For those days when only a little paranoia will do: We Who Are Your Closest Friends We who are your closest friends feel the time has come to tell you that every Thursday we have been meeting, as a group, to devise ways to keep you in perpetual uncertainty frustration discontent and torture by neither [...]

Three years ago I created a blog called Graciespeaks with a link to this poem. I think I should read it every day.  Aloud. And begin again. Praise Song for the Day BY ELIZABETH ALEXANDER A Poem for Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each other’s [...]

Winter under cultivation Is as arable as Spring. –Emily Dickinson

The Lightest Touch Good poetry begins with the lightest touch, a breeze arriving from nowhere, a whispered healing arrival, a word in your ear, a settling into things, then like a hand in the dark it arrests the whole body, steeling you for revelation. In the silence that follows a great line you can feel [...]

A lane of Yellow led the eye Unto a Purple Wood Whose soft inhabitants to be Surpasses solitude If Bird the silence contradict Or flower presume to show In that low summer of the West Impossible to know – –Emily Dickinson

Heaven for Helen by Mark Doty Helen says heaven, for her, would be complete immersion in physical process, without self-consciousness— to be the respiration of the grass, or ionized agitation just above the break of a wave, traffic in a sunflower’s thousand golden rooms. Images of exchange, and of untrammeled nature. But if we’re to [...]

 this poem by Joyce Sutphen will apropos for today: CROSSROADS The second half of my life will be black to the white rind of the old and fading moon. The second half of my life will be water over the cracked floor of these desert years. I will land on my feet this time, knowing at [...]