an old writer and his words

  • WORDS

    “Suppose,” he says “words may be used only once, after that they disappear.” “You mean in a poem” she replies, “or life itself?” Even four stanzas can challenge most except perhaps Basho. Haiku would replace sonnets, villanelles, sestinas suddenly gone, anaphora is self-contradiction. “Imagine,” the young girl mused “sloganless politicians, talking heads struck mute, hushed…

    Lou Faber

  • IN LOVING MEMORY (17 this time)

    Just what will the puppet king say or will he simply run and hide as we are left to mourn and pray Seventeen more are dead today, we know better than to abide just what will the puppet king say more hollow words, for which they pay “only more guns can stem the tide.” As…

    Lou Faber

  • THE WALL

    No one is certain who painted the words on the wall. No one knew when the painting occurred, someone noticed the words one morning and told others, and the word spread through town. People stopped to look at the words, but few understood what they meant. Soon there were pictures drawn around the words, familiar…

    Lou Faber

  • A DIFFERENT WORLD

    In a different world, I would write you stories, poems, that would bring a tear to your eye, that would make you laugh even when your mood would deny joy, that would bring freedom to some and loosen the shackles on many, that would reflect peace, that would lighten your burden, that would heal, if…

    Lou Faber

  • HOLOCAUST

    Years later on, having walked calmly away from my former faith, I am left still pondering where you find the words to describe, to teach the unspeakable, and how you use them to reach children who have no right to know the unspeakable, but who must, lest they later speak it. It was a generation…

    Lou Faber

  • RESOUNDING SILENCE*

    (*Be forewarned, this is a shift from the usual post. On December 14, 1992 there was a shooting on the campus of Simon’s Rock College of Bard. A professor and student died, four others (my son included) were seriously wounded. Twenty years to the day later, in Connecticut 26 people died in a shooting at…

    Lou Faber

  • OH, NOAH

    None of us can remember what was here before. We can search for clues, develop elaborate surmises and find telling relics from which we can conclude this or that, with a certitude the gods would surely mock. But our field of vision is restricted, our memories equally so, and we are left with one certainty,…

    Lou Faber

  • AN ALIEN(‘S) JOURNEY

    He has just returned from the land of Others, where he expected to see all manner of things that would, could never happened to him. He thought he would be able to explain why this was, but now those things are happening to him. He suspects it is because he came to close to the…

    Lou Faber

  • CORSO

    When my back was turned, Corso slipped away somewhere in Wisconsin silently, without protest carried off by Charon across a gasoline river. There was no bomb to announce his departure, no Queens orphanage stopped frozen in a silent moment. In the small park at the north end of Salt Lake City no one lifted a…

    Lou Faber

  • RELATIVITY

    I can no more imagine a lack of freedom then they can imagine the freedom I assume. It is always like that imaginings are real until you try to make them corporeal, then the evanescence is all that is real. It is easy to ask how can they live in such poverty, and had they…

    Lou Faber