Posts Tagged ‘water’
To Be Born Again
October 9, 2017
The day after Yom Kippur 5778 When I finish being born for the fourth time, I will live in a house by the sea. The windows facing the ocean will hold the ocean, as much as glass can hold. The phone will vibrate with messages of peace. There will still be a trashcan: everything that…
Read MorePoetry Friday: “Love’s Alchemy”
August 25, 2017
The first thing I’m drawn in by in Margaret Rabb’s “Love’s Alchemy” is the lusciousness of the language. Alliteration and rhymes abound, and the iambic pentameter of the sonnet form holds the sounds together. Then as I re-read, I see that at the poem’s center is the wife of the 17th century poet John Donne.…
Read MoreThe Baptisms on Pentecost
July 26, 2017
Our guests at the baptism on Sunday agreed, all of our friends and family, many of whom simply don’t care for church or really can’t stand church or usually wouldn’t be caught dead in a church, but all of them, all of them agreed: Yes, what a beautiful cathedral, and wasn’t the choir amazing, and…
Read MorePoetry Friday: “Afternoon Swim”
February 17, 2017
The play of grammar has always lured me. I’ve wondered: why do English sentences take the shape they do? So when I reached line 4 of Lance Larsen’s “Afternoon Swim”—with its bold announcement that he was switching from second person to first—I was hooked. Play with grammar is this poem’s medium. I laughed out loud…
Read MoreWater and Oil
October 21, 2010
“Still waters run, run deep in me.” —Jim White “I think the devil will not have me damned, lest the oil that’s in me should set hell on fire.” —Falstaff, in The Merry Wives of Windsor Water: we think of it all the time. This is perhaps especially true of me, born a Baptist, an…
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