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Posts Tagged ‘opposition’

Dear Finn,

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on October 22, 2025| 14 Comments »


 
On the way home from the protest,
It occurred to me you likely would have
stood quietly on the corner of Oak and Colorado
with a sign that said, I stand with the President.
It makes me grateful we were able
to talk about such things when you were here,
both of us loving our country in such different ways.
I’m sure somehow you know they flew
the American flag over the capitol building
in DC for you, a gift from someone we never met.
They sent us that flag. It flew over the school
on the day you didn’t graduate.
I sat in the school parking lot that day and watched
the breeze lift its corners, giving life to the flag,
somehow giving life to you, too.
Every time I see the American flag, I say hello to you,
especially the flag at the bottom of our drive.
I know you don’t hear me when I greet you,
but somehow I know you do. Like the way I don’t
hear the sun, its wavelengths measured
in hundreds of miles. Just because I can’t
comprehend the sound doesn’t mean the sound
isn’t there. So I send my small yawp into the air,
and trust our mutual love for our country still brings
us together somehow. Me in person, you in the wind,
the wind that catches this hello from my lips
and carries it beyond what is here. What is here?
The chance to remember how deeply we can love
those who are so different from us. The chance
to remember how unity can look like disagreement.
The chance to remember what is here is sometimes,
like peace, what doesn’t seem to be here.  

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Opposite Sides

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on May 13, 2025| Leave a Comment »

If you were in Europe and I were in Boston,
it would take eighty days to swim to you.
Sometimes it feels as if you are in England
and I’m standing on the Atlantic’s opposite shore.
Sometimes it’s all I can do to dip my toes in the water.
Sometimes I swim out till I start to fear
what swims with me. Always I turn back.
This time, I want to swim. Want to swim eighty days
if that’s what it takes, regardless how big the waves.
Want to swim eighty days no matter how cold.
Though the waves are big as our country.
Though I am exhausted and afraid of what I might find
on the shores of you. What I long to find: you,
swimming toward me. Want to meet you
at forty days, both of us ungrounded,
both of us vulnerable, both of us ready
to swim toward safety together.

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Two Worlds, One Dancer

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on February 12, 2025| 6 Comments »


 
 
I love the dark, and yet
my body wholly melted
this morning the moment
sunlight entered the room,
as if my limbs were made to receive
that warmth. Even moss,
which desperately needs
the dark, also needs the light.
How did we ever believe
we could survive without
embracing both?
Everywhere I turn,
the teaching to straddle
two opposite worlds, to find
a way to walk with one foot
in one world, one foot in the other.
No. Not just to walk that way.
To dance.

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The Opening

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 25, 2024| 6 Comments »


 
 
I feel it before dawn—
the longing not only for light
but for the vast embrace
of the dark,
the way it links me
to the farthest reachings
of the universe,
the way it holds
each dull planet,
each luminous star,
holds me with no question,
no reservation,
holds all I love
and all I have yet
to learn to love.
With each breath
I bring it into my body,
small sips of dark,
great gulps of dark.
Inside me it swirls
with my love of light,
and this is how the certainties
of the heart are erased—
when I love and ache
in two directions at once—
and what’s left
is so raw, so open,
so alive.
 

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Timeless

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on April 29, 2023| 15 Comments »

after Ruth Stone, “Train Ride”

There are not enough hours to walk by the river,
not enough hours to work and make soup
and dream and sit and do nothing at all.
Is it true there is not enough time?
There is time for every word
you have written, every petunia you’ve planted,
for every path you have walked,
for every lover you’ve kissed
and kissed and kissed there is enough time.
No. Not enough. Not enough time for reading
the tall stack of books on the desk.
Not enough time for making the pie crust
from scratch. Not enough time for wandering
in the forest with the soft green hanging moss
until you, too, remember you are a tree.
And yet you have read tall stacks of books.
Many, many tall stacks.
You have made cherry pies and rhubarb pies
and pumpkin pies from scratch.
You have wandered for hours through dappled glades
and draped your hair with moss.
There is enough time for everything you have ever done
and for every moment spent doing nothing at all.
How is it you feel such lack?
Here is the moment. Open it.

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Hour-Long Interview on Living with Paradox

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on October 28, 2022| 4 Comments »

I am so grateful to Naomi Horii for inviting me to be her first guest on Heart Speak on Bold Brave TV. We spend an hour reading poems, talking about practical and poetic ways to live (and thrive) in the middle of opposition–joy and sadness, love and loss, fear and courage, devastation and beauty. We even wrote a collaborative poem near the end with those present … a real joy to be a part of this program!

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How

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 2, 2022| 3 Comments »



How do we live at the traumatic center of death and life?
            —Rabbi Irwin Kula, Original Thinkers Festival 2022


A single moment contains
the scent of warm pumpkin pie
and the gravedigger’s spade,
the splatter of blood
and the smooth honeyed flesh of mango.
Did we ever believe we would live
this life unscathed?
Oh, the stab of loss
and the clean, mineral perfume of rain.
Oh, the ache of loss
and the deep golden sunflowered yes.
Oh, the carving of loss
and the sweet subtle tang of apples in fall.
Oh, the ache, bless the ache,
oh, the beauty, the loss,
oh, the beauty, the loss, oh, the beauty.

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Between Intimacy and Independence

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 11, 2019| Leave a Comment »

 

 

we become what we love and yet remain ourselves.

—Martin Heidegger

 

 

and this is how

the vessel learns

that though it’s full

there’s room for more—

those sides of us

we thought were walls

were well concealed

doors

 

 

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