To say my father was a sports fan is like saying I like to cook. The man would pull over and watch five year olds play football just because it was a game. He became the Sports Chaplain at Baylor because he loved going to the games. I’ve thought a great deal about him today…
The woman who wrote the article I talked about yesterday said one of the ways she tried to reach her daughter was to put poems in her shoes because, she said, “What I wanted her to know is: People have been in pain before, struggled to find hope, and look what they’ve done with it.”…
love is the drum that beats in our bones even in our broken melodies of grief our symphonies of sorrow and sadness relentless resonance in the late night club of all that could have been the hope of the high hat the syncopation of surprise the gentle jazz of joy put your hands together love…
I have been going back through some poems I wrote several years ago. My intention was not to repeat them, necessarily, but a couple of them have taken hold in new ways and feel as though they are worth bringing to light once more. I needed these words tonight. I hope they find you, too….
Mark Strand died this week. He was a poet, even a former U. S. Poet Laureate. In the middle of the violence that makes up our world, it feels worthwhile to say thanks for the life and words of a poet who held a sense of appropriate insignificance with grace; therefore I offer two of…
There is no them. Only us: across the table, behind the wall, sharing coffee, passing the green beans, throwing stones, breaking curfew; armed to the teeth biting back with rubber bullets, cheering for little leaguers, praying for peace, marching in the night, hiding behind official jargon; joining in song, crying out for explanations, flying drones…
I can see them coming over the tops of the trees the lights at the old ball park the roof tops of the old warehouses the clouds pile up some white as anger behind them a grey wall as deep as darkness here comes the rain again falling on my head like a memory what…
I am dreaming these days, but not in a language I remember; I wake up with some sense of where I’ve been . . . of stories I’ve been told . . . . In the resonance of my ruminations, I feel at home riding strange trains with Schanuzers who now live only in my…
the southern summer is not personal: the onslaught of heat and humidity falls on the just and unjust the sacred and the sweaty gets under your skin refusing to relent in its drive to depletion as you dart from one cool remove to the next more afternoons than not the swirl and stack of clouds…
We’ve been wandering on streets where the stones tell stories and the river laughs and lingers just below the city streets: the veins of history flowing underneath the skin of sidewalks and skyscrapers. Time feels as wide as the boulevard in this middle child of a city; kindness is common currency, spoken and shared where…