Justice

Justice Society demands vengeance but cannot bear justice, requires morality but cannot stand faultless under a searchlight, expects order but despises authority, screams for open borders and the acceptance of the tired, poor huddled masses yearning to be free but won’t share a meal and offer a bed to a stranger in need. We are…

A New Poem

A New Poem I love a new poem that I must read over and over. First run is a foreign language, but as I go through the words one by one— turning them over and over, weighing, measuring, giving them the tender respect they deserve—then the phrases, metaphors, similes, word spacings, and stanza breaks, it…

Barely Smelling Bacon

Barely Smelling Bacon Out on the lake’s edge in the blackness of a remote mountain cabin, she sits straight up in bed peering into the dark and blinking to see better. A creature is shuffling on the rocks outside, rummaging, and brushing against the outside log walls. Then scratching, is it the sound of claws…

Love and Beauty

Love and Beauty How we yearned for the earth to release, to let go its weightless gold and allow the revelation to   fill our souls. And suddenly it bloomed, parchment leaf by parchment leaf shimmering in   the light until our whole world brimmed with the treasures of unfolding fall. In those sweet  …

Canyon Carvings

Canyon Carvings What words are carved of You Oh, Ancient of Days across these canyon walls? I see You, think if You, yearn for You in every crevasse. What is Your Name? What motivates You? All this glory around me tells me a story about You. But as it turns out, this is my story….

The Edge

The Edge It’s hard to imagine just how much we live on the edge. Daily life brings us to the   periphery of the lake, the pond, the river, the fountain, the canyon, even the thin   brink of the heavens in a swift moving jet. But some get sick of that hard   demarcation of…

Shackled

“But if he says to you, ‘I will not go out from you,’ because he loves you and your household, since he is well-off with you,  then you shall take an awl, and put it through his ear into the door, and he shall be your slave forever” (Duet. 15:16-17). Shackled There is a chain…

The Flood

Painting by Liam Rainsford The Flood Yesterday’s burdens weighed you down — too heavy for the long road as they gathered in the corners of your heart. Let the blueness of that wound you bear today become a scouring tide; let it rise and wash away winter’s broken, brown debris. Let the tears flow, let…

Like No Other

Ever-Increasing Light Jewish Sabbaths, Feasts, and More Marking Jewish Themes with Distinction “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy” (Ps. 137:5-6). Wayne and I…

Bluest Ever

Bluest Ever The Indian Paintbrushes are jealous of the Bluebonnets, and maybe that is why they riot along the roadsides and highways. Bluebonnets don’t care. They prefer to silently parade across the new sprung grass during their seasonal spell in the spring; and certainly, they do not compete with paintbrush strokes of garish neon orange….