Paul Christensen: The October Twilight
Leaf by leaf, the sky unfolds its ancient sunlight and lets the fragments of history drift to the ground, one broken fact at a time. How difficult it is to gather up the ruins of time and try to make sense of what we are — the foreground we emerged from, the burden of our legacy as inheritors of shame and guilt.
Paul Christensen: Three Cheers for Autumn
I woke up this morning to a chill in the air. I closed the bedroom windows and shivered into my clothes, then hurried down to the kitchen to consult the … Continue reading
Paul Christensen: The Reluctant Summer
I could feel the rage building as I saw the nation writhe, then uncoil its wrath and take to the streets. I was demoralized to realize that my whole life had been lived in the twisted emotions of a country poisoned to its soul with racist hatred.
David Huddle: Parable of the Same Scene Every Day for Years
Consider my mother gazing out her window
over the kitchen sink as she washes breakfast, lunch,
and dinner dishes for fifty-some years.
Paul Christensen: Snow Bound
The snow and the dark wind, the impassable wastes of one’s backyard, the icy draft that leaks in under the front door tell you you have no place to go. You must sit down and allow the slightly old-fashioned language of self to drift in.
Sydney Lea: Passing the Arts and Crafts Fair
There aren’t many like him anymore, the handy, soft-spoken old ones, who still know how to farm, how to raise up a house you can live in, how to still-hunt a whitetail.
Paul Christensen: The Rain It Raineth Every Day
They say the average cloud weighs about the same as eighty elephants. A big storm such as now darkens the sky overhead must be an infinite parade of elephants milling around in the dark gray pastures above us.
Paul Christensen: Ghosts and Memories
It’s the place where the dead are sleeping, barely breathing in the moist black earth along the creek. They will rise when the time comes, and ask the living for a candle, perhaps a dish with a cookie on it.
Paul Christensen: Walmart, Walt Whitman and me
I admit it. I sometimes go down to Rutland, Vermont to the Walmart Superstore. My friends are all good liberals and the conscience of Middlebury ways, so I know reconsiderations … Continue reading
