A. Anupama
We could have courage, discipline or kindness for dinner tonight, so which’ll it be? They all sound good, right? I’m going with kindness right now. Partly because I feel like I have had to serve extra helpings of courage and discipline every night of this whole pandemic, just to get through. How does kindness taste?…
My daughter told me that fear is a good thing to have because it makes people focus and learn and achieve. She is thirteen years old, and this is her personal experience, so far. I think that she will understand eventually that there are detrimental complications within fear, but, because I'm busily shielding her from…
I wonder if I’m noticing enough, even as I pause over fresh red leaves in the roadside next to the curb. There’s pleasure in writing poems, even breathless with exertion of reluctance. The last robin in our neighborhood to fly away for winter might have gone already, or might not yet. A poem waits and…
I had forgotten about the way I kept “teaching shoes” in my car after this year-and-a-half in virtual classrooms. It’s so good to be with students, in living presence, and there’s no equivalent for it. Now that the school semester is fully underway, most of my thought and energy is in the lectures, discussions, assignments.…
What do butterflies say? If a child asked me that, I’d say “listen.” This past Sunday, my neighbor and I walked up the newly built section of trail that leads from Nyack Beach State Park to the Long Path, which climbs to the peak of Hook Mountain. We met a woman named Felicia, who teaches…
A tree laid its crown on the ground, mindful of the saplings nearby, mindful to lay it across the meadow somehow, away from the sculptures. Now an attentive ear much taller than a poet stays cocked at the side of the footpath: an enormous ellipse of tangled root, rock, and earth. On a bright morning…
There are moments I don’t photograph or write about, though they are worthy of a creative expression. Maybe that’s partly why I took up painting and guitar this year, to see if more angles of approach could widen my praise of life. But it hasn’t really changed the level of silence I keep. A blue…
If suns grew in a field together, would they get along? If stars fell into fields, would we memorialize them? If the crescent moon mowed the field, what kind of hay would that make? Poems are made of heat, light, consciousness. On a hot day in August like this, maybe poems get lost. Maybe in…
I’m figuring out how to play “Blackbird” on guitar. It makes me feel like a cicada— sounding a bit awful, but feeling happy to spend time in musical daylight, sound spheres. Of course, this song is about night and the light it contains. Outside my window, fireflies move in wide arcs in the rough breezes…
My older daughter is a real entomophobe, and she protested by loud wailings my choice of subject for yesterday’s painting. I had said “dragonfly” and so I agreed that it did sound scary. Is “damselfly” more charming? They are, in fact, two different types of creatures in the order Odonata. But maybe they occupy a…
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