Saint that I am, I also shot a bullfrog. But I don’t remember if it was before or after I shot the sparrow. When I shot the sparrow, I was alone. When I shot the bullfrog, I was with the boy who lived down the road on the farm adjacent to ours. We both shot the bullfrog. I remember being sickened by it at the time. I knew it was […]
More than fifty years later, I still think about the sparrow I shot and killed when I was a boy, and how, in one brutal, life-changing instant, it fell from our walnut tree and landed on the ground. Even now, I remember its tightly shut eyes and colorful feathers, which from a distance had seemed drab and gray, and the little grave I dug and placed it in. Thank goodness […]
Concord — harmony; a grape; a town; Emerson; Thoreau; all that’s forgotten, but not unknown. * Negativity: the great pandemic. Yet the cure is instantaneous, and starts with yourself. * How strange, being a member of a species smart enough to kill itself. And here is our mother, gently whispering over us, Live, and we think her voice is only the sound of the waves, the wind in the trees. […]
As my fingertips on one hand traced the lines of the open palm of the other, I suddenly recognized them both as old childhood friends. It felt like years since I’d seen them. I held them up. They looked at each other, then at me. There were many things I could have asked them, but they seemed so sensitive and shy, I only nodded and kept silent, thinking, Perhaps another […]
This old body is going through some changes this winter. It reminds me of cracking walnuts with my father during the long cold evenings. He was a boy, and I was at least a hundred and ten, when, crack! The outside was in, and the inside was out again. . [ 1640 ]
I sweep the rug in the entry with the whisk broom our family used during my childhood. Every once in a while, bristles come out — museum pieces — like these, from my memory. . [ 1637 ]
Moment by moment, breath by breath, may I live consciously, not by habit or rote. And when I grow tired, may I still be inspired to forget the last thing I wrote. . [ 1602 ]
A picture of a mountain isn’t a mountain. So with a river, a flower, and those we hate and love. Memory, too, is a kind of picture, as are words. The word mountain isn’t a mountain. But to show each other our pictures, we climb mountains and mountains of words. The memory of something that happened isn’t the happening. Maybe that’s one reason we keep fighting wars. Genocide in books […]
Between what I can do and what I can’t, Is a lifetime of what I did and what I didn’t, when I could. Now I do this, without wondering if I should, if it’s bad, or if it’s good. I do this, tho’ the doing’s hardly doing, and the done is never done. I do this, ’cause the doer’s here to do it, Tho’ ’times it seems he’s gone. . […]
When someone near remembers what you remember differently ripens the fruit ends the year billows the sail brings the old ship home . [ 1569 ]
William Michaelian 