My friend David Gentiles knew how to make gumbo. His mama taught him how to do it and he used her recipe. I never had a chance to let him teach me how to do it before he died, but on more than one occasion I would call him from Boston and say, “I tried…
my job tonight was to mix the ashes and the oil making from the charred remains a paste of penitence the sacred soot stared from the bottom of the plate as I poured olive oil from home and began to stir the ashes stuck to me like skin like they knew me turning the lines…
For Valentine’s Day, Ginger gave me a waffle iron. Actually, she gave me a replacement waffle iron. She gave me one several years ago that I wore out making waffles when I worked at the restaurant at Duke and I wanted to put chicken and waffles on the menu. One of our friends suggested we…
On my last trip to Texas, I was passing through Fort Worth and called an old friend to meet me for lunch. When he asked what I wanted to eat, I said, “Chicken fried steak,” since, for all of its wonderful food, that is not a part of the Carolina culinary lexicon. As I was…
who knows how many pictures of you I’ve taken how many times we’ve walked down our street — in sun and snow — on our way to coffee and conversation yet you still steal my heart in the simplest of ways the singlest of frames the hope and ache of a lifetime caught…
One of the things I have had to unlearn from my childhood is how people were described when telling a story of something that happened. What was modeled for me was white people were simply described as people: a man, a woman. People of any other ethnic or racial background were given a qualifier: “I…
I have work to do this morning but I keep running into poems that give me pause and pull my gaze out my second-story window to the dance of sunshine and shadows on the fence line, the blanket of dead leaves turning to soil and the trees, their bare branches reaching or — perhaps —…
The Christmas tide is going out . . . the waves of wonder which crashed against the sea wall of my heart are sliding away reminding me that the tides come and go, neap and spring: this is the rhythm of redemption. Along the now silent sands in my mind’s eye I still see…
I wrote this poem several years ago, and I thought of it this morning. the morning after Mary rose before sunrise; the baby was still sleeping, as was Joseph and most of the animals, except for one cow who looked a little sheepish. The shepherds were long gone. In their excitement, they had not cleaned…
Thanks for making the journey with me this Advent season. The night is far spent; the day is at hand. I am grateful for all the love that surrounds me. I let James Taylor sing us to sleep. Peace Milton