Poetry

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

This is the age of ashes.
Ashes of burned children,
of cold trials of hell,

Aging women mourn while they go to market,
buy fish, figs, tomatoes, enough today to
feed the wolf asleep underneath the table
who wakes from what dream?

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.”