Three Poems Up on Poets For Living Waters

I am late publicizing the fact that three of my poems, “Like This,” “Free Radicals” and “Empty Rhetoric,” were published on Poets for Living Waters. Here is “Free Radicals:”

Rowboats on the pond:
random particles
dancing to laws
they couldn’t name
even if the god
that doesn’t exist
descended this moment
and himself commanded
them to speak

—and our son, sleeping,
nestles further back
in his stroller, animals,
no doubt, tracking with him
through his dreams
the mud of the day
we’ve just lived;
and when he wakes
he’ll read the story
back to us,
the narrative components
bouncing off each other
like these vessels
would do on the water
if all at once their pilots slept

—which, if we’re honest about it,
is how we got here,
bumped and bonded,
released from our rage
into this hope, this boy,
this: his own life.

Submission guidelines asked for, along with three poems and a bio, a statement if you wanted to make one. Here is mine, corrected for the spacing errors that appear on the site:

Tikkun olam, a concept that is central to Jewish spirituality, means, literally, the fixing of the world, and it refers to a religious duty Jews are supposed to consider our­selves obligated to perform. In one strand of Jewish mystical tradition, tikkun olam means the task of gathering the fragments of the shattered divine, the pieces of him­self [sic] that the god of the Hebrew Bible gave up in creating the world so that the world could live and grow, and then using them to reconstruct the original godhead. On a more mundane, though no less significant level, tikkun olam is represented by such things as the struggle for social justice. For me, writing poetry is also a form of tikkun olam. As Sam Hamill has written, “The first duty of the writer is the rectification of names,” and he quotes Kung-fu Tze [Confucius], “All wisdom is rooted in learning to call things by the right name.” Finding my way through language to a finished poem is the act of finding that name, whether it is the name of the way things were, the way things are or the way things might be. Poetry’s response to disasters like the BP oil spill, it seems to me, needs to encompass all three of those possibilities.

The Poets for Living Waters mission statement is also worth reading:

Poets for Living Waters is a poetry action in response to the BP Gulf oil disaster of April 20, 2010, one of the most profound man-made ecological catastrophes in history. Former US poet laureate Robert Pinsky describes the popularity of poetry after 9/11 as a turn away from the disaster’s overwhelming enormity to a more manageable individual scale. As we confront the magnitude of this recent tragedy, such a return may well aid us.

The first law of ecology states that everything is connected to everything else. An appreciation of this systemic connectivity suggests a wide range of poetry will offer a meaningful response to the current crisis, including work that harkens back to Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing regional effects.

This online periodical is the first in a planned series of actions. Further actions will include a print anthology and a public reading in Washington DC.

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