We have to cross / the river and my strength fails me.
In another job, in another time, when I had to be thinking through a policy around bereavement leave, I was reminded of - indeed, once again confronted by -...
circle without end and without God. /
The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters and the diameter of its effective range — about seven meters. And in it four dead and eleven wounded. And...
How frugal is the Chariot That bears the Human Soul
When I was growing up, many of the books that were available to me — what would now be called “Middle Grade” — were books by Enid Blyton. I read them all:...
as in a relay race: / the baton never falls
Not the peace of a cease-fire, not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb, but rather as in the heart when the excitement is over and you can talk only...
The grieving have only the unknown.
I know I’m stressed about everything going on because I am considering a new hobby that I absolutely do not have time for. So instead I have watched several...
Everything is symbolic in / literature.
In Trinidad, for the first time since January 2020. On a work call—this was a “working holiday”, as are they all, aren’t they—and I hear the accent of home,...
Speak this because I exist.
There is an exercise I practice, or try to. It begins, what is the most useful thing I can be doing right now? It continues, to whom can I be useful (because...
make way for / those who know little.
After every warsomeone has to clean up.Things won’tstraighten themselves up, after all.Someone has to push the rubbleto the side of the road,so the corpse-...
protested / but not enough
War, again. Or perhaps, still. Or indeed, always. Attribution And when they bombed other people’s houses, we protested but not enough, we opposed them but...
October is / when night guzzles up/ the orange sherbet sunset
Every third conversation, oh yeah, they couldn’t come because they have Covid. Nonchalant, but not immune. Schedule the no-longer-called-boosters; stay...
There is an autumn sadness upon me, / A dreamfulness in my heart,
A changing of the seasons. Wistful is how I feel about autumn, a season I didn’t experience for the first eighteen or so years of my life. Funny how quickly...
Is it possible my function is to hold / All the intricate, interstitial pain
Congratulations to all those on the National Book Awards Longlists, and especially to Charif Shanahan and all the poets. Attribution: Specks of toothpaste...
Fortune's expensive smile / Is earned
Sometimes, when you are on the nine hour flight that followed the five hour drive that started at 5.30am, and the seat next to yours is occupied by a very...
my body just laughs because it knows who started this war
That ability can be temporary is something you understand deep in the body if you have lived with chronic pain, or just chronic physical dysfunction. Doing a...
What are poets for, in such an age? / What is the use of poetry?
“In cities around the country, if you want to understand the history of a neighborhood, you might want to do the same thing you'd do to measure human health:...
I keep forgetting the change in climate change.
Fire, floods. What a thing to be living through a climate emergency. There are mundane adaptations. Office dress codes, for instance. Take it from a person...
I know the stories of our loss
Research by Clay Trauernicht, a fire specialist at the University of Hawaii, and others has shown that the scale and frequency of wildfires have been...
it is just as wrong, or even more, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.
Bob said, if you know your history / then you would know where you're coming from And so I visited the Civil Rights Museum in Birmingham, Alabama. By myself,...
Most likely, you think we hated the elephant, /
Exit, July. Every year since that longest March, the March we thought we’d get through with just a couple of weeks of inconvenience, for some value of ‘we’...
Let them say, as they must say something: /
If you listen to Caribbean music long enough, you will encounter fire. It stretches across genres—soca, dancehall, reggae– and across decades. Deployed as a...