The rut of your thinking, the rough road, the weary pleasure in the familiar sights and sounds, and then the joy of a sudden storm that settles it all to ground — or it might be the laugh of a child, just as they lower you, just as wild seed takes root when love’s sweet something is found. Recently Banned Literature, August 22, 2016 . [ 1139 ]
How to describe the complex scent left behind by yesterday’s rain? First the nose asks the toes. Then they all have a good laugh at the brain. June 14, 2021 . Sunday Morning as Rain Approached Sunday morning as rain approached, we walked by the river among snowing cottonwoods. I inhaled a pound of lint. Yesterday I heard a girl I grew up with lost her husband to cancer. I […]
A little before four this morning, it was cloudy with only one star briefly visible; then, a few minutes later, between the birches and firs, through a break in the clouds just above the neighbor’s second-story roof, we caught a sustained glimpse of the full lunar eclipse, as the shadow passed and the moon began to emerge. Now there is a robin singing from the chimney-top. It comes to mind […]
Your leaves and her hair. Her limbs, your grassy slope to the stream. Your roots. Her sudden rain. Her sunlit path. Your green. And every thing unseen, slowly. Is this what meaning means? Her hair? Your leaves? And all of it so tenderly? Recently Banned Literature, June 11, 2017 . [ 1114 ]
O, dear one, life is a lightly blown kiss. Can you imagine a love like this? Or will you choose pride, regret, and loneliness? “Which Way the Breeze?” Recently Banned Literature, August 2, 2017 . Thistledown Freedom is the art of letting go, now, of all that will be washed away in the end — our prejudices and cares, our politics, arrogance, religion, and despair, our national identities, our borders, […]
They looked at one another as if each had swallowed silence, and were forbidden the use of their hands. Recently Banned Literature, July 20, 2011 . [ 1103 ]
Imagine your paws on the tailgate and sudden arms that bear your weight through open fields and tender fate in clover time. Recently Banned Literature, June 11, 2014 . [ 1099 ]
There are only three hundred sixty-five days in a year, yet that short time is enough for the passing of four miraculous seasons. Each day is one of significant change, and though it holds reminders of those just passed, and promise of those to come, it is in itself unique and profoundly alone, ready to be welcomed, loved, appreciated, noticed — and then . . . and then, it is […]
At one point or another, all of the problems in the world — the homelessness, the poverty, the hunger, the injustice, the inequality, the nationalism, the environmental degradation, the violence, the war — I have helped to cause. Now, even though the cause was here before I arrived, it is time for me to be the uncause, to root out the cause in myself, and see that it is not […]
If this were framed, and hung in a quiet corner where it could be read each day, it might serve as a kind of household guardian spirit. It might serve even if it were not read. After all, poems have their ways. . Imagine Your Mind Imagine, your mind, wandering, until it imagines itself home, raindrops on a silver coach, clattering on stones, a sign nailed on with flowers, proprietor […]
William Michaelian 
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