As I was reciting some Whitman poems this morning and noticing my mood improving, I realized: I want to invite friends to read Whitman this summer. There was never any more inception than there is now,Nor…
Dear Friends, As we are reading Nhat Hanh’s poems for our June session, I thought I’d share a few poems by other Zen poets in the weeks ahead. Here is one by Han-Shan, who lived…
✓ A Confession and Other Religious Writings (Penguin) ✓ The Gospel in Brief: The Life of Jesus (Harper Perennial) ✓ Hadji Murat (translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky) ✓ The Kingdom of God Is within You…
1. I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil.–Walt Whitman 2. In 1968 Susan Sontag visited Hanoi for two weeks. In her account of her experiences, she seemed a bit surprised the…
Heaven high above, the night air chill,ranged stars crowd the sky, all in proper places,big stars darting rays back and forth little stars busy as boiling water.Heaven and humans don’t meddle with one another —what does…
Dear Ruthie, Have you ever read Brecht? He was one of my influences —I stole a couple of lines from “A Worker Reads History” and used them at the end of “A Mindful Rant for…
Elizabeth I, When I Was Fair and Young When I was fair and young, then favor graced me. Of many was I sought their mistress for to be. But I did scorn them all and answered them…
Wislawa SzymborskaABC I’ll never find out nowWhat A. thought of me.If B. ever forgave me in the end.Why C. pretended everything was fine.What part D. played in E.’s silence.What F. had been expecting, if anything.Why…
Contemporary war is a bureaucratic and capitalistic enterprise that requires its bored clerks, soulless administrators, ignorant taxpayers, contradictory priests, and encouraging families. If we understood that a war machine is a pervasive system of complicity…