Rebel Girl's Poetry Corner: "peace comes dropping slow"

At some moments, Rebel Girl feels like she must have done something right. For some summers, high in the Sierra, she has listened to Galway Kinnell recite this Yeats poem and it is as if Yeats himself is in the small room with the dark wooden walls, crowded with poets. He isn't, of course, his words are though and almost chanted or sung in the company of people who recite them with eyes closed or nearly so, and that is close enough, that is closer than she ever imagined she'd be to anything that felt like that.

A few years back Rebel Girl read a story in the NY Times about how Kinnell showed up when Stanley Kunitz was in the hopsital and recited this Yeats' "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." Everyone thought that Kunitz, then 97 or 98, was dying, but he didn't - he lived to go back home and garden and write and read for a couple more years.

Last week, someone out there in the blogosphere requested some Yeats, so here it is, for you, anonymous one, and for Rebel Girl's friend, who has been struggling mightily this last year and half with cancer and is finally home now and forever, where his peace, she hopes, is dropping slow, with friends and family in Echo Park. Soon, she knows, her friend will arise and go. Yeats wrote this poem after reading Thoreau. The "purple glow" is the heather. He was 23.

THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear the water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

Quaker oaths

•.....Gosh, I remember having to sign a "loyalty oath" back in the late 70s when I worked for UC. Most of us took great offense to that.
....."What if we don't sign?"
....."Then you don't work."
....."Oh."
.....We signed.
....."Waddya gonna do?" we said.

From the San Francisco Chronicle: Pacifist Cal State teacher gets job back:

.....A Cal State East Bay math teacher and practicing Quaker who was fired for refusing to sign a state-required loyalty oath got her job back this week, with an apology from the university and a clarification that the oath does not require employees to take up arms in violation of their religious beliefs.
....."It's the best possible outcome," said Marianne Kearney-Brown, 50, a graduate student in mathematics who was teaching a remedial class for undergraduates. "My concerns have been addressed."
.....As a Quaker, Kearney-Brown is committed to nonviolence and was unwilling to sign the state oath of allegiance that required her to "swear (or affirm)" that she would "support and defend" the U.S. and California constitutions "against all enemies, foreign and domestic." She tried inserting the word "nonviolently" in front of the word "support," but was told by university officials that altering the oath was unacceptable.
.....…In a grievance hearing Thursday conducted in a telephone conference call, an attorney for the California State University chancellor's office presented Kearney-Brown with a statement saying in part, "Signing the oath does not carry with it any obligation or requirement that public employees bear arms or otherwise engage in violence."
.....With that statement stapled to the loyalty oath, and a promise by the university to present the clarifying language to other new employees, Kearney-Brown said Friday that she felt comfortable signing the form and returning to work.
....."We're very happy with the results," said Clara Potes-Fellow, a spokeswoman for the CSU chancellor's office. "The university would very much like her to be an employee. ... We were acting in good faith, and we wanted to resolve the situation in a positive way."….

College Republicans: making the world safe for louts & racists?

• From yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle: S.F. State GOP group wins free-speech case:

.....To the relief of a campus Republican group, the 417,000 students at California State University's 23 institutions no longer face the possibility of discipline for failing to be civil to one another.
.....The change was part of a settlement approved by a federal magistrate in Oakland this week in a lawsuit by the San Francisco State College Republicans, whose members were subjected to a disciplinary hearing after some of them stomped on two flags bearing the name of Allah during an anti-terrorism rally in October 2006.
.....The flags represented the militant organizations Hamas and Hezbollah and had "Allah" written on them in Arabic. A student later complained that the College Republicans had engaged in "actions of incivility" and had tried to incite violence and create a hostile environment.
.....A panel of students, faculty and staff held a hearing in March 2007 and found no violations of university policy. But the College Republicans and two of their leaders filed suit four months later, challenging the speech and conduct codes that led to the disciplinary proceedings.
.....One line in the policy manual that applies to all 23 campuses says students are expected to be civil to one another. University officials said the manual didn't set disciplinary standards or authorize punishment for incivility, but U.S. Magistrate Wayne Brazil said the Republican group at San Francisco State had been investigated for precisely that reason.
.....…This week's settlement includes a systemwide ban on punishment for incivility, along with revisions in the standards for student conduct at San Francisco State.
.....…[T]he university agreed to pay $100 each to the College Republicans and two of its leaders, and $41,500 in fees to their lawyers.
.....The settlement is one of a series of victories won by conservative legal groups against college speech codes.
.....…The San Francisco case is "a great victory for free speech," said David Hacker of the Alliance Defense Fund, a lawyer for the College Republicans.
.....State university students, Hacker said, "are now more free to speak on issues that matter to them."
.....Although the civility standard may seem innocuous, he said, "speech codes like this are consistently enforced against Christian and conservative students across the country merely for expressing their beliefs."….

Photo from Golden Gate XPress
(2nd photo from Neandernews.)

"All that makes existence valuable to anyone depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people. Some rules of conduct, therefore, must be imposed—by law in the first place, and by opinion on many things which are not fit subjects for the operation of law." —Mill

Watch what happens when a Republican Presidential Candidate dares to suggest that we are being attacked, not because of what we believe (our freedoms, our values), but because of the nasty things we do (e.g., installing dictators, building military bases, etc.):