Category: musings
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Dear Tich Naht Hahn Dear Tic Nat Hhan Dear Thich Nhat Hanh, I mislaid your address and even the foreign mystery of the spelling of your name in the explosion. The girls’ school papers and award certificates, sheet music, lithographs, photo albums, love letters from my father to my mother, jars full of buttons and…
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What I did not know, in my greenness, was that you cannot shed your wildness like a snake sheds her skin. The wildness is inside, part of you.
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It′s a day to remember America was not great back when you were a white child in the white suburbs outside Toledo, in a brand-new tract home in a place called Sylvania.
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It’s your birthday, Mama. In the picture you’re about 12 or 13, but you did headstands for as long as I can remember. When I was a teenager, I lived in fear of your doing one when a friend was over. The other mothers didn’t do things like that. I’m beginning at last to see…
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Louise Erdrich says in her poem, “Thistles”: “under loss and under hard words, under steamrollers under your heart, it doesn’t matter. They can live forever.” I think there are some feelings that are like thistles, that’s why Erdrich’s poem and the thistles along the sidewalk speak to me like an old friend as I ponder…
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Dear Mama, This year marks twenty-five years without you. I took this photo because this sky made me think of you, tumbling me back to a warm late-summer night when I was a college sophomore. It was the year after Dad died, and the humid air felt heavy with unheld grief. Grammy was not in…
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“Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living in better conditions.” –Hafiz Fear is ever-present, a room in every house. I think it must be acknowledged to be lived with. Denying fear’s existence, its slithery form under the bed, under the pillow, in your head, in your darkest…
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A poem for my neighbor’s hibicus Furled for the night, see? They’re rolled up tight, like tissue-paper cigars in the moonlight sleeping in the morning they will spin open I’ll be walking past I’ll be sucked in, again will spin with them, six-and-a-half again ballerina fantasy fairy dresses for princesses named Hibiscus, Rosemallow, Swampmallow. The…
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I believe in hope in change in light in dark times in turning off the news in speaking the truth in spreading beauty into the world in the power of small miracles in starting where you find yourself in breathing in the moments To anyone who struggles (which includes, I think, everyone?)—keep trying, keep moving,…
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Day and night arrive, depart, endlessly— always right on time: I am forever late, running behind. Breathing in the soft dusk I feel eternity evaporate.
eeo 