More on: Poetry

El Niño slips across latitudes, rises dripping from the ocean From seafloor mud, El Niño brings up the secrets of childhood El Niño crawls in the manger, time runs out El Niño rocks himself dry on the edge of a continent Prairies of wheat go unpollinated, there is rumor El Niño is killing the honeybees…

I pledge allegiance to the doomed life, clumsy person, old salmon that batters up a shallow stream. Marked for hurt by this failing, arrested by a simple glimpse of struggle or cruelty, I see the hopeful swagger of a grown person in a child’s bravado, or the childish hurt in an old-face defeated stare. The…

The road takes you from there to here. Here is where you are. Time takes you from then to now. Now is what you have. Language takes you from what you have to what you have to say. When we meet, this is your gift. And writing takes you from what you have to say…

Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it… ————————————-—Simone Weil Simone Weil, it’s hard to concentrate on you with those three boys on the next bench blowing up balloons and letting them go, all squirt and grunt, fizzling into— the void, I think you’d say. And…

Why Believe in God? Over the past few years, the Image staff contemplated assembling a symposium based on this simple problem. But we hesitated. Should we pose such a disarmingly straightforward question to artists and writers, who tend to shun the explicit and the rational? Or were we hesitating because the question itself made us…

What can the sky say, waiting for the sun, which may or may not come, the leafless trees, unless I speak for them, their waiting deep as tap roots’ cold, suspended burrowing? I can always write another poem but I am tired of speaking of the world. If he wants a spring poem, let the…

Even the kids negotiating friendships on that yellow school bus racketing past know it’s a different scenario every day, not just the same elemental hostilities like ocean versus sand, tough places to make a living. To see things as they are, keep your eyes open. This morning on the bay side of Egg Island I…

Roger Williams, 1678 As I was weeding in my squash patch, I heard the braying, as of an ass, down at the nether end of Towne Street, the first I have heard since England, and I do love those raggedy-faced beasts. A crowd down there was milling about some distraction, which parting revealed the poor,…

Pieces of torn bread on the tablecloth. Plates empty in front of them as if they have just removed the halos they will wear in a few years. Jesus holds out his arms like he is scolding them for such a mess. They look startled, like they are seeing it for the first time: it…

And one, from hunger and bitterness, wrung the loaf as if it had absorbed all the promises he had believed. But between hands it regathered itself, the way a cloud gathers itself from within, and they didn’t see that it stayed about the same size. He listened. His lips sweetened. Then he slept. When he…