The Cat and I Watch the Morning

Posted on August 13, 2020 by Jack under Blogroll, In Time

Jack will livestream today’s poem at 9am, ET, on his Facebook Page here, and the video saved with all of his past Livestream videos here.

Let’s see: 45 on Mt. Rushmore? Hmmm…

How about if next he demands to be inserted into some of history’s most memorable artworks?

“Wouldn’t that be terrific! Think how many more people would come to see these and how much more they would appreciate them. Terrific idea. Terrific.”

For starters:

American Gothic
The Last Supper
Whistler’s Mother
The Peaceable Kingdom
The Bathers
The Ascension of Christ
At the Moulin Rouge
Young Woman Powdering Herself
Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jutte
Nude Woman in the Sunlight
Jacob Wrestling with the Angel
Still Life with Plaster Cast
The Gleaners
(The) David
Birth of Venus

Your list?

The Cat and I Watch the Morning

It’s what we do. Each morning.
The cat still sleeping on the sill, tail

twitching. Standing at the window,
I sip my coffee, new-brewed and

caramel-creamed. Within the sprawl
of this light, I want to turn and say,

“Watch how the light moves across
the liriope, sharp-cutting in shafts

through the winter leftovers of
browns and yellows, how it lies

on the platter-leaved butterbur,
drips down the fragile dangle

of coral bells and columbine, settles
into the full dark of the hemlock.”

–Jack Ridl

First published in the Chariton Review.
Subsequently published in Saint Peter and the Goldfinch, Wayne State University Press.

The best medicine for this time has come from the great Detroit Poet and merry prankster, M. L. Liebler, and his poetry happenings online. Do follow him, show up for his Zoom readings. Feel better.

Kirk Westphal’s’s new collection Arts and Science is available through Dos Madres Press. The poems explore in unexpected ways how the arts and the sciences blend, even fuse, can’t be simply separated. Westphal’s knowledge of philosophy infuses his work as he moves the reader to reflect on one’s encounters with both disciplines, enabling us to recognize we are encountering both at once.

Where are the books? Visit Reader’s World or Hope-Geneva Bookstore in Holland, The Bookman in Grand Haven, the Michigan News Agency in Kalamazoo, and The Book Nook & Java Shop in Montague to find Jack’s books in West Michigan.

See all of Jack’s Facebook Livestream Videos Here.

Jack’s page on Amazon.

Click here to subscribe to receive Jack’s poems and news in your inbox.

Click here for Jack’s entire collection, In Time — poems for the current administration.

Jack on And Then Suddenly podcast by Angela Santillo.

Click here to watch Jack’s TedX talk.

Jack at Fetzer Institute on Kindness.

Jack at Fetzer Institute on Everyday Forgiveness.

Jack at Fetzer Institute on Empathy.

Jack Ridl at Fetzer Institute on Suffering and Love.

Beyond Meaning with Jack Ridl, C3: West Michigan’s Spiritual Connection

Let Comfort Come

Posted on August 6, 2020 by Jack under Blogroll, In Time

Jack will livestream today’s poem at 9am, ET, on his Facebook Page here, and the video saved with all of his past Livestream videos here.

I am writing this on Tuesday, August 4, the birthdays of three extremely different personalities, three black men our souls would be close to impoverished without.

The poet Robert Hayden opened us to understanding love when it’s given by those whose daily lives lead them to be chronically angry. His poem “Those Winter Sundays” tells of a son’s realization that “even on Sundays” his worn-out father showed his love by shining his son’s shoes. Find the poem here. It’s one that breaks and heals the heart. Hayden taught at Fisk for 25 years, and he was the first African-American poet named Poet Laureate/Consultant to the Library of Congress.

Louis Armstrong was perhaps the most charismatic and influential jazz master. He was at first called Satchelmouth because of the way he blew high C’s on the trumpet. Satchelmouth was later shortened to Satchmo, and he was Satchmo from then on. Armstrong is considered by most the player most responsible for solo improvisation. Today it’s ironic and uplifting that he always said the favorite song he played and sang was “It’s a Wonderful World,” saying, “Seems to me it ain’t the world that’s so bad but what we’re doing to it, and all I’m saying is: see what a wonderful world it would be if only we’d give it a chance. Love, baby, love. That’s the secret . . .”

And it’s was the birthday of PRESIDENT Barack Obama too. I hope you heard his dignified, articulate, insightful, beautifully cadenced and timed eulogy for John Lewis. I heard someone say that he should not have brought politics into the memorial service. Hilarious. What could be more honest and honorable to John Lewis than to speak up for what Lewis spent his life struggling for. It wasn’t inappropriate, what Obama said; it was courageous. It was “Good Trouble.” And I would add that it was love.

Three liberating, brave souls to celebrate on the same day. Oh how I hope that is uplifting to you.

Let Comfort Come

We read while form stays
still and waits. The words sing

or speak, clamber on or say
or tell or even sometimes step

aside and hope we wander in.
Everywhere within the form

of letter, word, space, structure
rests the hush around the hurry,

the opening wherein any form —
table, door, the lover’s arm

and tongue, the cat asleep
on the sill—lies the quiet,

the shawl around us all
who have to clatter through.

Let be be the nothing of not.

–Jack Ridl

First published in The Colorado Review
Subsequently published in Saint Peter and the Goldfinch (Wayne State University Press)

Z.G. Tomaszewski has published two new collections. KORAKIA was created with his partner, Hayley. It is a collection of poems, haiku, photographs, all arranged in a fresh design layout. The other collection is titled STONE POEMS. Each poem focuses on a different stone, revealing what is astonishing about a single stone.

See all of Jack’s Facebook Livestream Videos Here.

Jack’s page on Amazon.

Click here to subscribe to receive Jack’s poems and news in your inbox.

Click here for Jack’s entire collection, In Time — poems for the current administration.

Jack on And Then Suddenly podcast by Angela Santillo.

Click here to watch Jack’s TedX talk.

Jack at Fetzer Institute on Kindness.

Jack at Fetzer Institute on Everyday Forgiveness.

Jack at Fetzer Institute on Empathy.

Jack Ridl at Fetzer Institute on Suffering and Love.

Beyond Meaning with Jack Ridl, C3: West Michigan’s Spiritual Connection

Willie and the Prof

Posted on July 30, 2020 by Jack under Blogroll, In Time

Jack will livestream today’s poem at 9am, ET, on his Facebook Page here, and the video saved with all of his past Livestream videos here.

Baseball and the military. I can hear an old English professor, “Stick to the topic, ONE topic.”

I’m gonna flunk this…

My wife Julie’s grandfather, the WWII War hero, the Rear Admiral, is buried at the Naval Academy. Her dad graduated from there the same year Jimmy Carter did, when they were hustling midshipmen through as fast as they could.

One of her brothers was a grad and became a Top Gun pilot, flying his F14 off aircraft carriers. Her other brother worked in the Navy’s digital imaging offices in the Pentagon before he retired. His wing was hit by that plane on 9/11. He happened to be out of the office at the time.

Julie’s father had charge of Subic Bay Naval Station in the Philippines during Viet Nam, where Julie lived until her early teens. He was also Captain of a destroyer going to Cuba during the missile crisis — the ships JFK ordered to turn around — the closest so far we have come to a nuclear war.

Julie married me. I was offered a Presidential ride to the Naval Academy. I turned it down.

And now for 37 years I have been happily married into a three-generation U.S. Navy family. Whew.

I bring all this up because we are so glad the Captain is not alive to see this time. He would be appalled at 45’s irresponsible attempts to use the military to put down peaceful protests. I couldn’t possibly recall how many times the Captain talked about being in the Navy for peaceful reasons, to protect every person in the United States and their rights.

He joined the military for its technology, for the science. He admired the discipline. The military wasn’t ever going to be a perfect fit for him, but he understood sacrifice for one’s country. He understood banding together to protect people who needed protection. It was okay to make your life a little uncomfortable for the benefit of all.

But above all, he understood that while the Commander in Chief is an office that deserves respect, the commands that issue from that office must be legal ones. There are lines that cannot be crossed. No soldier can be commanded to perform an illegal act.

How furious he would be to watch 45 divide the country, label protesters anarchists, arsonists, Marxists out to destroy “our democracy.”

I heard Julie’s father disagree with many a policy, many a protester. Even at the close of his career when he commanded the NROTC at the University of Wisconsin after his unit was bombed, even when he had to wear civilian clothes to class and then change into his uniform, he would always say his task was to serve and protect American citizens.

And now a Wall of Moms has taken on that job. Thanks be to them.

And so baseball.

Baseball is back. Well… kinda. Had to laugh the other day when a manager fumed at an umpire, all the time wearing a mask.

And of course, it’s the best we can do, all of us in the “stands” of our couches and recliner chairs, chomping on a hot dog that costs less than $7 and a bowl of popcorn under $8 and a beer for a buck.

Sixty games is plenty to determine a champion. I don’t wanna get into that argument. The game is back, and at a time when July doesn’t seem like July because it’s almost August and just the other day it was May, this is one small gift to our day.

So, if ya like baseball…

Willie and the Prof

Say hey! Willie Mays retired.
And I’m no longer young.

Last night I heaved my paunch
and slugged a slow pitch softball
off the left field wall. The faculty
out-huffed the frosh 26 to 25.
At second base I wallowed in my
former dream. I, too, broke in
in ’51, in little league. A wad
of raisins stuffed my cheek.
Willie went up 13 times
before he got a hit. I never felt
the first base sack beneath
my tennis shoes. I peed my pants
before each game. The on deck circle
ringed my fear that lay along
an endless streak of strike threes
through the last game when
my coach had me take on 3 and 2.
All winter I lugged a leaded bat,
swinging it against the Pittsburgh wind.
Toward the spring, I felt a lump jump
in my bicep. Swinging in the wind
paid off. I hit .650 in my second year.
Willie cracked .300.

Say hey! Willie Mays retired.
And I’m no longer young.

It wasn’t his knees, throbbing
and swollen with cortisone.
Or his arm wilting under packs
of ice. Or his chest, heaving
from the dash from first to home
on a rookie’s punk double down
the line. It was his .211 average
typed every morning. The bench
pricking his hips that once
seduced the pick-off throws
of pitchers who thought
they could hold him on.
The fly balls dropping
one by one like dead
offerings just out of reach.
And in New York.
It’s embarrassment that drives us out.

Now my days of adolescent applause,
of late-inning rallies, of off-season
days are gone like a wild pitch.
I’m left with silence when I drive
home the winning point about
a masterpiece. That’s what’s hard,
Willie: the silence. There
I’ve got a start on you.

Tonight I swung and doubled
home my colleague with the
winning run.

Say hey! Willie Mays retired.
And I’m no longer young.

–Jack Ridl

On August 4, Matthew Baker’s new book, Why Visit America? Henry Holt & Co., comes out. It has already received exceptional reviews, and Matt has offered remarkably insightful interviews. Esquire Magazine has called it one of the twenty must-read books published this summer.

See all of Jack’s Facebook Livestream Videos Here.

Jack’s page on Amazon.

Click here to subscribe to receive Jack’s poems and news in your inbox.

Click here for Jack’s entire collection, In Time — poems for the current administration.

Jack on And Then Suddenly podcast by Angela Santillo.

Click here to watch Jack’s TedX talk.

Jack at Fetzer Institute on Kindness.

Jack at Fetzer Institute on Everyday Forgiveness.

Jack at Fetzer Institute on Empathy.

Jack Ridl at Fetzer Institute on Suffering and Love.

Beyond Meaning with Jack Ridl, C3: West Michigan’s Spiritual Connection

Putting Down the Dog

Posted on July 23, 2020 by Jack under Blogroll, In Time

Jack will livestream today’s poem at 9am, ET, on his Facebook Page here, and the video saved with all of his past Livestream videos here.

The other day, Buddy, Peter’s dog, died. It was not expected. Peter is our church’s music director. Because our services are virtual, we always watch Peter play from his home, Buddy at the corner of the screen watching Peter. Buddy had become, in many ways, the congregation’s dog.

I bring this sadness because of hearing time and time again how important people’s dogs have been to them during the pandemic.

And they don’t know.

Monday afternoon we went downtown with our dog, Vivi. Our daughter was maintaining the ceramist Jeff Blandford’s magical shop. (Is there a ceramist the likes of Jeff? Do go to his shop in Saugatuck.)

The town was all but completely masked, a relieving and hopeful sight. And everyone who saw Vivi wanted to bend down and pet her, talk to her.

Hers is one of the only breeds that in the dog books is described as “kind.” And many said just that: “She seems so kind.”

And then the subject that invariably came up was “We can’t imagine getting through all this without our Benjy, Jojo, Glory, Searcher.”

Every day dogs keep us at our routine. Vivi woofing ever so gently at 6:45—time for breakfast. They keep us walking. They keep us calling for them when they sneak off. They let us scratch and pet them for hours. They curl up with us, a comfort as we endure the news from the only purposefully dangerous president we’ve ever had.

And so, Buddy, thank you. Thanks be to every loving dog who simply and not so simply is always there, devoted, without taking any credit—well maybe a biscuit—for helping us each through each difficult day.

Putting Down Our Dogs

We let the vet
place them

on the last place
they will smell.

Do they see
the unknown

in our eyes?
They feel

our fingers
scratch

behind
their ears.

Then our palms
along their backs.

–Jack Ridl
from Saint Peter and the Goldfinch, Wayne State University Press

See all of Jack’s Facebook Livestream Videos Here.

Jack’s page on Amazon.

Click here to subscribe to receive Jack’s poems and news in your inbox.

Click here for Jack’s entire collection, In Time — poems for the current administration.

Jack on And Then Suddenly podcast by Angela Santillo.

Click here to watch Jack’s TedX talk.

Jack at Fetzer Institute on Kindness.

Jack at Fetzer Institute on Everyday Forgiveness.

Jack at Fetzer Institute on Empathy.

Jack Ridl at Fetzer Institute on Suffering and Love.

Beyond Meaning with Jack Ridl, C3: West Michigan’s Spiritual Connection

My Grandmother Lived Mostly On Her Porch

Posted on July 16, 2020 by Jack under Blogroll, In Time

Jack will livestream today’s poem at 9am, ET, on his Facebook Page here, and the video saved with all of his past Livestream videos here. Maybe a story for our times…

I all but grew up on my grandmother’s porch. In many ways my grandmother raised me. Her husband, my mother’s father, had died at Christmas. I was born the following April. In her grief, my mother really couldn’t do much for me. Lala (the name I gave my grandmother) took over. My father was overseas, leading a company of men around Europe.

Once I could manage sitting up on my own, I had my own chair on “Lala’s Porch,” and she and I would spend most of the day there.

There were breaks for tea. She came from northern England, told stories of hiking across the border for picnics in Scotland. Had to break for tea.

Lala lived in an understated yet elegant brick house, the kind where the passageways from one room to another had a curved archway.

Her porch was the same, the roofline quietly curved. There was an iron fence on three sides. the fourth wall had a pile of firewood and a door.

Lala and my grandfather had lovely gardens, one a sunken rock garden where I would “set up camp.” They gathered the rocks on their travels. He called her “Lovins.” She called him “Lover.” My mother, their only child, adored her father.

The home sat on a fairly large corner lot in a quiet, all-but-English village. This enabled us to watch who was coming or going from two different directions. And that was what we did: watch the people walking by. There were always those who would say, “Hi there, Mrs. Rogers. Hi, Jackie.”

If she was unfamiliar with someone, she would often make up a story or mutter, “Good god, who would wear such a hat!?” or “I bet I know what he has in that bag.”

She never learned to drive. So each day at 2pm we would, as she said, “walk up-street,” where all her sisters lived about a mile up the hill next to one another on Broad Street. The sisters had lost their parents and were sent to America (Immigrants!) to be raised by Aunt Lil. There on Aunt Lil’s porch the sisters would congregate and kibitz.

It’s hard not to wonder if there would be less need for therapy if we all had a place to go, without needing an invitation much less an appointment, where we would gather and trustingly tell one another what was really going on in our lives.

My grandmother taught me a love of reading—by reading me comic books. I don’t recall her ever reading me a book. But the range of characters I met in those dime paper stapled stories was remarkable—we would go from Red Rider to Felix the Cat to Little LuLu to the Katzenjammer Kids before dinner, which invariably was a “meat cake” (a hamburger pattie) bought at the A & P on the way home from being with Aunt Lil and the sisters. “Here comes Mrs. Rogers. Get out the hamburger.”

Yes, she was a character. And the older I get, the more I feel her presence. While we kept our eyes on the sidewalks, she spent most of the time between lunch and heading up-street, just playing solitaire.

And what has this to do with now?

Now we have a front porch. Two chairs. We have lots of wonderful neighbors, neighbors who greet, and often stop to kibitz. And that’s when it all comes back. Well, almost all. The most important part is those just walking by. And I realize that because of this Covid I feel a deep, profound gratitude for each kindness from each neighbor as they pass.

My Grandmother Lived Mostly on Her Porch

Git,” snarled my grandmother
at any stray dog
sniffing at her lawn.
If it set a paw
on her property,
she’d yell, “Go on;
Git out of here. Go on. Git!”
and it would take off down the walk.
She lived alone, her husband, Lover,
dying four months before
my mother and I came
to live with her in her house
where she read me Marvel Comics,
taught me
the Jack of Spades is the bullet,
and took me every day
for a walk “Up street.”
We’d stop at the bank
wander through the five and ten,
sit for a couple hours
with her three sisters
on Aunt Lil’s porch.
On the way home,
we’d pick up a loaf of bread,
and some ground round for a meat cake.

–Jack Ridl

First published in Sunrust.
Subsequently published in Between (Dawn Valley Press).

See all of Jack’s Facebook Livestream Videos Here.

Jack’s page on Amazon.

Click here to subscribe to receive Jack’s poems and news in your inbox.

Click here for Jack’s entire collection, In Time — poems for the current administration.

Jack on And Then Suddenly podcast by Angela Santillo.

Click here to watch Jack’s TedX talk.

Jack at Fetzer Institute on Kindness.

Jack at Fetzer Institute on Everyday Forgiveness.

Jack at Fetzer Institute on Empathy.

Jack Ridl at Fetzer Institute on Suffering and Love.

Beyond Meaning with Jack Ridl, C3: West Michigan’s Spiritual Connection

The Morning after the Tenth Straight Loss

Posted on July 9, 2020 by Jack under Blogroll, In Time

jacknotafraidofamask

Jack will livestream today’s poem at 9am, ET, on his Facebook Page here, and the video saved with all of his past Livestream videos here. Maybe a story for our times…

My father is coaching the University of Pittsburgh’s basketball team.. It’s the mid ’60s.

After losing the opening game, PITT goes on the longest winning streak in the country. Sports Illustrated features the team. All the starters are from no more than maybe 15 miles from campus.

One day after practice my father is approached by a guy who introduces himself
as “Sonny Vaccaro. I’m from Pittsburgh, but I work for NIKE, and have come up
with a new promotion, and I’d like to offer you the first chance at taking advantage of it.”

“OK. what’s the deal?”

“We’ll give you $100,000 if you outfit your team in NIKE gear.”

“What?!?”

“Yep. That’s all you have to do. Just have your boys wear only NIKE sports
apparel when they play and practice.”

My father asked him to leave. He then called the University, asked for full security if Vaccaro came around the field house, his office, his home.

About all he ever said to us was, “No one should have to decide between money
and doing the right thing.”

My father coached one more year. He retired at 55. He never explained why he
retired that early from coaching the game he loved. They would have had to drag
him out of the gym. His salary when he gave up what he loved was around $18K a year.

The Morning after the Tenth Straight Loss

“The only thing that’s happy in my life,”
Coach thinks, “is my dog’s tail.” He looks
at his hands and wonders what they could
have held. It’s a day when the temperature
will stay below zero. He goes upstairs,
all the losses lying in his mind’s graveyard,
opens a window, reaches for the heat tape
dangling from the snow covered roof, grabs it,
pulls it inside, plugs it in. His dog
has followed. Downstairs, on his bookshelf
are his gardening books: The Gardener’s
Garden, Guide to Creative Gardening, All
About Perennials. In the fall, he strung
last summer’s geraniums from a string
across the basement, the plants dangling
in the slant of light through the earth-high
window. He goes back down, looks
at the morning paper, sees another
loss, goes to the shelf, takes All About
Perennials, goes to the living room, sits
on the sofa, one hand turning the pages,
one hand scratching his dog’s right ear.

–Jack Ridl

From Losing Season, CavanKerry Press, 2013

See all of Jack’s Facebook Livestream Videos Here.

Jack’s page on Amazon.

Click here to subscribe to receive Jack’s poems and news in your inbox.

Click here for Jack’s entire collection, In Time — poems for the current administration.

Jack on And Then Suddenly podcast by Angela Santillo.

Click here to watch Jack’s TedX talk.

Jack at Fetzer Institute on Kindness.

Jack at Fetzer Institute on Everyday Forgiveness.

Jack at Fetzer Institute on Empathy.

Jack Ridl at Fetzer Institute on Suffering and Love.

Beyond Meaning with Jack Ridl, C3: West Michigan’s Spiritual Connection

Reasons Enough

Posted on July 2, 2020 by Jack under Blogroll, In Time

Jack will livestream today’s poem at 9am, ET, on his Facebook Page here, and the video saved with all of his past Livestream videos here.

How are you holding up? For a lot of us it has gotten more difficult.

We are trying our best within the rise of the pandemic, the beginning of an overflow of messages from candidates and organizations, and the despicable words and acts of 45.

It’s overwhelming enough, let alone each time I hit unsubscribe, I feel I’ve let down helping out with all that really matters.

This is a second wave. We haven’t finished the first. We miss our break to get out, gather hugs, hang out with the people who keep us going.

I spent part of the morning playing with Hattie our cat. I have never pet Vivi so many times during a day. Of course I can’t scratch her butt enough as far as she is concerned. I always thought I would love having this much time to read.

There’s this sneaky feeling that I am lurking. It helps to get into the garden, even just sit on the porch and watch the sunset, most anything that doesn’t require passing through a barrier.

Well, we will make it. I am, for one thing, changing my view from “reading” to reading this book I’ve never experienced.

Reasons Enough

Because the afternoon sun shines through the window and settles on the pillows
And because the last of the summer sausage was stuck in the back of the fridge
That’s why. And—
The way the car starts like a bad joke
The way yesterday’s mail sits on the desk
The way the priest holds the host and carries the crucifix
Oh, and
Because of the Hopper print in the bedroom
Because of the maps of the Florida Keys in the glove compartment
Because of the burro’s tail drooping down across the open kitchen shelves
And the rosary beads on the mantle, the dog dish on its mat, the garden rake leaning against the side of the house
Also, when it rains at night, Sarah Vaughan, the radio
And the end of the driveway, that big rock with hostas around it, and the light on the back porch

–Jack Ridl

First published in The Journal (Ohio State University Press)
Subsequently published in Broken Symmetry (Wayne State University Press)

J.R. Solonche’s The Time of Your Life is out, his latest from Adelaide Books.

Rosemary Wahola Trommer’s new book Hush, winner of the Halcyon Prize for a collection of poems about human ecology, is a book-long love song to humanity and the natural world. It’s driven by curiosity and a willingness to dance in the unknown. You will want this one, I promise.

Ginger Rankin’s novel , Grapefruit Parlor, is out on Amazon a novel that explores human trafficking in terribly personal detail. Touching, terrifying, and hopeful by turns. You won’t forget it.

R.A. Kamin’s first novel, The Other One, is out on Amazon. A psychological thriller that has your heart firmly in your throat from beginning to end. Set in the West Michigan!

See all of Jack’s Facebook Livestream Videos Here.

Jack’s page on Amazon.

Click here to subscribe to receive Jack’s poems and news in your inbox.

Click here for Jack’s entire collection, In Time — poems for the current administration.

Jack on And Then Suddenly podcast by Angela Santillo.

Click here to watch Jack’s TedX talk.

Jack at Fetzer Institute on Kindness.

Jack at Fetzer Institute on Everyday Forgiveness.

Jack at Fetzer Institute on Empathy.

Jack Ridl at Fetzer Institute on Suffering and Love.

Beyond Meaning with Jack Ridl, C3: West Michigan’s Spiritual Connection

Poem Beginning with Of Course

Posted on June 25, 2020 by Jack under Blogroll, In Time

Jack will livestream today’s poem at 9am, ET, on his Facebook Page here, and the video saved with all of his past Livestream videos here.

This past Thursday Jean Kirchner was honored by the U.S. Navy in a formal ceremony as she retired from her remarkable career.

Jean saved many lives — many after their tours of duty. She enabled Navy personnel suffering from trauma, PTSD, suicidal tendencies, to be restored to their civilian lives, some to return to duty.

Jean, like so many, is a hero who will go unnoticed while at the same time she will be able to recall the lives she restored.

She and her husband Gary were among my first students and could never have known way back then that they enabled me to recognize that if this is what teaching is like, I don’t want to do anything else.

Like so many events today, the ceremony took place on ZOOM. So there I sat at home facing a group of senior officers honoring Jean. I was to close the ceremony with two poems.

What touched me so much was how profoundly sincere, personal, and serious in celebration each officer was, speaking directly to Jean. Voices cracked. Jean touched the corner of her eye. Her husband smiled.

Out of somewhere came the realization that sitting in front of me was the embodiment of courage; however, this time I recognized not only military courage which was most certainly evident, but moral courage. In the past week, these and many other senior officers had to display a kind of courage for which they have always been ready, but hope never to face: to firmly defend the Constitution against their so-called leader. This itself had to be traumatic. And there they were distinguishing one of their own in times that threaten the very stuff of people like Jean and Gary Kirchner.

Jean, we wish you quieter times. We thank you for your humane, life-restoring work. And we thank each officer we met that morning for defending our country against an inside force who does not know how to defend us, only how to defend himself.

Poem Beginning with Of Course

–for Jean Kirchner

Of course there are days when

the story slowly becomes one

we have known before: quiet

except for the highway

humming a mile away

while we still sleep within

the dream that hasn’t yet

awakened us. The morning

will slip away like the dew

on the hostas, ferns, and

butterbur. Mid-afternoon

will hang its heavy heat

on the spiders’ webs

while the cosmos droop

their startle of pink into

the bees’ bypass. Our ragged

cushions sit on the haphazard

disassembly of Adirondacks

we bought when we wondered

if we would stay where time

now settles into itself, the two

of us waiting within what lingers.

–Jack Ridl

Published in Practicing to Walk Like a Heron (Wayne State University Press)

R.A. Kamin’s first novel, The Other One, is out on Amazon. A psychological thriller that has your heart firmly in your throat from beginning to end. Set in the West Michigan!

See all of Jack’s Facebook Livestream Videos Here.

Jack’s page on Amazon.

Click here to subscribe to receive Jack’s poems and news in your inbox.

Click here for Jack’s entire collection, In Time — poems for the current administration.

Jack on And Then Suddenly podcast by Angela Santillo.

Click here to watch Jack’s TedX talk.

Jack at Fetzer Institute on Kindness.

Jack at Fetzer Institute on Everyday Forgiveness.

Jack at Fetzer Institute on Empathy.

Jack Ridl at Fetzer Institute on Suffering and Love.

Beyond Meaning with Jack Ridl, C3: West Michigan’s Spiritual Connection

Late Night Jazz Station, Coach Listening

Posted on June 18, 2020 by Jack under Blogroll, Good Reads

Jack might just livestream today’s poem at 9am, ET, on his Facebook Page here, where the video will will be saved for later viewing. Buuuuuuttttt, he might not. He had lower back surgery yesterday, and though, at this writing, he is doing great, he might decide to sleep in… Meanwhile, you can find all of his past Livestream videos here.

Black lives always mattered to my father. Here is how he taught us…
(I apologize to those of you who have heard these stories…)

My father was the Captain of a black company in WWII. In boot camp he drank from a different fountain, showered, slept, ate in different tents. One day he noticed that his men’s equipment was not equal to the white companies’ equipment. He confronted the General, and his men were given equal equipment. But still the separate quarters, separate eating spaces. Later, he would wonder aloud to us why he hadn’t noticed these things then. “It’s just the way it was.”

One night, in 1958 (correction, 1957), before civil rights was in our consciousness, my father, now the basketball coach at a small college in western Pennsylvania, started three black players.

The next morning he was called into the president’s office. When Dad came home for lunch, we asked, “What was that about?”

My father said, “The president looked me in the eye and said two words, ‘Next game,’ and then he held up two fingers.”

My mother, sister, and I sat stunned, frightened. We assumed our father’s job was on the line. One obeys the president. We tried to just go ahead and eat our lunch. But after a few swallows, I couldn’t take it, and I stammered, “What’re you gonna do?”

My father finished his sandwich, wiped his fingers, paused, took a breath, and firmly but quietly said, “Next game,” and he held up four fingers.

And that’s what he did.

Titans 1957

Late Night Jazz Station, Coach Listening

Coach lets those good notes
float, swing their good way
into his late night. He smiles,
and his eyelids lower, and his
young dream comes sauntering
down the aisle of his mind.
He plays the sax.

“Here, Coach, take it,”
and he blows the meanest
wail, so mean that Bix
looks up, drops his chops,
Diz’s cheeks collapse,
and Duke and Lionel both turn
to Miles who laughs and says,
“Man, Count, we’ve all been had.”

Coach is hot. The whole joint
is swinging as he leans down,
blowing his whole damn life out
his horn. Everyone’s clapping,
stomping, shouting, “Yeah!”

Even Bird is flattened, floored,
turns to Mingus, says, “That’s
it. We got a sax.” Coach
can’t believe his ears, hits
a last long, loving note,
letting it hang in the air, feeling
the reed go limp against his tongue.
No one says a word.

Coach looks up,
gives them all a nod,
and takes his leave, the
whole place wondering
where the hell he’s been
and where the hell he’s going.

for Paul Zimmer

–Jack Ridl

Published in Between (Dawn Valley Press.)
Subsequently published in a slightly different form in Losing Season (CavanKerry Press)

On June 21 at 2pm I will give an online reading with Charles Baxter and Laurel Blossom as part of M. L. Liebler’s Living Room Online Literary Series on ZOOM. You can find the zoom link here. I hope you can join us.

See all of Jack’s Facebook Livestream Videos Here.

Jack’s page on Amazon.

Click here to subscribe to receive Jack’s poems and news in your inbox.

Click here for Jack’s entire collection, In Time — poems for the current administration.

Jack on And Then Suddenly podcast by Angela Santillo.

Click here to watch Jack’s TedX talk.

Jack at Fetzer Institute on Kindness.

Jack at Fetzer Institute on Everyday Forgiveness.

Jack at Fetzer Institute on Empathy.

Jack Ridl at Fetzer Institute on Suffering and Love.

Beyond Meaning with Jack Ridl, C3: West Michigan’s Spiritual Connection

The Chair

Posted on June 11, 2020 by jridl under Blogroll, In Time, Uncategorized

Jack will livestream today’s poem at 9am, ET, on his Facebook Page here, where the video will will be saved for later viewing. You can find all of his Livestream videos here.

Because some personal losses happened this week that had nothing to do with Covid-19 or the protests, I thought a lot about those who are grieving in the midst of these events that affect us all. One still receives sympathy emails and notes along with baked goods, a casserole or two. But friends to sit with and be comforted by?

How does one personally grieve when one is already overwhelmed? Can you say to yourself, “I’ll put personal grieving off until family and friends can gather? No. Grief is an ambush. It attacks when it attacks, certainly immediately in the form of shock, then as the days crawl by, it sneak-attacks, and you find yourself crying in the produce section and wondering why.

And yet if you turn away from the hideous blaspheming of 45, the beautiful solidarity of the protests, the welfare of others regarding Covid, and the need to actually “serve and protect,” you feel you’ve put aside what could be — finally — a shift from consuming what isn’t needed to caring for what is.
I need to change the tone.

Let’s imagine 45’s book report on The Bible. First sentence, “It’s incredible.”

The Chair

This chair is empty. This evening
is another evening coming down around
us like the last moment before
the winds are gone and the wild
songs of the insects disappear into
the endless dream of the mind’s nest.

Whoever is not sitting in that chair
is who is resting in your veins, ready
to drift out of you, taking the voices
that interrupt the child’s play,
that hover over the marriage bed, mocking
the rhythm of being alone, ripping
the last chance from the last chance.

This empty chair sits, and sits facing
the window that frames the light
that you imagine is a gift
knowing its source is fire, its long journey
a flood, its movement through
the spider’s web a grace no less invincible
than sight. These are the days.
These are the nights. And at rest,
the empty chair.

–Jack Ridl

First published in Free Lunch. Subsequently published in Between(Dawn Vally Press).

On June 21 at 2pm I will give an online reading with charles Baxter and Laurel Blossom as part of M.L. Liebler engaging reading series on ZOOM. Write to him for details.

Naomi Shihab Nye has a new collection: CAST AWAY (Greenwillow). She has developed a fascinatingly direct voice. Imagine, 147 pages of poems about trash! Those concerned about our environment–everyone!– will find it a companion.

Linda Hillringhouse has a personally powerful book of poems out about the things that shape her life. The Things I Didn’t Know to Wish For, from NYQ Books.

Dan Gerber’s new, beautifully reflective long poem, Landscape at Eighty, has been gorgeously printed in letterpress by Hound Dog Press.

Gayle Boss has recorded her luminous book of environmental essays, Wild Hope, Paraclete Press, available now through Audible.

Our own Pastor Sal — Salvatore Sapienza — has a new book out, encouraging us to put away our childish thinking. It’s called… wait for it… Childish Thinking: How the Church Keeps Us Stuck in Sunday School.

See all of Jack’s Facebook Livestream Videos Here.

Jack’s page on Amazon.

Click here to subscribe to receive Jack’s poems and news in your inbox.

Click here for Jack’s entire collection, In Time — poems for the current administration.

Jack on And Then Suddenly podcast by Angela Santillo.

Click here to watch Jack’s TedX talk.

Jack at Fetzer Institute on Kindness.

Jack at Fetzer Institute on Everyday Forgiveness.

Jack at Fetzer Institute on Empathy.

Jack Ridl at Fetzer Institute on Suffering and Love.

Beyond Meaning with Jack Ridl, C3: West Michigan’s Spiritual Connection

RIDL.COM

"Quietly waging the most peaceful and poetic political protest in history." — Garret Stack, author of Yeoman's Work