The earth is too wide
for a free man
to put up with humiliation
or hatred.
10/10/22
“I should not have waited.” - Lady Akazome Emon (translated by Kenneth Rexroth)
I should not have waited.
It would have been better
To have slept and dreamed,
Than to have watched night pass,
And this slow moon sink.
10/7/22
The Clothes Pin - Jane Kenyon
How much better it is
to carry wood to the fire
than to moan about your life.
How much better
to throw the garbage
onto the compost, or to pin the clean
sheet on the line
with a gray-brown wooden clothes pin!
9/24/22
Next Second, You Were Gone - Randall Stephens
I heard about an old broken phone box
Where people would go to have imaginary conversations
At first, I found it foolish
And then I joined the queue.
Where people would go to have imaginary conversations
At first, I found it foolish
And then I joined the queue.
When my turn came, I dialled your old number.
There was no ringtone, but I told you everything
and I waited in silence
as if you might respond.
I thought I heard you breathe.
Then I remembered they told me my life should go on.
One second, you were here.
9/4/22
7/12/22
The Derelict - Sharon Olds
He passes me on the street, his hair
matted, skin polished with grime,
muttering, suit stained and stiffened—
and yet he is so young, his blond beard like a
sign of beauty and power. But his hands,
strangely flat, as if nerveless, hang and
flap slightly as he walks, like hands of
someone who has had polio, hands
that cannot be used. I smell the waste of his
piss, I see the ingot of his beard,
and think of my younger brother, his beauty,
coinage and voltage of his beard, his life
he is not using, like a violinist whose
hands have been crushed so he cannot play—
I who was there at the crushing of his hands
and helped to crush them.
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