• GARDEN

    Why do the televangelists beg and cajole me, constantly ask me for my money? Surely they must know that in Eden which they promise, we are all naked and have no pockets.


  • PACEM

    Christmas is a day that demands silence and a certain solitude that we no longer allow. Some say you need to rediscover your inner child, but that isn’t it at all and maybe more the problem, since we all forget that we celebrate an infant and all infants know is peace.


  • MIRACLES

    If you ask, she says, you take away the chance of ever getting a miracle. If you ask and it happens you reduce it to a simple prayer answered, no matter how surprising the outcome. You don’t see, he said it’s not the final act that is the miracle, it’s that it actually happens to…


  • SHINKANSEN VIEW

    At first it was a checkerboard of ponds neatly arrayed, reflecting the sun, the work of man, for God so rarely plays geometrician with creation, less often still using right angles. Soon enough green blades reach up through the shirred surface, random, reaching for a sun they can never touch. It is a field soon,…


  • CASTING THUNDER

    The night was ripped by the lightning, the thunder piercing our dreams, awakening us to the shadow’s play on the skylight shades. As I slip back into sleep the gods turn their backs and continue to argue well into morning.


  • THE FIRST JEW ON MARS

    The first Jew on Mars sifts the red sands through gloved fingers and kicks the small stone, glares up at the heavens the cold sun returning his stare and waits patiently for the rain of manna. looks vacantly across the landscape and curses under his breath at the absence of a good lean pastrami and…


  • WHAT DID YOU DO

    When they asked him what did you do during the war he said “I just stood guard.” When they asked him where he said “A station, just a station, like most others, I just stood guard.” When they asked him did you see the trains carrying the bodies crammed into cattle cars he said “I…


  • GODS ONCE

    The once gods have been reduced again to mere mortals and find the change disquieting. Just the other day I saw Hermes meandering along Fifth Avenue pausing to look at scarves in a window of a store he never imagined. Even the once great queen finds herself behaving like a love-struck teenager. One who bred…


  • SHE HOPES

    Faith is something, she says, that everyone has, it is just that some don’t recognize it, even while the coin is flipping through the air and the desired outcome is whispered in the mind. She believes that life is a joy, but that it is also heaven’s waiting room, and while there may be a…


  • GENESIS

    Cain slew Abel in a moment of anger, a crime of passion would be his defense today. We can only imagine what Isaac might have done to Ishmael, had Hagar not been sent off by Abraham, after all he was a child who saw the knife first hand and helped sacrifice the thicketed ram. Joseph…