The Hawks of Winter
I thought it was a hawk as first. Swiveling its beaked head almost completely around. Sitting high in the white pine, level with my second floor windows. Big but not enormous. Not an eagle. Not a condor! The bird … Continued
I thought it was a hawk as first. Swiveling its beaked head almost completely around. Sitting high in the white pine, level with my second floor windows. Big but not enormous. Not an eagle. Not a condor! The bird … Continued
Dear Readers, I am no longer on facebook. A while ago, someone or other impersonated me. There were, thus, two facebook pages almost identical, purporting to be from me. But I could get into only one, the “real” one. The … Continued
Odd these conjunctions: lifesize Chinese tomb warriors from 200 BCE striding in their stone shapes at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Then rooms full of women’s art, made from the mid-1970s to the present era, associated with one of the … Continued
It is cold today in Minnesota–minus 10 on the thermometer on the backyard deck. Two thin-tailed squirrels shiver as they cram their mouths with sunflower seeds. All kinds of birds flock–blue jays dip into the heated bird bath, cardinals alight … Continued
It is quiet now with the snow. Streets, sidewalks muffled. A dog barks. We are too far for church bells. In Charleston winters when I grew up, we often had windows open to the clack of palm fronds and … Continued
‘Tis the season to be taken to account. The US federal government has just averted a financial cliff of cuts and ups that would have, according to financial experts, thrown the country into a downward spiral. This is not news. … Continued
A good poem can bequeath you one or two lines: such as these from Maxine Kumin’s Feeding Time: Time which blows on the kettle’s rim Waits to carry us off. (Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief, 1992) I stand … Continued
Carol Bly, one of Minnesota’s finest essayists, published an essay with this title in her collection, Letters from the Country. It’s probably my favorite, written when she lived in a small prairie community in the 1970s. She advised us, in … Continued
At the northern edge of Kauai, the most northwesterly of the main Hawaiian Islands, a point of land reaches out to a lighthouse. This is the Kilauea lighthouse. Once there were 14 lighthouses studding the rugged coast of Kauai, in … Continued
The small plane from Houston banked lower, the clouds parted, and there lay a wide, dry plateau spread with cactus like huge Gumbies ready to jig. The word arroyo came back to me: deep fissures in the earth, which would … Continued