Meals of Grief & Happiness 1 I believe in the tears of an elephant. How they stamp the ground and forget they are in musth— panting—and cinnamon shrubs or piles of sugarcane can’t tempt them to stop their cycle of grief. I believe I the broken heart of an elephant. When a companion dies, I […]

Blasphemy For Sam Hamill Let the blasphemy be spoken: poetry can save us, not the way a fisherman pulls the drowning swimmer into his boat, not the way Jesus, between screams, promised life everlasting to the thief crucified beside him on the hill, but salvation nevertheless. Somewhere a convict sobs into a book of poems […]

Grief Trying to remember you is like carrying water in my hands a long distance across sand. Somewhere people are waiting. They have drunk nothing for days. Your name was the food I lived on; now my mouth is full of dirt and ash. To say your name was to be surrounded by feathers and […]