Toward a World that Works for Everyone
November 11, 2021 Out of your whole life give but one moment! So you make perfect the present… Thought and feeling and soul and sense– Merged in a moment… ~Robert Browning, Now I want something new to write about. I’m tired of writing about the same problems and worries. It’s only entertaining for so […]
November 8, 2021 …Stewards tirelessly Persuade them onwards to his voice and hands… Each dwells some twenty seconds. Now, dear child, What’s wrong, the deep American voice demands, And, scarcely pausing, goes into a prayer Directing God about this eye, that knee… In everyone there sleeps A sense of life lived according to love. ~Philip Larkin, […]
November 7, 2021 After the murder, like parades of Fools, The bungling supernumeraries come… Meanwhile, in another place—their figures cold, Both turned to shadows by a single pain, Bloodless together—the killer and the slain Have kissed each other in the wilderness, Touching soft hands and staring at the world. ~David Wagoner, Murder Mystery I […]
November 6, 2021 Ah God, that love should be Another road to pain… Still—if death were not Another way to love, There were little need of heaven That sages whisper of. ~Willard Wattles, Heaven Here’s a question that has bothered me pretty much forever. If each human being is actually an eternal soul experiencing […]
November 5, 2021 And there is the silence of this morning which I have broken with my pen, a silence that had piled up all night like snow falling in the darkness of the house— the silence before I wrote a word and the poorer silence now. ~Billy Collins, Silence Every once in a […]
November 4, 2021 As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past, letting my memory rush over them like water rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream. I was even thinking a little about the future, that place where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine, a dance whose […]
November 2, 2021 The dates drop from calendars, in order… I steal each second grain by grain from the hourglass, my hands cover themselves with ashes. ~André Velter, tr. Marilyn Hacker, Sand and Ashes Every day I wake up feeling funny, weird, not right. Every day I also wake up thinking, today I must […]
November 1, 2021 Now the orchestra at once throws down its instruments. The doors in the house of God tear off their hinges— I’m the child’s fist drumming its mother’s back, rock that hits the skull that silences the martyr… I’m gone, glad, empty, good riddance… …the night filled up with crows. ~Deborah Digges, Rough Music […]
October 31, 2021 I went by the Druid stone… And I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows… And they shaped in my imagining To the shade that a well-known head and shoulders Threw there when she was gardening. ~Thomas Hardy, The Shadow on the Stone The most innocuous things can trigger an existential […]
October 30, 2021 Starting now she’ll reason with herself deliberately… It was possession, turns out, by a force whose intention touched the first body alone, a body changed again precisely to its own form, a very special intention. ~Jana Prikryl, To Tell of Bodies Changed Playing with the cat, dangling a knotted string and […]
October 30, 2021 When you’re down and troubled And you need a helping hand And nothing, nothing is going right Close your eyes and think of me And soon I will be there To brighten up even your darkest night ~James Taylor, You’ve Got a Friend When I’m down and troubled, I turn to […]
October 28, 2021 What signal from the stars? What senses took it in?… Rebellion or surrender?… What use to learn the lessons taught by time, If a star at any time may tell us: Now. ~Howard Nemerov, The Consent My energy is so jangled, almost the first thing I did when I got home […]
October 27, 2021 Oh, I got plenty o’ nuttin’ And nuttin’s plenty for me… ‘Cause de things dat I prize Like de stars in de skies All are free… ~George Gershwin, I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’ (from Porgy and Bess) There are so many things to write about! Why doesn’t one of them visit […]
October 25, 2021 The wind came down from mountains cold, and like a tide it roared and rolled; the branches groaned, the forest moaned, and leaves were laid upon the mould. ~J.R.R. Tolkien, “The wind was on the withered heath” (from The Hobbit) I don’t much like this rain. Which is a silly thing […]
October 23, 2021 There is a wall of which the stones Are lies and bribes and dead men’s bones. But I will gather and I will ride, And I will summon a countryside… And many a man shall ride with me Who never had thought on earth to see High Justice in her armoury. ~Hilaire […]
