Why I Urge You to Do What You’re Passionate About


When Rilke travelled through Russia
and studied Saint Francis
and fell in love with the married Salomé
and wrote poems for The Book of...

Hymn to Matter


Blessed be you harsh matter, barren rock; you who yield only
to violence, you who force us to work if we would eat. Blessed
be you, perilous matter, violent sea, untamable...

Blessed Are You Who Bear the Light


Blessed are you
who bear the light
in unbearable times,
who testify
to its endurance
amid the unendurable,
who bear witness

On the Pulse of Morning




A Rock, A River, A Tree
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9nTt2F0Kdc
Hosts to species long since departed,
Marked the mastodon,
The dinosaur, who left dried tokens

A year of loss and chaos draws to a close.

Stories from a thousand cultures remind us that the cosmos is born - and reborn again and again - from chaos.

We have passed the darkest night of...

Gratitude


Gratitude, I am your listening post,
perched on the shoulders of mountains,
in the grasses, in your granite face,



reclining in the long valleys of your body.

Called By The Fire



Called by fire blazing in leaves,
wandering like Aengus into the beauty,
ambling a dappled circle,
tracing the cycle of my life.

Some Girls


Some girls can’t help it; they are lit sparklers,
hot-blooded, half naked in the depths of winter,
tagging moving trains with the bright insignia of their
fury.
I’ve seen...

Returning to Kindness


I am returning to kindness
a place where I am strong in my softness
I will start by kissing all of my scars
and washing them in rain
collecting dust from long journeys...

Kindness


Before you know what kindness really is
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCkjSUb7K5o
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What...

Legacies


her grandmother called her from the playground
“yes, ma’am”
“i want chu to learn how to make rolls” said the old
woman proudly
but the little girl didn’t want...

Willing

Let me listen.
Let me not know what to say.
Let me receive the world
as it slurs and shrieks,
hums and whispers,
speaks and bleats.
Let me lean ever closer in.
There are walls I...

Threshold

It has happened.
You thought you had some control
of your life
and that you were in a place
you understood
in a time that moved
from a past you knew
to a future that followed

Anthem


The birds they sang at the break of day
"Start again", I heard them say:
Don't dwell on what has passed away
or what is yet to be.


Ah, the wars they will be fought again,

A New National Anthem




The truth is, I’ve never cared for the National
Anthem. If you think about it, it’s not a good
song. Too high for most of us with “the rockets’
red glare” and then...

It Is I Who Must Begin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvCjA8qRhwM


It is I who must begin.

Once I begin, once I try —

here and now,

Only A Pawn In Their Game

A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers’ blood
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCjGSbm2LFc
A finger fired the trigger to his name
A handle hid out in the...

Hello, How Are You?


Tears without knowing why
Grief, deep grief for all the dark
the shadow side of humankind that
ends up spewing their disbeliefs on
my being and the being of my beloveds

One


The mosquito is so small
it takes almost nothing to ruin it.
Each leaf, the same.
And the black ant, hurrying.
So many lives, so many fortunes!
Every morning, I walk softly and with...

Concurrence



Each day's terror, almost
a form of boredom - madmen
at the wheel and
stepping on the gas and
the brakes no good -
and each day one,

This Moment


At this moment of cruel uncertainty
Planet Earth seems pretty steady
In its turning and circling
Gifting our eyes
With the illusion of the sun rising
And later on descending...

Because Of You




Because of you,
when I awoke I left my bed earlier than usual.
There is so much to say hello to and wish a good morning.
Because of you
I had cereal, blueberries...

Black 101


“How are you afraid of a man
running away from you?”
-Toni Morrison


Fear is a magnetizer.
It changes the polarity of black bodies.

Quarantine, 1918


There were towns
that knew about the flu before
it arrived; they had time to imagine the germs
on a stranger’s skirts, to see how death
could be sealed in an envelope,
how...

Oceans


I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.


And nothing
happens!

The Rhythm of Each


I think each comfort we manage-
each holding in the night, each opening
of a wound, each closing of a wound, each
pulling of a splinter or razored word, each
fever...

Dust in the Wind
Recalled During Times of Covid 19


(with gratitude to Ken Burns)




To Amarillo came the initial

Hospital Chaplain


In the other room,
that only masked nurses and doctors can enter,
he hears with the ears of his heart the last breaths of the dying.
The family, in the emptiness of the...

Pandemic


What if you thought of it
as the Jews consider the Sabbath—
the most sacred of times?
Cease from travel.
Cease from buying and selling.
Give up, just for now,
on trying to make...

Small Kindnesses


I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a...

The Weighing


The heart’s reasons
seen clearly,
even the hardest
will carry
its whip-marks and sadness
and must be forgiven.

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Kindergarten Justice

an anvil sits on the heart of America
her breath labored through a mouth wide open
in a frozen scream of boundless rage for justice


and we, blinded by tears, implore...

Not for Him the Fiery Lake of the False Prophet


"When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best.... They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists."
-  Donald...

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What If


What if you were an angel,
called to earth to do your part?

Not Unaware

The community’s time capsule resides beneath the parched and nearly
barren earth. A forlorn coffee can size relic coffin.

Above ground, a dusty bronze plaque specifies the...

The Dream

to Martin Luther King Jr.

"I have a dream," he said,
the dream, fitted to his times,
that his master the Nazarene
two-thousand years ago amplified
from the ancient...

Another Happy New Year


The party's done, the plastic cups used up -
the ones we never know whether to wash or throw away -
thus
ambivalence follows us
into the new year
starting with the...

Could this be the year?


Could this be the year the troops come home
from every battle every land everywhere -
home to love healing peace?

Could this be the year we build more homes than...

i believe

in myself
light rain
sudden storms
the moon
polenta and sausage
good sex
red sunsets
a perfect martini

Blessings for the Tomb, the Womb, the Cocoon
(the Liminal Spaces, all)


May you surrender to the sacred gravity of your grief and loss

May you give honor and homage to that which has fallen...

The Way It Is

There is a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn't change.
People wonder about what things you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread....

Awakened

In advanced age, my health worsening,
I woke up in the middle of the night
and experienced a feeling of happiness
so intense and perfect that in all my life
I had only felt its...

American Song

I'm in sweatpants, pouring boiling water
over grounds that smell of soil
and autumn ferment.
The radio is pouring out Bye bye
Miss American Pie
so I scoop up the cat for a...

To Create An Enemy


Start with an empty canvas
Sketch in broad outline the forms of
men, women, and children.

Dip into the well of your own
disowned darkness
with a wide brush and

Ode to Gratitude

Thanks to the word
that gives thanks.
Thanks to the gratitude
for how excellently
the word melts snow or iron.

The planet seemed full of threats
until soft

Grace


Though the world is dented and dinged
and scuffed and scorned,
we trim the beans and peel the potatoes,
and the kitchen is warm and full
of laughter. We hum as we work
and break into...

The Parable of the Old Man and the Young

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born...

Adrift

Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.
This is how the heart makes a duet of
wonder and grief. The light spraying
through the lace of the fern is as delicate
as the fibers of...