Articles

Songs for the End of the World

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On the other side of praise / it’s time to chop down the tall tree in the ear— / enough enough with the starlit promontories—/ a nervous condition traces itself/ in lightning in the clouds, / a little requiem rattles among Coke cans / and old vegetable tins

Articles

The Good, the Bad, and the Oscars

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The outcome of the recent Academy Awards sweepstakes was a very mixed bag. Argo, the winner of the best-picture prize, is a nice little movie with a timely theme, a feel-good ending, and reminiscences of the 1997 comedy-drama Wag the Dog. Yet while it’s ably directed by Ben Affleck and engagingly acted by a talented cast, it doesn’t have the artistic or emotional heft that distinguishes the best best-picture winners.

Fiction & Poetry Articles

Empty Air

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“Here in this empty air we reckon ink, / Color and volume as a way of life, / Leibnitz’s chain across the galaxy, / A string and a spiral.” A Poem by Kenneth Fields.

Articles

Hartford

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City of gun shots, where Hartford Hospital on Jefferson Street employed my mother, a nurse, dressed in her white uniform with pearl buttons, and now employs me, forty five years later, a chaplain with a black shirt and a white clerical collar. Some nights when I sleep in the on-call room, I think I hear them page my mother’s elegant name, Loretta. “Trouble,” a nurse says, “Why is the city so troubled?”

Articles

A City Where Justice Dwells

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Place matters. Even in this globalized, Internet era, I believe in making long-term commitments to specific places, and especially to the places where we live. Our communal social justice efforts should begin by choosing the places where we will make an impact.

2013

An Alphabet

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Air, element we take inside and send back altered,
Be lucid: show us the swift’s passage in twilight, the earliest stars;
Calm the undervoice that yammers what is the point? Dishevel our hair, carry away our hats and umbrellas. Even as you build clouds taller than mountains,
Favor us with the lightning’s power, the fog’s invisibility cloak. Grant us this breath and another, grant us tomorrow. Hold us closely, lest we fly apart as we would in space;
Incline your full weight so that we feel you hold us
Just as you hold the dew before nightfall, the cloud before rain;
Kiss us as we wish a lover to kiss us, without forethought or purpose.

2013

Morning Blessings

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For Rabbi Burt Jacobson

Blessed is the dog’s tongue
Shamanic prayer flag
Binder of vapor
Harbinger of light’s arrival. Blessed is the brain stem
That battled entropy
All night on my behalf. Blessed are my nether, pleasure parts
That double as effluent outlets. Blessed are you, Ya, granter of civility,
In whose name the trash trucks
Are held in abeyance until the sunlight
Girds the plum trees. Blessed are the medicines,
Polyglot organic molecules,
That soothe or jumpstart
My various organs, that find
My son at sea and return him
Safely to port.