{This poem was shared during the Sebastopol Jewish Community's Rosh Hashana service on Zoom this morning}

Small Kindnesses
By Danusha Laméris


I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk...

We Have Come to Be Danced


We have come to be danced
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLzsaEwZ9tY&t=34s
not the pretty dance
not the pretty pretty, pick me, pick me dance
but the claw our way...

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~Epilogue~

by Carol Cotton/Quora Top Writer

....And after the fire, the villagers slowly returned~
a little charred around the edges,
~but happy to find their huts
had been spared the...

TALKING TO GRIEF

Ah, Grief, I should not treat you
like a homeless dog
who comes to the back door
for a crust, for a meatless bone.
I should trust you.

I should coax you
into the house and...

Photograph of my mother sitting on the steps

My mother who isn't anyone's
just her own intact and yearning
self complete as a birch tree
sits on the tenement steps.

She is awkwardly lovely,...

The Lanyard

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I...

I practice a very special
form of mindfulness
called not-minding-ness.
This has brought me peace and purified
my soul to the point that it is almost
possible to live with me.
My sacred...

I recently came across this poem by Fred La Motte.

My Ancestry DNA results came in.
Just as I suspected, my great great grandfather
was a monarch butterfly.

Much of who I am is still...