poetry | pull up a chair

keening.

the winds have been howling all night, a rushing, a roaring of air on amphetamines. sometimes the sound rises in pitch, almost a keening, the sound of a soul in mourning.

keening, a word that draws me half around the world to the banshees of that faraway island from which my people came (a good half of my people, actually, but it seems the half i’m rooted in). it’s a word that places me in a dark and damp room where a fire roars, and the people are circled in sorrow, cloaked in black woolen wraps. swaying and rocking, the sound that rises up is the sound that lives at the pit of us, the sound that rises when our heart or our soul is shattered. cracked wide open. it’s the ooze of anguish that comes without volition. keening sometimes comes without knowing. it just is. it’s primal. a reservoir so deep inside us it takes velocities of sorrow to tap into it, to draw from its well.

i might have keened once or twice, but i barely remember. both times someone had died, and it felt like part of me did as well. i remember the sound, remember i barely knew where it rose from, or that i’d had it inside.

the God who imagined us imagined so far beyond the imaginable. the God who imagined us gave us a sound, buried it deep, deep inside, where it awaits necessity. there are in our lives times when only that keening will do. that high pitched guttural whoosh that captures the unspeakable, a whoosh that rises and falls, traces the scale from basso, the animal roar, to mezzo soprano, up high where it’s piercing.

and why would the wind be keening?

look around.

listen.

don’t let us dull to the litany.

waking up to find we live in a pariah nation is one. but that’s almost too big for my head. i tend to operate in the finer grain. and the closest i came to keening this week was the news that the poet had been shot through the head.

what poet, you might ask?

the one in minnesota. the one whose first description i read was “37-year-old, mother of a six-year-old, award-winning poet.”

who shoots a poet? how often does the descriptor of a violent death include the word poet?

poets are porous. poets live in the world permeable to the little-noticed. poets process what’s breathtaking and put it, miraculously, to words. poets, the ones i love, the ones whose words put form and frame to unutterable parts of me, they’re among the most gentle-souled humans i’ve known.

renée good was a poet. a mother. and she died at 37, in the front seat of her maroon van we’ve all now watched over and over.

renée good, back when she went by the name renée nicole macklin, won the 2020 academy of american poets prize. that’s not a prize for a piker. that’s a real-deal prize, a trophy worth tucking on the highest shelf in your house. she won it for a poem curiously titled “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs.” now, that might not be the first thing that stirs me to want to write a poem. but poets begin in curious places sometimes and take us into terrain where wisdom or epiphany comes.

when we become a nation where a poet is shot through the windshield, just minutes after dropping her six-year-old off at school, we need to ask who in the world we’ve become. it only becomes more twisted when we can see for ourselves how the scene unfolded, and the people in charge, the ones holding the guns, the ones not letting a doctor rush to the scene, tell us that we didn’t see what we saw.

i wonder how apt this headline would be: good is dead.

that would be the headline atop the poet’s obituary. rachel good, award-winning poet and mother of three, was shot through the head. by federal agents. who then refused to let a doctor rush to the front seat of her bloodied, bloodied minivan. and waited too many fading heartbeats before giving the okay to call 9-1-1.

no wonder the wind is keening.

no wonder the world is tapping into its most guttural cries.

not long before i’d found myself tripping over the violent death of rachel good, i’d been thinking deeply about poets. thinking about a breed of poets i’d likened to “a tribe of saintesses.” that’s a feminization of saint, an intentional genderizing, if you will, because the poets i’m most drawn to might technically, and in an old-time world, be coined poetesses, and because the ones to which i am most deeply drawn are ones who weave the sacred, even the liturgical, into the vernacular from which they write. because the saintesses to whom i am most drawn are the ones whose verse scans the divine, shimmers at the edge of the ineffable, catches me unaware, but grounds me in a certainty more certain than many a gospel, i turn to them for edification and plain old uplift of my weary soul.

i keep them in close reach.

sitting just beside me here at this old maple table are two such poet saints, the ones whose lines leave me gasping, my spine tingling as if something holy has just wafted by and through me. because it has.

here’s one. her name is kathleen hirsch, and this is from her mending prayer rugs (finishing line press, 2025). it’s the last stanza of her poem “prayer rugs” (emphasis mine):

I bend in blessing toward all that breathes
May each hour enlarge the pattern—
rose dawn, wind song, tender shoots of faith—
that I may see the weft of the hidden weaver.

or, also sitting right by my elbow, jan richardson’s how the stars get in your bones: a book of blessings (wanton gospeller press, 2025), i flip through pages and pluck just one, titled “the midwife’s prayer.” it begins:

Keep screaming, little baby girl.
Keep practicing using those lungs
and do not stop,
because hollering will help
to ease the shock
every time you go through
another birth.

the saintesses, i swear, speak from a godly vernacular. they see deeper than the rest of us, dwell deeper too. their gift is the gift taken away at Babel. while all the rest of us were stripped of the powers of universal understanding, the saintesses kept on. they speak words that speak to all of us—if we listen closely. if we trace our fingers across the lines they offer, sacramental lines, lines that lift off the page, lift us off the page and into the transcendent, where for just a moment we get to reside.

i don’t know the rest of rachel good’s poems. but i know she was a poet. and the silence where once she spun the words of the unspoken, the little-heard voice, that silence now is cacophonous.

and even the winds are keening.

you can read the whole of rachel good’s prize-winning fetal-pig poem here.

and here are the first few lines…

On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs
by Renée Nicole Macklin

i want back my rocking chairs,

solipsist sunsets,
& coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches.

i’ve donated bibles to thrift stores
(mashed them in plastic trash bags with an acidic himalayan salt lamp—
the post-baptism bibles, the ones plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots, the dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind):

keening in minnesota on the block where rachel good was killed

what shall we do to quell the need for keening? and what poets draw you into the depths of the Holy?

16 Comments

December 12, 2025

oh, the places we’ve come . . .

winter, i’ve always sensed, is the curling-in time, the season of unseen stirring, and in an octave of dawns, dusks, and nightfalls, winter will be upon us.

but even now, it’s a season for quieting, for simmering thoughts as well as saucepots of cinnamon stick, star anise, and clove. my simmering for the last nineteen years picks up the pace as the page turns on another year of pulling up chairs to this imaginary old maple table, one where the indentations of long-ago math homework are pressed into the grain, where so many coffees and juices have been poured and sipped and spilled and sopped up with sponges. over the course of these nearly two decades, it seems i’ve developed a knack for simmering while tapping away at the rows of alphabet keys—some 1,255 simmers and counting, all under the name “pull up a chair,” now tapped, posted, and filed away.

only a handful of the very first chairs—bless them, those stalwart humans—still pull up a chair, at least every once in a while. but along the way, so many chairs have been added, and multiplied. and our polestar has never shifted: to carve out a sacred space where questions are asked, and stories are told, where hearts are bared, and above all where gentle, gentle kindness is the metronome by which we set all our rhythms. once in a while, over all the bumps and bruises encountered along the way, we’ve been known to bow our heads and pour out our hearts in holy, holy please God, pray for us.

on the twelfth of december, 2006, our firstborn had just been bar mitzvahed, and our then so-called “little one” was but a kindergartener, not yet reading or writing but melting my heart by the minute and filling our notebooks with his stories and antics and an encyclopedia of unforgettable “teddyisms.” (some kept alive to this day; for the sheer pure joy of it). the firstborn, now law professor, insisted at the dawn of the self-published blogging age that i, his little old mother, could figure out how to “blog,” a verb that’s always sounded to me like a crude guttural effusion, a burp perhaps. and back in the day, he gave me his hand-me-down laptop to do it. to prove i could blog, that is. (as has so often been the case, he even then was wiser than me…)

back then, the question that had captured my attention was the simplest of notions: i believed, after a few years of keenly observing, tagging along with, and writing long newspaper stories of families in the thick of life transitions as a reporter for the chicago tribune, that life’s biggest questions aren’t reserved for colloquia and global summits, nor do they wait for podiums and percussive applause. they are the stuff of the everyday. and if we watch closely, pay keen attention, we can lift those universal, deeply-human questions and struggles from the quotidian stream, hold them to the light for closer consideration, and reap their wisdoms and epiphanies in real time. now, before the moments pass us by and we come to the saddest realization of all: that it’s too late, and our chance at most wakeful living has slipped into the distance.

all these years later, life certainly has galloped along here at the table. this ol’ chair has seen the growings up of two boys, buried parents beloved, moved another from her home of sixty years. taken a tour of cambridge, mass., and a second helping of college. trekked across the pond, set our sights on war zones, and been rolled into surgical suites and recovery rooms. we’ve feared for our country, for humanity, for civility, and plain old decency. and we’ve refused to surrender to the crude and cruel ways wielded by those who seize power. we’ve kept our minds opened, and tried—oh, we’ve tried—to emphasize the imperative of objective, double-sourced truth, and the slaying of hearsay and heresy. we’ve laid out worries here, and plenty of joys; we’ve marveled and wondered and been gobsmacked aplenty. i’ve pondered cancer and the physics of time, and the holy shimmering presence i know as God.

lately i seem to have taken to gathering up wisdoms far greater than mine will ever be. i am, as a beloved friend of the chair once put it, something of a magpie. a magpie mostly attuned to seeking the sacred amid the plainstuff of living. the idea of the commonplace book is one i heartily embrace: bring on the poets and sages and prophets, and let me invite you into their brilliant notebooks and minds and unfurl for you their passages and poetics that take away our collective breath and find a way of percolating for hours to come.

this ol’ chair has given me a place to keep on tapping away at the keys. i realized long ago that i untangle the knots of my life by stringing out sentences. and trying on thoughts. thank you for indulging me, those of you who choose to read along. thank you for pondering the questions at the end of each post, in the quiet of your own soul, or by leaving a note at the table.

you are, collectively and individually, humans who restore and buck up my faith in the inherent majesty and wonder of the shimmering undying spirit that populates this earth with more than a modicum of heaven’s best offerings.

bless you, bless you, a thousand times thousand, bless you.

this week i am bringing a little birthday bouquet of beauties that struck me across the week, all of them tied together by the beautiful idea that the birthing of holiness is a sacramental act of which we must partake. it’s one that entails unlocking our hearts, making room in the manger within, and allowing the Holy and Sacred to form within, and to birth it with our words and our love in the act. it’s quite the trinity here: a benedictine monk who practices and teaches meditation in the french countryside at a monastery known as bonnevaux; st. john of the cross, the great mystic, as translated by the poet daniel ladinsky; and the late, great luci shaw, a beloved british-american poet and essayist who died at 96 on december first.

first up, the idea of birthing God within us from the benedictine monk, laurence freeman, whom i’ve been learning from for years…

In the 14th century, Meister Eckhart enjoyed waking people up in his sermons by expounding some uncomfortably new perspectives about their standardised faith. He must have stirred a few dozy parishioners when he asked: “What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly, but does not take place within myself? And, that it should take place within myself, is really what matters.”

Actually, the great Augustine had asked the same question a thousand years before and added that if we are the children of God, we must become God’s mother as well. If, he said, this birth of the eternal word as Christ in the soul is to happen, our heart – the deepest centre of our being – must become the sacred manger. If we are filled with egocentric distraction there is ‘no room at the inn’ and so the heart must become that empty and open space where the birth takes place and through which he is welcomed into our world.

In today’s gospel, John the Baptist is usually and badly translated as saying ‘repent, for the reign of God is close at hand’. Basileia, the Greek word we think of as ‘kingdom’, is feminine and so could equally well translate it as ‘queendom’. It doesn’t mean a juridical area but the space in which the presence and grace of God is acknowledged and welcomed. The gospel word, badly translated as ‘repent’, is ‘metanoia’: a change of mind and heart. It is not about feeling sorry for past mistakes. It means spinning round 180 degrees and entirely changing your perspective on and approach to reality.

Living in the desert, wearing a garment of camel hair and eating locusts and wild honey, John seems to us a bit extremist. People who reduce waste and get back to essentials are often called crazy. But because of his spiritual sanity he drew the crowds who asked him ‘what shall we do?’ because, like us, they lived in confused, divided and dangerous times. He told them simply to live honestly and justly but that this lifestyle would prepare them for the imminent – and immanent – coming of the great transformer of all things.

Meditation is the great simplifier. It reduces the way we waste both time and life’s opportunities. In daily life it is the catalyst for ongoing metanoia. The medicine that loosens the grip of illusion. Usually, we start enthusiastically but before we get to the full 180 degrees we slow down and say, ‘this is quite good, let’s stop here’. Fortunately, if the birth process has already started, it will not allow us to arrest or deny it. We have to see it through until it breaks through into our world and we are happy and lucky if we do.

—Laurence Freeman

and from the sixteenth-century mystic St. John of the Cross there comes this interpretation/translation of what daniel ladinsky calls one of his “love poems”…

IF YOU WANT

If
you want
the Virgin will come walking down the road
pregnant with the holy,
and say,
“I need shelter for the night, please take me inside your heart,
my time is so close.”

Then, under the roof of your soul, you will witness the sublime
intimacy, the divine, the Christ
taking birth
forever,

as she grasps your hand for help, for each of us
is the midwife of God, each of us.

Yet there, under the dome of your being does creation
come into existence eternally, through your womb, dear pilgrim–
the sacred womb in your soul,

as God grasps our arms for help; for each of us is
His beloved servant
never far.

If you want, the Virgin will come walking
down the street pregnant
with Light and sing …

—St. John of the Cross, “If You Want” in Daniel Ladinsky, Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West (New York: Penguin Group, 2002), 306-307.

and, in closing, here’s a classic from blessed, blessed luci, whose great contribution to the canon of Christian poetry would be her capacity for drawing big truths about God and human experience from viscerally pulsing fine-grained images and objects. she is the perfect voice to close out this nineteenth year of the chair….

Kenosis
By Luci Shaw

In sleep his infant mouth works in and out.
He is so new, his silk skin has not yet
been roughed by plane and wooden beam
nor, so far, has he had to deal with human doubt.
He is in a dream of nipple found,
of blue-white milk, of curving skin
and, pulsing in his ear, the inner throb
of a warm heart’s repeated sound.
His only memories float from fluid space.
So new he has not pounded nails, hung a door,
broken bread, felt rebuff, bent to the lash,
wept for the sad heart of the human race.

amen.

may this blessed week bring softening to the walls of your heart, and a widening within those chambers so that Holiness, however you name it, might be birthed there….love, b.

25 Comments

December 5, 2025

so close to the bone

uncharted is pretty much the most fitting descriptor for the cartography of cancer. undiscovered nooks hide in the shadows. though not all of it is somber. sometimes, with no warning, you find yourself among an unexplored parcel for the very first time.

i’m covered with goosebumps this week, not because my latest scan was ominous (it wasn’t) but because i am reminded again this week, viscerally so, how very damn thin this ice is—the ice that is any cancer, and mine in particular. i sat down with my oncologist the other day, and she spelled out so many truths about the merciless ways of cancer—how so many hit-or-miss variables make up each individual constellation, how some of mine fall in the you-don’t-wish-this column, and one or two don’t, how some cancers are “undruggable” (mine is) yet some of the drugs are so toxic you’re mostly relieved you don’t have to have them coursing through your veins—and it all becomes stunningly clear that there really is not much certainty or sense to the prognostication at play here. sometimes you make it through the labyrinth, sometimes you don’t. who’s to say what flicks the switch that plays out your story.

but that wasn’t the only reason for goosebumps.

a curious thing happens almost instantaneously and mysteriously when you find out you’ve been highjacked into cancer camp: you make fast friends. with the ones you find strolling around the campground, the ones who know the indignities of needle pokes and incision tattoos that now crosshatch your flesh; the ones who spout the most off-color jokes, and know all the words to the worries that keep you awake in the night; the ones who strip truth to the bone and don’t shy away from words that others dare not utter.

one of those friends died this week. bruce was his name, and not too many months ago, he was the one who all but talked me onto the airplane to new york to get a second opinion, when i—the one who never has had a taste for ruffling feathers, nor for appearing to second-guess authority—was so afraid to face the cold hard reality of a cancer center whose very name registers the seriousness with which cancer is to be taken. bruce told me all about his trek to mayo clinic, and insisted i get on that plane to sloan kettering. and when i got home, he checked in to make sure i’d stayed in one piece. his wife, eileen, also my close cancer buddy (and also with ratchety-vocal-cord voice), has been one of the ones who until now has made me laugh the hardest; lately, her texts have been tearing me apart, especially when she told me she’s mostly been crying herself to sleep these last couple months.

and just yesterday i was scrolling across the internet and bumped into the news that one of the fiercest patient advocates in the world of lung cancer, a woman whose cancer (diagnosed when she was 39, and recurred multiple times) has defied all odds for 16 years, has just started another round of radiation for two metastatic nodules on her chest wall.

when one of us goes down, the thud is felt by all.

and so, as if never before, i am looking out at the snow-caked garden, at the beefeater-sized snow caps atop all my birdhouses and feeders, and i am whispering, whispering, inaudible prayers of pure and profound thanks. for the miracle of another winter. for the quotidian phone call from one of my boys. for the chance to sit in a near-freezing kitchen to work side-by-side my second born. for the husband who leaves his car in the snow, so i can pull into the snowless garage. and who waits till i get home late one night to eat his bowl of cereal, while i slurp my soup.

and tough as it is to swallow, and bracing and sad as it all sometimes is, i am, in the end, more than a little grateful to be so fully awake to the whole of it: the friend whose courage i’ll carry; the blessing of a doctor who minces no words and delivers each one so bountifully, and with such tender, all-absorbing care; the miracle of any old friday or thursday or tuesday; the lungs that still work as mightily as they can; this place that lets me write it all down, because sometimes you just need a way to make sense of the blur, and this was one of those weeks.

not because i’m dying; because i’m alive.

and with that, a poem that so deeply echoes the essence of all that pulses through me these days, and is, in many ways, the core message of book No. 6 now in the pipeline….

Praise What Comes
surprising as unplanned kisses, all you haven’t deserved
of days and solitude, your body’s immoderate good health
that lets you work in many kinds of weather. Praise

talk with just about anyone. And quiet intervals, books
that are your food and your hunger; nightfall and walks
before sleep. Praising these for practice, perhaps

you will come at last to praise grief and the wrongs
you never intended. At the end there may be no answers
and only a few very simple questions: did I love,

finish my task in the world? Learn at least one
of the many names of God? At the intersections,
the boundaries where one life began and another

ended, the jumping-off places between fear and
possibility, at the ragged edges of pain,
did I catch the smallest glimpse of the holy?

~ Jeanne Lohmann ~
(The Light of Invisible Bodies)

Jeanne Lohmann was a Quaker poet, and one of the very favorites of the great Parker Palmer. as a wee bonus i am adding here the last stanza of another one of her beauties, “what the day gives.” she is a poet in whose work i shall be poking around. here’s the stanza:

Stunned by the astonishing mix in this uneasy world
that plunges in a single day from despair
to hope and back again, I commend my life
to Ruskin’s difficult duty of delight,
and to that most beautiful form of courage,
to be happy.

and finally a poem from one of my favorite irish poets, eavan boland, passed along to me by one of my favorite humans. simply because it’s so perfectly, perfectly glorious…..and the very definition of love in its highest order….

Quarantine
by Eavan Boland

In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking—they were both walking—north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.

From New Collected Poems by Eavan Boland. Copyright © 2008 by Eavan Boland.

what brought you this week the deepest sense of how very blessed you are, to be alive and able to exercise love in whatever form fills you the most?

p.s. i hope all of you who still find a seat here (after all these years; 19 next week!), or who are here perhaps for the very first time, know how very very deeply this space, and your presence here, has become one of the polestars of my life. my calendar is set by writing the chairs (every friday morning without fail); six books now have first been seeded here; and the kindness circle we’ve all built together is rare and precious in the fullest sense of that word. as the world around us has grown harsher, and the rules of engagement seem to be shifting at rapid and dizzying pace, we have rooted ourselves more and more deeply in the gentle art of caring gently for each other, offering up wisdom by the ladleful (and i mean the wisdom you offer me, offer all of us), and lifting our kindness off the page (aka screen) and into the real living, breathing world. among the things for which i am so deeply grateful, all of you dwell at the core of my heart. bless you.

24 Comments

November 28, 2025

spill-over gratitude

morning-after kitchen: when the cookstove becomes the drying rack

in this old house, the day after the feasting is the day for leftovers and long walks in the woods. we steer clear of the malls, the black-friday deals, and the great american drive to consume. among the leftovers spilling this morn are the ones of my heart which never ever has enough room for all there is for which to whisper “thank you”….

And so I begin with that glorious morning-after inhale and exhale of a put-back-to-order kitchen, a very full fridge, and the echoes of the night before still pinging off the walls, making me giggle as I count out my coffee scoops: the 95-year-old mama who still sits by my side, still notices the one or two things I might have forgotten, and nibbles “quality control” of every dish at every stage on its way to the groaning board; the brother and his beloved who drove in from Detroit, and the one who flew from LA; the new friend who drove down from the Twin Cities and brought along his Rhode Island clam fritters; the beloved friend who mashed every last potato and dolloped in butter, heavy cream, cream cheese, half and half (and sent us all to the cardiologist morning after)…and of course, of course, the miracle of both our boys, the line cook and the law professor, here for the holy hour when we bow heads, hold hands, and pour forth our litanies of thanks; and at the far end of the table, my most beloved, whose presence across from me is always, always the sweet spot of any day…

Moving along, and thinking back across the last stretch of days, the kid mechanic at our neighborhood garage who got rid of the “check-engine” light with a know-how that had me back on the road less than ten minutes later. Phew.

The oncologist who talks to me with her knees pressing against mine, intent that we look into each others’ eyes. And sometimes deeper, I swear.

The orthodontist who put down her pen amid banal history taking and announced: “Let’s just go for coffee!”

The law professor colleague of my very own kid who saw how cold I was in the first quarter of my first football game in 51 years, who slithered from her seat for what I presumed was a dash to the powder rooms, only to have her return with a brand-new-from-the-merch-store, very-warm, blue-and-gold scarf to wrap round my neck and up to my ears.

My sweet line cook of a kid who called to insist he was making two of the sides, plus an appetizer, for Thanksgiving “because you already have a million other things to do, and you shouldn’t have to do everything, and everyone should have skin in the game.” Where did he come from this kid who is always thinking of how it is to be the other someone?

The nice people at the grocery store who made my stuffing so I didn’t have to.

Ditto the nice people who made the gravy.

Ditto the very nice people who smoked the turkey!

The sister-in-law who always always rolls up her sleeves and scrubs every last plate, knife, and serving platter.

The editor who finally said I could send along the latest drafts of a book in the works, a book exploring the undulations and awakenings of Scan Time, that netherworld for those whose days are measured scan to scan to scan.

The countless, countless tenderhearted souls who have paved this bumpy road of a year with more kindness than any girl would dare fall to her knees and ask for…..from hand-stitched quilts, to crocheted afghans, to tea loaves, to the electric blanket that does not fail.

The blessed, blessed souls who dared to share their immense and sometimes unbearable grief; especially the two whose course was so deeply fraught and who dared to unfurl the whole of their fears as they marched face-forward to inevitable ends, and in those unmaskings gave me a glimpse of the ineffable courage and mortal core that will carry us all across our last distance and beyond the sacred veil.

The curious thing that what could have been any old Thursday is now, in this moment, a draw that pulls people we love from across the hills and vales, and rivers and lakes, to sit round one single table, to partake of platters of bird and bread and roots pulled from the ground, for the simple sacrament of saying thank you, And I love you enough to put up with airports and very-packed roads.

For the wisdom guides in this life, the likes of whom include the incomparable Maria Popova, who is adamantly not a religionist but is deeply sacred, and who astounds me time after time with her epiphanies—often all the more forceful because we come from different angles but land at the same sublime spot. She strikes one of my polestar beliefs when she writes this passage, concluding with the line: “It may be that we are only here to learn how to love.”

Because the capacity for love may be the crowning achievement of consciousness and consciousness the crowning achievement of the universe, because the mystery of the universe will always exceed the reach of the consciousness forged by that mystery, love in the largest sense is a matter of active surrender (to borrow Jeanette Winterson’s perfect term for the paradox of art) to the mystery.

It may be that we are only here to learn how to love.

With all my heart, I believe that. And devote my days to the doing of it, an urgency all the more sacred now that my life is set by the metronome of Scan Time….

a forever favorite poem…..

Small Kindnesses

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”
+ Danusha Laméris

a bit of theology, in advent of Advent, the season of anticipation, awaiting the soon to come Silent Night…..

this is from my friends at the SALT Project who always stir thoughts because they poke around and enter through uncommon angles. i found myself stirred by the idea of Three Advents, one of which comes without folderol or clanging of cymbals, which is in keeping with the quietist that is my soul’s natural setting….

Advent means “arrival,” and Bernard of Clairvaux, the twelfth-century abbot and theologian, wrote eloquently of “three Advents”: first of all, the Incarnation, the Advent at Christmas; and last of all, the Parousia, the Advent at the end of the age (Matthew’s subject in this week’s passage). And the second or “middle” Advent, the one in between these other two, is the everyday arrival of Jesus: the host at the table, the still small voice, the hungry mother, the weary migrant. In other words, Jesus comes to us again and again, calling us, inviting us to help repair the world, little by little, a thousand swords remade into a thousand ploughshares. The new era of God’s shalom is dawning even now — though its glimmers aren’t always obvious at first. On the contrary, they often shine in unexpected places and at unexpected hours, like a thief in the night.

and in the spirit of Thanksgiving’s groaning board, one last dollop, a line that echoes Maria Popova’s wisdom on love; this, from the poet Philip Larkin who ends his famous poem, An Arundel Tomb, with this indelible truth and unforgettable line: “what will survive of us is love.”

the obvious question: what lines will you add to the litany of deep thanks?

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November 21, 2025

the not-so-simple tasks of being alive

life, sometimes, makes like it’s an arcade of carnival challenges, and to make it to the other side is, in fact, something of a triumph we barely take time to note.

we shouldn’t, though, take it for granted. we are mightier than we think. and there will come times when we truly need to believe how mighty we can be. we’re not here on this earth to dawdle around.

as this week draws to a close, i can testify that these things happened: a new used car was found, bought, driven home, and will soon be ferried to another state; a kid wrestled through the decision of which of three job offers he’d choose, and started the one; husband down for the count with a cough that sounds like it’s hollowing his lungs; cavity filled in the way back of my mouth; latest peek at my lungs behind me (now awaiting results, a fraught interval that always leads to some trembles); and the latest round of edits on Book No. 6 at last sent off to editor (i had to wait till her calendar cleared).

not included in the list, but very much there, are the facts that i spent the week dodging the heck out of whatever virus was mucking up the works, for fear my scan or my cavity filling would get bumped; also, never mind the “check tire pressure” light that went on halfway home from the car lot, and the hurdles to get that untangled. in addition, i arose each dawn, never crashed my own car, swam a few miles, cooked a few mediocre dinners and one or two fair ones, and grocery shopped what seems like ninety-five times.

such is the business of living. each week throws at us a spaghetti bowl of hurdles, some humdrum, some of dimension that leads us to gulping.

it’s the quotidian stuff that comprises our day to day. and to make it through and to the other side is a feat that draws on cords and gears we barely acknowledge. to miss the chance to take note, to not ponder just how resilient we are, just how swiftly we can untangle ourselves from houdini’s chains is to short shrift our capacities.

we live our lives amid stories of what seem insurmountable feats: folks rolling into surgeries that untangle their insides, or shave off a lump on their spine; house fires that leave lives in ashes and soggy remains; kids finding out their cancer is double-D badd. (and those are stories plucked only from the last 48 hours, each one devastating and true.)

the news of the bad guys around us might distract and infuriate and leave us in tears. but the hard work of being human is never far from home. it’s the pit in our belly we awake with, and the headache that drums us to sleep. it’s what we might face before breakfast, and what comes with an unsuspecting wallop midway through the day. it comes in the phone call we never expected, and the one that makes us fall to our knees.

i’m not trying out for a part as the voice of doom here. i’m simply saying what we too often forget: no matter the circumstances, nor the twists in the story, we are all made of strong stuff—stronger than we remember to note.

to get to the other side of the traumas and troubles that hurtle our way is worthy of note, if not ovation. it might do us well to take count of the muscle it takes, and the grit, and the intense imagination, to merely get to the other side.

and here we are, on the far side of all those things that a week ago seemed insoluble.

that alone might stand as proof that even the frailest among us are tough as tough can be. and we can take on just about anything. we are breathed into life with every capacity our lives will demand. and we are living proof of how much we can survive.

you needn’t share this with anyone other than yourself, but perhaps you might find strength in looking back across the arc of your life and seeing what a marvel you are, and all the impossible hills you have climbed. what marvels you the most?

as antidote to all that, i bring you a bit of wonder in the form of the latest book that crossed my transom. it’s titled bellyache: poems for sensitive souls (harper one, 2026), and they had me at the subtitle. it’s by brianna pastor, a poet described in her bio as “a queer writer, empath, advocate, and author of the poetry collection good grief.” the book isn’t due out till february, but i got a review copy, and i’ll share a few marvels here. pastor’s poetry is rooted in childhood trauma and what it means to heal, with sensitivity and love as the non-negotiable parts of the deal. she writes, according to the author note, “about the raw, the uncomfortable, the overlooked, and makes clear that at the root of all things, is love.” it’s not every day that you open a book and find yourself in the midst of a poet whose heart feels so immensely attuned to the pain and the preciousness of tender, tender feeling.

here’s one of my favorites….

and here are two others (the spare simplicity is everything in these love-drenched poems):

and this:

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October 10, 2025

on faraway sands, the poets of war spoke to me

i was alone for the day, a whole sumptuous day of solitude and silence. so i, like half the rest of the world it seemed, was pulled to the water’s edge. i carried but a book and a bottle of water. i knew the week ahead would be rough, though i hadn’t a clue yet quite how rough. (two beloved souls, my exact age, died suddenly, one falling to her death*, another simply dying in his sleep.)

the book i carried is one i’d yearned to crack into, and as i sat there allowing its truths to wash over me, as the waves of the lake just across the sand washed over the shoreline again and again, i felt every drop of its anguish and truth. it was a book of poems written by thirty poets in gaza, and four from the west bank.

once upon a time, for ten good years, i gathered up each month for the chicago tribune a collection of three books that had most stirred my soul. they might be children’s books, or poetries, or memoirs and stories of the holiest people. the gatherings were vast, and some of those publishers still send me books, knowing full well my readers now are not the millions from the tribune and beyond, but rather the cherished friends of the chair.

this book i bring today is one worth clutching in your hands, pressing hard against your heart. it might be even more poignant against the improbable news that a cease fire in gaza has begun and some twenty living israeli hostages will soon be released.

its title, you must live: new poetry from palestine (copper canyon press, 2025), only begins to tell the story, only hints at the horrors and tendernesses within. but you can hear the pleas, the cries rising up from the rubble. it’s a bilingual anthology of poetries from gaza and the west bank, translated from the arabic and edited by Tayseer Abu Odeh and Sherah Bloor, with guest editor Jorie Graham, and it’s written not by poets who’ve somehow escaped, left behind the ravages of war, but rather it’s written by those still there. in poring over its pages—slowly and with prayerful intent—you hear the murmurs perhaps unheard by anyone else, you hear the lone voice rising from dust, you hear the whimper of a child left alone in the world, in the shattered brokenness of a world that no longer stands.

“especially now,” the editors write, “it is crucial to attend to those whose voices are under threat of elimination.”

ocean vuong called it “a light beam of a collection in our dark hours.” ilya kaminsky, the great poet most famous for his deaf republic, has written that it’s a book “filled with poems of utter urgency, poems that give us wisdom, in the face of devastation, in spite of devastation.”

i was as moved by the story behind the poems, as by some of the poems themselves. for starters, editing in a war zone is no feat for the timid. the editors write that at first they didn’t realize that every time someone’s phone connected to a satellite (to reply to an editing question) they became a target. to get a clear signal, the editors write, meant a life-or-death decision: standing atop rubble is where the signal is sharpest, and yet of course that means the poet is risking her or his life to reply.

consider that.

the editors write too that every time a reply did come through, be it a response about punctuation or diction, the editors sighed with relief. “they were still with us.” imagine being willing to die over a comma rather than a semicolon. consider that the next time you make a simple correction in a sentence you’re typing.

the collection begins with a poem that’s become fairly widely known, “if i must die,” by the late Refaat Alareer. the editors write: “this poem stands in for all those poets we failed to reach in time. their poems—chalked onto collapsed walls, or on the blackboards of schools-turned-shelters-turned-bombsites, traced in sand, or shared in private messages—will never reach us.”

the silence is stunning. the silence demands our reverence.

the editors call the poems a “poetry of witness,” speaking from a war zone deadly for journalists, a war zone where so many stories would otherwise go untold. the poets paint the portrait. and it is seizing with humanity. humanity crushed. humanity pummeled. human refusing to extinguish its tender, fragile beauties. we must know what we, humanity all, have wrought.

here are a few samples, barely enough to give you a sense of the pathos within, the pathos that rises from this old globe like a poisonous cloud desperate for one breath of air….

here is the poet Waleed al-Aqqad’s elegy for a young friend, set at the boy’s funeral, and tenderly describing the mutilations of his war-torn body:

We said goodbye
to you in your small death like the death
of sparrows.
We rearranged you.
We placed your severed hand across your chest,
covered your wounds with flowers,
cried as you wanted.

or this, from Ala’a al-Qatrawi’s poem to her children, two daughters and two sons, all under the age of six, all killed in an air strike on their home. she addresses her babies in heaven, offers her own body parts to her daughter, Orchida, as if she could piece her body back into her embrace:

And give my lungs to her.
Without them, maybe she suffocated.
Maybe she couldn’t call my name.
The rubble would have been too heavy for her.

it is wrenching to read. all of it. page after page, i read slowly, as if a dirge. i sat on a bench on the sand thousands and thousands of miles away. that seemed cruel, unfair, that i should be hearing the sounds of a day at a beach, when the sounds of war pressed on. and the words of new poets would again go unheard.

to those who understand the power of words, to those who dared to gather poems out from the rubble, bless you, and bless you, and may peace, everlasting peace, at last come to the holy land.

maria corina machado, recipient of the 2025 nobel peace prize

this hard week ends with a few sparks of hope: first, word of the cease fire and the imminent promised release of 20 living israeli hostages, and the bodies of 26 confirmed dead. and, in the immediate wake of that, the nobel peace prize was awarded this morning to venezuela’s “iron lady,” maria corina machado. the committees’ citation reads: “She is receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”

where did you find hope in these hard times?

*joannie barth was a most beloved reader of the chair. she lived in evergreen, colorado. was the right-hand everything to the best-selling author philip yancey. she and i had gone to college together, but mostly got to know each other’s souls through this ol’ chair. she would send notes radiant with love, with a faith that couldn’t be shaken. she shared her own heart’s ache, an ache i now hold for her. i was with her less than a year ago, and as she always had, she lit up a room. her smile rose from a deep deep place. a week ago, she was rock climbing. and the belts gave out. she died instantly. not at all surprisingly, i feel her closer than ever. she was, and is, an angel.

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September 12, 2025

sodden, sodden week

i come this week with sodden heart, afraid for the world we are (no longer becoming but present in the now), fearful of what’s to come.

once again, a week of news bulletins, and the voices of mass-shooter psychologists filling the airwaves, unfurling the narrative in their cable-news staccato. i didn’t write of the children of annunciation church two weeks past, because i had no words vast enough to reach the depths of it. and i didn’t want to add empty noise.

but a woman i’ve come to love for the purity of her heart, and her inextinguishable humor (mother of five, breast cancer survivor, sister of a brother who died too young, neighbor of annunciation, and one as likely to freely shed tears as to find the hilarity in the everyday) found out that at the moment the first bullets shattered the stained glass of annunciation church, the children in the pews were just beginning to recite psalm 139.

one of the most ancient prayers, it begins:

Lord, you have probed me, you know me:

    you know when I sit and stand;
    you understand my thoughts from afar.

You sift through my travels and my rest;
    with all my ways you are familiar.

Even before a word is on my tongue,
    Lord, you know it all.

Behind and before you encircle me
    and rest your hand upon me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
    far too lofty for me to reach.

and it includes a line i consider one of the most beautiful of all sacred text:

II
You formed my inmost being;
    you knit me in my mother’s womb.

I praise you, because I am wonderfully made;
    wonderful are your works!
    My very self you know.

My bones are not hidden from you,
When I was being made in secret,
    fashioned in the depths of the earth.[e]

Your eyes saw me unformed;
    in your book all are written down;
    my days were shaped, before one came to be.

III
How precious to me are your designs, O God;
    how vast the sum of them!

Were I to count them, they would outnumber the sands;
    when I complete them, still you are with me.

When you would destroy the wicked, O God,
    the bloodthirsty depart from me!

Your foes who conspire a plot against you
    are exalted in vain.

i can barely get past the line about being knit in my mother’s womb. and it turns out neither could my friend laura.

she recites it here, a reading worth hearing, as you absorb the words….

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Laura Kelly Fanucci (@thismessygrace)

then came this wednesday, and with it an assassination and yet another school shooting. and then, thursday, the twenty-fourth anniversary of 9/11. another tragedy, another thread that over the years has brought its tragedy into full view as a woman i have come to love lost her father in that tower that day. and because i know of the layers and layers of tragedy it brought, it is so much more to me now than a terrible day in our national story. as with any violent death, the shrapnel is of the never-ending sort, carnage upon carnage, year after year. flesh shredded, souls shattered, psyches never ever re-settled.

and so, this poem, with its title so apt: “Try to Praise the Mutilated World.” mutilated we are, all right.

this poem, it seems, made its way to light in the immediate wake of 9/11 quite by accident, when the poetry editor at the new yorker, who happened to be reviewing an advance copy of the poet’s newest book (at the time) was asked by david remnick, the new yorker’s editor, to find a poem fitting for a special edition of the magazine to be printed and published within days of the tragedy. it was printed on the last page of that issue, as we all scanned the mutilations that hadn’t yet fully revealed themselves. isn’t that always the case with tragedy? the revelations, not unlike a land mine, explode and explode, unseen until the moment of detonation, whenever that comes.

adam zagajewski, a polish poet who died in 2021, had written the poem with no particular occasion in mind. over the last two dozen years, it’s become his most famous poem, and a poem often pulled from the files to mark this sad, sad day. his choice of the word mutilation is most apt, a word not too too often pulled into text. twinning it with the verb “to praise,” is wholly disturbing. what is there to praise? maybe the work is in the “try.” maybe that’s the instructive, meant to be just beyond our reach. try to praise….

there is work to be done here. there is always work. and maybe if we can remember june’s long days, and the wild strawberries, and the gentle caring of one stranger for another, we can remember why we must weep at the sound of gunshot, and why we must not surrender. this world, mutilated in so many ways, is still a world rife with wonders.

might we add but a single drop of sweetness to the bitter, bitter taste in our mouths….

Try to Praise the Mutilated World

By Adam Zagajewski

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.
(Translated, from the Polish, by Clare Cavanagh.)

a closing thought from jeremiah johnson, co-founder of the Center for New Liberalism, who writes on his substack Infinite Scroll, where he ponders the politics of posting and the dynamics of the social internet:

As much as you can, resist the hysteria. Refuse to participate in it, refuse to make the polarization worse. The purpose of liberalism is to allow us to disagree with someone without discriminating against them, without harassing them, without killing them. It’s a precious thing, perhaps the most precious thing our civilization has achieved. Every time you break bread in peace with an outsider, every time a Catholic and Protestant shake hands, it’s a miracle. Don’t take it for granted.

what might you find to praise in this mutilated time and this week of mutilation?

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August 29, 2025

add this to your constellation of poetries

i’ve been on rooster time for weeks now, though there’s no rooster pecking about the nearby yards. the rooster resides in my little noggin where it cock-a-doodle-doos round about four, and i patiently wait till five. as if the nuns have granted permission and at last i can dash out from under the bedsheets and into the playground that is my kitchen table at that early early hour.

ostensibly i’m up to write, to think, to edit. and i do get to that. i always do. but first i soften into morning turning pages. in other words: i read.

it sometimes seems my mission here is morphing into something more along the lines of slipping poets under your noses; writers, too. any weavers of wonder i happen to happen upon. this week i happened upon an astronomer poet, a brilliant soul who died too soon at 39. she spent her life mesmerized by the heavens, and hers was the gift of reaching into the stars, scooping up a glug of moon, and giving us a taste.

her name was rebecca elson (1960-1999), a canadian-american who at 16 began her studies at smith college, and would go on to earn her PhD from the university of cambridge, somehow fitting in years at radcliffe college and harvard teaching creative writing as well as an expository writing course on science and ethics. at cambridge’s institute of astronomy she was awarded an isaac newton studentship, meaning they paid for her to be there. it’s where she died, amid a field of star embers, i do hope.

her posthumously-published slim volume of poetries and extracts from her notebooks is titled a responsibility to awe (carcanet press, 2001). that title alone is poetry, and tells you all you need to know. in four short words, some might argue, it lays out our holy purpose. our one assignment while we’re here on planet earth, that little orb floating amid a universe of burning flecks of star dust and helter-skelter sky litter (though there’s nothing remotely litter-ish in even one celestial orb, from jupiter to milky way, to the not-yet-named planet L 98-59 f (identified just last month!, the fifth such planet in a splotch of far-off space unpoetically named L 98-59, a system of “remarkably diverse worlds.” little f is orbiting so close to its star, it’s possible liquid water might exist there, the scientists tell us.)

back to rebecca, known to those who loved her as becky. soon as i read the words astronomer and poet coupled in a pair, i was drawn magnet-like to snatch up a copy of her awe-struck works. it’s considered a contemporary classic, in the world of poetries. and not a line of it disappoints. among the pages that left me awe-struck: an ode to discovering zero; another asking what if there were no moon? (her reply: “there would be no months / a still sea / no spring tides / no bright nights / occulations of the stars / no face / no moon songs / terror of eclipse / no place to stand / and watch the Earth rise.”)

a mind as facile and deep as one that imagines darkest night, scans heavens for answers to questions others never even think to ask, is a mind i want to enter. to add my footprints to the paths that have traversed it. as if, in poring over her way of seeing, i too might see more vividly.

that rebecca/becky died too young of a cruel cancer (isn’t every one a cruel one?) added but another element to my quest to know her by her words. her masterwork is considered her six-stanza poem, “antidotes to fear of death.” she begins (as only a star-studier might): “sometimes as an antidote / to fear of death / i eat the stars.”

from there, extracts from her notebooks follow, and we almost watch a mind at work. as she cobbles poetries, we see the words struck out, the finer ones she chose instead. we see, in a swatch titled “origins,” her change of mind, in the line “shaken in the dark soil ~~soul~~ of space.” soil, a richer word (more unexpected) than soul here. we see adjectives get ditched, as she pares and pares her lines. titles of poems are revised. it’s a nimble mind, exercising in the gym, and we are peering through the windows.

two years after elson’s death, the economist, in 2001, named responsibility to awe (her one published poetry volume, though she published 56 scientific papers in her short life) a “book of the year,” writing “with great poignancy, she shows us the world through the eyes of a human being faced by her finite time.”

the bulletin of the american astronomical society, in their roster of supernovae gone dark, described the breadth of elson’s scientific research, her work ranging from “a search for stars in the halo of our own galaxy to regions of rapid star formation halfway across the Universe. She set strong limits on the contribution normal stars could make to the Milky Way’s dark matter halo, using counts from the Hubble Deep Field to rule out a significant stellar component.”

maria popova, who first pointed me to the poet-astronomer, calls her poem “antidotes to fear of death,” a “stunning cosmic salve for our creaturely tremblings of the heart.” she recorded a recitation of it, set against the mournful strains of cello, for her 2020 “universe in verse” extravaganza, popova’s “annual charitable celebration of the science and splendor of nature through poetry.”

elson, whose book now rests beside me, belongs in that rare constellation, a favorite of mine, of those who study the cosmos and, side-by-side the formulae and theorems, see the poetry, and draw it forth: loren eiseley, lewis thomas, robin wall kimmerer. they and their ilk (there are more and more) hold a sacred space on my bookshelves. without them, there are volumes i’d not see, musics i’d not hear.

the back jacket of responsibility to awe says it best, describing elson’s work as “a book of poems and reflections by a scientist for whom poetry was a necessary aspect of her research, crucial to understanding the world and her place in it, even as, having contracted terminal cancer (non-hodgkins lymphoma, diagnosed at 29), she confronted early death.” the text goes on to say that elson was an astronomer whose work took her “to the boundary of the visible and measurable.” isn’t that the space we’re all drawn to, meant to explore? isn’t that where theologians and mystics ply their minds? isn’t that where simple us might wonder too?

in the end, elson, like all who dare to ponder deep beyond the lunar surface, was “undeterred by knowing how little we can know.”

and thus we all now have our one assignment: to search undeterred for what we can. knowing there is majesty in the mystery, and beauty far beyond what we’ve yet glimpsed. our responsibility, of course, is always, always to awe.

where did you stumble into awe this week?

i’ll leave you with a page. . .

have a blessed, awe-filled week….

oh, i promised my dear friend wini i’d share this wonderment she is bringing to town (town being chicago, or the northern environs to be specific). wini is a poet, and she’s worked closely with, and had one of her poems judged “best in class” by the marvelous poet rosemerry wahtola trommer. wini, who makes things happen, invited her and now is inviting all of us for a day of poetries. part workshop, all wonder, it promises to be a day to remember. here are the details, courtesy of wini:

Come experience the gorgeousness of poet, teacher, and storyteller Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. This event is about more than just poetry; it’s a chance to listen to what is true in your heart and open to “The all of it — the Beauty and Sorrow.”

It is beyond lovely to be in-person with Rosemerry, and truly what a treat to sit in community again with like-minded people, and to uplift and celebrate each other’s beauty and light.

I hope you’ll join us. It would be so lovely to see you again.

When: Saturday, September 27, 9:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m. (lunch included)
Where: Valley Lo Club, Glenview, IL
Details: Three different ticket prices are available.

Buy your ticket here

thank you, wini, for bringing this priceless gift…..

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August 22, 2025

acquiring acquaintances: another name for pen pals

it started because months, or maybe years, ago, i stumbled onto a poem that took my breath away. it was written by a poet i’d not known of, didn’t think i’d ever read. but the poem, titled “Nativity,” stayed with me, a poem that paints the first Christmas scene in strokes and shades that settled deep into my marrow, and forever more are the Christmas i imagine.

it’s a poem that lays the baby Jesus in a rough-sawn barn, the air pungent with animal. “the wind tugging at the shutters.” there is nothing gilded about it. and it was written, i knew right away, by someone at ease with being small, tucked off in a corner keeping watch. it was written, i could tell, by someone whose very veins course with humility, and understood a God who preached the same, a God who asks us to get about the business, the holy business, of loving as we would be loved without noise or bombast or folderol.

the poet’s name is kenneth steven.

it turns out he lives on an isle on the scottish west coast, a place where the wind might tug at shutters. and it turns out he is something of a polymath: a poet, a painter, a children’s book writer, a translator of great works. and, above all, something of a pilgrim, a pilgrim seeking the quiet beauties that punctuate the everyday. he calls them “atoms of delight.”

and he writes of pilgrimage: “the word is often used to describe the journey to a shrine or sanctuary in search of spiritual transformation, which is a meaning i acknowledge. but now pilgrimage has become a much bigger thing for me; it has gone far beyond that rather heavy and medieval sense of going on a journey to visit a holy site. why shouldn’t it be about a walk to a hill loch to listen to the impossibly beautiful singing of red-throated divers? why shouldn’t it be about a child running into the forest in the early morning to find the treasure they dreamed of? these are journeys of the heart, seeking the profoundly precious places where little miracles happen. and why shouldn’t it be about panentheism—the finding of God in all things?”

it’s not hard sometimes to recognize a kindred soul.

what is hard is to imagine finding yourself in conversation with such a kindred someone. but that’s what’s happened. kindness is the thing that opened the door, his kindness. in a world ruled by transaction, where fees are paid and contracts signed for any exchange of goods—be it words or bricks or lumber—kenneth steven lives otherwise.

i found that out not long ago, when, during the editing phase of my next book, i dove into the task called “permissions,” in which for any chunk of text—poetry or prose or lyrics to a song—beyond a certain measure, you must secure permissions from its author. this can be a costly exercise. and it is always one that makes me quiver, wondering what walls i’ll encounter, and what cold-shouldered hubris i might have to tiptoe through.

it’s that poem, “Nativity,” that’s stayed with me all these years. and i’d included the whole of it, eight lines, at the start of an essay that i hope to include in the book.

wondering if i was whistling into the wind, i sent off a proper letter, the digital kind, and shipped it cross the sea. i’d no idea if mr. kenneth steven would ever reply. but, lo and behold, come monday morning, there he was, tucked kindly in my mailbox. and more than generously writing: “of course you are more than welcome to use the poem. i’m sure you’ll mention where you found it.”

and thus, with the stroke of his generous heart, a friendship has unfolded. and a treasure trove of poetries have now brushed through me. and i am richer for this scottish friend who, as a boy, awoke one night at midnight, and hearing a great and ferocious wind, hurriedly dressed and left the house, where he climbed a hill in howling winds, before crossing through a field to reach his favorite tree, where he knew the horse chestnuts would be falling, and he was out to save them, to gather them up. “i felt given a whole world,” he writes in an essay about the midnight escapade. “it was about the autumn and the big winds, and the thrill of running up that long hill and entering the field at last at what felt like the middle of the night.” and the indescribable delight of knowing “that all this treasure was mine.” the treasure: a cloth bag of chestnuts shaken from the limbs, their deep and woody smell, orbs that looked as though they were made of shoe leather.

befriending him, he who writes me every day now, sometimes more than once a day, is magical. is akin to befriending any of the authors from my childhood who’ve long entranced me, drew me into storybook tableaus: tasha tudor; e.b. white; frances hodgson burnett, who wrote the 1911 children’s classic, the secret garden, a book that featured my holy trinity—an orphaned girl, a padlocked garden, and a robin redbreast that finds the key—and once prompted me to fake a fever so i could skip church one sunday to stay at home and turn its pages.

long ago, when i’d be asked if i’d ever want to write a book, i demurred, brushed away the thought. didn’t think i could hold a thought long enough to pen more than a few pages. i didn’t know, though, that the magic of a book comes in all the threads unspooled along the way. threads that carry me to places far and wide, and to souls i’d never otherwise know. but words, like little birds, or prairie seeds, catch on the wind and settle into fertile loam. and we are richer for them.

in much the way, my beloved chairs, through all the words and all the years, have become my dearest treasures.

bless you.

love, bam

have you a penpal in this digital, globe-crossing, email world? someone you’ve not met but who seems a certain friend?

i promised kenneth i would share word of his beautiful meditative podcast, Imagining Things, on the patreon platform. recorded in a studio that seems to be just behind his island home, you can sometimes hear the scottish winds blowing off the atlantic, and a bird or two not far away. (or maybe i’m imagining.) and of course he speaks in a scottish-soaked timbre, and in between reflections he shares poems that will make you hit rewind so you can listen once again, so breathtaking are the lines.

his latest book, one that should be landing on my front stoop within days, is Atlantic: Selected Poems of Faith. but i’m already deep into Atoms of Delight: Ten Pilgrimages in Nature, and Iona: New and Selected Poems.

10 Comments

August 1, 2025

ode to summer’s drippiest fruit: the tomato

in which we begin with news: ol’ babs signed a book contract yesterday; the book, it so happens, is already written (sorta unfurled swiftly, once i started to type), and already back from being edited (the contract was agreed upon back in may, but these things take time to get shuffled around the publisher’s desk.) and now i’m knee-deep in responding to edits, cranking the dial in an attempt to make it worthy of the paper on which it shall be printed, and the bookshelves on which it might take up real estate. more details shall come but what i can tell you now is that the working title is When Evening Comes: An Urgent Call to Love, and the epigraph pretty much points to the heart of the book:

“When the evening of this life comes,” says St. John of the Cross, “you will be judged on love.” The only question asked about the soul . . . “Have you loved well?”
––Evelyn Underhill, The House of the Soul

in a nutshell, it’s a collection of essays exploring the spiritual awakening and very real tremblings that come with cancer. a subject with which i’ve been living for the last two years. so, while i’m deep in the fine art of toiling over the words that will or won’t wind up in the book, i leave you today with the simple tomato, summer’s drippiest fruit, and my all-star contender for the juiciest mouthful of summer.

it’s summer and living is easy. and beginning to drip down our chins. at least in the tomato aisle, that is. because i am deep in the task laid out above, i am leaving you today with the simple tomato. and pablo neruda’s sumptuous ode…

my recipe is this:

pluck the reddest orb faintly tender to the touch.

slice, or halve into hemispheres, if you’re the poet neruda.

sprinkle with a dusting of sea salt.

add a grind or three of tellicherry peppercorns.

lean over sink.

employ your top teeth and your jaw.

clamp down.

dribble.

repeat.

and now for the ode, one of the many neruda wrote in the later chapters of his life. what’s more than charming—and so very wise—is that neruda, the chilean poet and nobel laureate, wrote odes to the simplest things, training a poet’s eye—and thus ours—on the wonders right before us. it’s a lifework worth emulating.

while poking around, i found a marvelous ode to the odester on the website of a chap named huck gutman, who happens to be not only a professor of english at the university of vermont, but the former chief of staff to bernie sanders. who knew?!?!

of pablo neruda, the great chilean poet, huckman writes that he is particularly fond of his late ‘odes’. he goes on:

“I love these poems in praise of his socks, his suit, lemons, and other everyday objects. They speak to me very powerfully about the wonderful world we inhabit. His aim, as I say in the long introduction to his poem, was to speak to those he lived with about the shared wonder of our world. He set out to speak not to intellectuals or ‘lovers of poetry,’ but to his neighbors in the small coastal town in northern Chile where he lived. The language of his odes is simple, the imagery rich but drawn from the experience all humans share. In a century when too frequently poetry seems divorced from the concerns and language of everyday life, Neruda embraced the commonplace and made it uncommon, though still shared.

“Neruda’s love of the richness of the world was hard-earned. He lived a full life, of sorrow and suffering as well as joy and love. He was acquainted with alienation and oppression, with persecution and exile; he also knew the glories of tomatoes.

“One of his close friends was Salvador Allende, the socialist who was elected President of Chile and then overthrown by Chile’s right-wing military (with, tragically, the collusion of the American CIA). Neruda, already ill with cancer, died shortly after Allende perished in the coup which ended both his presidency and Chilean democracy.”

Ode to Tomatoes
by Pablo Neruda

The street
filled with tomatoes,
midday,
summer,
light is
halved
like
a
tomato,
its juice
runs
through the streets.
In December,
unabated,
the tomato
invades
the kitchen,
it enters at lunchtime,
takes
its ease
on countertops,
among glasses,
butter dishes,
blue saltcellars.
It sheds
its own light,
benign majesty.
Unfortunately, we must
murder it:
the knife
sinks
into living flesh,
red
viscera,
a cool
sun,
profound,
inexhaustible,
populates the salads
of Chile,
happily, it is wed
to the clear onion,
and to celebrate the union
we
pour
oil,
essential
child of the olive,
onto its halved hemispheres,
pepper
adds
its fragrance,
salt, its magnetism;
it is the wedding
of the day,
parsley
hoists
its flag,
potatoes
bubble vigorously,
the aroma
of the roast
knocks
at the door,
it’s time!
come on!
and, on
the table, at the midpoint
of summer,
the tomato,
star of earth,
recurrent
and fertile
star,
displays
its convolutions,
its canals,
its remarkable amplitude
and abundance,
no pit,
no husk,
no leaves or thorns,
the tomato offers
its gift
of fiery color
and cool completeness.

which lines made you marvel? what’s making your mouth water these days?

tomato madness: slow-roasted cherries from the vine out back

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pull up a chair

Tag: poetry

January 9, 2026