Byron Hoot: To Life
The restlessness
of age has entered me. That longing for more
knowing there’s only less to take in.
Baron Wormser: Dissident
Of necessity, the path of the dissident, since it depends on the exactions of conscience, is a solitary one. I think of Henry David Thoreau’s night in a jail … Continue reading
Desne A. Crossley: Something I Came Across
Yesterday, I was culling through papers to throw out and came across a letter from my mother to her father. She’s trying to cushion the news that no one will tell him. He’s dying of cancer.
Rebecca Gordon: Trump Rages to Snuff Out Democracy’s Candle
Allow me to stipulate that I do not wish to die. In fact, had anyone consulted me about the construction of the universe, I would have made my views on … Continue reading
James Crews: Beech Trees in Spring
Perhaps they need the reassurance,
or maybe they’re here to lend music
to the silence of winter
Ma Yongbo: Father’s Little Boat (English and Chinese)
She sits beside him all night,
watching the Father’s darkness,
listening to the careful breath of the dark,
listening to the broken winds of another world.
Lawrence Wray: Stonehouse Alms
There is in me a traipsing line of ragged men
I can’t ignore. Grass stalks dangle from chinks
in the house’s mortar by the caged window.
Robert Cording: Reading Poems with David
Over the phone, David begins to read
and Mary, in old age, in a nursing home,
returns to life in David’s voice, voicing
her words, her questioning
of her own bafflement
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Leaving It There
I stop weeding, stand still a while, hands on hips,
because it’s back again — that feeling of elation
tangled with grief.
Ann Fisher-Wirth: Empathy
In the long long bliss of the breastfeeding years, I belonged to that rocking chair where sun filtered through the window and the leaves of the summer pomegranate shifted slowly in the hot June air.
Jianqing Zheng: The Overlook
I embrace two rivers, the Changjiang and the Mississippi, each taking a share of my tributary for thirty-four years. Life is a river. The migration from East to West is a way of releasing the self for a confluence of places and allowing the rivers to flow through me and form a shoal of belonging.
Kathleen O’Toole: Migrations
On exiting “Warmth of Other Suns” at the Phillips Collection, 2020
Naomi Shihab Nye: The Words Under the Words
My grandmother’s days are made of bread,
a round pat-pat and the slow baking.
She waits by the oven watching a strange car
circle the streets. Maybe it holds her son,
lost to America.
Bob Dylan: Nobel Lecture
When awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, Bob Dylan gave no comment for two weeks, ignored the Academy’s calls, didn’t attend the ceremony, and collected the award in a hoodie four months later. But Dylan later sent them a rambling, 27-minute ode to literature.
