Once upon a time I read fairy tales. Once upon a time I read a slightly subversive Victorian lady fairy tale to a virtual audience of about ten. We were all in little digital Zoom boxes, but outside of the boxes we were inside of homes.
Last weekend, I either learned or was receptive enough to hear that Halloween, or Samhain, marks the Celtic new year. As in, the start of the cycle of seasons, not merely an autumn holiday on the way to the end of the year, as I grew up believing. The Irish teacher/guide who said this (in…
I pitched something to Lit Hub and they took it. A dream. But bittersweet. Because it’s for Eavan Boland. It’s about motherhood, and middle age, and passion and confusion and regret. So it’s also for all mothers who have art stirring, and waiting, inside them. Go be you. I know it feels hard. But do…
During the Kincade Fire some friends and I wrote some little things. Literally, little things: haiku. And then I wrapped some more words around them, and published it on Medium. I’m just getting around to putting it here. I hope you enjoy.
“It is distressing, baffling, confusing, but the fact must be faced; there is no certainty in heaven above or on earth below.” – Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938) Virginia Woolf was right. Of course. But it’s what we say in Zen, too. And at Pacific Zen Institute, we have started an online magazine of Zen and…
It’s been a wild autumn. I was picking up speed here, posting about Barbuda and Puerto Rico, and a poem in response to Las Vegas, and then…silence. The reason for my silence was fire. I live in Santa Rosa, which was the city hardest hit by the Northern California fires in October. I was rendered…
I want to write a poem about silence just like almost every other poet ever probably and am of course twisted up immediately in words but here is why I want to write a poem about silence silencers all sorts of silencers metal ones and flesh ones and metal ones that cut flesh with their…
Something shifted in me during or after the press conference yesterday, or during a stormy night, or when I cried in the bathroom this morning about the way Trump bullied that orthodox Jewish reporter, with whom I surely disagree on many issues but who deserves respect and dignity like us all, or on the way…
Yesterday at a poetry workshop I took off two layers of clothes. One minute we were discussing black poetry. The next, we were arguing about women’s dresses at the Oscars. The next, I had taken off my clothes. You see, Maya Angelou told us in her powerful, incomparable way that no matter what you do…
Let’s make him fly, says Milo, about his foam board Santa hitched to tottering, prop-legged reindeer when we get out the Christmas decorations. And I believe him. I believe in him. I have to. Because more people were gunned down today. People who help people were gunned down today. So sweet five-year-old boy, I will…