writing | pull up a chair

it is a strange sisterhood. it comes in out-of-the-blue phone calls that, within a sentence, pull us both into perhaps the darkest corner of our lives. “do you have time to talk?” is sometimes the precede. sometimes not even that. yesterday i got the precede. the time before i did not. (yes, that’s two such calls within the space of a month.)

i dialed the number attached to the text, and the woman who answered, a woman i barely know, suddenly inhabited the very same place i know too well, will never forget. she’d found out, the day before, that she had stage 4 lung cancer. she said it so fast — and so plainly — i had to ask her to say that again. i wasn’t quite sure i had heard what she said, couldn’t possibly have heard what it seemed like she said. she sounded so matter-of-fact when she said it.

she said it again. the day before, she’d gone in for biopsies, two of them, both in her lungs, and woke up to the surgeon telling her it was cancer, and it was stage 4, a number that scythes like a death knell.

not even a whole day later, she was working the phones, searching for doctors who would dole out what amounts to the only possible hope: chemo that just might stave off the spread, just might dial down the madness of cancerous cells that divide and multiply dervishly, devilishly, and finally deathly.

she’d heard that i too know what it is to find out cancer’s been lurking without any warning. lurking in the lungs, specifically. lurking in the very bellows of where and how you breathe.

when cancer, any cancer, is the subject at hand, you don’t need to know much about the someone you’re calling. you just call. because inside the very dark chamber in which you are finding yourself, you reach for any semblance of light seeping in. and someone who might know a doctor is all the light you might need.

so she called. and in curious ways, she sounded quite numb. as if gathering the names of oncologists, and deciding where she’d go for her daily infusions of chemo, was not too different from shopping for just the right shoes. but then the hand-grenade sentences came. when she said, “surgery isn’t an option for me. it’s all over my lungs.” and, when the subject of five-year-survival rates came up, she said plainly: “i won’t live that long.” and in between those sentences she mentioned how much she loves her life, how much she’s loved her thirty years being married to the love of her life, how her girls are her everything. it’s the whole gamut, from gut-wrenching realism to the first seeds of mourning, all in one fell swoop. and she spoke all of it without shedding a tear.

i gave her the name of the doctor i love, the doctor who pulls her stool close whenever she talks to you, presses her knees against yours, all but cups your face in her hands. i opened the door to a chamber in my heart that seems to have moulded itself into a space for those who know, for those swept into a club no one wants to belong to. but once there, we are sealed as tightly and fiercely as humans are able to be. we muster our “fight.” we pray fiercely for each other. we ride each other’s highs and lows and the muddies all in between. we laugh with the darkest of humors. we sometimes speak in a shorthand. i don’t need you to tell me how desperately you don’t want to die, to leave the luscious life you call your own; i already know. me, neither.

we speak each other’s most foreign language.

these phone calls remind me how human we are. how, within mere breaths of beginning to talk, to tell our worst imaginable stories, we can sidle so close to each other, we can almost finish each other’s sentences. at the core, there is so very much about us that isn’t so one-of-a-kind.

we humans get scared. we humans sometimes get dealt the worst possible news, news that wants to shatter us. but then, pressed against the warmth of someone else’s breath, someone’s skin, someone’s voice, we remember we’re not wholly alone.

there is someone out there who travels a similar road. someone else has heard the death-knell sentences and picked up the pieces and carried on. because that’s what humans do—till the end.

and in that associative property (the back and forth of courage and fear, of questions and answers, of hope maybe just maybe flashing off in the distance) we find the pulse beat to carry us forward. not alone. but tucked tight in a cocoon that no one wants to inhabit.

i will always, always answer those calls, make those calls, chase down the answer to questions that come in those calls. inscribe those someones on the close-to-my-heart rolls. check in just often enough, or sometimes out of the blue. because that’s what sisterhoods do. and there’s a mysterious beauty here in the chamber where no one wants to be: the truth-telling is as clear and unfettered as any i know. we might be our very most human in the space and the time when we realize time is short — so short — and all the distraction is stripped away, and we are living as close to the holy nub as we can possibly be.

i am still grieving—that raw early stage when it’s never far from mind—two of those sisterly souls who dwelled in that most sacred space, right alongside me, right till the end. their end. barely a month ago. and i can all but feel them just the other side of this worldly existence. they live in me now. i think we are sealed in the holiest union. and it all begins with the worst story we might have ever been told: you have cancer.

what’s beyond that story, that door, though, is breathtakingly, beautifully rare: the human spirit in all its magnificence; a muddling of courage and truth, of seeing through a luminous lens, asking the most eternal of questions, and sometimes just plain finding the hilarity in the ridiculous twists and turns on cancer’s godawful road.

in uncanny, indescribable ways, i am so blessed to find myself in this rarest of rooms. a room where all is magnified, and illumined, and little goes without notice. most emphatically, the marvel of every last drop of being alive.

before i go, i found a poem this week, and another poet who will someday soon be the subject of the next installment of adopt-a-poet. i found her through anglican poet, priest, singer, songwriter, and hobbit lookalike, malcolm guite, who included this poem in his anthology for lent, titled word in the wilderness: a poem a day for lent and easter. the poet, kelly belmonte, who hails from upstate new york, is the creator and founder of All Nine, a creative collaborative. she explains the “nine” as “a reference to the nine sister muses of Greek mythology. These inspirational sisters represent multiple domains of creativity and intelligence, from epic poetry to science. For any vision to move from the inside of one person’s eyelids to the physical world where it can make a positive impact, it takes a collaborative effort across multiple disciplines and an openness to many sources of inspiration. Hence, all nine.”

her latest work, the mother of all words, came out last year, and is on my library list. belmonte claims as her poetic influences an eclectic list including Kobayashi Issa, R.M. Rilke, Mary Oliver, and Frank X. Gaspar.

i found myself stunned by the interplay of the quotidian here, and the easy reach within which we find God….

How I Talk to God

Coffee in one hand
leaning in to share, listen:
How I talk to God.

“Momma, you’re special.”
Three-year-old touches my cheek.
How God talks to me.

While driving I make
lists: done, do, hope, love, hate, try.
How I talk to God.

Above the highway
hawk: high, alone, free, focused.
How God talks to me.

Rash, impetuous
chatter, followed by silence:
How I talk to God.

First, second, third, fourth
chance to hear, then another:
How God talks to me.

Fetal position
under flannel sheets, weeping
How I talk to God.

Moonlight on pillow
tending to my open wounds
How God talks to me.

Pulling from my heap
of words, the ones that mean yes:
How I talk to God.

Infinite connects
with finite, without words:
How God talks to me.

how do you talk to God?

15 Comments

February 27, 2026

adopt-a-poet: lynette roberts—silenced, forgotten, deserving of her due

most of us might do well, or we think so anyway, to live our lives in reverse.

or maybe it’s as it should be that the richest chapters come now, at the far end of our sprint, when we know just a shade more about where our hungers lie, and what sates us.

maybe there’s some common thread between the long-ago me drawn to be a nurse, and the me now drawn to—can’t keep myself away from—the world of poets and poetics, where words are the fine implements that probe the soul, elicit what stirs there, often from the realm of the unspoken.

in my best stints as a nurse, caring for kids who often were dying of terrible cancers, i prayed for the not-often-enough chances to plunk down at their bedsides, in between the passing of meds, and the chasing down of doctors’ orders, to unspool whatever was tight-wound in their souls. to listen for the words that painted the stories inside: what it felt like to be 15 and so sick from the chemo you locked yourself in the bathroom, stuffed towels under the door, and lit up the joint your mother bought for you off some street corner somewhere—because it was the only thing that quelled the endless heaving. or what it felt like to be 12 and unable to wiggle your toes cuz the tumor that tentacled your spine had cut off the nerves from your waist on down.

it’s the soul—and its uncharted interior—that’s always drawn my attention. once as a nurse where unfathomable questions loomed in rooms where children lay dying, lay suffering, and, nowadays, it’s poetry that brings me to that sharp edge.

it’s struck me of late that this old table might be a fine place for the occasional poet to drop in, to squeeze in among the circle of chairs, to be heralded as the subject of the day. where i might tell a bit of their story, unfurl a snippet of poem and praise.

thus begins the occasional episode of adopt-a-poet here at the chair.

this morning, i bring you one lynette roberts (1909-1995), a hauntingly original welsh poet, argentine-born, whose two books of poetry—collected poems (1944) and Gods with stainless ears: a heroic poem (1951)—have been described as “as dramatic, varied, dense, elliptical and inset with verbal novelty as any experimental poetry in the twentieth century.”

t.s eliot was her friend and editor, and offered the highest of eliotic compliments, writing that her poetry “communicated before it made sense.” (ah, both the magic and miracle of poetry; and a line worth pondering.)

dylan thomas was best man at her wedding. robert graves—he of i, claudius—was her pen pal. (graves wrote that in her fruitful years, the 1940s, during world war II, when she was living in a small welsh village, she was “one of the few true poets,” and added that “her best is the best” among a milieu that included the likes of eliot, thomas, and, yes, graves himself.)

most endearing of all to a ragtag magpie like me, roberts and her poetry were long considered eccentric. even at her height, she was an outsider, dwelling at the outskirts of london’s bohemian literary scene. then and now, literary critics describe her as “a poet’s poet,” and one of those critics defines that epithet as one “by which we designate writers we know are important but who don’t have the readership or reputation to prove it.” (long live the poet’s poets.)

that was all it took for me to decide to do my feeble best to haul her out of the shadows. to nudge her back toward the literary glow i believe is her due (or at least offer her a chair to this old table). and to read her, everywhere i could find her.

when i read that she was committed to a mental institution after a particularly rough breakdown, diagnosed with schizophrenia, and in and out of such quarters at least four times in her remaining years, her pen going silent until her death, i grew all the more determined.

her poetry, until its resurrection in 2005 in the tome simply titled collected poems, had been out of print for half a century. her prose, including a war diary, an autobiography, and unpublished articles and memoirs, long had been forgotten. i’d never heard of her till a week ago when i heard the american scholar‘s amanda holmes read one of her poems.

roberts’ best work, though, is considered to stand alongside that of her near-contemporaries, the anglo-welsh poets david jones, r.s. thomas (an anglican priest and poet i count among my favorites), and dylan thomas. but even in wales, her ancestral homeland and the country to which she returned and finally settled, she found herself on the margins.

in the poets’ academy, roberts is considered a war poet, a modernist, especially focused on a woman’s life in wartime. her poetry during the second world war plumbed bereavement, brokenness, and fracturing both for those sent to the front lines and for those left at home. she’s also been called “a love poet,” and “a poet of the hearth,” though not one to idealize the domestic. she captured it in all its extremes, the heartbreaking, and the cruel.

it’s bits of her biography beyond the poetic that might charm me as emphatically as her poems stir me.

before ever dipping her pen in the inkwell, roberts who’d come to london to study art in the 1930s, decided she and her roommate, the writer and painter celia buckmaster, needed a holiday. perusing an atlas, she decided—on the basis of it being the only place where the Bristle Footed Worm remained—to venture off to madeira, a portuguese archipelago, and traveled there in cargo. it was in madeira, in a house high on a hill, that she settled on her life’s work as a poet. “have found my voice at last,” she announced in a telegram sent back to london.

for reasons i’d love to know, once back in london, roberts trained to be a florist, and opened a flower arranging business before marrying, birthing two children, and later divorcing the welsh writer and editor keidrych rhys about whom she had once written that he “was charming and spoke like a prince.”

her daughter, angharad (welsh for “beloved”), describes roberts as nomadic (crisscrossing the seas and continents from buenos aires to london to madeira to wales to london and back to wales), someone who longed for nothing so fancy as a simple home, a place defined by the sparest necessities: a fire, a table, a place to look after friends in need.

for a good bit of her life, as a single mother with a daughter and son, roberts took to living in a caravan, with an address as plain as could be: The Caravan, The Graveyard, Laugharne, on the coast of south west wales (and literally parked in the village graveyard). angharad remembers: “we spent a whole summer catching butterflies and dragonflies, draping muslin round the caravan to keep them captive so we could draw them.” roberts drew as charmingly as she penned poetry, the pages of her diary filled with both.

and she grew roses, but not just any roses. she deciding which to grow by smelling. and she had two criteria for planting in her garden: scent + history. a proper story need be attached. oh, to plant a garden led by nose and narrative.

and so, my library this week has grown by two: i’ve added collected poems, and diaries, letters. and recollections to my shelf. and i intend to read, underline, asterisk, and dog-ear many a page, clear to the end, as i absorb the quirky wonders of one lynette roberts, and carry her forth (at least in my own little mind) into this time, the ever-so-rocky twenty-first century.

here is the first of roberts’ poems found in collected poems, “poem from llanybri,” a welcome-poem to a soldier and fellow poet. the oxford literary critic patrick mcguiness writes of it as “a portal to the book,” one that “imagines the poetic encounter as a hospitality extended and hospitality repaid. this is poetry as dialogue, poetry as rooted tradition: a celebration of community, both in the village, here described for its uniqueness, and within the circle of poets. it takes pleasure in the welsh words and phrases—‘cawl’, ‘savori fach’, and place names such as ‘cwmcelyn’—but also in the welsh speech-patterns that make their way into english: if you come my way that is…”

what i love is nothing so much as the way she brings a wee welsh village, and its innate kindness in war time, to life. i can see the pair sitting by the fire, absorbed in the silence best shared by those who know each other so fully. “No talk. Just a stare at ‘Time’ gathering” . . .

at the end of his introduction to her collected poems, mcguinness, editor of both her republished volumes (poems in 2005; diaries, 2008) concludes that hers is a poetry “bristling with contexts, alive to its time and place even as it dazzlingly dramatizes and reimagines them—a poetry open to influence and example while perfecting its own distinct voice and vision.”

whether it be her poems, her quirky tellings of village life, or her inspiration to plant a garden led by my nose, i intend to keep ms. roberts close and alive, in that way that poets and poetries live on long after their one last breath.

what is the medium that holds deepest allure for you? that leads you into depths so deep you lose sense of the world around, and burrow into the place beyond answers to questions?

9 Comments

February 13, 2026

love is . . .

i am sitting on a velvet couch, by a great stone hearth, looking out onto a city still cloaked in darkness. dawn comes late on the western edge of the eastern time zone, and that’s where i am. not a mirrored sliver of light is yet igniting the river that flows just beyond, where yesterday swans glided by.

i seem to have landed in a stanza of poetry here in a professor’s house on the banks of the st. joe river. upstairs sleeps another professor, the one who is renting this house for a semester. and what a thing it is to step into a home appointed by someone you’ve never met, someone you suddenly wish more than anything you could sit down beside, curled on this velveteen couch with steaming mugs of darjeeling, unreeling a bounty of stories.

this house is that of a professor from mauritius, a professor who has lived all around the world. it is filled with tropical, faraway touches, remnants of home on the island nation in the indian sea. draperies are silk; paint colors, rose and persimmon and a blue as blue as a tidal pool. the hoosier wood floors, covered with rugs so persian you can almost hear the cacophonies of the shuk where they might have been traded.

i’m here, instead of home where on the fourteenth of february long, long ago construction-paper hearts would be sprinkled from bedside to breakfast table, and where today my beloved is there all alone, because here is where love drew me.

love is what draws you to places you hadn’t intended to be. because love is the something that comes when it’s called. love sits in silence. love is the sound of footfalls in another room, the simple reminder that love is nearby, is filling the spaces between you. and nothing need be spoken.

love is the ineffable force that lies at the heart of that vessel within, that one we call “the heart” for we’ve no other word, really, for that rising tide inside us, the one that washes through us sometimes, the one that breaks us out in tingles. the one that makes our knees go weak. the one that makes us weep.

i don’t think love lives in the heart, actually. i think it lives in the whole of who we are. i know it lives in our fingertips because i’ve felt my fingertips melt when entwined with anyone i love. it certainly takes up occupancy in our knees because they’re the first to wobble whenever we’re overcome—by joy, by heartbreak, by grief. and i know it lives in our eyes, because i’ve seen it. and once you’ve seen it, you know it.

i’ll concede that that place mid-chest and slightly off to the left, the one that thumps and races and slows, love shares a room in there too, but it surely isn’t confined. can’t be. though we seem to have pinned it onto the heart in our flimsy imaginations.

i’m thinking much about love this week—how it shapes and colors our hours, and how it pulls us beyond ourselves—because this is a week where it’s made itself so vividly known.

love is the arrow that plunges the bayonet into your heart when someone you love has died. because the heart, schooled by life, knows the measure.

this week a someone i loved beyond measure breathed her last, and i, along with legions of others, am stricken. i only knew her for maybe a year and a half, but oh we loved deep right away. she was a fellow traveler on cancer’s road, and in that way that cancer works, she was more alive than just about anyone i’ve ever bumped into. once you know you have cancer, time is condensed. you can trek miles in minutes. so we did, she and i, mostly in letters.

her mind was brilliant, was curious; her writing took my breath away. my laptop is filled with her shimmering letters. she asked the most profound questions of life, of God, of whatever comes next. she found joy just about anywhere. quite certainly in books. during the months as she grew sicker and sicker, she was deadset on one final task: filling the shelves of the library her magnificent husband had just built for her, a whole room, wall to wall to wall. heaven on earth for my friend.

in the best of us, these are the trademarks of living with cancer, wringing every last droplet of life, with little room for regret. urgency underscores all of it. and filters are all stripped away. her name was annie, a name i’ve always adored, a name that makes me think ragdoll but in the most beloved way. i wasn’t going to write about her because her mama—one of the loveliest, funniest, fiercest someones i’ve ever met (this apple didn’t fall far from its tree)—often pulls up a chair, and i didn’t want to tread on her pain, or speak out of turn. but here i am saying simply that annie was love, was incandescent, and inextinguishable. and i will never ever let go of her spark. and i will carry her with me forever. i love her.

love defies death. it refuses to go. carries on into the all-that’s-to-come. shifts form, and does not grow thin.

that’s not all that broke my heart this week. i am keeping vigil as another someone i’ve loved is breathing her last. she’s in montana now, living with her brother who is at her bedside as i type this. he squeezes syringes of morphine between her lips, and sends me updates by text.

for years, she was a constant here in our leafy little neighborhood. she’d moved back to the big family house to care for her aging mama and papa, both of whom have since died, and the house was sold, and the money ran dry. and it was a heartache, all of it.

but she, like every other someone i’ve ever loved, taught me so very much on the subject. sarah is her name, and she made us her tight-knit family, all of us who live along the alley that runs behind our houses: she baked by the hour, tended a tomato garden, filled baskets with juicy peaches at the farmer’s market, and delivered her goods door-to-door in bulging bags she’d hang on the doorknobs. she sent kids off to college with care packages filled with just about anything under the sun (first aid kits, mini blenders, packets of pedialyte). and, most of all, she adopted feral cats, cats so afraid of humans it took her months to get them to curl up beside her. but night after night she sat out there in the alley with her still-warm roasted chicken, and her cans of albacore tuna, and piles of blankets (all for the cats who knew where to find her, every evening at 7). some nights, she’d sit there till midnight, sarah and one or two of her cats. maybe they counted the stars.

the sun is up now. and i hear footsteps above. another day to learn about love. and mostly to live it as deeply as i am able.

here’s a beauty found this week….

This world is a school and we are its students. Each of us studies something as we pass through. Some people learn love, kindness. Others… abuse and brutality. But the best students are those who acquire generosity and compassion from their encounters with hardship and cruelty. The ones who choose not to inflict their suffering on to others. And what you learn is what you take with you to your grave.

—Elif Shafak, Turkish novelist

what did you learn about love this week?

9 Comments

January 9, 2026

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 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 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.

12 Comments

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…..

4 Comments

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.

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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: writing

March 6, 2026

lung by lung