More on: sadness

This sadness I feel tonight is not my sadness. Maybe it’s my father’s. For having never been prized by his father. For having never profited by his son. This loneliness is Nobody’s. Nobody’s lonely because Nobody was never born and will never die. This gloom is Someone Else’s. Someone Else is gloomy because he’s always…

You enter that light which binds night and day, that swirling mist of pain, fortunate pain, which has no need to be seen. It shimmers on the ever-present, ever- inactual shore. Simple worker, like those who build men’s houses— Breathe life into the whirlwind where the dead shall find you, dear friends absorbed in daylight.…

But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb…. —John 20 She came to take care of the body. Some are like that. They feel the need to touch and handle _____where life was. We call it seeking closure. We call it clinging. We call it having difficulty facing reality; the reality that life itself _____has left…

So much sitting still these past months, hoarding my sorrows, looking out at another day’s news- paper being buried by the accumulating snow. I could be waking from a half-remembered dream that, no matter how I try, I’m unable to put together, my daily sighs a kind of catch-all for the poverty of everything I…

Sometimes, I miss the Aramaic of youth. Then, the personal flame came over us and we spoke to the numb nations— until the nations winnowed and muted us, but not breaking the spirit of our speech. Now, I live in the breeze’s murmur, the native tongues to which the soul responds, a language that comforts…

DON’T FORGET YOUR TRANSFER,” my grandmother said. From 1989, she said this to me for ten years. It took two buses to get from the West Side, where I studied and lived, to the East Side, where she had lived her entire life, first on its lower end and now, in her eighties, its upper…