a poem is a sermon
Beneath the rust and the gray toxic dust left behind when the water went down past the edge of the Quarter’s bright lights and disorder there’s nothing much left to this town Maybe the Crescent City was never too pretty for more than three blocks in a row, but it made our lives fuller, regardless […]
What useful illusions we once had are gone: that governments serve, that the lowliest pawns with slow forward motion may yet become kings. How quickly it seems that the simplest things become complicated and mired in deceit, and minor successes engulfed by defeat; despite constant vigil and unending toil, the fruits of one’s labors will […]
What light may break through the scrub trees that line the well-groomed yard at dawn is thin and pale, its weight degrees less than it when it lingers on the lower depths, the southern end, below the Orleans waterline; there it hangs and drips with fat and heavy water in the pines and live oaks. […]
A single shelf sits untouched by the rubble, its contents unmolested by the storm; while mold grows from the walls like razor stubble, and walls and ceilings crumble beyond form. Below, the room is nothing but destruction, appliances and desks upturned and smashed, displaced and wretched by the flood water’s suction, strewn through the house […]
H elpless in the laughing face of elemental change u nloosed as a pointed reminder that we each exist – r eally, at the mercy of the Mother’s loving hands, the r ight extending blessing, while the left removes our veiled i llusions of reality. When humans pause and c ontemplate their permanence beyond wild […]
Dear America: The day after Katrina passed by New Orleans and the reporters at the Royal Sonesta Hotel on Bourbon Street, in the goddamn sacred French Quarter, were saying “New Orleans has been spared” I knew it would come to this. The day I heard the levees at the river and the lake had been […]
The things by which we measure our success: accumulations from long years of toil, the pride of equity in an address, and our precious illusions. How soon spoiled, in just a moment’s passing, are these goods, respectability’s crush torn away. All the great faiths instruct us that we should in times like these find hope […]