an old writer and his words

  • FOR RENE

    “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility… The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.” – Albert Einstein (1936) Cogitodice clatteragainsta cornerof the universe,rolling the bonesof a thousandgenerationsone slidesinto the black holevoida losernextplayerto the lineboxcarsstacked as cordwoodinto the pitrottingthe snakestaresat a halfeaten applehooded eyescloseHawkingpresses keysindicatingchuckling First Published in Ionosphere, Vol. 1, Issue…

    Lou Faber

  • I HATE THIS

    I am not a person who hatestoo many things, and fewer people.I say that in my own defense, foryou have asked me to list my hates,and no one, anywhere, save perhapsthe Dalai Lama, is free of hate.so here goes my short list.I hate polluters and those who carenot at all for the world in whichwe…

    Lou Faber

  • CONVERSING

    What we will never understandis that a wolf howling at the moonis engaged in a conversation, the silencewe hear is the moon’s answer to the wolf.We never stop to fully listen,for in silence much is said by naturethat our self-imposed deafnessto all but our kind forces us to ignore.In silent dreams entire worlds open upand…

    Lou Faber

  • ON ARRIVING

    They arrive after a long flightfrom tyranny, from oppressionfrom the nightmare of endlessfear, from hunger, from faithdenied, from the bottomlessdepths of poverty, scarredmemories etched in their souls,hoping for an ending as muchas wishing for a new beginning.They have been here, a newgeneration, raised on the stories,versed in the painful history,still residual anger bornof love for…

    Lou Faber

  • TOODLE-OO

    So, Bly, you have finallygone and joined the parade,holding out the longest as thoughthat was a badge you couldsomehow carry out with you. Take consolation that youbested Ginsberg and Corsoand even outlasted Ferlinghetti,though he was giving youa run for your money. And Plath, well shewas the first, far too youngeveryone said, but now Iam left…

    Lou Faber

  • EXTINCTION

    My granddaughter is intenselyconcerned with the growing lossof species, and rightly so, and Ishare her fears, though I feellargely powerless to do anything. She has the faith of youth, a beliefthat she and her peers can,with work, effect a lasting change,climb up the slippery slope whichwe have cast them down, and saveother species from a…

    Lou Faber

  • BANDAGE

    She wants to know if it is even possibleto make a bandage large enoughto bind the wounds we have inflictedon a planet which we were toldwas ours over which we wereto exercise our wise dominion. She says it isn’t fair that she will beleft to try to clean up the messthat we have made for…

    Lou Faber

  • ELEGY FOR A POET

    (for Allen Ginsburg) You died quietly in your bed friends gathered around the cars and buses of the city clattering out a Kaddish to a God you had long ago dismissed as irrelevant. We would have expected your to howl, to decry the unfairness of it all, but you merely said it is time, and…

    Lou Faber

  • UNTO EACH GENERATION

    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

  • CHANGE

    They lie in the field uprooted slowly desicating in the harsh sun, the fruit they might have borne trapped in the dying flower, the seed of another generation denied. It was not supposed to be like this, the sun should have fed them, the soil nourished their souls, their stalks growing thicker, drawing ever more…

    Lou Faber