Have you seen the many video clips, “warning this is very graphic and may be disturbing to some,” played and replayed across your television set. Have you watched the deaths of, murders of black people splayed on the news- local, national, international. Below is my poetic response. When I first […]
A good friend recently sent me a New York Times Style Magazine which was dedicated to the idea of friendship. There were thirty-two categories of friends. Some were somewhat silly to me like actor friends which could as well have been singer friends or electrician friends or doctor friends, you […]
There ae those mornings gray or sun stroked skies when you wake and realize your world is in a different orbit. Things have changes and they will never again be quite as they were. There are new spaces revealed, new gullies to tumble into, and the roads you travel have […]
A brief note on translation before I begin. It is a truism in poetry that when a poem is translated from one language to another it becomes a new, although closely related, poem. Some words are untranslatable, others are used differently so that line meaning changes. The issues of rhythm […]
I was born with the idea of peace in my heart, in my bones. I always turned from violence; school yard fights upset me, I could not watch, I could not encourage, I could not join. I did not, and do not, enjoy cinematic salutations to war. Oh, I could […]
I have been thinking about apologies lately. Amy Cooper, a white woman who called 911 in reaction to a Black man who requested that she follow park rules and put here dog on a leash. She indicated she was being harassed and was in fear of her life. Her […]
I love walking through California meadows. If it is not bramble full, bare feet are best so that I can catch the rhythms of the earth under my feet. I was walking through my meadow this morning, my meadow that used to be a neatly trimmed lawn in the front […]
My new book has just been released. Well it will be July 31. From today July 28-30 folks can get a per-publication discount by following the link. Know ye that at the right hand of the Indies there is an island called California, very close to that part of the […]
World eyes are turned on Covid-19. The different parts of it are parsed, how “front-line” workers are affected, who front line workers are, in a constantly expanding definition that always includes doctors, nurses, EMT, police, but rarely janitorial crews, health assistants who clean units, kitchen staff, but that sometimes acknowledges […]
As I am a citizen of the world, I have friends from many of the world’s cultures and ethnicities. I relish their differences and value our commonalities and celebrate our uniqueness. If I have one Bengali friend I do not assume that all Bengalis do or should act like her […]
