JULIE
Comes by with a loaf
Honey date bread from oven
during Lenten fast
Jim Bodeen
2 April 2025
Photo of J. R.’s bread by Karen Bodeen
CORAZÓN MADURO
CORAZÓN MADURO*
Because I translate
Machado’s poem
instead of entering
I fail the afternoon
Jim Bodeen
16 March 2025
*Antonio Machado, “La Noria”
"EL MUNDO ES, UN MOMENTO..."
... el mundo es, un momento
transparente, vacío, ciego, alado
Antonio Machado
Pick up Machado
Late at night when sleep departs
Tender steely yes
Jim Bodeen
14 March 2025
ENCOUNTER AT ROCKY TOP
ENCOUNTER AT ROCKY TOP
It looks to me like
an old real estate sign
advertising houses.
How it got here
on The Walk and Roll Trail
is not a question
my grand daughter and I ask.
She's a photographer with a camera.*
This is the William O Douglass Trail
next to a garbage dump. You can
walk to Mt. Tahoma from here.
We turn this into a proscenium arch
and I smile for my grand-daughter.
The stage, exposed by her vision,
proves to be too small
for the world we’re walking into.
Amid the joy of first flowers,
the grandfather smile disappears.
Jim Bodeen
11 March 2025
*photos by S.M.
WONDROUS ORIGINS
WONDROUS ORIGINS
Renouncing revenge
and to let himself be led
The old man’s bloodwork
Each day about the same time
he turns compost with his spade
Jim Bodeen
11 March 2025
UNDERWATER RAIN
UNDERWATER RAIN
Baskets from your hand
Lazy birds thistle-scatter
Still water’s deep yes
Jim Bodeen
9 March 2025
BIRDS STOPPING BY OUTSIDE OUR WINDOW
BIRDS STOPPING BY OUTSIDE OUR WINDOW
Karen’s breathing dreams me to sleep
and I wake in a crumbling garden,
yes, there’s oatmeal with raisins,
apple and cinnamon—with toast
and strawberry freezer jam
we made together last summer
from Klicker’s strawberries
grown in Walla Walla down the road
Jim Bodeen
8 March 2025
YOU ARTISTS AND YOUR MOUNTAINS
YOU ARTISTS AND YOUR MOUNTAINS
--for m.l.
You paint the emperor’s portrait
in asbestos and glaze
his wine cup with lead
Stillness abides
Too early for grasshoppers
I turn the compost
Jim Bodeen
7 March 2025
AFTER WORDS
Soon after his speech
I drink this glass of milk and
eat 19 cookies
Jim Bodeen
4 March 2025
Storypath/Cuentocamino: : SERMONS FROM THIS WORLD: ENCOUNTERS WITH 'THIS WOR...
Storypath/Cuentocamino: : SERMONS FROM THIS WORLD: ENCOUNTERS WITH 'THIS WOR...: Sermons from this World SERMONS FROM THIS WORLD DURING THE TIME OF CRISIS IN THE UNITED STATES OF...
LET ME SEE IF I CAN SAY IT FOR MYSELF
LET ME SEE IF I CAN SAY IT FOR MYSELF
My country is in crisis and so am I.
Blessed by family, I am surrounded by books and art.
Karen and I have known each other for 60 years.
You met her in the anniversary poem.
Sit with us at table. My son-in-law
made the Gathering sign
and the crosses come from El Salvador,
the ones over this table.
Of the twenty-two sermons in the book,
This World and Beyond, I have written them
into 12 sections. Why 12? There are 12 apostles,
yes. But there are more than 12 apostles
inside these pages. There are 12 steps
in the Alcoholics Anonymous program,
too, aren’t there. There are. And there
are more than 12 alcoholics inside
these pages, too. The poet Lucille Clifton,
who is here, was born with 12 toes.
Twenty-two sermons, 12 sections.
More than one world, too.
May my prayers for these pages
include 22 petitions and one prayer
for each of the 12 sermons.
But there are 22 sermons.
Correct. There are 22 sermons.
There are grandchildren, too.
Beautiful children, children
also in crisis. My grandchildren.
There are poems for the grandchildren here.
The poems for the grandchildren
show them in their beauty,
in the before of what’s coming.
Not all of them are mine.
None of the grandchildren are mine.
All of the grandchildren are here.
Not all of the poems for grandchildren are here.
All of the grandchildren, none of the grandchildren.
This is the part that I can say, Let the poems be written.
This is the part where what can be said
and what can’t be said is said like this.
When you meet Josh you meet them all.
When you meet Samantha you meet them all.
When you meet Deanna you meet them all.
You meet them all when you meet Katie.
Some of this is about saying what can’t be said.
It is beyond my understanding to contemplate
a world of children who do not have poems
written for them. It is that simple.
The man who wrote these twenty-two sermons
during the years 1936-1950, Rudolf Bultmann,
found a way through crisis. That this book
has come into my hands at this time,
is a blessing for one such as me,
one who was given the beyond
as a country boy at a young age.
A man living in crisis, a crisis
he didn’t always recognize.
A man who knew he could never
get there on his own.
A man whose country is in crisis.
And all these children. All of these
grandchildren. They’re all his.
None of them are his.
EIGHT DECADES AFTER HIS MARBURG SERMONS, 1936-1950, TO RUDOLF BULTMANN FROM YAKIMA
EIGHT DECADES AFTER HIS MARBURG SERMONS, 1936-1950
FROM YAKIMA, WASHINGTON STATE, DURING FEBRUARY, 2025
“Our church has withheld a good deal
of criticism and scholarship from the laity
and must rapidly make up for what has been missed,
if it does not want to atone for this in a painful way.”
Rudolf Bultmann: A Biography, Hammann Konrad, p. 101
When I found this kernel of nourishment,
I photographed it, but in my haste,
did not record the source.
The sentence alone fed me.
It became the image on my post card.
poems were written and mailed. Quickly
I ran out of friends I could safely
send them to, and then there were those
who I found it difficult to speak to,
except--
when I had this to say to them.
This is more important today than before.
I relish this post card in the mail,
with short poems on the back,
using a special commemorative stamp
with each one. The final step
involves getting a hand cancellation
from the postal clerk before mailing.
I’m attaching a rare James Baldwin stamp
on your card, mailing it to the White House
in Washington, D.C.
Others,
well, for them, what Rilke said,
Professor Bultmann, Take a step out.
Love, Jim
14-18 February 2025
CODA TO BULTMANN SEQUENCE
CODA
Pulpit as silent
as the church mouse
Narthex after worship
all about cookies
Nobody recites the poems of William Blake
or the songs of Kris Kristofferson
To see a world in a grain of sand
and a heaven in a wild flower
hold infinity in the palm of your hand
and eternity in an hour
I turned 21 in Panama
working with the medics
at the government hospital
in the Canal Zone—Gorgas
its name. GI. I learned how
to conjugate verbs
in high school Spanish
and some Panamanians
thought I was Castilian
right out of Madrid.
There weren’t many
and mostly they were
with Gis in bars
singing Guantanamera
Growing up in rural North Dakota
near the Canadian border,
Jesus on a flannel board
mounted on a tripod
in a boat on water
taking the fishermen
deeper than they were
comfortable going,
Jesus with David,
John the Baptist,
Abraham, Jacob, Joseph
the coat of many colors
I was down for that
all of them so good together
Just months before, fall of 65,
lost from Karen in New Orleans,
failing even with literature
when Hurricane Betsy hit
closing the university of Ponchartrain,
Dylan singing, Something is happening
and you don’t know what it is,
from Highway 61, walking away
from those classes,...do you, Mr. Jones?
How to become a soldier in New Orleans.
What must be done to get back to Karen.
The chaplain in Basic Training
who put me with the medics
telling me, We believe in this war.
Enrolled in a poetry class
at the Canal Zone college
dressed in Class As,
wearing our cunt caps
and walk into that room
full of 18-year old red lip-sticked
dependents of officers
who moved away from me
when I sat down. We read
Prufrock,….would I be good?
And memorized 40 lines
of immortality.
That’s some catch, that Catch-22,
Yosarian said. It’s the best there is,
agreed Doc Daneeka
After Prufrock, Sunday Morning
by Wallace Stevens and I memorized
great chunks of that, Complacencies
of the peignoir, and late coffee and oranges
in a sunny chair...I learned how
to pronounce peignoir, see through
sheer, the negligee itself
floating feathers, and the teacher
whose name I do not know
to this day talking how Sunday
worship’s become common place
next to Sunday morning, and more lines
from other poems, Call the roller
of big cigars, the muscular one,
and bid him pitch…
I could have stayed in Panama
and finished my tour, but
I had to go to Viet Nam
to get back to Karen—again--
A career soldier, Tom Pendergrass,
West Texas Irish Baptist,
loved Hemingway, became my guide.
We drove the Panama-American Highway
in his VW to San Antonio not knowing
about the war in Central America.
I saw Oaxaca for the first time
from the south.
I spent a month with Karen
in Seattle, a buck sergeant now,
on my way to Viet Nam, supposedly
I knew all there was to know
about evacuation. This was
August, 1967.
The question I would ask
people for the rest of my life:
Where were you in 1968?
85th Evacuation Hospital, Qui Nhon.
When the Non Com said,
We’re going North, I told him
my orders were to stay in Cam Ranh Bay,
he says to me, Get your ass
on that fucking truck, soldier.
●
You might not believe this,
but I took my R&R and went skiing in Japan.
Took the luxury train out of Tokyo north
to the mountains close to where Bashō
walked, making his journey to the narrow north.
Hot springs, cotton robes, powder snow.
Flying back into Saigon,
Ho Chi Minh City today, the plane
couldn’t land. Tan San Nhut under
attack. Tet. 1968. Days later
when we got back to the 85th
it was non-stop triage for three months.
We evacuated 700 Gis a month
until Johnson stopped the bombing.
King is shot 8 May
in Memphis. In my letter
to Karen on the 9th
I’m listening
to the black medics
saying, And this time
they’ll send us
back to the United States.
I came home in August, 1968.
Turned 23 in the Nam.
I’m renting violins in a music store
and two weeks later, enrolled
in an evening drama course
at the community college.
That first class
the drama teacher says,
Jim, let’s go outside for a minute.
I’m going to show you
how to walk into a room.
Karen and I got married in November.
The 23d. Kennedy, the president,
was killed on the 23d, right? 1963.
Right after Karen and I graduated.
I’m back in school. Full time.
GI Bill.
And the beer I had for breakfast
wasn’t bad, so I had one more for dessert.
Kris Kristofferson singing.
I’m older. The 18-year olds
ask me two questions,
Did I kill any babies?
Did I have any dope?
Back in a poetry class.
Reading Wallace Stevens again.
Kristofferson had just written that song,
Sunday Morning Coming Down.
That’s what I’m listening to.
I’m in a master’s program now.
Blake and Wordsworth.
Robin Redbreast in a cage
Puts all Heaven in a rage.
I write my paper on those two
Sunday mornings--
Stevens’ and Kristofferson’s
I get all the way to Jesus
but the door doesn’t open.
That door will open too, later.
That door to another existence.
It opens to the Black Church.
It goes through El Salvador.
It rides ICE flights.
Some of that better be here already,
why I read these sermons.
Rudolf Bultmann opens that story.
If you don’t think Bultmann’s important,
you might need a bigger gospel.
Jim Bodeen
11-13 February 2025
XII. THAT OTHER WORLD IS THIS ONE--RUDOLF BULTMANN
XII. THAT OTHER WORLD IS THIS ONE—RUDOLF BULTMANN
●
RUNNING BACK AGAIN, MORE THAN WORDPLAY,
MAGIC ON FABRIC, EFFIE, LUKE 9:36, JOHN 3: 16
for Rex DeLoney, again
On the wall in the living room
beneath the butterscotch chair
where I sit, Rosie Lee Tompkins,
African-American quilter,
from a painting, looks down
at me, every morning, like this,
her luminous eyes, woke open
and framed by her kerchief,
tied in a knot at back, looking
at me, as I’ve said, and speaking too,
saying, God gave me these colors
to see. Saying, The pool
is giving birth to itself all the time.
It is February, African-American
history month. This painting,
by a friend, Rex DeLoney,
colorist, commissioned by me
for my wife, who is also a quilter.
Rex, a friend, also gave me his painting
of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme
when I left the classroom. Mss. Tompkins,
born in 1936, began with pillow cases.
She is famous now. Her imaginative
portrayals of God and freedom,
quote scripture. Her mother’s here,
also quilting, and the cross to the left
of her face (Magic Johnson’s on it),
which she had to cross through
enabling her to do her magnificence.
Extremely shy, known as Effie,
she called herself in fabric
Rosie Lee Tompkins. If you listen
while looking at these quilted squares
embedded in paint, you will hear
the horn of Ornette Coleman.
You will know the word, Palindrome.
●
ON RUDOLF BULTMANN’S SERMON, 17 JUNE 1945
2 Corinthians 4: 6-11
“For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness’, who has shown in our hearts
to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.
‘But we have this treasure in earthen vessels.”
Rudolf Bultmann
“The spiritual strength of Paul springs from the fact that he lives in two worlds; not only in the visible world of change and decay, of tears and death, that world in which we are, ‘afflicted in every way’ and ‘perplexed’, but also in the invisible world in which there is no fear and no despair.”
Rudolf Bultmann
“What she said next sounded barbed...’I don’t know how you can sleep at night.’ Obama replied, ‘You know what? I don’t really sleep at night. It’s not just that I worry about these kids from El Salvador. I also worry about kids in Sudan, in Yemen, and in other parts of the world. And here’s my problem. We live in a world with nation states. I have borders.’”
Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, Jonathan Blitzer
Last night on the news, They can move you
if they have a bed—and they’re building centers
with 40,000 beds. Call this country as you call me.
Can I turn myself inside out? Transcending
anxiety on my own? It’s June, 1945--
my mother is seven months pregnant with me.
Born 9 August 1945—that day.
Invisible realities. 80 years later, having lived
this life, consuming as no one in the history of mankind
has ever consumed. No one. Not like this.
Physicians desperate, I recommend
putting medicine in the water for all.
What you say at Marburg: Right cannot
be maintained without power.
The world demanding practicality.
This world. Where our church--
ours—hijacks Bonhoeffer.
How does anyone sleep at night, not,
What have we become, but who we are.
How you address June, 1945.
And still you call on the poets.
I say, Thank you, again. Galway wrote
that short poem seeming to channel you:
“Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.”
This world and the beyond,
coming back to you, understanding.
Understanding ourselves, 2025.
Sterling Brown in the 1930s, again,
you were delivering sermons at Marburg
against the strong men, writing to his people,
like you, the two of you, worlds apart,
They taught you religion they disgraced.
To have been in that pew, Professor Bultmann.
To hear you now is to have heard you then.
Empathy won’t take me that far.
Cancel myself, Rilke? Rilke, tan poco,
won’t get me there. You call
for the first question, How,
while in the midst of it all--
Church, Black Church, children
crossed and border-separated.
Crucified children. On the cross with the criminals.
First congregation revisited.
Here among the sacrificed. Say their name.
And still, you call on the poets
from the pew where the poets have fled.
And here, in America, mass deportations.
●
You wrote
that sermon,
finishing
with the psalm,
Psalm 115:
Not to us, Lord, not to us--
La gloria, Señor, no es para nosotros,
No es para nosotros--
giving us then Paul Fleming’s poem,
Be content and know your part.
●
“...our hopes to the world of unseen realities. It is just in so doing that we shall win true inner freedom for the urgent tasks of the present, courage to accomplish the work which in the distress of our days is laid upon us. For then no disillusionment can paralyse our strength; then we have become unassailable. Patience…”
23 June 1946, Rudolf Bultmann, This World and Beyond, Lamentations 3: 22-41
And that sermon sandwiched between two others. One on Guadalupe’s Day, December 12, 1943, on the Beatitudes, asking, “Do we belong to the circle of those to whom these promises apply?” And you single out, the one in particular addressed to your people: Blessed are they who mourn for they shall be comforted. We feel what we cannot see in your words. Strange. Offensive, Bewildered. Frightened, astonished, piercing all humanity to its depths, renunciation. With an attitude of waiting. Suppressed, distorted. Thrust forward by achievement or pose. And then this: “...or whether our waiting for the future is so radical that we renounce all dreams and yet are cheerful in our waiting...true joy is promised to those who wait upon God.”
Jump to the third sermon, following the 17 June 1945 sermon using Paul’s text from II Corinthians, Let light shine out of darkness. Here, the twenty-first of twenty-two sermons in This World and the Beyond, the sermon this study will close with, you turn to Lamentations 3: 22-41. The date is 23 June 1946. “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end.”
You ask in a series of questions: Do we feel the pain and suffering of our people? You say, “...perhaps in our case, the situation is one of irremediable ruin.” And you let the poet in Lamentations have full rein. My eyes flow without ceasing...El Señor es todo lo que tengo...The Lord is my portion.
Again and again we listen from the African-American songbook. Stony the road we trod. How we hear you, Professor Bultmann, citing poems, citing scripture, here, this:
As God shall guide, so will I walk,
resigning all self-will.
And again, Moses only permitted to see God’s back:
As God shall guide, so will I walk,
Though hard and stony be the way
Black church. People of color. La Raza. Difficult truths. Cheap grace again. How far from solidarity, America. Your sermons, Rudolf Bultmann. Your reading of Lamentations. Your reading the poems. Ending this sermon with the toughest love in the toughest time:
What has a living man the right to complain of?
It is his sin that each man should lament.
This one, a long, tough sermon. “Yes and no. The way to God leads not to hell but through hell, or, in Christian terms, through the cross. It leads us not to hopelessness but to a hope which transcends all human hope; and we must silence all human hope, if that divine hope is to dawn for use...For man as he is...This hell we must traverse.”
Jim Bodeen
10-12 February 2025
●
TRIPTYCH TO RUDOLF BULTMANN, TRYING TO SAY SOMETHING OF WHAT HE GIVES ME
XI.
TRIPTYCH TO RUDOLF BULTMANN, TRYING TO SAY
SOMETHING OF WHAT HE GIVES ME
“The Poet who feels that poetry is born from this strange punishment—from the punishment that creates the strange--”
Michael Edwards, “Poetry and Isaiah’s Burning Coal”
This morning, four men at coffee.
Poet, photographer, jeweler.
I no longer know what to call myself.
Between it all. The photographer’s
birthday, 78, the youngest. The jeweler’s
85. Two poems. I took notes on the poems.
Four of us making an odd bunch. Friends
over decades, historical eyes and ears,
listening in a snow storm. Before coffee,
this from my friend Terry, poet friend given
cancer as a retirement gift ten years ago:
Look to the Margins, from Richard Rohr,
priest who runs a center for meditation.
Path of prophets, an essay from Cassidy Hall,
Queering Prophecy. First a word about margins.
Everywhere not geographical—we’re
everywhere. The illuminated margins
of El Salvador: Los Marjinados.
Those who live between railroad tracks
and the street, building casas de carton.
Mi amiga que vive en los marjinados
me envieron café desde esta frontera.
If the prophetic is queer, Cassidy writes,
..roots from 16th Century Scots, when
the word meant things like odd, strange,
transverse, or oblique. Ezekiel ate a scroll.
The poet at coffee reads his poem
celebrataing the birthday of his friend
and the history of photography,
light and dark. There’s a hidden
eye in the jewelry torched by fire--
and our nation queered by an election.
●
“Maybe poetry always begins with such a double
awareness, of sorrow but also of something else: not necessarily of God…”
Michael Edwards “Poetry and Isaiah’s Burning Coal”
El Salvador is always somewhere close to me,
Professor Bultmann. Five decades ago, Stanley Marrow,
Iraqi Jesuit priest, confronts me with my own questions
and brings me the end of the world. At first
I think I can tell others, This is how.
This is how to change your life.
Like Rilke said we must.
This world and the beyond. Right here.
A tiny cross on my dresser before me
where I put my glasses the night before.
I place it around my neck, sitting in the pew.
The Subversive Cross from the small
Lutheran Church in San Salvador.
The cross that went to prison, prisoners
painting the sins of the state on the cross.
Injusticia social, violencia a los derechos
humanos, sea pobre y marjinado.
Descriminación contra la mujer. Hambre.
After decades of failure to show others
Christology in daily walking, God
fed me pupusas, liberating nuns
and a Jesus who walked with the poor.
Obispo Medardo Gómez, Fr.s Jon Sobrino,
Ellacuria and Dean Brackley. I sat
in the pew where Rutilio Grande
gave the Santa Biblia to campesinos.
After the murders of Romero and Ellacuria,
I read the letters Sobrino wrote to Ellacu--
and Obispo Medardo—bishop to the poor,
walked me through barrio-soaked tsunamis,
taking me into his home, telling me how
he told the president to return his cross,
the Subversive Cross, the replica I place
around my neck this morning. All of this,
part of my walk, Medardo promising
I would be given this poem to write--
his great unsaying, the bewildering
unsaid, gift of a simple amen.
All of this written down in a notebook.
A Chinese koan.
●
“If a threshold is meant, we perceive even more clearly the ability
of poetry to open the world for us, to cross
a trembling limit, to penetrate into the otherness of things.”
Michael Edwards, “Poetry and Isaiah’s Burning Coal”
Your sermons open in many ways.
Today I’m looking at your homily from 22 June 1941,
not the news that Germany’s now at war with Russia,
not the text your preaching from, but this calling
for more understanding for spiritual, intellectual life
of our time...the burning questions and struggles—I want
to speak here of American voices who listen deeply
for prophetic presence. Dropping names--
American crisis calling. Calling Bultmann?
You’re part of this, How shall I live with myself?*
Barry Lopez, Gary Snyder.
Terry Tempest Williams, Rebecca Solnit.
So many names caring for our dying planet,
names who speak in the world as you spoke, ones who
mentor and confront. Snyder you could have
known, born in 1930. Trailmaker crossing
into Japan, coming home Buddhist. Lopez
stared into melting glaciers. In our town,
where I sit at coffee with friends, where
I worship, still—unsettled, with my wife,
I ask the pastor to sit with me beside
another cross, on three chairs, one for
her dog, Goldie, trying to talk between
the poem and the pew, the pew and the pulpit,
that between place. She listens.
She lets me. She isn’t afraid of Bultmann
or the poets. Of pastors or pews.
You wouldn’t know Michael Edwards,
of course. He comes later, now.
Poet and Christian. English writing in French,
translated.back to English. I read him now, reading
your sermons, This world and beyond.
P.S. This short thanks—for taking us there, and always, for courage,
for believing in us, the ones in the pews. For words in dangerous times.
●
*In a letter to Karl Barth, Bultmann states, asking, What shall I say to my children?” but consists of the question: How shall I say it to myself? Or rather: How shall I hear it myself? #94 Marburg, 11-15 November 1952. Karl Barth—Rudolf Bultmann Letters, 1922/1966.
Jim Bodeen
3-10 February 2025
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