Two Poems for Ash Wednesday--one old, one new

First, an old one--thinking about my Mother and her last Ash Wednesday on Earth:

The Last Ash Wednesday (February 2003)

After teaching my classes,

I drive over to Kevin’s house

Where Mom now lives after moving from Euclid

Our family home for fifty-one years.

It’s getting harder for her to go out,

So I come to her house,

Burn last year’s palm fronds in the ash tray

And anoint her forehead with the Sign of the Cross.

I find myself unable to utter the ancient words,

“Remember, Woman, from dust thou art,

And unto dust thou shallt return.”

The words are too painful, too real,

The abiding dust

too close.

Then Mom anoints my own forehead,

Again leaving the words unspoken:

No one can ever know . . . .

After the little ceremony,

We both laugh, and Mom says,

“Let’s drink a beer!”

“Not on Ash Wednesday,” I tease.

“The hell with that!” she retorts.

“I’m old enough now to be above the rules!”

We both laugh, and I pop open two beers.

We drink to Mardi Gras and to Lent,

And to the ashes on our foreheads.

                                                             Bob Coughlin

                                                                        February 21, 2007

                                                                        Ash Wednesday



And this evening, I went to St. Gabe's in Concord Township for mass and ashes. To my astonishment, there were about 400 people there. I thought about how much I love my Church and my fellow Catholics (and, by the way, I love people in other traditions very much too). This poem came to me after mass:

Thou Art Stardust

As a child, Monsignor John Fleming

Made the sign of the cross on my forehead

With the ashes of palm fronds, saying,

“Remember man, from dust thou art,

and unto dust thou shalt return.”

At St. Gabe’s this evening, 400 people came on a Wednesday

For mass and to celebrate this strange ritual of ashes—

Almost astonishing in this year of cruelty, 2018.

I wished I could have spoken different words

While anointing their foreheads with the cross—

Something like, “You, my friend, are stardust! Never forget that!”

Or, “You are my beloved son, daughter,

Mother, father, wife, husband, friend!

Anoint your beloved’s forehead

With your burning love!”

This Ash Wednesday, I think of

All those I love, the dead and the living,

From my Mom and Dad, long in the ground,

To my little grandchildren, one brand new.

You are stardust!

I love you!

                        Bob Coughlin

                        Ash Wednesday / February 14, 2018

[By the way, two inspirations for this poem, besides the reality of being there tonight at St. Gabe's--Chet Raymo's writing; and Joni Mitchell's song "Woodstock." Raymo, an astronomer, once wrote that every molecule in our bodies was forged in a star. We are quite literally stardust.]

Poems and the Universe: We Are Stardust

Thanks to Kathy Flora for this image

Well maybe it's not exactly made of poems (I favor green cheese). But we poets sing about the universe. Joni Mitchell has a phrase in her song "Woodstock" that "we are stardust." Chet Raymo, the great writer, astronomer, and physicist, says that we are literally stardust. Every atom in our beings was forged in a star. Every atom of every thing in our world was forged in a star. "We are stardust, we are golden, and we've got to get ourselves back to the Garden" (Joni Mitchell).

The Green Flash at Sunset

Most people have never seen the Green Flash at sunset, but Linda and I have seen it once--a couple years ago on a late summer or early fall day. We had eaten supper at the Firehouse Winery right at lakeside in the town of Geneva-on-the-Lake in Ashtabula County, Ohio. After dinner we climbed down the rickety cast-iron steps to watch the sunset on the small pier jutting out into Lake Erie. The day was cloudless with very low humidity and the sun began setting over the lake in the west. As a joke, we always looked for the "Green Flash" in such situations. I had read about it in one of Chet Raymo's books ("Honey from Stone," I believe). But we had begun to think that this green flash was a myth, and that it was not ever to be seen. And then, for a second or so, we saw it, clear as could be. We felt incredibly lucky, incredibly blessed. It was like the Rainbow Sign in the Old Testament, a sign of hope.

I thought of this because of a little article in yesterday's Plain Dealer (February 2, 2009) in the column by Bill Sones and Rich Sones called "Strange but True." The article quoted lines by Jules Verne regarding the green flash: 'If there is a green in Paradise, it cannot be but of this shade, which most surely is the true green of Hope." The article also mentions web pages of San Diego State University astronomer Andrew T. Young called "An Introduction to Green Flashes" where the physics of this phenomenon is explained (http://mintaka.sdsu.edu/GF/).

The Green Flash is a phenomenon that delights both astrophysicists and poets. It's a sign of Hope.

Poem Inspired by "Honey from Stone"

I have written a few poems that were inspired by Chet Raymo's nonfiction books, Honey from Stone and Climbing Brandon. The following poem was a rearrangement of the words of Meister Eckhart, as seen in Raymo's Honey from Stone:

“Put on Your Jumping Shoes”—Found Poem

(the words of Meister Eckhart, 14th Century mystic,
as found in Chet Raymo’s “Honey from Stone”)

Up noble soul!
Put on your jumping shoes
Which are intellect and love!

The eye by which I see God
Is the same eye
By which he sees me.

My eye and the eye of God are

One eye
One vision
One knowledge &

One love.


Up noble soul!
Put on your jumping shoes
Which are intellect and love!

[Arrangement by Robert M. Coughlin
March 23, 2004]

For more informantion on Mesiter Eckhart, click on this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meister_Eckhart.

Here's another poem, this time inspired by another great book, Thomas Cahill's, How the Irish Saved Civilization:

St. Colmcille’s Illumination

In medieval Ireland
The miraculous happened every day:

St. Colmcille loved books so much
He “borrowed” his master’s illuminated psalter,
And in the dark began to copy it
By hand, ink against vellum.

Starlight, moonlight, and the
Five fingers of the saint’s left hand glowed--

Illuminating his right hand as he copied down,
In his beautiful Irish hand,
The precious psalms.

Brought before King Diarmait
For this little indiscretion, the King ruled:
“To every cow her calf . . .

To every book its copy."

Robert M. Coughlin
April 4, 2008

Chet Raymo and "Science Musings"

One of the world's great geniuses, and American National Treasure, is the scientist, teacher, and writer Chet Raymo. Chet has written two of my favorite books: Climbing Brandon: Science and Faith on Ireland's Holy Mountain; and Honey from Stone: A Naturalist's Search for God. For desciptions of all sixteen of his books, check this link: http://www.sciencemusings.com/books/ . Both of these books are set in Ireland (Raymo has a home on the Dingle Peninsula, the Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking) area of County Kerry, Ireland). Chet Raymo has such a broad learning, you wonder how a human being in one lifetime could acquire such knowledge and wisdom. He combines the mind of a physicist-astronomer with the heart of a poet and a spirit aching for God.

Besides Chet Raymo's wonderful books, he writes columns under the title of "Science Musings" (http://www.sciencemusings.com/about/) and has a related blog at http://www.sciencemusings.com/blog/ .

Here is a brief description of Chet Raymo from his "Science Musings" website:

About Chet Raymo

Chet Raymo is Professor Emeritus at Stonehill College in North Easton, Massachusetts. He is the author of twelve books on science and nature, including Skeptics and True Believers, An Intimate Look At the Night Sky, The Path: A One-Mile Walk Through the Universe, and most recently Walking Zero: Discovering Cosmic Space and Time Along the Prime Meridian. His work has been widely anthologized, including in the Norton Book of Nature Writing and annual editions of Best American Science and Nature Writing. He is a winner of a 1998 Lannan Literary Award for his nonfiction work, and the subject of a biographical essay in American Nature Writers. Raymo has authored three novels: In the Falcon's Claw, Valentine, and The Dork of Cork, which was made into a major film.

Here is a link to the Wikipedia entry on Chet Raymo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chet_Raymo

I would love to meet Chet Raymo some day. He has certainly inspired me to climb Mt. Brandon, one of Ireland's great holy mountains--one of these days! I'm proud that he has degrees from my alma mater, the University of Notre Dame.

I've written some poems inspired by Climbing Brandon and Honey from Stone and will post them at some future date.