I live in a busy city in Texas, a border state with Mexico, and I see many refugees where I live. They're often families with children, selling flowers at street corners or asking for money at busy intersections. My great grandparents were Italian and Polish immigrants. They labored…
The other day I was thinking of the phrase that we often toss out when someone we love is doing something that alarms, frustrates or distresses us: "They'll learn." We can feel so helpless and powerless when the people we love are suffering. This powerlessness can…
Ida Zaccagnini Zborovancik was my great aunt - my maternal grandmother's younger sister, one of seven children from an Italian Catholic family. These old ones lived long: most past ninety. But over the past decade, year by year, another one died. Last fall, my great uncle Tony died,…
In my last writing group, the monthly theme was courage. It was a day when courage, for me, felt absent. I was recovering from another bout of illness - a very frequent visitor in my guest house these days - and I felt vulnerable. When the time came to write,…
Today is Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, which I became familiar with and began celebrating twelve years ago when I moved to Texas, just north of the Mexican border. If you want to be moved and educated about this holiday, this movie will do the trick.…
This year I've been a part of a monthly writing group where we meet to read poems, write, and hear ourselves more deeply. Each month has a theme, and this month our theme was failure. A bucket of poems have come in the wake of this exploration. Most…
This poem came one morning when I was scrolling through etsy, looking for a new pair of earrings. Scrolling etsy can be inspirational and joyful - there's so much creativity alive in the world. And I'm often amazed at how often I crave something new when…
In my most recent poem I mentioned that two poems came to me last week about softness. The first you can find here. The second began with a line borrowed from Mary Oliver's famous poem, Wild Geese: You do not have to be good. And so I wondered,…