almanac website:

The poem talks about John’s father’s faith, how he learned about God in Poland as a child, and how his faith sustained him while a prisoner in a Nazi German concentration camp.

The poem can also be heard on most NPR stations and stations that carry American Public Media programming on December 28, 2007.

Christian Witness, Homilies, Poland - Polish - Polonia,

What My Father Believed

All Souls Day - Poland

I received a very kind E-mail from John Guzlowski of the Lightning and Ashes blog. This blog has linked to John for awhile now.

John has three published editions of poetry: Lightning and Ashes, Third Winter of War: Buchenwald, and Language of Mules.

John’s poetry is primarily focused on his parents who had been slave laborers in Nazi Germany. His website notes the his poems try to remember them and their voices.

John was extremely generous and sent along a poem which he asked me to include on these pages. He said:

I want to give you a poem about my father and his beliefs. He was a “faith-filled” man, and always took Jesus and the things the priests said seriously.

This poem is particularly appropriate as we remember the faithfully departed this All Souls Day. I will certainly remember John’s parents Jan and Tekla in my prayers at Requiem Holy Mass tomorrow. Eternal rest grant onto them O Lord!

What My Father Believed

He didn’t know about the Rock of Ages
or bringing in the sheaves or Jacob’s ladder
or gathering at the beautiful river
that flows beneath the throne of God.
He’d never heard of the Baltimore Catechism
either, and didn’t know the purpose of life
was to love and honor and serve God.

He’d been to the village church as a boy
in Poland, and knew he was Catholic
because his mother and father were buried
in a cemetery under wooden crosses.
His sister Catherine was buried there too.

The day their mother died Catherine took
to the kitchen corner where the stove sat,
and cried. She wouldn’t eat or drink, just cried
until she died there, died of a broken heart.
She was three or four years old, he was five.

What he knew about the nature of God
and religion came from the sermons
the priests told at mass, and this got mixed up
with his own life. He knew living was hard,
and that even children are meant to suffer.
Sometimes, when he was drinking he’d ask,
—Didn’t God send his own son here to suffer?—

My father believed we are here to lift logs
that can’t be lifted, to hammer steel nails
so bent they crack when we hit them.
In the slave labor camps in Germany,
He’d seen men try the impossible and fail.

He believed life is hard, and we should
help each other. If you see someone
on a cross, his weight pulling him down
and breaking his muscles, you should try
to lift him, even if only for a minute,
even though you know lifting won’t save him.

All Right Reserved © 2005 - 2023