Everywhere is the touch

My sister wrote this some years ago. Johnstown is where we grew up. It was a steel town until the steel industry went belly up. The final stanzas employ Suzy Q. Groden’s translation of Sappho’s Fragment 105a. The image immediately below is by ChatGPT.

Johnstown, Pennsylvania, USA
1959

Everywhere is the touch
of nuclear sting. Radioactivity
haunts every fear.

Breaths away from dying.
Breaths away from surviving.
It was the Cold War.

Postures of iron & steel
captured to synapses banished
by a shadow for bodies.

We are the ones
whose life in outerspace
is kneeled into questions

speechless for words.
Just how a girl can create
calm inside this fear,

this flesh. . . not to be
a finish of note into nothing
beyond. Lasting.

Lasting in musical scores.
Even the July-June sun
is greyed to the gleam

for waste existing
where it was unknown before.
That the dead are outlived

by nuclear bombs
pitches me unexpectedly
from supper’s chair:

another air raid drill,
urgent with its siren call
of uncrowned chaos.

Food is eaten away
long into the moment later
by the spoon bailing

Mother’s story of The Flood.
Now? No more servings? Ending again
with the next and the next flood.

Oh, is brother ever relieved
not to be singled out by the creamed corn.
Survive. Yes, people did, he said.

The mud, the meatloaf. To be somebody
who trumpets the sound of green trees.
Family of four here. Rarely heard crying.

The cat too survives. We are the ones
who remember its nine lives. Let us celebrate
the Big Bang and all its domains

exploded out of full circle now.
Berserk living through storybook chemistry!
Someday, the moon lands.

Father sneezes for his own sense
of smell with home again. The certainty.
Gravity as impersonal

in this century
as the last. And the arc
hailed by the golf ball

equally the loft then again
timed to green a foot away.
Now, spinning. Just when.

Simplicity? Where?
Authority by which to leap. Symmetry.
Ironclad trappings to open

moments alone from after-
dinner conversation, have a wink of tea?
Imagine the order a spark sees.

Voice in quest of a body.
Aired in delights, perhaps even
laughter in a song’s light-year.

Speak to me, o moment,
you comic of everafter half-life.
Missing your legs,

soothe this decay
with the sound of your voice
alone. Sappho also

was startled by life,
life with this mother sun.
The quenched Earth.

Exile we all share.
“.  .   . like the sweet-apple
that has reddened.  .   .

And the apple pickers
Missed it there - -   no, not missed, so much

As could not touch.  .  .” 

Coda: As this graffiti photo from December 2006 testifies, we are still haunted by the threat of nuclear war:

* * * * *

A new image for the poem, over a year later, July 18, 2026: 

Conjunctions on the Autumn Equinox [Shinnyo-en at St. Bartholomew’s Church]

I’m bumping this post from 2013 to the top of the queue, both on general principle, and as a reminder that we need some Buddhist wisdom in the world today.

Early yesterday afternoon I found myself sitting in the sanctuary at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan. The Parish was founded in 1835; this is its third church, built in the second decade of the 20th Century. It is Byzantine in style, with glittering mosaics on the interior.

The pipe organ is the largest in New York City, and one of the ten largest in the world. I didn’t know this when I sat there yesterday, for that was the first time I’d even been in the church. “Byzantine” didn’t even click in my mind yesterday, as I sat between my sister and her friend, Yasuko. But I was certainly thinking “icons” (“iconoclasm”), “Greek Orthodox,” and even “Russian,” the conjunction of which all but added up to Byzantine. But didn’t quite get there for me. This was, after all, an Episcopal Church, no?

Yes.

The Wikipedia tells me that it is this parish that brought Leopold Stokowski from Europe in 1905 to be its organist and choir director.

Holy crap! says I to myself, no way!

Way.

Stokowski went on to direct the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra. He had become something of a celebrity by the time when, over 30 years later, he ran into Walt Disney at a restaurant in Los Angeles. Walt invited him over to his table and Fantasia was hatched. Not then and there, mind you, it took awhile. But that’s when the wheels started turning.

Walt’s father, Elias, had been one of many carpenters who worked on The Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. And that fair featured a Japanese exhibit and pavilion on a small 16 acre in a lagoon. It was the unexpected hit of the fair and the first time most Westerners would have had an opportunity to encounter the Japanese, who’d only recently been subject to forced entry by Admiral Perry in 1853.

 

That was 120 years ago. Now, or rather yesterday, I was sitting in an Episcopal sanctuary for an Autumn equinox ceremony offered by a relatively new Buddhist sect, Shinnyo-en. My sister, Sally, who lives in Philadelphia, had come to New York for the occasion. It was a special one because the current head of the sect, Her Holiness Shinso Ito, had traveled from Japan to conduct the ceremonies, Sharing the Light of Peace on Saturday (yesterday), to be followed today (Sunday) by floating lanterns in Central Park.

After the principals had processed into the sanctuary (paced by the ringing of a lovely little bell), the ceremony began with three prayers. A blue-clad Sufi priestess danced and whirled a prayer while a young woman sang, relieving her guitar of the need for gentle weeping. Then a Catholic priest sang his Latin in a voice ancient as the hills and young as the dawn. Finally, a Hindu priestess chanted a sutra, threading her syllables through three millennia of microtonal immediacy and grace.

Much of the service was conducted in chant. There was a choir of chanters to the left, with a young pure-voiced woman in the front row leading the way. Much of the chanting was call-and-response, with the congregation joining in the response. During the last half Her Holiness delivered a brief message; she spoke a few sentences in Japanese, which were then translated into English. Before that the Episcopal choir sang something. And somewhere in there some paper bits in the shape of flower petals (see the image at the head of this post) got tossed around. I stuck two of them into the pages of hymnals in front of me.

At the end of the ceremony 20 or so lanterns were lit had given to some 20 leaders of various faiths who then lined up, two deep, in front of the altar, holding their lanterns. It was a VERY touching moment.

The principals processed out of the ceremony...

...leaving the ushers with the task of getting us out of the sanctuary and back into the daylight.

On the way out I happened to see Steve Love, whom I’d met a number of years ago while working with Zeal Greenberg on World Island.

We chatted.

* * * * *

For a post about an utterly different service, see Religion on the Ground, Sunday Service. For a different encounter with the Japanese in Manhattan, again on a mission of peace, see The Japanese Take Manhattan, Protest Nukes.

Remembrance of Christmas past

Transfer of Power

the sun and the moon sustain
the earth this life revolves by
sea & sky of (tw)heated warnings: sounds the click-back heard from whales whose prey
gut our false light of harmony

by Sally Benzon

Sandy Bay, Massachusetts

by Sally Benzon

Sandy Bay, Massachusetts
The Ending Is Undone


The homing nuclear calamity anchors sun-splitting sound
netted by all the world, its unmaking trawled without shores.

This moment exists for all time. Fusion new with choice
clears tomorrow’s waters. Does not ignore the longings

the fouled feelings of the god’s god jealous in body,
pleased by slavery & rape, bought by murder & blood.

A moment of seconds into the uprise, and absent chaos --
all memory evolves to change course without an ending war.


The forage by doubt magnifies land, air, and water
without fearing the hope of even one animal’s prophet.

Tides who squall for the decay of inordinate matter
instead drop the surface of the oceans into rain.

Alive in echoes whose sovereignty had been deceived,
quiet resounds, nameless. These seas. Guardian waves.

Smokey clouds flux to palest pink & ochre horizon.
The psalm of blue skies exclaims “Light! Always!”

In Memoriam: William Benzon

* * * * *

From Dad

by Sally Benzon


William Benzon
(1912 – 1998)


Clinging to light
By weeping tears

Charged with this silence
Only sorrow can receive:

Whispered heights of trees
Sway the breathless memory

Out of nowhere,
From the airs of body

You walk at once alone,
And beside us: Not that we are

Asked by a flock of birds
Who insist on behalf

Of one shy authority,
“Part our days together

To a different branch. Larry, Sally,
Sing to laugh around the world

With me!” Tiding this canopy,
You are the man whose voice outlives

Agreeable disbelief
Into our inhabited green

Hundreds of leaves, golf balls, too
And leaves growing! . . .

Round of arms’ reach
The echo of echoed wings

Reveals the merry chance
Now a sunbeaming glow:

Chimes to sound
The melody of you.

Our Father

Two things you should know about our father. He loved golf, a game played, as you must surely know, in a garden. One winter, for example, he painted some old golf balls with red shoe polish and then went out on the course to practice in the snow. Was his golf jones so bad he needed a fix in mid-winter? Or was he secretly amused at the thought of a middle-aged man trudging about in the snow hitting red balls with some very expensive sticks?

Perhaps both.

He also kept meticulous practice notes and designed and constructed his own putter.

* * *

He had a sense of humor. We called it his “Danish sense of humor.” Whether or not it was peculiarly Danish is beside the point. His parents were from Denmark, of which he was proud. Victor Borge was Danish, played the piano well, had a sense of humor. From this it follows that Dad’s humor was Danish.

A favorite riddle: A duck family was swimming in a pond, Mother, Father, and the Baby. Perhaps there was a fourth; I forget; but it doesn’t matter. Anyhow, they swam about: circles, S-curves, spiracles, ogives, pterodactyls, parabolas, equilateral triangles, eternal ones too, helices, and hemi-demi-semiquavers, all the standard figures of Olympic pond swimming. As they were heading back to shore, feeling all flushed and satisfied, the baby duck remarked: “Aren’t we five ducks having fun?”

Why'd the baby ask that?

* * * * *

From Dad

by Sally Benzon


William Benzon
(1912 – 1998)


Clinging to light
By weeping tears

Charged with this silence
Only sorrow can receive:

Whispered heights of trees
Sway the breathless memory

Out of nowhere,
From the airs of body

You walk at once alone,
And beside us: Not that we are

Asked by a flock of birds
Who insist on behalf

Of one shy authority,
“Part our days together

To a different branch. Larry, Sally,
Sing to laugh around the world

With me!” Tiding this canopy,
You are the man whose voice outlives

Agreeable disbelief
Into our inhabited green

Hundreds of leaves, golf balls, too
And leaves growing! . . .

Round of arms’ reach
The echo of echoed wings

Reveals the merry chance
Now a sunbeaming glow:

Chimes to sound
The melody of you.