additional poems related to those of April 2-3

When Carter returned home to Plains, Georgia, in 1981 after his term in the White House, Miller Williams and James Whitehead both wrote poems honoring Carter. Williams’s poem “Sir” (p. 470) and Whitehead’s poem “For President Jimmy Carter on His Homecoming” (p. 471) were later published in the Summer 1981 issue (v. 3, no. 4) of New England Review. You can listen to Whitehead read his poem, which champions Carter as “a steward for the earth” who “cared for human dignity,” starting at 17:02 of the aforementioned A Word on Words episode. I close this post with the last stanza of the poem, which seems an appropriate epitaph for a man whose life was so full of love for all of Earth’s inhabitants:

People and history
Begin to say it’s clear you love the earth,
Day in, day out, so much you catch your breath
To imagine how The Death
Might take the possibility of love away.
Thank you, sir, I’ve nothing more to say. 

FROM RICHARD BLANCO : We're the cure for hatred caused by despair. We're the good morning of a bus driver who remembers our name,

the tattooed man who gives up his seat on the subway. We're every door held open with a smile when we look into each other's eyes the way we behold the moon. We're the moon. We're the promise of one people, one breath

declaring to one another: I see you. I need you. I am you.

 

"Declaration of Inter-Dependence" HOW TO LOVE A COUNTRY, Beacon

 I am sensitive to the over-abundance of information available.  The first poem, by James Dickey, performed at the Gala before  Jimmy Carter's inauguration led me to explore how his love of poetry and belief in the power of words well used, would result in sharing with congress this poem by Dylan Thomas:"The Hand that Signed" by Dylan Thomas  https://poetryarchive.org/poem/the-hand-that-signed-the-paper/--

Dylan Thomas looks at what kings order w/ their signature... and yet a goose's quill can also put an end to murder... that put an end to talk... ) the finger joints cramped with chalk,  A Hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven... // hands have no tears to flow. 

Sunday, Rattle Magazine had a version of this signing, mocking the teetering tower of executive orders on the  president's  oak desk, called  Resolute made of timbers taken from the British ship that shares the desk’s name.  https://rattle.com/executive-orders-by-tonya-lailey/

Tonya LaileyExecutive Orders

Who, in a back room, prepares the folders? The ones

that look like menus from ’80s family restaurants.

In the office, there’s always a person, let’s be honest,

a woman, who procures the staff birthday cards 

then devises a way to circulate them—in a binder, a folder,

within a pad of paper—for discreet signing by fellow

workers. Does the executive-order-folder-preparing-

woman take care of the White House birthday cards

too? I wonder. May I take your order? Does she

say that before whisking the folders off 

to the Office of the Federal Register to be given 

a sequential number?

  

In today’s New York Times photo, just one folder lies

open on the high gloss of the Resolute Desk. Oak 

rests below the thick polish. Timbers taken from the British 

ship that shares the desk’s name. Earlier NYT photos 

showed folders in stacks, like at a hostess station

where families wait to be taken to a table. I remember 

those months too, when there were so many birthday

cards to sign at work that eventually I just signed

my name without much thought for whom it was for

or what anyone else wrote. I’d grab a juicy, inky

marker, like a Sharpie, and use my time to form every

letter in my name, as if that were the gesture, as if 

that were the work. I learned recently of an English 

ancestor on my dad’s side, who mastered his art of making 

wooden bowls. That’s what he learned to do in life, 

so that’s what he did. He turned wooden bowls 

with a pole lathe. Elm mostly. I read he didn’t concern 

himself much with what happened to them

after he’d made them. I once found a photo of him 

in his work shed in an archive online. He and his lathe

in a murky light. Behind him, tower after teetering tower 

            of empty wooden bowls. 

Tonya Lailey

“The photos of President Trump at the Resolute Desk signing executive orders are piling up. For whatever reason, the March 26th one hit me in a new way. Maybe it’s the Sharpie and seeing the name Donald being fully written out in big thick ink. I had been noticing how repetition renders ordinary the story of relentless executive orders. I wanted to explore the ordinary, the simplicity in the act of signing in an office, be it the oval one or otherwise, the familiarity in the office work involved, the movements of people and papers. It is curious to me how such reckless and deadly expressions of power nonetheless adhere to certain codes of conduct, certain rituals. My ancestor’s empty bowls flew in while I was writing. I feel they belong here.”