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November Angels?
One thing leads to another. Three years ago I wrote about the poem, “My November Guest,” by Robert Frost. This morning I found myself looking at the poem again. It’s a poem in which the speaker becomes aware of sorrow as a guest and begins to understand how deeply sorrow appreciates “the desolate, deserted trees/ the faded earth, the heavy sky.” Since I first came across Frost’s poem I’ve been struck by his notion: feelings as simply guests. Nothing more or less. They come and they go. A particular...
Enough: A Poem for a November Morning
I like this poem by Jeffrey Harrison for its apparent simplicity. For its timeliness—a warm cloudless November morning. For its honesty—that surprise toward the end of the first stanza when the speaker of the poem admits to a mind that is not quiet but is instead roiled with personal grievance. It’s a gift, this cloudless November morning warm enough for you to walk without a jacket along your favorite path. The rhythmic shushing of your feet through fallen leaves should be enough to quiet the mind, so it surprises...
November Update: Writing and Healing
The project I’m featuring in my Healing Corridor is HODI: Soldiers of Peace. This is an inspiring project a woman has begun in Kenya where young men and women are offered healing alternatives to violence. There’s a moving video about young men from different tribes playing soccer rather than destroying each other. Well worth a look. I also did some close reading of the poem, Kindness, a couple weeks ago. It’s a poem I’m trying to keep in the back of mind–and sometimes the forefront–as I go into the...
Odysseus in America: A Book for Healing and Writing
Let me begin with a story about Bear. Bear served one tour in Vietnam as a sergeant in the infantry. During that single tour he was ordered to slit the throat of a wounded enemy soldier. He followed orders. He saw close friends die, including one particularly horrific incident when his platoon, after a night ambush, discovered two headless bodies of their own men; a ways out they came upon the two heads set up on stakes. His platoon went berserk after the incident, cutting off the heads of...
HODI: Soldiers of Peace
They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore. –from Isaiah, the New International Version of the Bible I’d been intending to feature projects in my healing corridor which primarily promote writing, education and healing, but an email last month prompted me to rethink and expand my definition of healing. After I published my piece on Sakeena Yacoobi at the Afghan Institute of Learning, I got a nice email from...
Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye
Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever. Oh. I didn’t get this the first...