by Susan | Apr 20, 2015 | National Poetry Month
They woke me this morning to tell me my brother had been killed in battle. Yet in the garden, uncurling moist petals, a new rose blooms on the bush. And I am alive, can still breathe the fragrance of roses and dung, eat, pray, and sleep. But when can I break my long...
by Susan | Apr 19, 2015 | National Poetry Month
I must keep from breaking into the story by force for if I do I will find myself with a war club in my hand and the smoke of grief staggering toward the sun, your nation dead beside you. I keep walking away though it has been an eternity and from each drop of blood...
by Susan | Apr 18, 2015 | National Poetry Month
It was a night spent in the basement of a burnt out building. People injured by the atomic bomb took shelter in this room, filling it. They passed the night in darkness, not even a single candle among them. The raw smell of blood, the stench of death. Body heat and...
by Susan | Apr 17, 2015 | National Poetry Month
Our life is a fire dampened, or a fire shut up in stone. -Jacob Boehme, De Incarnatione Verbi Outside everything visible and invisible a blazing maple. Daybreak: a seam at the curve of the world. The trousered legs of the women shimmered. They held their arms in front...
by Susan | Apr 16, 2015 | National Poetry Month
“Make of yourself a light,” said the Buddha, before he died. I think of this every morning as the east begins to tear off its many clouds of darkness, to send up the first signal — a white fan streaked with pink and violet, even green. An old man, he lay down between...
by Susan | Apr 15, 2015 | National Poetry Month
We know, Peace is more than absence of war And Love is much more than the absence of hate And Yes, Life is so much more than the absence of death So much more . . . How long would it take us to say, “Every human Life is sacred” in every tongue, Seven and a...
