By Carol Buckley
People are places wandering by,
nonchalantly Copenhagen or Mars.
Some are undiscovered but known.
You are soft and holy,
a landscape of peonies and violets;
I am a salty beach straddled by
two continents:
Doubt and Self-doubt. [Read more…]
Overnight
airbursts
A city
on another continent explodes
By morning
the reflective wave
blasts through a local coffee house
[Read more…]
She said goodbye and I was left with memories.
Running across a field at her placid back.
. A yell. She turns.
Running across a field at her fleeing back.
A phone call and a small voice says,
come, with half a question mark on the end.
The meeting-place is an old one — a dream
midway between two realities.
. I’m on my way. [Read more…]
By Steve Kowit
I hiked out to the end of Sunset Cliffs
& climbed to the breakwater,
sneakers strung over my shoulder
& a small collection of Zen poems
in my fist.
A minnow
that had sloshed out of someone’s bait bucket,
& that I came within an inch of stepping on,
convulsed in agony.
From the StoryCorps YouTube webpage:
At eight years old, Storm Reyes was already working full time with other migrant farm workers in the fields outside Tacoma, Washington. One day, a bookmobile arrived and brought her new worlds—and hope.
StoryCorp’s mission is to preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world. [Read more…]
By Fran Finley
Some days I feel as if
We are some
Warring game board
Stored in the round
Stored as the earth
When not in use
Until the giant gods
Of the universe
Make ready their game
As we are flattened out
And with the roll of the dice
Our numbers begin to fall [Read more…]
By Jennifer Cost
I have spent a lot of time in the past thirty years kayaking, hiking, and backpacking in the western United States–in Alaska, the Sierra Nevada, the Lost Coast, the Wind River Range, the Bob Marshall Wilderness, the Beartooth/Absarokas, the Grand Canyon, the Anza Borrego Desert, and the San Juan part of the Colorado Rockies.
On every backpacking trip for the past twenty years, I have walked through or around larger and larger areas of charred forest, and from most mountaintop views, rust brown swaths of dead conifers cut through the healthier dark green forest of the surrounding mountains.
In the backcountry, I routinely scan the sky for foreboding plumes of smoke, and once a year find myself walking through a smoky haze, wondering if this hike would be my last. I have always walked out. But for millions more of the world’s species, there is no escape from fire, drought, dying oceans, and epic deluges. [Read more…]
By Gail Shatsky
I am relaxing into meditation
Listening to the teacher telling us to breathe
Trying to quiet the chatter in my mind
Trying to find the witness to my thinking
Hearing a commotion, looking up to see
Eleanor is fainting
The white curls of her head falling gently
Onto her neighbor’s shoulder [Read more…]
A mosque
may also be a church
if the beholder’s eyes
can marry minaret to
round-arched windows
If two houses of worship
can grow together
Minds
can mirror architecture [Read more…]
By Sadé Graves
We dripped from the hands of the Creator
Wonderstruck by the possibilities
Beaded there together, a bright and motley crew
The rapture of our ignorance obscured the inevitable [Read more…]
Sitting here talking philosophically,
about the fin of humanity,
in the throes of a heat wave,
shaded by the towers of Fault Line Park.
One has to ask,
does the name they gave this place,
lurking like something about to go terribly awry,
more so than the “Out of Order” sign
permanently etched on the restroom door,
serve as a preemptive warning
that everything can change,
catastrophically,
in an instant? [Read more…]
Spoken without words. There is poetry in the deaf community as well. Here is Crom Saunders’ RAINBOW BRIDGE- an ASL poem about the Orlando tragedy. [Read more…]
