Always that moment
when I wake up
in the dark
before dawn
and the first birds
Smyrna, Delaware—Bald eagles descended to pose on the banks and boulders on the mudflats. Shorebirds bobbed in shallow pools. Great blue herons, great egrets, and snowy egrets snapped up fish … Continue reading →
We are still ripening
into our bodies, still in the act of becoming.
Rejoice in the day’s long sugar.
Praise that big fat tomato of a sun.
Poetry is the remembrance and avowal of loss and is accordingly pushed aside.
I am writing not to send you light,
but to let you know you are not alone
in the darkness. I am here, too,
scribbling with no sight, no certainty
you cannot separate the job from the house from the rent from the earth from the food from the healthcare from the water from the transit from the war from … Continue reading →
With the help of their family, friends, and faith, three fathers unravel the incomparable partnership of forgiveness and community in North Philadelphia.
For insights into building a broad-based pro-democracy movement take inspiration from nature.
The bright eyes of song sparrows sitting on spotted eggs
Peer restlessly through the light and shadow
Of all Springs.
People grabbed at court, guys chased and pummeled at Home Depot, women cuffed as their kids cry, crowds shouting in rage. A guy on the ground, piled on by thugs, screams, “I’m an American!” Brown workers at a car wash are dragged off past two dazed white workers.
I imagined my mother by a fishpond
with garden rocks and submerged reeds,
a pool stocked with orange comets,
fantails, and spotted carp.
I can choose to motivate students by manipulating their fear of grades or I can subvert their ideas about grades and inspire them to learn because a good human being becomes a better human being when they are learning for real.
Today my three-card spread says there’s a Twinkie in my future again
US State Department said it was “aware of reports of the death of a US citizen in the West Bank.”