More on: war

The Forgotten War MY MOTHER INHERITED her father’s war letters before immigrating to America, and by the time she passed them on to me, after my daughter was born, much of the text was illegible, a language lost to a fragile medium, pencil marks on paper the weight of ash. The disintegration had begun at…

For Aciek Arok Deng I leave the camp, unable to breathe, me Freud girl, after her interior, she Lost Girl, after my purse, her face: dark as eggplant, her gaze: unpinnable, untraceable, floating, open, defying the gravity I was told keeps pain in place maybe trauma doesn’t harden, packed, tight as sediment at the bottom…

During the Oregon centennial celebration, my Boy Scout troop, dressed as cowboy cavalry, was brought to the dog track to rout a whole tribe of Cub Scouts dressed as Indians in a wild reenactment of a battle that had never occurred or had occurred a thousand times, depending on your degree of historical specificity. Firing…

1. The vigil and the vigilance of love. Sitter to three towheaded, rowdy boys, the spoiled offspring of the local doctor, our cousin Maren came north for a summer and brought us stories of the arid south— cowpokes and stone survivals. ————————————-One afternoon she summoned two of us to the garage, a leaning shed with…

Canadian singer/songwriter and human rights activist Bruce Cockburn has released twenty-eight albums over the course of a career that now spans more than four decades. His early music was contemplative, broadly spiritual, and grounded in nature, with a folk sensibility, and though he converted to Christianity in 1974, he never fit the Christian music industry…

My father thought the Anglican liturgy pure poetry, once, Three hundred people chanting in the multi-colors of the chancel, Saying on cue We do! Though they might have answered Otherwise in their own living rooms, together They committed to many things, the dignity Of every human being, the baby lifted high above My father’s head,…