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to the making
of books
no end

vanity of vanities
in viral times
poems
prayers
sermons
meditations
hosts
of pieties

vanity of vanities
is this
the worship
I choose
go feed
go clothe
and be
mercifully still

In the Netflix reboot, 12-year-old girls model collaborative leadership.

The Book of Longings offers a rare glimpse into the interior lives of women in the biblical world.

The human form “capture[s] the energy, motivation and spirit that are reflected in every as­pect of the subject,” says Basil Watson, a Jamaican artist now based in Georgia. When such forms are gathered with fists raised in united protest and hope, their energy is exponential. Whether it’s a bust of Rep.

All I can write these days
is busy, teeming, too late,
a jar of flour moths
opened in a grain world

or fat maggots
in the disemboweled
squirrel my dog loves.
Lord, give me open hours,

a to-do list in ashes.
Let me carve the heart
of the week and eat it
slowly. Let me sleep in.

Give me a snarl of entrails
and time to weigh them,
to double-check.
Leave the knife

on the table: show me
what to do.

Recently, faith leaders have been carrying prints of Mark Doox’s Our Lady of Ferguson to protests in cities across the country in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and numerous other black men and women. Doox works within an icon-styled form he calls Byz-Dada (Byzantine Dadaism). His images are informed by “American democratic and spiritual ideals, the African-American experience, humanistic existential reality, black folksy wisdom and pragmatism”—which he combines with piercing, direct commentary.

Knowing the real Fred means seeing the unseen.

The early palaver of nestling crows
Outside my window in the white pine tree
Calls back a childhood in which such ruckus
Seemed prelude to possibility.

But I need to resist any rosy nostalgia:
I had my small troubles. I scarcely believed
The world would be nothing but pleasure and promise.
Even young, I wasn’t entirely naïve.

Still I woke eager for my gang of pals,
For games we devised by improvisation,
And of course the vigor of our own palaver,
Which was graced by savvy. Or so we imagined.

You, who were not in the candleflame, not
in the Mass this morning, season after season
why do you keep silence? Come. Roll in on breakers
like bright reeking seaweed or drop like a seagull
through a crack in the low stratus. Come any way at all.  
I will be your prey.

This year I find the river slowed,
The trout gone missing, insects too,
The yellow lily, broken-stemmed,
No wild rose or river otter, no
Migrant warblers passing through.

Impermanence, I tell myself,
Though given how I love to fish,
Upset again that nothing lasts,
But bit by bit I settle in for, after
All, I can still cast.

Waist-deep, cold water, rod in hand,
Fly landing gently, mending, drifting,
Expecting nothing, needing nothing,
Rod raised to begin again, line lifting,
Graceful, fine as breath,