Deprivations of the Deep

He wants to dive deep. He can’t. Too many flotation devices. Too much buoyancy. He wants to enter deep into the cave. He can’t. Too many danger signs. Too many warnings. He wants to go deep with his wife. He can’t. Too many deadlines. Too many t.v. commercials. He...

The Beginning of Poetry

Genesis 2:19-20 Adam squirmed in the mud- womb hearing God say ‘let’. With each ‘let’ life leaped out of nowhere into ‘is’, the first verb Adam needed to make sense of his world. Being after being appeared, materialized, happened, took its place among the rest. After...

 A Kind of Homecoming   study guide

This is a philosophical poem.  It has to do with our relationship to the earth.  Not only is the earth our current address, it is our mother.  We are humans, earth beings, raised up out of the humus, the soil of the earth. The second biblical creation story, Genesis...

A Kind of Homecoming   

“Our view of man will remain superficial so long as we fail to go back to that origin [of silence], so long as we fail to find, beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence, and as long as we do not describe the action which breaks this silence. The...

Poetry and the Internet

When I was in college studying T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land for the first time, I made the mistake of sitting down to read the poem in my dorm room.  I opened the book expecting an intellectual challenge and I got one.  What I didn’t expect was a physical challenge. ...