I pass a woman on the beach. We both wear graying hair, feel sand between our toes, hear surf, and see blue sky. I came with a smile. She came to get one. No. I'm wrong. She sits on a boulder by a cairn of stacked rocks. Hands over her heart, she stares out to sea....

I use a trick to teach students how to avoid passive voice. Circle the verbs. Imagine inserting “by zombies” after each one. Have the words been claimed by the flesh-hungry undead? If so, passive voice. I wonder if these sixth graders will recollect, on summer...

Part of suffering is the useless urge to announce that you’re suffering. There is no other way to say it: I’m suffering. Just to say “I suffer” helps. I read somewhere, “we become lyrical when we suffer.” Happiness is suffering for the right reasons. First-order...

We are spendthrifts with words, We squander them, Toss them like pennies in the air– Arrogant words, Angry words, Cruel words, Comradely words, Shy words tiptoeing from mouth to ear. But the slowly wrought words of love and the thunderous words of heartbreak– Those we...

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city, Mad-eyed from stating the obvious, Not proclaiming our fall but begging us In God’s name to have self-pity, Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range, The long numbers that rocket the mind; Our...

God started small              At the first showdown between good and evil        God didn’t come at anyone like a cowboy        God didn’t open...

From the sequence “Shekhinah Speaks” Comfort, comfort my people ... —Isaiah 40:1 A voice says, “Your punishment has ended.” You never listen to that voice. You really suck at being comforted. Another voice says, “Cry.” That voice always gets your attention, keeps you...

For those of us who live at the shoreline standing upon the constant edges of decision crucial and alone for those of us who cannot indulge the passing dreams of choice who love in doorways coming and going in the hours between dawns looking inward and outward at once...

The people I love the best jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight. They seem to become natives of that element, the black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half-submerged balls. I love people who...

Out of heaven, to bless the high places, it falls on the penthouses, drizzling at first, then a pelting allegro, and Dick and Jane skip to the terrace and go boogieing through the azaleas, while mommy and daddy come running with pots and pans, glasses, and basins and...

I thought of happiness, how it is woven Out of the silence in the empty house each day And how it is not sudden and it is not given But is creation itself like the growth of a tree. No one has seen it happen, but inside the bark Another circle is growing in the...