Reflections

I know the truth – give up all other truths! No need for people anywhere on earth to struggle. Look – it is evening, look, it is nearly night: what do you speak of, poets, lovers, generals? The wind is level now, the earth is wet with dew, the storm of stars in the sky will turn to quiet. And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we who never let each other sleep above it. -Marina Tsvetaeva (poem found at Anchors and Masts) (Photos taken at 9 Acre Farm in Arlington, WA where this week’s Poetry Party took

God’s Grief Great parent who must have started out with such high hopes. What magnitude of suffering, the immensity of guilt, the staggering despair. A mind the size of the sun, burning with longing, a heart huge as a gray whale breaching, streaming seawater against the pale sky. Man-god or beast god god that breathes in every pleated leaf, throat sac of frog, pin feather and shaft- god of plutonium and penicillin, drunk sleeping on the subway grate, god of Joan of Arc, god of Crazy Horse Lady Day, bringing us to our knees, god of Houdini with hands like

“In poetry, language is not the only medium; silence is also a medium. We might even say that, in poetry, the very purpose of the language is to inflect the silences. It’s like after church bells ring: the air resonates with their sound. In poetry, the silences are resonant, from the language that precedes them. . .The silence in poetry is like space in a Gothic cathedral. The function of all that mass of carved stone is to shape a sacred space.” -Li Young Lee  The Cloisters, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is one of my favorite places in all of