Father Daniel Berrigan

[really]

Poet, priest and social activist, Daniel Berrigan was born May 9, 1921, in Two Harbors, Minnesota, to a devout German Catholic family. His father, a railroad engineer, expected "nothing less than perfection" from Daniel and his five brothers. Daniel entered the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in 1939 and was ordained a Catholic priest in 1952. Berrigan once wrote that he became a Jesuit because "they had a revolutionary history."
Remaining true to that history, Berrigan quickly became and "unsettler," leaving his mark on Church and country in his fight against violence and for peace. "Peace is something that has to be done," Berrigan once remarked, "with your heart and your hands like love." Berrigan was a leader of the religious opposition to the war in Vietnam. In 1968, Daniel, his brother Philip and seven others were arrested in Cantonsville, Maryland for burning draft files with homemade napalm in opposition to the war. "The Cantonville Nine" received international attention for their protest, inspiring Berrigan to write what became a successful play about the trial. In 1980, Berrigan and others (including Philip) entered the G.E. nuclear weapons manufacturing plant and hammered on an unarmed nuclear nosecone, symbolically "beating swords into ploughshares." Berrigan has been arrested hundreds of times for his acts of civil disobedience against preparations for war.
Berrigan is a prolific writer--publishing fifty books to date which include prose, poetry, and drama. He is perhaps best known for his poetry. His first volume of poetry, Time without numbers, published at the suggestion of poet Marianne Moore and later nominated for the National Book Award, was awarded the prestigious Lamont Prize for Poetry form the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Many of his poems have been composed from jail cells, safe houses and locations around the world, including Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Rabbi Abraham Heschel and Buddhist leader Thich Nhat Hahn. Actor Martin Sheen wrote, "Mother Teresa drove me back to Catholicism, but Daniel Berrigan keeps me there." Yet, Berrigan has as many critics as he has supporters. Although he is hailed by many as a pacifist and a prophet, he has been labeled a "fanatic," a "terrorist" and a "misguided anarchist."---------Alan Kaufman

I took Brit Boi Gee's lead with praising certain poets. I like this one. Here's an example why:

Georgetown Poems (7)
The Trouble With Our State

The trouble with our state
was not civil disobedience
which in any case was hesitant and rare

Civil disobedience was rare as kidney stone
No, rarer, it was disappearing like immigrants' disease

You've heard of a war on cancer?
There is no war like the plague of media
There is no war like routine
There is no war like 3 square meals
There is no war like a prevailing wind

It blows softly; whispers
don't rock the boat!
the sails obey, the ship of state rolls on.

The trouble with our state
--we learned it only afterward
when the dead resembled the living who resembled the dead
and civil virtue shone like paint on tin
and tin citizens and tin soldiers marched to the common whip

---our trouble
the trouble with our state
with our state of soul
our state of seige--
was
Civil
obedience

[InTheStars]

His style seems nice...I might check him out. Thanks man.