Ukraine poem by Kevernacular, may we light the world with hope and action

My well-used Ukraine candle from Door County Candle Co. Photo by Kevin Lynch

Ukraine Fire (in the Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart)

In this moment something calls,
So, I listen, mute receptacle, past the painful loss of another younger sister,
realizing thousands of Ukrainians have lost how many family members.
I’ve been reading about war as contemplated in the marvelous anthology,
Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: Poems for Men 1

So, the hell-on-earth of the Ukraine War rises acrid from my gut,
yet what have I suffered of horridly, brutally, inhumanely genocidal devastation?
I reflect, yes, we have more of the hoary old West versus East,
and the festering of poisoned power, delusion of hate-bile wallowing in past glory.

So, I sit glumly and light my Ukraine candle from Door County,
with its blue and yellow colors, summoned to fire
on days that seem apt to the moment and sentiment
of accumulating lost innocent lives, souls stripped from mangled bodies.
“Parents very old that had one son,” President Zelenskyy described a typical loss,
adding, Russians have abducted and “weaponized” tens of thousands of Ukrainian children.

Is this inflamed point in history imploring madly upon that fiery candle tip?

***

For perspective, America’s war of North and South never fades as a barometer
of bloody border tragedy at a local level, of fraternal countrymen dying
for a perversion of The Declaration’s ideals of liberty for all.

“Gettysburg – a town of only 250,000 inhabitants – was one makeshift burial ground, fetid and steaming” is how Garry Wills pointedly describes it.2
Somehow, Lincoln transcended and, yes, abstracted, the tragedy, but with rhetorical genius
embraced, emancipated, and let the healing begin, North and South, a horribly wounded nation.

“Lincoln sensed, from his own developed artistry,
the demands that bring forth classic art –
compression, grasp of the essential, balance, ideality,
an awareness of the deepest polarities in the situation
(life in the city coming from the death of its citizens).” 3

 

Might someday, sooner than later, Ukraine hear its version of the Gettysburg address?
Until then, so much remains to mourn and yes, fight for.
We have witnessed from afar war crimes to begin rivalling Hitler and Stalin.

Each a mad Ahab in his time, even somebody’s hero! 4
(“The blackness of darkness,” Melville called it, he the writer who, upon meeting — at a dinner of unfathomable spiritual trembling — Hawthorne, our great chronicler of dark American Puritan spirit. Melville, himself from stern Calvinist stock, then transformed his drifting whale yarn into a looming, cascading, doomed nation-ship, bursting at its blackest seams
amid the ocean’s rhythms, engulfing all, to roll,
“as it rolled five thousand years ago…”
into the great American novel,
having swallowed and subsumed
the rainbow-hued crew, Ahab’s blood and the harpoon-pierced White Whale’s,
two bloods perhaps commingling in dark destiny.)

 

So, now a wider question, “What Can We Hope For?”
Yes, another voice rises from the grave,
or in the wind of ashes aloft in air,
circling into small silos of sound,
the song whispering, now sonorous
of the speaker (who asked thusly),

Richard Rorty, Richard Rorty…
the name itself rings in alliterative echoes,
like an old folk hero.
He, recently deceased American pragmatic philosopher,
posthumously urges us past philosophy and ideology,
to effective action,
to something to reasonably hope for, as a whole nation. 5

 

Could this Ukraine tragedy, as Wills says happened in the Civil War,
bring an emergent form of victory –
blood welling ‘round new roots,
rising rose-red with thorny shoots,
new blood from shed blood,
spirit anew in the proud, billowing, blood-streaked blue and yellow banner –
of this European democracy,
when it wins, finally wins, its sovereignty, again?

How sure is the West, to assist in agonizing fits, what might’ve been won and spared by now?

Beyond the Civil War, America’s politics provide further dragging baggage,
a sordid history of Empire building, often tragically partial, in the name of “democracy.”
And even today, in America, remain those who perversely idolize Putin,
And his demagogic types, with strong-manly ways,
which Richard Rorty once warned us of. 5.
Whither American Christianity which heeds Jesus?
Can a Godless, sociopathic man be “our savior”? 6

Perhaps the Ukraine candle evokes my Catholic upbringing,
the flaming sentinel of vigil, of faith in righteousness holy spirit.
So, the spirit takes the deepest of inhalations and sighs
like a great buffalo of the plains,
yet don’t let the candle go out!
It shudders from the hot-breath wind.
Flame rises again, its small, defiant fire.
Hard to believe but, hear this:
This Door County Candle Company has delivered
one million dollars of direct aid to Ukraine
from its army of blue-and-yellow sixteen-ounce candles!

If that is not one — bigger than who’d imagine –
answer to Richard Rorty’s plaintive question,
I don’t know what is!

Soon I’ll buy and light another candle.
The spirit flickers again,
Light amid the Blackness of this Darkness, spreading around the globe,
as surely as changing climes, enshrouding Mother Earth.
Can we ever feel their unfathomable pain?
That which is the world’s is Ukraine, Ukraine!

— Kevin Lynch, September 20, 2023

____________

Here is the link to the Door County Candle Company’s Ukraine candle. All proceeds go to Ukraine: https://doorcountycandle.com/products/ukraine-16oz-candle

  1. Robert Bly, James Hilman, Michael Neade, ed., Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: Poems for Men, Harper Collins, 1992
  2. Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America, Simon and Schuster, 1992, 21
  3. Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg, 52
  4. For a book-length discourse on the relation between Moby-Dick and totalitarianism, see C.L.R. James, Mariners, Renegades & Castaways: Herman Melville and the World We Live In, Dartmouth, 1978
  5. Richard Rorty, What Can We Hope for? Essays on Politics, Princeton, 2022
  6. From whence come the political rationalizations of Christian Evangelicals, “speaking with God?” “(The mind is its own place, the mind has a mind of its own) This is a domain that, without ever having to name it, the right has always best known how to manipulate.” Jacqueline Rose, in “The Analyst,” a review of Jamaican-British writer/activist Stuart Hall’s memoir Familiar Stranger, The New York Review of Books, Sept. 21, 2023, 50.

 

 

Whiteness or democracy? Which will they (or we) choose?

A supporter of President Donald Trump chants outside the Senate Chamber inside the Capitol, Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021 in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

” ‘People were angry when the projections came out. People said they wouldn’t stand for being a minority in their own country.”

“Now there are troops at the border,” I said. “and shootings of black and brown and Jewish people.”

Taylor nodded. He contemplated the meaning of that. “So the real question would be,” he said finally, “if people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?”

We let that settle in the air, neither of us willing to hazard a guess to that one.’ ”

— from Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent, by Isabel Wilkerson

My ensuing thoughts formulated on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. So let’s pause, peer out at the horizon of our souls, and see if we can see, above and beyond, any glimpse of “the mountaintop,” “the promised land” or that ever-mystical “arc of justice”?

The question, to me, posed above, came from Wilkerson’s profound and necessary book. The query has settled in the air just long enough for me to hazard a response.

There on the ground before us, the question prompts another one: What does “whiteness” mean in the context of losing our democracy? It ostensibly would mean benefiting a new white minority aggrieved, for fears of not being the most populous ethnicity. More to the point, they seem unaware of, or to not acknowledge, that the desired change means losing the freedoms — those that are typically lost in the authoritarian nations that have challenged democracies around the world in recent years. If you are white, what good is it if you lose the privileges your white privilege had afforded you? And a statistical minority hardly means, by itself, that the deeply uncased conventions of systemic racism will suddenly disappear, or be appreciably weakened.

This was a manifestation that power at its worst, of domestic terrorists.

And there’s no mistaking it, Donald Trump lusts to be an authoritarian “strong man” like his professed idol, Vladimir Putin. The neurotic depths of his narcissism will allow him no other sense of truth, Thus, he’s incapable of admitting defeat. So, this is classic case of followers fighting against their own interests, and for only the presumptions of social systems hundreds of years old, which systemically enslaved and lynched, and still discriminate against and prolifically incarcerate, people of color. A system that allows men to be punished, or killed, simply for breathing.

The larger point is that authoritarian governments by definition benefit those in authority, and those with the power to directly curry favor and influence with such authorities — typically unprincipled rich people. Ordinary palookas clinging to guns might coerce or steal freedoms from those threatened, but in the contemporary world if you’re merely “free.” you’re gonna struggle mightily as a lone wolf even if you have a big hunting pack. That’s because in a society is geared to an array of financial demands that only a system with a democratic government provides. If you don’t like the government, democracy allows you to peaceably replace it, through elections.

So how many would choose whiteness over democracy? One would sadly assume a certain percentage of the most radicalized, fanatic, racist and aggrieved Trump devotees. Even if Trump himself truly fades away (increasingly likely), “Trumpism” won’t soon and it may attract a new more intelligent and strategic avatar. That is the fear of lovers of democracy and its freedoms and political beauties.

Even after the Capitol travesties, most Republican legislators remain largely craven in fear of losing the Trumpism vote.

As CNN senior political analyst Jeff Greenfield commented on Republicans called for temperance rather than impeaching the president who incited the deadly attack: “Forgive me, but the cynic in me thinks that’s like the teenager who kills his parents and pleads for leniency because now he’s an orphan.”

But the issue remains saving democracy, or saving whiteness. By activism of a genuinely patriotic kind, that is still exemplified,  by Martin Luther King Jr. , as much as any leader.

In his biography of King, the brilliant writer and public intellectual Michael Eric Dyson explains, King’s was a “patriotism of flesh and blood, born of the holy obligation to provide a bridge over which the words of democracy might march from parchment to pavement. His most enduring trophies were the calluses he gathered for marching for justice and merciless heat in the sore knees he gained bending to pray for enemies he defiantly loved…

King’s version of love of country was certainly challenging. It drew a contrast between belief in the strange providence of God, which is often disguised unpredictable events, and the idolatry of a nation that it is a damaging counterfeit of true patriotism. King understood that authentic patriotism depends on telling the truth about the nation in an effort to help it achieve its highest destiny.” 1

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (at right in front row, arm raised) leads a march for civil rights in Selma, Alabama, March 1965. Courtesy The Clarion Ledger 

In our times, such idolatry has been offered up to a con-man president who promised the moon and delivered the dregs of his rich cronies’ empty bottles, at best.

And “telling the truth about the nation to help achieve its highest destiny” has been lost in the cacophony of social media and politically supine news media, so that those susceptible live in an alternate’s universe, a pretend reality. But the siege on the Capitol was no pretend exercise, it was a “well-coordinated attack” on the heart of our democratic government, according to acting deputy secretary of Homeland Defense, Ken Cuccinelli. Time will tell of who did the strategizing, and how.

Meanwhile, here’s a report based on extensive viewing of videos of the mob attack, posted by participants:

Our house. It is the most dominant phrase of any of the chants shouted by the mob as it presses into the Capitol. It is an expression of entitlement — white nativist entitlement, as many have noted: This is our house, our country. It’s the entitlement that leads one invader to pick up a phone in a Capitol corridor in one video and say: “Can I speak with Pelosi? Yeah, we’re coming for you, bitch. Mike Pence? We’re coming for you too, fucking traitor.”

What is striking about the videos, though, is how often this entitlement is laced with insecurity. The attackers profess ownership of this house, but so much of their commentary betrays discomfort and alienation within it, bordering on a sort of provincial awe. “This is the state Capitol,” a man says to his young female companion inside the visitor center, his struggle to grasp the grandeur of the place encapsulated in his incorrect terminology. “It’s amazing,” she says, as a man dressed as a Roman centurion, complete with sandals, wanders by.” 2

Where will these people wander off to, those who aren’t convicted of crimes and jailed? What do they hope to gain? The world to lose their souls? And yet they’ll likely gain, in a totalitarian regime, the “world” in a paper bag. Such are the rewards of delusional idolatry.

Am I being unfair to these people who believe baseless propaganda, rather than facts? They convey a kind of pathos, a sense of a patriotism they believe in. So pity is stirred.

But too many are the kind of hate-filled extremists — racists, Neo-Nazis, the wildest conspiracy-mongers — who any reasonable person would despise. And enough of them brandishing paramilitary weapons remain a threat to our way of life and governance, to the historically vast majority who voted for Joe Biden, and a threat to potentially anyone else, including themselves.

Actually overcoming our government by military force is quixotic, so they will inevitably fail, but not without further damage to our nation’s most precious values and functions.

After Trump’s sagging gasbag wheezes away in the wind, no one can say for sure what darkness lies on the horizon. We can brace ourselves, live our lives, and build them on the power of love, as King, Jesus, Gandhi, John Lennon, John Coltrane, and other enlightened people counseled, and work to bolster our democracy. Our wounds, still open, need serious healing. Black smoke hovers over the looming sky yet the morning breaks anew, as ever. So may hope and action.

____________

  1. Michael Eric Dyson, I May Not Get There With You: The True Biography of Martin Luther King Jr.,The Free Press, 2000, 226
  2. Alec MacGillis https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-the-capitol-riot-what-the-parler-videos-reveal