Every Good Morning

I think I sometimes use the possessive to stave off considerations of mortality and not only to register affection, but that said, ‘our’ two fall and winter crows have become five, and when they visit the feeders, the three young look sleek as racing cars and walk, hop and sit as near their parents as they can. Young mourning doves, still slim as models, visit and nuthatches and the Cooper […]

Only their own lives mean something to tyrants. The importance of life for others is dependent on how closely they circle the Sun of the ruler. If they exist beyond the sight of his glancing, disinterested eye, let’s say beyond the orbit of Saturn, a sometime evening star, then the reality of those lives is murky, their humanity erased. “No real person is involved”* in their deaths. Tyrants see them […]

They have always been there. Their bodies have always been there. Their suffering has always been there for all to see. They were stolen, sold, crammed into ships, raped and murdered during the “ Middle Passage ”, sold, raped and murdered by their owners, sold, sold, sold with all their children and children’s children — a few names : Ghar, Dayhoo, Ba, Frar, Humom. More names than you can ever imagine have always been available […]

There is no teleology to history. Nothing is preordained except entropy and death … and as long as there is life, rebirth too, and resurrections and reinventions. At my age, history seems like white hot lava streaming downhill across uneven ground. We give events their pattern. We look at those cross-sections of landscape and flow from 5000 feet up, at the gutters and gullies it takes, the cities it consumes, […]