As this year draws to its end, We give thanks for the gifts it brought And how they became inlaid within Where neither time nor tide can touch them. The days when the veil lifted And the soul could see delight; When a quiver caressed the heart In the sheer exuberance...

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes that a storm is coming, and I hear the far-off fields say things I can't bear without a friend, I can't love without a sister. The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on across...

Though there are torturers in the world There are also musicians. Though, at this moment, Men are screaming in prisons, There are jazzmen raising storms Of sensuous celebration, And orchestras releasing Glories of the Spirit. Though the image of God Is everywhere...

When great trees fall, rocks on distant hills shudder, lions hunker down in tall grasses, and even elephants lumber after safety. When great trees fall in forests, small things recoil into silence, their senses eroded beyond fear. When great souls die, the air around...

Quiet friend who has come so far, feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth into the change. What is it like, such intensity of...

I stalked her in the grocery store: her crown of snowy braids held in place by a great silver clip, her erect bearing, radiating tenderness,watching the way she placed yogurt and avocados in her basket, beaming peace like the North Star. I wanted to ask, "What aisle...

Not songs of loyalty alone are these, But songs of insurrection also, For I am the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel the world over. —Walt Whitman I see the dark-skinned bodies falling in the street as their ancestors fell before the whip and steel, the last blood...

The city’s streets are densely shelved with rows of salt and packaged hair. Intent on air, the funk of crave and function comes to blows with any smell that isn’t oil—the blare of storefront chicken settles on the skin and mango spritzing drips from razored hair. The...

Whose broken window is a cry of art (success, that winks aware as elegance, as a treasonable faith) is raw: is sonic: is old-eyed première. Our beautiful flaw and terrible ornament. Our barbarous and metal little man. “I shall create! If not a note, a hole. If not an...

I begin with love, hoping to end there. I don’t want to leave a messy corpse.          I don’t want to leave a messy corpse        Full of medicines that turn in the sun.   Some of my medicines turn in the sun. Some of us don’t need hell to be good.    ...

In the worst hour of the worst season of the worst year of a whole people a man set out from the workhouse with his wife. He was walking—they were both walking—north. She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up. He lifted her and put her on his back. He...

I have known only my own shallows— Safe, plumbed places, Where I was wont to preen myself. But for the abyss I wanted a plank beneath And horizons... I was afraid of the silence And the slipping toe-hold... Oh, could I now dive Into the unexplored deeps of me— Delve...