p

The Waitresses The waitresses At the restaurant Have to keep reminding The schizophrenic man That if he keeps acting Like a schizophrenic man They'll have to ask him to leave the restaurant. But he keeps forgetting that he's a schizophrenic man, So they have to keep reminding him.

Matt Cook

q

Suffering shows us what we are attached to... dying doesn't cause suffering, resistance to dying does.

Terry Tempest Williams

p

Borrowed Time I will not die tonight I will lie in bed with my wife beside me, curled on the right like an animal burrowing. I will fit myself against her and we will keep each other warm. I will not die tonight. My son who is seven will not slide beneath the ice like the boy on the news. The divers will not have to look for him in the cold water. He will call, "Daddy, can I get up now?" in the morning. I will not die tonight. I will balance the checkbook, wash up the dishes and sit in front of the TV drinking one beer. For the moment I hold a winning ticket. It's my turn to buy cold cuts at the grocery store. I fill my basket carefully. For like the rain that comes now to the roof and slides down the gutter I am headed to the earth. And like the others, all the lost and all the lovers, I will follow an old path not marked on any map.

David Moreau

q

Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

Simone Weil

p

Mother's Day

I do not doubt you would have liked

one of those pretty mothers in the ads:

complete with adoring husband and happy children.

She's always smiling, and if she cries at all

it is absent of lights and camera,

makeup washed from her face.

But since you were born of my womb, I should tell you:

ever since I was small like you

I wanted to be myself-and for a woman that's hard-

(even my Guardian Angel refused to watch over me

when she heard.)

I cannot tell you that I know the road.

Often I lose my way

and my life has been a painful crossing

navigating reefs, in and out of storms,

refusing to listen to the ghostly sirens

who invite me into the past,

neither compass nor binnacle to show me the way.

But I advance,

go forward holding to the hope

of some distant port

where you, my children-I'm sure-

will pull in one day

after I've been lost at sea.

-to my mother

Daisy Zamora (trans. Margaret and Elinor Randall)

q

Let the beauty of what we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

-Rumi

p

Airport Security In the airport I got wanded, though not by a fairy princess. I had to remove my shoes, prove they were not twin bombs. But the strangest scene I saw that day was where random checks delayed the suspicious- the grey lady in her wheelchair and the toddler boy tugged from his mother's hand, pulled through the metal detector's arch. She tried to follow but was restrained by two guards who grasped her arms as she yelled, "But I told him not to talk to strangers!" The child wailed bloody murder. A female guard patted the boy all over, although he did not giggle. I myself went on profiling terrorists. ---------------They were so obvious.

David Ray

q

To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.

-Abraham Lincoln, 16th US president (1809-1865)