your journey is not my journey
though your struggles mirror mine.
be strong and persistent to the end.

books are better
than diamonds when rain
falls at last

kirtan kavannah

the entire earth
generosity
and not self

breathe in foul
hold and transform
breathe out ahava

oozing and coating
the neighborhood city earth
in sweetness

peanut butter and jelly on rye
holy holy holy
surrounds and fills

midday confusion may give way
to compassion if patience is served
in a water glass with lemon

sitting across from blackness
in armbands, blackness professing love
on the back of a book receipt

inky oblivious blackness
lonely as a cloud in loud calligraphy
slow motion come back for more

Partisans

They would transport photoless false identity cards (they would not know how many they were carrying) from Vilne to Hrodno, a routine trip. They would make contact in three days (they would not know their contact's name), which would give them time to pack carefully. They would make their way through Ponar, using the skills they’d been trained in and their own cunning, and head south. Both sisters had Aryan features and would be dressed as Aryans in kerchiefs, and both would speak German, which they had learned as children from their grandmother. Even when they were two alone, speaking to each other, they would speak German to eliminate a possible error of intuition or habit (they would not know who was listening). They packed their rucksacks together, sharing where they could and providing advice, one to the other. The older would carry the hairbrush and tooth powder; the younger took both extra pairs of bulky wool socks. In the morning, each would receive a starless coat and a packet of life to hide under her skirts, and they would walk away into the unknowable woods.

I Did Say Yes

found poem from "The Wreck of the Deutschland" (part the first)
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

O at lightening and lashed rod
the swoon of a heart
astrain with leaning of, laced with fire
fled with a sling of the heart
to the heart
from the flame to the flame then, tower

soft sift in an hourglass
kiss my hand
lovely - asunder
out of bliss springs the stress felt
hushed by, hearts are flushed by
the faithful waver, the faithless fable

only the heart being hard at bay
is out with it
brim, in a flash, full!
Thou art lightening and love
and fondler of heart
dark descending