• BLESSING

    There is a blessing in silence that we so often deny ourselves, unaware that it lies just beyond the noise of our minds and lives. We crave it, beg for it, and hearing the beggar, shun him for the noise he carries like the skin he cannot molt. Beethoven understood silence in his later years…


  • TICK TICK TICK

    My grandson has a smile that is as old as time itself, as young as the mind of a four-year-old and in this moment, beaming, I am left to guess which it is, for he won’t say, and so I smile with him and time has no meaning, no beginning, no end.


  • DANCE

    The red kite dances alongside the yellowed leaf borne by the fall breeze. The clouds flow like a river across the smile of the child. First appeared in Active Muse, Varsha 2019 Issue


  • RADIO DAZE

    There was a great deal I wanted to say, after all when you end the broadcast career that spanned forty-three years you want to be entitled to a farewell address. She said, “you’ve been on the air here for two years, and reading the news to the blind once a week for half an hour…


  • WALKING

    He walks slowly, with a stoop, born of time or knowledge of a world that has seeped away. He smiles, but you cannot tell if it is at the worm slowly crossing the sidewalk, or the young woman pulling on the leash of her far too large dog. He could walk this route with his…


  • SEKISO’S NOTHING IS CONCEALED 正法眼蔵 語十八

    When you look in the mirror are you real, is your reflection real? Be careful what you say, for if I look into that mirror and see you, is the you I see anything other than real? When you go through the gate you say “I am exiting”. When I follow you through the gate…


  • FINIS

    When it all ends, just what will you being doing the moment before. Of course you cannot know, for you have no idea just when it will end. And if it ends as a result of your actions, then you won’t know that it is your action that is ending it, so that is no…


  • IN TRANSIT

    We have decided to skip the viewing to say our farewells in thought without needing to see her face frozen in the morticians best attempt at placidity, erasing the anger, the fear, the frustration, the pain that made leaving easier for her than remaining. We will say the prayers, most of them, she with fervent…


  • STILL SMALL VOICE

    We listen carefully certain we can hear it if and when it appears. We hear nothing, but we are used to not hearing, but faith is a far more patient than it is given credit for and we have nothing to do in any event, other than to abide an event we cannot predict and…


  • A MORNING PRAYER

    My words are carried on the winter morning wind echoing off the obsidian mound and shattering in silver crystals reflecting the frigid sun. The barren moon recedes as my son, the wolf, ravens devouring knowledge of the world, listening to the song of the dolphin. She is a rose, soft petals fluttering thorns poised to…