an old writer and his words

  • GROUND HOLD

    She sits in the middle seat of an oversold DC-9, Carhartt jacket and watch cap pulled tightly over her hair, a blond wisp slipping out the side. She cradles on her lap a tawny brown Stetson with a tooled leather and silver hat band. “It’s never goin’ in an overhead, my fiancee’d go up there…

    Lou Faber

  • BAGHDAD VILLANELLE

    We enter, the conquering heroes, drive quickly through the city’s core. We leave a crude division in our throes. We expected flowers, not blows of an angry mob, to be adored. We enter, the conquering heroes. An old man sits in a small café, he knows what will come of this, a festering sore. we…

    Lou Faber

  • BELLY OF THE BEAST

    From within the belly of the beast Sheol is a placid place, removed from the waves rattling the timbers, silent of the cries of the men berating their fate, uncertain as to the cause of their discomfort. Let Nineveh burn, lets its people scatter to the streets, let the King stare out at the destruction…

    Lou Faber

  • UNKNOWING

    I don’t know what                                                I am, the Buddha said. I don’t know why                                      …

    Lou Faber

  • EARLY MORNING

    Early this morning as I drove through the mist that clings to Portland in March like a child’s yellow slicker, I thought of you, home, asleep on our bed, my side tidy, no faint indentation of life, and I thought of the thousands who have died to date in Iraq, who never again will leave…

    Lou Faber

  • MISSION ACCOMPLISHED (GWB VERSION)

    Strangely enough I can imagine Segasa Tokugawa standing on the parapet of Osaka Castle saying only a fool like Toyotomi either father or son would wage a war on Korea to expand his empire and stand here and say mission accomplished while so many at home mourned the loss of sons or innocence, or both…

    Lou Faber