Blue Sky God

It's Thor's day and the weatherfeathers are saying that the heat-hammer is preparing to move away from Okieland over the coming weekend. Yeah. We shall see. The mailbox is already almost too hot to touch …

The poet Hayden Carruth was born on this date in 1921 Waterbury, Connecticut. If you don't know him, consider doing so. informed by his political radicalism and sense of cultural responsibility, many of Carruth’s best-known poems are about the people and places of northern Vermont, as well as rural poverty and hardship.

It is also the birth date of "Ernie" Pyle. the journalist and war correspondent was born near Dana, Indiana in 1900.

Love is what we most fear. We can’t let anybody love us for nothing. True intimacy with anyone terrifies us. – Richard Rohr (not the usual link)

So that others do not see our love

– after Rilke

We kneel and make pious gestures,

build domes of gold,

worship a blue-sky god

remaining ignorant of Indra's net

connecting us to our earthly origins

our roots shared by mushrooms and stars.

8.3.23 jb

from “The Bearer”

He came from the forest. . .At last he came to his people far

In the darkness. He smiled and spoke his words,

And he looked intently into their eyes gleaming

In firelight. He cried when they cried. No rest

For his lungs. He flinched and lay down while they

Began to kill him with clubs and heavy stones.

– Hayden Carruth, “The Bearer” from Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991. Copper Canyon Press. 1992. National Book Critics Circle Award 1992.