The Muse of Lament and Dissent
IntroductionWe heard it.“When the World As We Knew It Ended”
The racket in every corner of the world. As
the hunger for war rose up in those who would steal to be
president
to be king or emperor, to own the trees, stones, and everything
else that moved around the earth, inside the earth
and above it. —Joy Harjo
Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light pp. 49-50
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| Sara Spaulding-Phillips |
Since the “Orange Man” began his tricky and treacherous reign, the Muse of Lament and Dissent has been causing a ruckus in the poetry circle I lead--Deep River—a public program for the San Francisco Jung Institute. We read great poets and write under their influence. Thankfully, we spent our last three months of this year’s cycle with Joy Harjo, who has shown us, brilliantly, how to engage in dissent and lament, in political poems that speak out of Indigenous consciousness—out of love and concern for our Mother the Earth and all her creatures.
As poets, our mode of expression is verse. So I’ve invited the poets of Deep River to give voice to their Lament and Dissent through writing political poems. The Sister from Below has graciously agreed to publish a series of these poems.
Our first poet, Maureen Wolf, gives us “Breaking News.” This powerful poem loops and spins from the NYTimes to the colorful changes spring creates in the foothills, to the myth of Demeter and Persephone, to the horrors of a Hades in El Salvador, where hapless immigrant men are held with “Trumped up” charges and without due process. In lithe poetic leaps Wolf carries us off to Ukraine, to children’s paintings of rising waters, to her Irish grandmother as she prays for her sons at war in the war to end all wars, back to the “riot” of Nature in spring, to the song in the mouth of a Stag at Easter and the Raven’s raspy voice, which even the Orange Man can’t stop.
Breaking News
by Maureen Wolf
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| “Guernica” Picasso - ARAS Online |
News from the NY Times: not much has changed;
the world is still riding the roller coaster of the
Orange man’s policies
dipping, looping, spinning beyond the rule of law.
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| “Pink Peach Trees” Van Gogh - ARAS Online |
But then maybe everything has changed.
It is spring: pops of orange, blue and white
speckle the green grass of the foothills populated
with scrub oaks, grazing cattle and the confidence of Nature.
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| “Demeter and Kore” - ARAS Online |
Spring won’t last long here: the gentle warmth of spring sun will change
quickly. The lupine, the paint brush, the shooting stars will shrivel
and the grass will brown and the air will become heavy and oppressive
under the summer sun. Remembering the scorched earth,
I wonder if Demeter has lost her bargain with Hades. |
| “Wailing Female Mourner” Yeats - ARAS Online |
Haven’t we all?
Aren’t we all waiting for the long winter days of the centuries to end,
Wondering when Persephone will push through
the hard pan clay of the human heart.
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| “Death in the Afternoon” Yeats - ARAS Online |
This spring I can hear the echo of Abel’s scream as the cell door clangs behind
Neri Jose Alvarado, Andry Hernandez-Romero, Kilmar Agrego Garcia and
more in the Terroism Confinement Center in El Salvador. Trumped up stories,
no evidence, no trials. The Orange Man and Nayib Bukele casting lots.
Not long after, I learn of a Ukrainian woman nearing her hundredth birthday,
living alone in an apartment which is miraculously standing in Zaporizhzhia—
with no electricity, no heat, thimbles of food brought by her niece
when bombs aren’t falling--who stays three more days in hospital,
not for medical reasons, but to visit friends.
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| Hour Glass Drawing by child |
I imagine a broken table in the hospital ward where the crones have tea
and grieve for the soldiers they once suckled at their breasts and talk
of the images their great grandchildren paint, images of a child standing
on the roof of home surrounded by rising water, of earth in an hourglass.
Scrawled in a child’s hand: No more planet.
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| “Weeping Madonna” Sara Spaulding Phillips |
I hear them singing Bozhe Velykyi and Mariye Maty Bozha prayers for protection,
prayers of supplication. I hear my Irish grandmother praying for thirty days
until her sons come home from the war after the war to end all wars.
Prayers to Mary. Prayers to Demeter. Prayers to Gaia.
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| “Stag and Moon” pixabay |
The songs are carried in the mouth of a Stag to me on Easter morning. When I watch
the pinks and blues of the eastern sky gently pull back the curtain of night, I hear
the raven’s raspy voice greet the sun and see the crown headed sparrow search
for seeds and know the confidence of Nature.
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| “In Shoreham Garden” Palmer ARAS Online |
The Orange Man cannot pen an order stopping the riot of Spring from hearts on fire.
But as the Stag, and the raven, the sparrow and the crones have sung to me
to be consumed by fire means leaving so much of me behind. The path to the Other
winds through the path hidden in plain sight.
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| "My Nurse and I" - ARAS Online |
Artist’s Statement
For several years I had eyed Naomi’s Deep River workshop in the CG Jung Institute of San Francisco program brochure. In 2019, I attended a conference on the Other at the Institute where Naomi was presenting. I spoke with her briefly about my interest in Deep River but also of my hesitation. I found understanding the works of most poets a mystery. Naomi said something to the effect of “Jump in.”
Nearly five years later, I jumped into Deep River. During this past year we wrote “under the influence” of three poets dislocated from the land of their birth. In these turbulent times in the States, I too have felt dislocated. Deep River became the place where I could explore and give voice to my exile. I am grateful to Naomi for providing a place and for her enthusiastic greeting of my fledging poems. I am grateful for the Deep River poets for their warm embrace of me and, especially, of my work. Over the years, I have collected several degrees. I am a psychotherapist and live with Ruby, a dislocated husky, in Fresno, California in the Central Valley, the doorway to the Sierra Nevada.
—Maureen Wolf
If you are feeling a need to express your own lament and dissent about the state of our country, we urge you to join Indivisible’s demonstrations on June 14th—A Day of Defiance.
