The Pitcher Cries For Water

I Am A Driven Writer. I Feel Guilty If I Don't Write, Not Self-indulgent If I Do.

Now That I Am In My Forties, She [my Mother] Tells Me I'm Beautiful; Now That I Am In My Forties, She Sends Me Presents And We Have The Long, Personal And Even Remarkably Honest Phone Calls I Always Wanted So Intensely I Forbade Myself To Imagine Them. How Strange. Perhaps Shaw Was Correct And If We Lived To Be Several Hundred Years Old, We Would Finally Work It All Out. I Am Deeply Grateful. With My Poems, I Finally Won Even My Mother. The Longest Wooing Of My Life.

We Seek Not Rest But Transformation. We Are Dancing Through Each Other As Doorways.

You Are Built To Pull A Cart, To Lift A Heavy Load And Bear It, To Haul Up The Long Slope, And So Am I, Peasant Bodies, Earthy, Solid Shapely Dark Glazed Clay Pots That Can Stand On The Fire.

Depressions, Local And Larger Strikes, Boom Times, Wars, Repressions, All Impact A Life As Do Epidemics Such As Aids And Pollution That May Take Years Off A Person's Life. We All, Whether We Like It Or Not And Whether We Acknowledge It Or Not, Are Impacted By The Racial Attitudes We Carry Within Us, And Experience In Some Form Every Time We Turn On The Television, The Radio, Go To A Movie, Read A Magazine Or A Newspaper, Or Walk Down The Street.