SOMETHING IS LOST AND MUST BE FOUND IN WOONSOCKET

SAINT ANTHONY, SAINT ANTHONY, PLEASE LOOK AROUND---

Sometimes very valuable items go missing.  They do not just walk away--someone takes them.

This has happened to an amazing degree in the Historic Civil War Cemetery  that sits like a secret garden just off Rathbun Street in the midst of Woonsocket.  Time has not been kind to Rathbun and along with a few Victorian cottages it is mainly a street of three-deckers in mixed state of repair.
However, once you turn into the gateway to Oak Hill you are in another world.  This is a place where the fervent Woonsocket Abolitionists were laid to rest. They were the community leaders  and the publishers and writers of the Woonsocket Patriot, a newspaper whose slogan was:
WE CHRONICLE FREEDOM.
Somehow an amazing community of intellectuals, poets, entrepreneurs, mill owners and pious Baptists and  Universalists found each other in Woonsocket in the  first half of the Nineteenth Century.

These leaders created a new cemetery to receive the bodies of those who would die in the coming battle against slavery.
Many  of these patriots were people of great means and they spared no expense in creating a Forest Cemetery that would  receive them and their honored  dead. 

Things changed in the 20th Century
 perhaps the demographics changed and surely the families of the dead may have moved elsewhere and left behind a wealth of artifacts to be stolen.

What is missing?
So much. Headstones-- on my family plot there are no longer any headstones; just foot-stones to mark the name of the deceased. However, this cemetery was never abandoned; there were always care takers in charge--for the families had paid for PERPETUAL CARE.

 The cemetery  had stones of special granite and marble. Famous stone cutters were employed and unique  memorials were made that include statues and special curbings and steps with  flora  flourishes  adorned the approaches.

 But perhaps the  greatest  crime was the  stealing of an immense fountain.
We can still see its circumference in the foundation circle that remains.  Now some locals  call it a Witches' Circle and cavort there on Halloween.

No not witches, lay not that soothing unction to your soul, not witches, but men with winches and riggers somehow managed to remove and carry off an immense  fountain and leave the place behind bare.

This ravishing of a holy place calls to heaven  for repair and replacement.

As a child we often recited a simple prayer when we wanted to find precious things that were lost:
"SAINT ANTHONY, SAINT ANTHONY, PLEASE LOOK AROUND. SOMETHING IS LOST THAT CANNOT BE FOUND."

I recently  discovered a more  serious plea to the Saint who finds lost things.  And I implore the Saint of my childhood to bring the hidden things to light.


Novena to St Anthony who restores lost things.

St. Anthony, you are glorious for your miracles and for the condescension of Jesus Who came as a little child to lie in your arms. Obtain for me from His bounty the grace which I ardently desire. You were so compassionate toward sinners, do not regard my unworthiness. Let the glory of God be magnified by you in connection with the particular request that I earnestly present to you.

[Please direct me and other caretakers of this bereft cemetery to discover the whereabouts of the fountain that once played there. Soften the hearts of those who have removed and defaced stones and urns and installed them in other cemeteries and in so doing actually dishonored their dead. Many of the thieves must, like me, be quite old and approaching judgement, may they be moved to confess their sins and make amends by restoring the stolen goods.] 

As a pledge of my gratitude, I promise to live more faithfully in accordance with the teachings of the Church, and to be devoted to the service of the poor whom you loved and still love so greatly. Bless this resolution of mine that I may be faithful to it until death.

St. Anthony, consoler of all the afflicted, pray for me.

St. Anthony, helper of all who invoke you, pray for me.

St. Anthony, whom the Infant Jesus loved and honored so much, pray for me. Amen.

WITH THE HELP OF THIS GREAT SAINT WE WILL FIND AND RESTORE  WHAT HAS BEEN STOLEN.   May God have mercy on their souls and mine and  take into heaven all of us most in need of His MERCY. 

A RANT AND A PRAYER FROM THE BUCKET DURING THE PANDEMIC

 THE EARTH IS TAKING A BREATHER

from the predation, pollution and destructiveness of mankind. 

We are reading tales of the skies clearing over  smog dense areas of China and India. Also the canals of Venice are cleaner and fish are seen there after many long years  away.

So for a relatively brief time the entire earth and the skies above are  free of  human waste products  that have  transformed them. We know from Genesis that after God created the world He looked at it and said that it was all good.

What has changed that is the result of centuries of human rampages, excesses and the emission of dangerous chemicals into the atmosphere.
Forests have been  destroyed and now the last immense rain forest of the Amazon is also under attack. This destructiveness is the true measure of what the human stewardship of Divine Creation has actually amounted to.

It is heartening to see what improvements  our world has made to rid  itself of the poisons of human activity in such a brief interlude.  We see that the world is always trying to clean itself.

Recent Nature shows on PBS have also described and demonstrated what happens when the balance between prey and predator is upset.
They show that when rabbits multiply so do their predators encouraged by the rich food supply.  But when the predators become too many and too greedy and the  rabbit population shrinks in time the predators  must leave and go to an area where  prey is still plentiful.
 When the predators leave, the rabbits  begin to restore their numbers rapidly.  And so the cycle starts anew. It is a cycle of a kind of supply and demand.

So if the human predators on earth have become too greedy and voracious, they too will  destroy the very thing that  nourishes them and this will trigger a  blight of the human population to save the prey itself.

That is one way to understand the Coronavirus and the expectation that there will be more world wide  pandemics. That may be nature's way of counter-attacking the marauding human  predators.
After all, nature is a living entity and we are all part of nature. We are not separate from Nature. 

 I recall  a funny cartoon that I saw many year ago  Two birds are sitting on a tree branch and two people are walking under that branch. One of the humans says "Feels great to be back in Nature."
One bird turns to the other and says "Where do they  think they have been ?

That is a good question--where have we been?  We have always been in NATURE; how can we get to anyplace else  before death.  


NOW FOR THE PRAYER--

Our Father, 
Who created all that exists. Please help me to see my unity with all life and my responsibility to protect all life. 
 Please help me to curb my greedy or hurtful or ignorant behaviors.
Please help me to cherish all the creatures that you have made and help me to see that my dominion over them is that of a steward, a helper and not a destroyer.
Please Holy Father in Heaven help me to see that it was the INCARNATION that made humanity special--"THE WORD BECAME FLESH AND WALKED AMONG US." 

We were saved, but the rest of Creation did not require salvation because trees, plants, animals, are not capable of wrong-doing. 
There is nothing to forgive. Oftentimes mankind has distorted their natures through goading them into fighting and dying for our amusement.
Please help me to see and protect the beauty that you have created.  Help me to be  allied with the sanctity and salvation of all creation. AMEN         

SHAKESPEARE"S BIRTHDAY CELEBRATED IN THE BUCKET

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WILL!

Thinking of the greatness of Shakespeare that cannot or at least has not yet been surpassed.


Today I asked my husband what  his favorite sonnet is, and  he  said Number 73 . Read it here and see what you think of his choice.

Sonnet 73: That time of year thou mayst in me behold

BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see'st the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west,

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the death-bed whereon it must expire,

Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.

This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

I think that he chose wisely and that  in the coronavirus days we are becoming even more aware of how fragile all that we love is.

  The sonnet is so perfect in form with its three quatrains each  explaining another  example  of  the near the end of things--the late time of year; the late time of a day and  and the late time of a human life.

Then comes the direct  statement of the wisdom of the sonnet in the final couplet.

That we should not love less or grow bitter when we can see that we are near the end of a year, or a day, or a life, but  be inspired to love that  fading glory even more. 

TO LOVE THAT WELL WHICH WE MUST LEAVE ERE LONG.

ADVICE OF A YOUNG AND AN OLD POET

ADVICE TO A YOUNG POET
BY NOEL MONAHAN

Break the lock on the field gate
Avoid the muck-worms at the gap
Abandon old visions you have of yourself:
Self pity in the face of a terrible God
The tribe of ghosts constantly shouting.
Get to meet God’s strange people living there:
The silenced priest, the lost child . . .
Stay in the field with its mysteries
Sift through the grass with the brown hare
Listen to the hills clapping hands,
Crab apples dropping into the ditch.
If you remain long enough
You’ll feel the warmth of a candle burning inside you,
The blur of its flame constantly changing.

I like this poem and it made me wonder what would be the advice I would give to Old Poets?  As an old poet myself, I should have something to offer.
Like the young poet, I have come to understand that creativity is a  gift from GOD.  It is the  large aspect of God's  Divine Mission--He created everything.  And  our souls give each of us a small piece of that creativity.  That is the basis of my  strong belief in the creative power of every  human being.  The only thing that we  can do wrong with our talent is to bury it--hide it under a lamp.  We  must  bring what we have  to bring to the table of life.

I had a dream about heaven last night that I want to share with you today. Don't get me wrong, I was not there to stay. No, I wasn't there to stay; I was just there as a census taker. 
I was wandering the golden streets counting and looking for friends.  Most people there were  clearly  Muslims.  There was a  large group of Buddhists and  a very small  tribe of Christians.  It did not scare me; it sort of amused me. 
When I woke I thought maybe the dream was a warning that although Christ came to save everyone, not enough Christians have taken  up his  teaching seriously in all its radical simplicity.

He repeated it  to each one he called,

"Leave everything you have and

 follow me." He said it; we read it but we did not get it. Why? Because on some level we like our material goods too much.

Maybe this dream is also a result of the fact that I have been  reading the listing of the 99 Attributes of God that is  part of Islam. 

 Daily I look at the attributes and I have never finished all 99 in one reading. 

Why?  Because  I am caught by one of them and am a little surprised by it and then I feel the rightness of it.   And I feel something in me relax and expand.  Yes, I think this is an attribute that I have not thought about before. And I stay there and think some more about this attribute that shows me another facet of the Infinite Beauty of God.

 One of the great gifts of Islam to the world  is its unrelenting  focus on the greatness of God and the way that everything is in the Hands of God.

IT makes  ALLAH a bit remote and distant; especially to us Christians who prefer the image of a Baby in a manger--so lovable and not scary.  But  keeping the focus on the greatness of ALLAH  also reassures us that Allah is in charge. 

ISLAM  teaches that mankind is actually too puny to alter the course of  the Divine Will and of the Human Destiny  that Will has provided for us all. 

That same Truth is embedded in the one prayer that Jesus taught mankind  in the Our Father
"Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." 

CORONAVIRUS IN THE BUCKET

ON EASTER LET US  THINK ABOUT  ALL THAT IS STILL WELL.

Our world may be  in an uproar, but the natural world is  coming into Spring  bloom and  grass is greening, bulbs are sprouting, birds are nesting and  their young are being fed.

 Here is a poem that expresses the wonder of Spring in the time of Corona virus.

CORONAVIRUS SPRING
by Zeina Azzam

 What I want to say to the tulips
that emerged, again, in March:
I am so grateful to count on you.

There is nothing else to gird me
anymore. This beauty almost
makes me weep.

Do you see how different
the world is now?

And they tell me: no,
as we know it, the world is still the same.
The rains arrived this morning.

The nightingale keeps working so hard
to sing. The starling wails.

If sickness comes
I want to be like the wise tulips,
store energy in my heart bulb

and come back after a hard winter,
dressed in bright turbans
of orange and yellow and red.


This poem is perfect for Easter and Spring.

It is not a coincidence that Spring and Easter coincide. 

 When God the Creator made the world,  when He was done, He looked at all he had made--including human beings--and declared it good. And it is still good no matter what virus emerges.

After all, Divinity embraced Humanity when the Son of God became man  and died on a Cross to rise again.  That embrace is a  representation of the  inter-twining of man and God  that  God started in the Garden of Eden. 

 Our relationship with God is still and always evolving.

 God is Infinite; every human possibility is already in God.  Who can say what new goodness will emerge from these times of sickness and death?

 If a tulip can emerge from a bulb, and if the rose erupts from the rose bush, who can say what mankind will become in our long journey towards our CREATOR?

HARD TO FORGET ONE I NEVER MET

IDA MOWRY TELLING HER STORY AND HER FRIENDSHIP WITH JANE CONLON, JUST OFF THE  BOAT.



On April 1 I started responding to daily prompts from TWO SYLVIAS  WEBSITE.  My goal to write a poem each day in  answer to the prompts sent out on email to me at the dawn of each day.  
This is a poem I wrote in response to one asking me to speak in the poem as an inanimate object or as a person no longer alive.   The Pandemic has made me think more of my grandmother who died in the Spanish Flu  pandemic of 1918.  And again it was her voice that I suddenly assumed in writing the poem  I  print below.

MY GRANDMOTHER'S PANDEMIC, CIRCA 1918

Norman’s girl, you came as a child with my daughter Grace. 
To clean my stone, plant flowers and wonder aloud

At my death and my mother’s just a week apart.

We were victims of the Spanish Flu.

Now you have your own pandemic.

A century later. Did you know

That I was a friend of your Irish   grandmother?

Jane hated the mill, the whistle, the bobbins

Spinning and the frenzy of the doffers,

Running from machine to throbbing machine.

She had known only calm Lough Neagh waters

Lapping the shore where she played.

. 

She would sit watching her mother

Untangle the lines that the fishermen

Her father and brothers would set

And bait to catch eels; barrels of them

Wriggling and writhing in a dark

Silvery mass loaded on wagons

And taken to Cookstown. Mill owner's cousin,

I was hired to train the girls new from Ireland.

They knew I had a soft spot for the Irish.

My first husband- God rest his soul-

Made me Ida Lynch for a short happy

time: I loved his laughing through tears way.                      

WHAT MATTERS NOW?

I AM NOT IMPORTANT; we are all important together.

Much of this poem was written before the Coronavirus but now it has an update.  The best lesson of the virus is that we are all connected and that we are in a global  community.  Choices we each make  can and do affect everyone.

                     FILTHY LUCRE

 “Shall I turn up the light for you?  No, give me deeper darkness.

Money is not made in the light.”  Bernard Shaw. Heartbreak House

Young person cannot understand the old.

A healthy person can't fathom a sick one.

A rich person can't know the pangs of the poor.
Post-pandemic, new normal will not be the old.

Trouble is my middle name; bitcoin my ass;

spilled milk, body fluids, tears of things,

tears idle tears. Can you finish that line? 
 I labor the question. All depth.

No, surface, do I affect your effect?

Experience shapes us all.

My pastiche; your mustache.

Not panache, just pastiche.

I'm your camp follower, Cardinal,

your liquidity freezes my blood.

Today let's improvise your demise:

my trajectory meets your bottom line.                              

Work-world with no workers; life as play

to pay : catch and hold Stormy's story.

Pay and play strip polka. Feel me.

Dirty money needs Magdalen laundries.

Hard money buys soft bodies. Touch me.

Running the table - shut up and deal-

the not-you gropes the not -me.

How low can we go? Robot's rules.

Make me an offer I can upchuck.

Bite me bitcoin –reality bites.

Fixed past, floating future, hazy now:

three roads converge in a purple daze.

Sorry I have to take them all.

SITTING OUT THE PANDEMIC IN THE BUCKET

THE SPANISH FLU--the PANDEMIC OF 1918

These times of worry and anxiety are shared world-wide. All sorts of events and activities have been rendered  futile and  cancelled.

  The fact of a world wide pandemic has made me think of the Spanish flu and the  blow that  disease  dealt to the Mowry -Jenckes family.

When I was a small child my Aunt Grace would bring me to the old historical cemetery in Cumberland where her mother Ida Mowry and her grandmother Polly Brown were buried. They both died in 1918 --one on Christmas and the other a week later.


 Those two tragic deaths altered the trajectory of the lives of her three children--Grace, Irving and Norman, my father.

How I wish I  had asked my Aunt  questions about her mother and grand mother.  On our trips to the cemetery  Grace would bring a  bush and a pail and a bottle of soapy water and she would scrub the stones of any grime or algae that had  collected since our last visit.

Grace would also bring  bulbs to plant  in the Autumn and in the early Spring she scattered seeds of quick growing annuals. My Aunt Grace had a green thumb and everything she planted seemed to prosper. 

I think today, now much older and a little wiser, of how  worried Ida must have been for the fate of her three children. All under ten, and of her  husband Oscar Jenckes, who would become unstable in his grief after her death. 

I am not even certain of where they were all residing but I believe that it was in the house  on Dexter Street very close to the family burial ground. 

I do know that the little family was torn apart after the deaths of their mother and  grand mother. 


SO it will be when this PANDEMIC  is over--lives will be altered and families will be changed forever. WE cannot  ever know the aftermath of these tragic events  nor how long the deaths  change the fate and fortunes of the children and family members left behind.