Poetry

Heart of the universe, pumping life’s love through all living flesh, both sleeping and waking, hear my prayer. May I make it through this day dragging my tired, worn body behind me through the minutes past the hurdles of fraught mealtimes fights over television deadlines at work, across the finish line, where my child surrenders

there is time still for sitting in cafes in Paris sipping wine. Time still for going to meet The guru. There is time still. Now I am caring for eternity. Carrying bodies soft with sleep to beds of flowered quilts and pillows. Answering cries deep out of nighttime fears. Buckling shoes. Opening doors. Pretending. My

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood. How grass can be nourishing in the mouths of the lambs. How rivers and stones are forever in allegiance with gravity while we ourselves dream of rising. How two hands touch and the bonds will never be broken. How people come, from delight or the

Maybe you suggested something unthinkable like, perhaps, I should get my dog groomed after she rolled in the poo of a sick horse and I naturally concluded that you were the absolute worst for thinking that I would subject an angel to the horror of being bathed by a blade-toting stranger. Maybe it was when

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on.

Before the animal sanctuary where I hugged a turkey, feathered angel nuzzling under my chin, before I knew turkeys love to be hugged, before I was old enough to volunteer to serve meals at the church, before I heard the preacher’s wife scold a man without a home for not being grateful enough, before I

Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves…. Do not seek the answers that cannot be given you, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, live

The other day I was ricocheting slowly off the blue walls of this room, moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano, from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor, when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard. No cookie nibbled by a

the things one will not regret, when the child wakes crying “mama,” late as you are about to close your book and sleep and she will not be comforted back to her crib, she points you out of her room, into yours, you tell her, “I was just reading here in bed,” she says, “read

I see you, Mama. An ocean of people rushing past you stand at the bottom of the grey subway stairs double-stroller in arms figuring your ascent I see you at the library at the free music classes at the grocery store on the bus pointing out dandelions and pine trees explaining that it’s not all

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice — though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. “Mend my life!” each voice cried. But you didn’t stop. You knew what you had to

This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. He may be