The Underworld
by Sharon Bryan

When I lived in the foothills
birds flocked to the feeder:

house finches, goldfinches,
skyblue lazuli buntings,

impeccably dressed chickadees,
sparrows in work clothes, even

hummingbirds fastforwarding
through the trees. Some of them

disappeared after a week, headed
north, I thought, with the sun.

But the first cool day
they were back, then gone,

then back, more reliable
than weathermen, and I realized

they hadn't gone north at all,
but up the mountain, as invisible

to me as if they had flown
a thousand miles, yet in reality

just out of sight, out of reach—
maybe at the end of our lives

the world lifts that slightly
away from us, and returns once

or twice to see if we've refilled
the feeder, if we still remember it,

or if we've taken leave
of our senses altogether.


Sharon Bryan, "The Underworld" from Sharp Stars. © 2009 by Sharon Bryan. Used with permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of BOA Editions Ltd., boaeditions.org (buy now) 

It's the birthday of playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht (books by this author), born in Augsburg, Germany (1898). In 1922, he won a drama prize for his first two expressionist plays, Drums in the Night and Baal, and followed those with Man is Man (1926). Brecht was a Marxist, and he regarded his plays as social experiments, requiring detachment from his audience, not emotional involvement. His theory of "epic theatre" asks the audience to acknowledge the stage as a stage, the actors as actors, and not some make-believe world of real people.

With Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Brecht sought asylum in Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, journeyed across Russia and Persia, and, in 1941, settled in Hollywood. In Germany, his books were burned and his citizenship was withdrawn. It was during this period that he wrote most of his major essays, his poetry, and his great plays, including Mother Courage (1941), The Good Woman of Setzuan (1943), and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1948).

It's the birthday of the man who wrote Doctor Zhivago (1957), Boris Pasternak (books by this author), born in Moscow (1890). His father was a painter and his mother was a famous pianist, and they encouraged his love of literature from a young age. He spent hours alone in his bedroom reading the classics of Russian literature — Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Pushkin.

His first two books were collections of poetry, A Twin in the Clouds (1914) and Over the Barriers (1917). After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, he decided that prose could better address the nation's problems, and so he started writing fiction. In the early '30s, he began work on his masterpiece, Doctor Zhivago, an epic novel that follows the lives of more than 60 characters through the first half of 20th-century Russia. He wrote, "I always dreamt of a novel in which, as in an explosion, I would erupt with all the wonderful things I saw and understood in this world."

He finally finished it in 1955 and smuggled it out of the Soviet Union to a publisher in Italy. Pasternak said at the time that he knew he was signing his own death warrant, but he felt he had to go through with it. The novel came out in 1957. It was immediately banned in the Soviet Union, but it became an international best-seller, selling seven million copies worldwide. The next year, Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, but he was forced to refuse it. He spent the last two years of his life living in a writers' colony, satisfied with the knowledge that his novel had been published, even if he couldn't see a printed copy. He died in 1960. In 1989, his son finally accepted the Nobel Prize on his behalf.

On this date in 1846, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — also known as the Mormons — left Illinois for the West. Their journey had begun in New York, where Joseph Smith reported that he had been visited by an angel named Moroni in 1823. Moroni had directed him to a buried cache of gold plates, on which were written the history of the Israelites. He retrieved these, and translated them with the help of two seer stones that were with them, and so wrote the Book of Mormon, on which he based a new sect of Christianity.

Smith and his followers moved to Kirtland, Ohio, in 1831, and later to Jackson County, Missouri. They were expelled from Missouri by the settlers there, and moved on again, this time to Commerce, Illinois. There they had founded their "New Zion," a town they named Nauvoo. Smith and the Mormons presented themselves to the locals as refugees and oppressed minorities, but it wasn't long before they ran into trouble with those that distrusted their views on polygamy and other matters. Smith petitioned Congress to make Nauvoo an independent territory. Then he declared martial law and named himself king of a theocracy. The governor ordered his arrest, but before he could go to trial, a mob broke into the jail and shot him to death in June 1844.

The Church's new leader, Brigham Young, believed that the saints would never be accepted in the United States, and he set his sights on the Southwest, which was at that time still part of Mexico. He had originally planned to leave Nauvoo later in the spring, but the continued strife with the surrounding communities, coupled with the rumor that federal troops were headed their way, motivated him to leave earlier. Twenty-five men were appointed to lead about a hundred families each on the journey westward from Illinois, across Iowa, to Winter Quarters, Nebraska. From there, they would cross the Rocky Mountains. Young had no fixed destination in mind; he believed that God would tell him when he had arrived. Young intended the migration to occur in several stages, with "camps" throughout Iowa, and he sent scouts ahead to dig wells and plant some crops to sustain the travelers on their journey. Conditions were rough: bad roads, harsh winter weather, and diseases like tuberculosis, typhoid, cholera, and "black scurvy" discouraged many families, most of which returned to Nauvoo. But by the autumn of 1846, some 12,000 Mormons were making their temporary home in Winter Quarters.

While in Nebraska, Young did his research. He talked to any trappers or traders passing through Winter Quarters and found out all he could about the West. Mountain man Jim Bridger was particularly enthusiastic about the Great Basin area in what is now Utah. Young organized a vanguard to break the trail through the Rockies and report back on the conditions they found. As before, they would plant crops and build basic infrastructure along their way for the benefit of the pioneers that would follow. The first wagon train left Winter Quarters in April 1847, and the first vanguard reached the Salt Lake Valley that July. One of the scouts wrote, "We could not refrain from a shout of joy, which almost involuntarily escaped from our lips the moment this grand and lovely scenery was within our view." Young himself first glimpsed the valley three days later, and said, "This is the right place." Within a week, he had preliminary plans for the layout of a city, and had chosen a location on which to build a new temple. But the goal of escaping to Mexico to get away from American interference was only briefly met; Utah became a U.S. territory in February 1848. For his role in the exodus of the Latter-day Saints, Brigham Young is sometimes called "the American Moses."

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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