Posts Tagged ‘hope’
The Next Abraham
January 30, 2017
A few days ago, I was blessed to be present at my grandson Abraham’s bris, his ritual circumcision. The mohel, the rabbi who officiated at and performed the circumcision, explained to the family and friends gathered for the ceremony, explained that a bris is the way God signs God’s name on a Jewish male baby.…
Read MoreKeeping Vigil
December 13, 2016
These are dark times. Here in the northern hemisphere the sun is at its lowest point in the sky; the winter solstice is still weeks away. I’m sitting outside on my elderly mother’s kitchen step. I’ve come to England three times this year to take care of her. I came before and after her heart…
Read MoreThe Neglected Garden, Part II
August 16, 2016
Continued from yesterday. The dollhouse my father was building for me was still unfinished when he draped a boat tarpaulin over the top, to protect it against the summer rain. The doctor had told my parents that there was a tumor in his lung. He was being sent to the M.D. Anderson hospital in Houston,…
Read MoreAdam Zagajewski’s Trench Warfare
July 5, 2016
“Writing poems is a duel / that no one wins…” As I’m reading the poem that opens with these words, I think: this could be describing my life. The poem is called “Writing Poems.” It’s by the superb contemporary Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, in his new collection, Unseen Hand. And in fact, nearly all the…
Read MorePoetry Friday: “The Manifestation”
May 27, 2016
I’m a poet and believer. If anyone should spend an evening gazing at a meteor shower, it should be me: dreamer, connector. Hidden under the fingernails of God. But those Zone 5A clouds seem ever near in August, when the air thickens with cicada song. And to be honest, I’m relieved. The day’s tasks of laundry…
Read MorePurple Light in Sarajevo
May 24, 2016
My fellowship liaison, Sevko, drove, and his gaze flicked across teenagers spilling over the sidewalks. The center of town spread within the cradle of the mountains, lit by the pink and blue haze of underground clubs. Gray office and apartment buildings faced the street, many of them gashed open, levels of exposed brick and wood…
Read MoreA Dancing Christ
April 5, 2016
On Holy Saturday, I woke up at my sister’s house in northern Minnesota with a visual migraine, an aura with no consequent pain. They happen occasionally, and mine are always pretty textbook: wavy sparkling spirals and shimmering crystalline lamellae. The aura is technically termed a scintillating scotoma, a result of a sudden tidal wave of…
Read MorePoetry Friday: “Creed in the Santa Ana Winds”
April 1, 2016
Growing up in southern California, I experienced the uneasy allure of the Santa Ana’s hot fall and winter winds that swept down from Nevada’s Great Basin. They whipped up the dust and screamed against the windowpanes. In the drier mountain areas, they ignited fires; in my coastal town, they seemed to blow the stars through…
Read MoreSnow on Snow
December 25, 2015
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, Snow on snow, In the bleak mid-winter Long ago. You probably know these lines, either from Christina Rossetti’s poem of 1871 or, more likely, Holst’s setting of them as a carol. I know them. I used one of them as title of a book, “bleak” altered to “deep”…
Read MoreWonder Woman, Flying, Part 1: Transcendent Hope
October 1, 2015
It’s one of my favorite images of Diana of Themyscira, a.k.a. Wonder Woman: her proud, bold body fills the page as she soars across a pink sunset, arms spread wide like a diver, her legs not straight but slightly askew as if skipping on the air. As someone who never had much use for comics,…
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