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My name is Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, and writing and listening to poetry has been a way to understand life. In my younger days, I had so many wonderful experiences with poetry. I remember sitting in a living room in Los Angeles where Maya Angelou barely known at the time was sharing her poetry. I remember sitting with my sister in our shared bedroom, performing for each other the poetry of Nikki Giovanni and Langston Hughes. And I remember sneaking to listen to my album by the last poets. I remember Gil Scott Heron singing his sad poetry, much like the poems of Sylvia Plath, or Robert Bly. And I remember the sun coming in, and a poem settling inside me and a feeling that their poetry could be a way of life.

In this episode, I share with you a poem by Abel miracle, who died in 1986. He is not known as a poet as much as his poetry became the mantra for the legendary Billie Holiday, the greatest jazz singer of our times. Every time Billie Holiday song Strange Fruit she was arrested because the poem, the song, the lyrics, put a spotlight on the torture of the times.

Strange Fruit by Abel Meeropol

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

Meeropol, a Jewish family man from the Bronx of New York turns the difficult into poetry. His pen name, Louis Allan were the names of his children who were still born a tragedy he lived with. He then raised the sons of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were executed after being accused of espionage with communist Soviet Union. All this to say Meeropol knew deep pain and this is what I love about poetry. We can be stilled by it as it lends itself to reflection on the rawness of life that we find hard to take in.

The fruit hanging on the trees, in the segregated south of this country, where black bodies were not only bodies but people became the fruit of hatred, rooted in the earth, rooted in the tree of life. Black bodies, who were people became bitter crop, became something other than human. The poem is both horrifying and somber. A quiet event that takes place in nature, where trees grow. It is a dark poem that sheds light on the difficult. The hard, the unimaginable pouring out in verse. Sung are unsung. It causes reflection. These bodies once alive, once vibrant, succulent, beautiful fruit prematurely ripen at the hands of those who did not know how precious and rare the fruit was. And this is what makes it poetry. There is still the scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh. In the midst of the horror, the sweet exist. This is life as poetry.

This is life in its rhythm that can make us dance or make us cry. We’re not left to imagine lynching on our own in this poem, just in case we shut it out before the full view. Meeropol brings it close to our face, just as it hit him. Billie Holiday repeats it over and over in song. Marcus Miller a jazz musician renders the songs pain through the voice of a bass clarinet. Lest we forget, as lynching has not been outlawed in this country to this day.

The use of the crow in this poem is not to be missed. Often seen as a dark bad omen, the crow is an important symbol of transformation and change. Being between two worlds—life and death—the transition into something other than being human. The crow is a watchful creature, magical and protective creature, a shapeshifter in the poem. The crow is fed in the death of the lynched and takes the flesh perhaps as a sacrifice, perhaps as a prayer into the sky, into the heavens into another realm.

While there is death in the poem, there is life. And like jazz, the poem has a life of its own. Its energy, its force continues as a long note in risks, crescendos and in a somber clarinet The poem lives as strong as the day it was born. It will never become Strange Fruit. This poem will never hang off a tree and die because it is an eternal mourning song, a dirge for the dead for those wrongful deaths throughout time and it is a call to awaken those of us who are still alive

Strange Fruit by Abel Meeropo

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop

You have been listening to all life is poetry. The poem Strange Fruit was sourced from the essay, The Strange Story of the Man behind Strange Fruit by Elizabeth Blair of NPR. For further information, please sign up for my newsletter at Zenju.org

It’s dark. The wake-up bell rings for morning meditation in the zendo. Feet hang out the side of the bed. The time has come to do the mundane— wash the face, brush the teeth. The bath in the hot springs will come in the afternoon before tea.

For now, it is morning. The birds crowd on branches to sing near the hall of silence. Meditation has already met me at the door and has entered my body. I breathe slow. Stillness, a must to enter darkness. My feet erase the footprints of yesterday. A humble daughter of former slaves, I have come to a practice I know the old Africans, sold and bought, understood. They knew the importance of silence, of listening for guidance in a life filled with hardship. The gateway to peace came to those who did not give up, those who did not give in to their imposed circumstances. So, I walked the cold floors of the zendo (meditation hall). No one knows I am being escorted by ancestors to my seat. I understand this is where they have brought me to see them, to see myself, to see life.

There is no teacher in the room, as of yet, because the teachings begin with walking and then a bow. Not the bowing of submission but that of recognizing and acknowledging life. Bowing is the silent language of peace. It speaks to the person who is taking their seat with me. It says, we will sit alongside each other with nothing of the world to do, except breathing in the way humans have done long before our birth, long before ancestors. When we bow together, it says let’s begin again, seeing only what we see of each other without looking or knowing each other. As we breathe, we are in a profound moment of stillness, inside a peace we could have never conjured on our own.

An unprescribed, non-religious Zen is an invitation to a ceremony. We know we are to bring ourselves. But we come asking, is there anything else I must bring? Nothing. What must I do? Nothing but be alive. It is a ceremony that mimics life, the breathing of deer, the trekking of bears, the aging of cedar trees, or the dying of eagles. There is no healing to be done by any of the chanting unless you are fortunate enough, in the middle of a chant, to experience the shallow breath of deer, the weary trek of  hungry bears, the sudden illness of cedar trees, or the decline of eagles. You wake up without the superiority of being human; you wake up in the middle of chanting, in the middle of life.

Our bravery to join the ceremony searching for peace inevitably leads to heart-wrenching and heart-opening. Is it possible to return from the grace, terror, sorrow, and beauty of sitting with nothing? If we let it, the silence shakes us. Still, we accepted the invitation to sit because we are daredevils willing to die in the silence if we must in order to live again.  We are thrilled by the possibilities and dangers of silence. We experience silence removing shields so that the earth can speak out loud or whisper in our ears. The danger is that deep silence leaves everything out — all of what you know and think you have.

Imagine being barefoot when the rising tides of life hit like a tsunami in the dark. There will be no need to pull shoes off your feet when you are drowning in your seat with how much of life hurts or how you have no solutions that last longer than a year. The teacher or teachings may come, not to deliver you from your suffering, but to walk with you to the gate of tranquility which is a long walk out into the middle of the ocean, which is to say, you will be walked to the middle of your vast life without drowning. Expect to arrive still seated, older, much older than you were when you first took a seat.

Ah! A few more deep breaths to settle upon bones that have reshaped themselves over the years. One kind of fly eats at the mucous of the eyes, another, bites at the skin, and still another one finds a home in the crevices of ears. The only way to survive torture is to sing, if only in your head. The only protection is nothingness. Nothingness does not hurt.

The bells bring tears — not of sorrow. They are tears of utter love. In-love with radiant darkness and the greater mystery of being. The big bell in the hallway causes the howling coyotes on the hill to yelp. Mating rabbits to scatter. Feet to move in place. Voices hushed. Heads bowed down. Everything is calling in silence, even justice calls us to the quiet so that we can hear with clarity what it has to say.

On the last bell ringing and drumming, we sing the song of liberation. It is not a liberation from what traps us, not liberation from life–but liberation to life– all of it. Free to come to life, to be in it and see it. Liberation is the freedom to awaken where our feet are planted. Awakening is freedom that cannot be given, legislated and then taken away. Liberation that comes with fear that we might not make it is not liberation. In awakening we can trust that our actions will not lead us to our demise. Awakened freedom is living out what we expect of others. What do I choose for my life? Who am I waiting for to give me whatever? Am I enough to bring a freedom of awakening? When asking am I enough, I am not promoting much-needed emotional recovery from the experience of inferiority or unworthiness. I am asking am I, are we, free enough to awaken and then take action in life that might disrupt everything old and unnecessary? Are we free enough to abandon any sense of ourselves being better than anyone else? Are we free enough to resist with love?

Sitting in the open meadow of the zendo I look back at the gate entered. Zen means nothing in itself and there is nothing in this meadow — only what is brought to it. We bring the voices of unabashed pride and ego-driven wondrousness, an idea of Zen, hopes, and the need to not suffer from our own ignorance. And thank goodness this human life can never be known, so that we can’t manipulate it to our own small desires or our ideas of what it should be.

Who is it that crawls through windows? It is the morning dawn. She parts the sea of darkness so that the center of light within it is revealed. The bells ring and the wooden drum knocks calling out ignorance.

The earth speaks silence. It breathes nothing but time and space. Make anything of breathing and you’ll wake in the middle of the dive.

Zenju Earthlyn Manuel – 2019