What You Should Know on Your 79th Birthday
You should know I find it easier
to write of climate change than love,
that time’s passage hurts in ways
drought cannot.
You should know I find it easier
to write of climate change than love,
that time’s passage hurts in ways
drought cannot.
I choose to make a stand on the beaches even as the waters rise and the sun bears down hotter than ever. And I choose to do so with a spirit of love, joy, righteous anger, and deep sadness.
It is a fallacy to claim that because only one political party opposes this rising threat, fighting for the preservation of American democracy is a partisan issue. If a train is on the verge of crashing into a group of pedestrians, the political affiliation of the conductor is immaterial to the task at hand: saving lives.
You are neither brave nor fit.
You abhor the deep-blue sea.
Innocent, who will acquit
those who look like me?
Liars all, you pay off the sharks
that murder us with glee.
So much death and pain today: slaughtered fowls,
reminders of genocide and oppression, celebration
of abundance denied to billions. Cousin, did you know
400,000 Ethiopians are suffering famine?
“The earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses.” – Utah Phillips Of all that the so-called Facebook Papers revealed, most interesting, I think, is the fact that on social […]
At what time the fog took over, I do not know:
I was, if not sleeping, attempting to, tossing
and turning like a Heron’s wing, lost in fog.
Birthdays present the chance to reflect on the passage of time, on how one’s life has intersected with the broader narrative of humanity. I was born on November 14, 1984
Love, like light, has no mass, is information.
Not that which is found in books, newspapers,
sacred texts: Suns laugh at our quest for
knowledge. Imagine a poem with no beginning
or end, no author or reader, words or meaning—
A week of coughing and fitful sleep.
Pigeons at war over the allocation
of crumbs. Irretrievable hours spent
before a screen, shades drawn tight
to keep out the glare—and still my eyes
are sore, my back.