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Prayer
Without Ceasing
You never grew tired of watching her work. You loved the hum of the machine, the sawdust that stuck to her sleeve, and how she bent her head over the wood like something swan. You knew she was sharing something intimate with you. You were witnessing prayer.
May 2022
Riding Out At Evening
At dusk, everything blurs and softens. / From here out over the long valley, / the fields and hills pull up / the first slight sheets of evening, / as, over the next hour, / heavier, darker ones will follow.
February 2022
World Prayer Day
While people all over the world / chanted and prayed for a miracle, / we stood in the woods with binoculars / trained on a pair of bluebirds / flitting from branch to branch, / tiny chests puffed out / in the chill morning air.
December 2020January 2021
Featuring Bill McKibben, Rebecca McClanahan, Derrick Jensen, and more.
December 2020Just This Breath
I can’t see the virus, but I feel its seeds in me. I can’t see my faith, but I feel its seeds in me, too.
June 2020
Selected Poems
— from “In The Beautiful Rain” | Hearing that old phrase “a good death,” / which I still don’t exactly understand, / I’ve decided I’ve already / had so many, I don’t need another.
December 2018The Lonely Girl’s Guide To The Cosmos
There isn’t really a reset button for life — a switch you can hit, after you’ve gone through something terrible, that lets you go back to the beginning and start over. But there should be.
November 2018
Reverence
I bow to the pencil, the pencil maker, the tree that gave its wood, the graphite that fills its core, and the mind that conceived pencil. I bow to all the teeth and jaws that have chewed pencils out of boredom or nervousness.
November 2018The Wrong Imam
If we could have been inside his heart, if we could have been offered transportation from our Jerusalem to his heaven, this is what we might have absorbed: Abkar was not leading us in prayer. He was talking to God while we happened to be behind him, squeezed in so tightly we could hardly find places for our foreheads on flawless plush carpet.
December 2017
Selected Poems
— from “To My Husband At The Beginning Of The Holy Month Of Ramadan” | Even though you no longer believe, you wake with me / before dawn. You prepare my breakfast: porridge, sliced banana, / a cup of tea, a glass of water.
December 2017
