This was before the time of lithium and Zoloft
before mood stabilizers and anxiolytics
and almost all the psychotropic drugs, but not before thorazine,
which the suicide O’Laughlin called “handcuffs for the mind.”
What if it were not such a tragedy to outlive one’s nation,
If poets and their art provide us with tools necessary for living, then Mahmoud Darwish may be the hammer and chisel in poetry’s chest, feared by some for his capacity to tear down the walls of comfortable myths, and lauded by others for...
Autumn and its thousand adjectives have come to this, a swither in the trees, their limbs bronchial and backlit in the gloam.
Heavenly earth flutters in the mind, word-borne.
Here it does not rest, a past I summoned with a bell so that things awaken
The road at the top of the riseSeems to come to an endAnd take off into the skies.