July 20, 2014

The News….

The news is awful:  planes shot out of the air, children filling refugee camps...in the U.S., hundreds of girls kidnapped, boys killed by bombs on a beach.  Maybe it has always been so, but this summer seems especially horrible.  The poet Mary Oliver speaks to my feelings:


The Morning Paper

Read one newspaper daily (the morning edition 
     is the best
for by evening you know that you at least
     have lived through another day)
and let the disasters, the unbelievable
     yet approved decisions,
soak in.

I don't need to name the countries,
     ours among them.

What keeps us from falling down, our faces
     to the ground; ashamed, ashamed?


From A Thousand Mornings, published by Penguin Books, 2012.