Your letters are always welcome in my house. My self-given and accepted task for today is to repeat over and over these two words: Heart and Love. Even now, at 75, I’m not sure about these words and what they contain.
So often, these days, I turn to Ryokan. A recluse monk, living in a hermitage in Japan, 1758-1831. Through his writings I meet a man who wrote so honestly about encountering the full range of human emotion, with amazing acceptance it seems to me. In the tradition of Zen, Ryokan wrote death-bed poems as he approached his own death.
This is a favorite of mine:
“When, when? I sighed.
The one I longed for
Has finally come;
With her now,
I have all that I need.”
Late in his life it is written that he fell in love with a younger nun, Teishin, and she with he. They wrote poems to each other. Teishin was with him when he died.
Another version of this poem, when translated into English, is:
When, When?
You, whom I have been
eagerly awaiting,
are finally here.
What else is there to want?
Though this seems to be a declaration of his love for Teishin, I am tempted to also read this as a letter to Death. What does one need as one is about to die? An ID card? Driver’s license? Social Security number? None of these things matter anymore. In the embrace of Death, where life and death become exquisite lovers, what else is there to want? Life and Death are doing a final dance. And, in his good fortune, Teishin is nearby to witness this dance. What else is there to want? Truly, what else? 🏮
That is beautiful David - thank you. The "you" in the "You, whom I have been / eagerly awaiting" is powerful. As you say, what do we need other than multiple ways to say you.
Mary Oliver and Hafiz. There are poems by both that I read over and over and over and each time I am surprised, affirmed, shook and "blown open" in the words of the late great Seamus Heaney. Also Seamus Heaney - I'll leave you with with one of his (also read over and over and over and always shook):
And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
A poem is always “evidence” that, in fact, “not all portions of me will perish.” ❤️🩹
Having spent so much time in Lviv (Lvov, Lemberg, Львов) and Kraków, I can feel both the steps of dancing, and the steps of fleeing in every stanza I read. There’s a resonance still.
I know these places...the cobblestones...the hiding places. The labyrinth of alleyways and passageways where lives were erased and lives were saved. Where poets became prisoners and prisoners became poets. Ever the entanglement of injustice and oppression. Marked by a back door and a left behind fountain pen, and a still warm cup of coffee, marked by the slightest shade of red lip.
“where I don’t go, there will be doors, and where I don’t come, they will remain...”
Where tourists and citizen soldiers now walk, if you listen carefully to the stillness that resides somewhere between the echoes of boots and heels, desperate whispers bounce aimlessly between the windowsills and the laundry drying, crisp in the unexpected winter sunshine.
The sheets flap in the winds above and look like a blanket of snow in a field of sunflowers 🌻 now.
Poets have long defended the borderlands. They say the pen 🖊️ is mightier than the sword 🗡️ but what about the turret?
If time is a portal, it takes me to a place where the coffee shop window is bathed in victorious sunshine...and the crispness of autumn makes the pastries 🥐 plump. And I imagine there, just around the corner, a wall, canvas filled with the poetry of Iya Kiva and Zuzanna too. And that wind of whispers now carries a toddler’s laughter chased only by the loving arms of a father returned home. 🇺🇦
I'm reading Séan Hewitt's memoir, "All Down Darkness Wide," right now. It's about queer men and the consequences of hiding monumental parts of yourself long after you've revealed those things and been accepted. One part that I felt uncomfortably seen in was in his passages about being a people-pleaser at his church. If he could only stay beloved by the older congregants, stay an altar boy, then everything would be okay and be a bulwark against the disgust others were already showing him for himself and his queerness. WOW. So I'm out and have my own church family, but I find myself being a people-pleaser there because that family loves me.
Reading Séan's revelation was unsettling but like a lightning-rod of recognition. Do I do that, even though I'm no longer hiding my queer/transness? Perhaps. I had to close the book for awhile afterwards, but it's rich food for thought.
Thanks Sam - Seán's work is great... and that memoir is magnificent. The complicated lines of trying to figure out how to be in relation -- to self, to others, to being malleable, to being clear - is a complicated thing indeed.
Wow, this hit home...heavily. Thank you for sharing. Hiding...long after it was deemed and chanted, slightly under the breath of those in charge: “It’s safe to come out now.”
Padraig, your question makes me think of Alice Walker's poem, "Each One, Pull One." In it she explores what happens if the artists in a society (specifically Black artists) expose the violent caste system they've been born into.
" … did we write exactly what we saw,
As clearly as we could? Were we unsophisticated
Enough to cry and scream?
Well, then, they will fill our eyes,
Our ears, our noses and our mouths
With the mud
Of oblivion. They will chew up
Our fingers in the night. They will pick
Their teeth with our pens. They will sabotage
Both our children
And our art.
Because when we show what we see,
They will discern the inevitable:
We do not worship them."
And then she exposes the tendency of some of those downtrodden to side with their oppressors in a misguided bid for individual acceptance. But Alice calls them out —
"All of us must live
or none."
She tells her readers, "Each one, pull one back into the sun".
The poetry translators who share a fallen poet's vision are pulling that vision out of the grave and back into the sun. You, Padraig, pull many buried visions back into the sun for us to consider. I'm so grateful to you for doing that!
Our children and our art - that line always chills me, as Alice Walker highlights that art is a legacy for the future, not just a decoration for the present. Thank you.
Sep 3, 2023·edited Sep 4, 2023Liked by Pádraig Ó Tuama
There is a wonderful Colorado poet, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer (do you know of her, Padraig?). She lost her son to suicide and has been working her way through her grief with a poem a day. Some are so hard to read, but others are pure magic. Today, coincidentally (?), she writes about a two word song that has sustained her: Deep Peace. That is what I wish for you and our world.
Two things came to mind and I'll let them exist uneasily in the same response. First is Citizen - An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine. I was equal parts unsure I could keep reading and unable to put it down. The near impossibility of finding a way to navigate the simple fact of being black in America was laid bare. "Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn't be an ambition." More recently I went to a movie theater for the first time since COVID, yes, to see Barbie. I'm only a little embarrassed to admit that this 79 year old woman, along with thousands of others, was moved by America Ferrara voicing the near impossibility of DOING IT RIGHT as a woman. "But never forget that the system is rigged. So find a way to acknowledge that, but also always be grateful."
I haven't seen Barbie, Joanne, but I could almost (only almost) be persuaded to because of what I've heard is the brilliance of the brilliant America Ferrara in it.
And I plan on remaining steadfastly "only almost" ONLY because of Ferrara. Thank you for your gentle response. I should repent for the hate in my heart I feel for this piece of opportunist plastic from my childhood to ESPECIALLY what this movie represents now....grrrr
Anticipating your upcoming series “Strange Stories of the Bible,” I know that any translation of Hebrew Scripture is inadequate . . . reading a recipe and never tasting the dish. Friends whose first language is Hebrew try to explain the nuances, rhythms and, yes, poetry of what we Christians mistakenly and offensively call the Old Testament. There are glimpses—the Rabbi chanting the Priestly Blessing (Numbers 6: 24-26) as he holds his prayer shawl above the children gathered around him. It is embodied in a heart-beat rhythm, with a confident “shalom!” at the end. Shalom is more than “peace.” It is wholeness, completeness, enough-ness. How do you translate that?
Sep 3, 2023·edited Sep 3, 2023Liked by Pádraig Ó Tuama
I love this post so much. “I see how art coursed through her: and how her art was a witness”
Some of the poets I return to again and again because of the ways their art is a witness are Kaveh Akbar, Ashley M. Jones, Ada Limón, Christian Wiman, Evie Shockley, Anna Kamienska, Adam Zagajewski, and Marie Howe.
I could keep adding to the list, but I’ll stop there.
For reasons I don’t understand, I’m having trouble answering the prompt today. Thankfully, I am so moved by all of your responses that I can’t help but be mindful of witness, generosity, and gratitude. That is enough for me today, and most days. Have a gentle Sunday.
Thank you, Padraig. Your wisdom and the poets you've introduced me to through Poetry Unbound have literally been fuel for me for "the energies to keep working for that world." I was spiraling into a bit of despair around the ways in which this world can hurt and was saved by listening to your interviews with Patricia Smith and Aimee Nezhukumatathil. I had a hard time containing the energy they evoked in me. Patricia for the truthful way she spoke of her mother and the way she uses the Persona form to speak the truth, and Aimee for her beautiful (and to me very brave) way she writes about erotica, as well at her thoughtful and generative ways of teaching her craft.
Ah, thanks Karen - I'm so glad you connected with both of those interviews. I thoroughly loved meeting those poets and we're delighted to have the interviews out!
So many cherished poets mentioned here, like seeing the names of old friends. Ocean Vuong is one I have not seen yet who is critical to include. I will also add Andrea Gibson to this list, who I recently discovered. Their book, You Better Be Lightning, contains a fierceness and a generosity. Many other fine words too but the balance of those two descriptors seems to be at the heart of it for me. One poem they created instead of writing a furious text to a friend. and becomes the most beautiful, honest and complicated love letter.
It begins:
I know most people try hard
to do good and find out too late
they should have tried softer.
The audiobook I highly recommend as they are a spoken word artist and their performance gives me chills every time.
Be well Padraig and this whole community. Grateful to begin my Sundays in such a thoughtful and delicious way.
Hello Padraig, I'm so glad to be introduced to Zusanna Ginczanka. You ask what poets we read who bore witness. I read Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva. (Both of whom I've translated) and of course Pasternak. I also have 3 notebooks in Polish which my mother wrote while in hiding during the second World War. Some day I'll translate those.
The grounded confidence, clarity, and insistent aliveness of the work you shared called up Aracelis Girmay for me. Her book, “Kingdom Animalia,” was recommended to me by another wonderful poet, my friend Mónica Gomery, at a time when I was feeling overwhelmed by loss and searching for my own willingness to keep my heart open to new life and new love.
The last stanza of Girmay’s poem, “Elegy,” is one that I’ve come back to many times:
Krikor is a poet, a lover of words that express remembering as in his small chapbooks, Ghosts and Whispers and Refuge in the Shadows.
Krikor is my partner of many years. I, a small town midwestern country girl. My roots go back to the Mayflower so it be told. How our roots got entangled is a mystery to both.
In earlier times, before Krikor, I sat sesshin in the Koko An Zendo in Honolulu with Aitken Roshi. There I met W. S. Merwin, zen practitioner and poet.
On the theme of Remembering….
“….as I stand eating the black cherries
from the loaded branches above me
saying to myself Remember this.”
W. A. Merwin, Garden Time
Merwin has passed. Krikor is in his late eighties. I, too, an octogenarian.
Fall approaches, gardens go to sleep memories remain, deeply rooted
Franz Wright’s book of poetry, God’s Silence, is an examination of life and death’s mysteries. While he gives signs of hope eternal, he beautifully deals with his/ my questions about truth and realty. To quote him here, I chose a couple of lines from “The Walk.”
Good morning, Padraig,
Your letters are always welcome in my house. My self-given and accepted task for today is to repeat over and over these two words: Heart and Love. Even now, at 75, I’m not sure about these words and what they contain.
So often, these days, I turn to Ryokan. A recluse monk, living in a hermitage in Japan, 1758-1831. Through his writings I meet a man who wrote so honestly about encountering the full range of human emotion, with amazing acceptance it seems to me. In the tradition of Zen, Ryokan wrote death-bed poems as he approached his own death.
This is a favorite of mine:
“When, when? I sighed.
The one I longed for
Has finally come;
With her now,
I have all that I need.”
Late in his life it is written that he fell in love with a younger nun, Teishin, and she with he. They wrote poems to each other. Teishin was with him when he died.
Another version of this poem, when translated into English, is:
When, When?
You, whom I have been
eagerly awaiting,
are finally here.
What else is there to want?
Though this seems to be a declaration of his love for Teishin, I am tempted to also read this as a letter to Death. What does one need as one is about to die? An ID card? Driver’s license? Social Security number? None of these things matter anymore. In the embrace of Death, where life and death become exquisite lovers, what else is there to want? Life and Death are doing a final dance. And, in his good fortune, Teishin is nearby to witness this dance. What else is there to want? Truly, what else? 🏮
That is beautiful David - thank you. The "you" in the "You, whom I have been / eagerly awaiting" is powerful. As you say, what do we need other than multiple ways to say you.
Padraig, deeply appreciated🏮
Wow! Thank you, David, for sharing this poem in 2 translations...or is it 2 poems?!
I especially love what you wrote and shared:
“In the embrace of Death, where life and death become exquisite lovers, what else is there to want?”
And the list: none of the earthly document of importance are of no importance at the time of death-a stark reminder of what matters.
I know I will be reading your post over again a few times. Thank you.
Karen, so appreciate your response. Best wishes, David 🏮
Mary Oliver and Hafiz. There are poems by both that I read over and over and over and each time I am surprised, affirmed, shook and "blown open" in the words of the late great Seamus Heaney. Also Seamus Heaney - I'll leave you with with one of his (also read over and over and over and always shook):
And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
How lovely to read that poem of his - especially this week. Thank you.
Ooh to be “blown open”. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you for this.
God, I am so grateful you shared this poem today. Thank you. 🙏
A poem is always “evidence” that, in fact, “not all portions of me will perish.” ❤️🩹
Having spent so much time in Lviv (Lvov, Lemberg, Львов) and Kraków, I can feel both the steps of dancing, and the steps of fleeing in every stanza I read. There’s a resonance still.
I know these places...the cobblestones...the hiding places. The labyrinth of alleyways and passageways where lives were erased and lives were saved. Where poets became prisoners and prisoners became poets. Ever the entanglement of injustice and oppression. Marked by a back door and a left behind fountain pen, and a still warm cup of coffee, marked by the slightest shade of red lip.
“where I don’t go, there will be doors, and where I don’t come, they will remain...”
Where tourists and citizen soldiers now walk, if you listen carefully to the stillness that resides somewhere between the echoes of boots and heels, desperate whispers bounce aimlessly between the windowsills and the laundry drying, crisp in the unexpected winter sunshine.
The sheets flap in the winds above and look like a blanket of snow in a field of sunflowers 🌻 now.
Poets have long defended the borderlands. They say the pen 🖊️ is mightier than the sword 🗡️ but what about the turret?
If time is a portal, it takes me to a place where the coffee shop window is bathed in victorious sunshine...and the crispness of autumn makes the pastries 🥐 plump. And I imagine there, just around the corner, a wall, canvas filled with the poetry of Iya Kiva and Zuzanna too. And that wind of whispers now carries a toddler’s laughter chased only by the loving arms of a father returned home. 🇺🇦
Beautiful. When the pen weaves worlds, eras, epochs ... day into night, life with death.
Thanks for taking me there.
This is so deep and poetic. Thank you for sharing your reflection, Bill!
I'm reading Séan Hewitt's memoir, "All Down Darkness Wide," right now. It's about queer men and the consequences of hiding monumental parts of yourself long after you've revealed those things and been accepted. One part that I felt uncomfortably seen in was in his passages about being a people-pleaser at his church. If he could only stay beloved by the older congregants, stay an altar boy, then everything would be okay and be a bulwark against the disgust others were already showing him for himself and his queerness. WOW. So I'm out and have my own church family, but I find myself being a people-pleaser there because that family loves me.
Reading Séan's revelation was unsettling but like a lightning-rod of recognition. Do I do that, even though I'm no longer hiding my queer/transness? Perhaps. I had to close the book for awhile afterwards, but it's rich food for thought.
Thanks Sam - Seán's work is great... and that memoir is magnificent. The complicated lines of trying to figure out how to be in relation -- to self, to others, to being malleable, to being clear - is a complicated thing indeed.
Wow, this hit home...heavily. Thank you for sharing. Hiding...long after it was deemed and chanted, slightly under the breath of those in charge: “It’s safe to come out now.”
Thank you so much, Sam, for sharing so honestly and with this wonderful recommendation. I’m going to order it this morning.
Padraig, your question makes me think of Alice Walker's poem, "Each One, Pull One." In it she explores what happens if the artists in a society (specifically Black artists) expose the violent caste system they've been born into.
" … did we write exactly what we saw,
As clearly as we could? Were we unsophisticated
Enough to cry and scream?
Well, then, they will fill our eyes,
Our ears, our noses and our mouths
With the mud
Of oblivion. They will chew up
Our fingers in the night. They will pick
Their teeth with our pens. They will sabotage
Both our children
And our art.
Because when we show what we see,
They will discern the inevitable:
We do not worship them."
And then she exposes the tendency of some of those downtrodden to side with their oppressors in a misguided bid for individual acceptance. But Alice calls them out —
"All of us must live
or none."
She tells her readers, "Each one, pull one back into the sun".
The poetry translators who share a fallen poet's vision are pulling that vision out of the grave and back into the sun. You, Padraig, pull many buried visions back into the sun for us to consider. I'm so grateful to you for doing that!
Our children and our art - that line always chills me, as Alice Walker highlights that art is a legacy for the future, not just a decoration for the present. Thank you.
Thanks for sharing those profound excerpts.
There is a wonderful Colorado poet, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer (do you know of her, Padraig?). She lost her son to suicide and has been working her way through her grief with a poem a day. Some are so hard to read, but others are pure magic. Today, coincidentally (?), she writes about a two word song that has sustained her: Deep Peace. That is what I wish for you and our world.
Two things came to mind and I'll let them exist uneasily in the same response. First is Citizen - An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine. I was equal parts unsure I could keep reading and unable to put it down. The near impossibility of finding a way to navigate the simple fact of being black in America was laid bare. "Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn't be an ambition." More recently I went to a movie theater for the first time since COVID, yes, to see Barbie. I'm only a little embarrassed to admit that this 79 year old woman, along with thousands of others, was moved by America Ferrara voicing the near impossibility of DOING IT RIGHT as a woman. "But never forget that the system is rigged. So find a way to acknowledge that, but also always be grateful."
I haven't seen Barbie, Joanne, but I could almost (only almost) be persuaded to because of what I've heard is the brilliance of the brilliant America Ferrara in it.
And I plan on remaining steadfastly "only almost" ONLY because of Ferrara. Thank you for your gentle response. I should repent for the hate in my heart I feel for this piece of opportunist plastic from my childhood to ESPECIALLY what this movie represents now....grrrr
Thanks for sharing from your life and wisdom.
Anticipating your upcoming series “Strange Stories of the Bible,” I know that any translation of Hebrew Scripture is inadequate . . . reading a recipe and never tasting the dish. Friends whose first language is Hebrew try to explain the nuances, rhythms and, yes, poetry of what we Christians mistakenly and offensively call the Old Testament. There are glimpses—the Rabbi chanting the Priestly Blessing (Numbers 6: 24-26) as he holds his prayer shawl above the children gathered around him. It is embodied in a heart-beat rhythm, with a confident “shalom!” at the end. Shalom is more than “peace.” It is wholeness, completeness, enough-ness. How do you translate that?
See you in the strange stories, Teresa!
Shalom = Deep Peace?
I love this post so much. “I see how art coursed through her: and how her art was a witness”
Some of the poets I return to again and again because of the ways their art is a witness are Kaveh Akbar, Ashley M. Jones, Ada Limón, Christian Wiman, Evie Shockley, Anna Kamienska, Adam Zagajewski, and Marie Howe.
I could keep adding to the list, but I’ll stop there.
For reasons I don’t understand, I’m having trouble answering the prompt today. Thankfully, I am so moved by all of your responses that I can’t help but be mindful of witness, generosity, and gratitude. That is enough for me today, and most days. Have a gentle Sunday.
Thanks Tom - how kind.
Thank you, Padraig. Your wisdom and the poets you've introduced me to through Poetry Unbound have literally been fuel for me for "the energies to keep working for that world." I was spiraling into a bit of despair around the ways in which this world can hurt and was saved by listening to your interviews with Patricia Smith and Aimee Nezhukumatathil. I had a hard time containing the energy they evoked in me. Patricia for the truthful way she spoke of her mother and the way she uses the Persona form to speak the truth, and Aimee for her beautiful (and to me very brave) way she writes about erotica, as well at her thoughtful and generative ways of teaching her craft.
Ah, thanks Karen - I'm so glad you connected with both of those interviews. I thoroughly loved meeting those poets and we're delighted to have the interviews out!
So many cherished poets mentioned here, like seeing the names of old friends. Ocean Vuong is one I have not seen yet who is critical to include. I will also add Andrea Gibson to this list, who I recently discovered. Their book, You Better Be Lightning, contains a fierceness and a generosity. Many other fine words too but the balance of those two descriptors seems to be at the heart of it for me. One poem they created instead of writing a furious text to a friend. and becomes the most beautiful, honest and complicated love letter.
It begins:
I know most people try hard
to do good and find out too late
they should have tried softer.
The audiobook I highly recommend as they are a spoken word artist and their performance gives me chills every time.
Be well Padraig and this whole community. Grateful to begin my Sundays in such a thoughtful and delicious way.
I'm a big fan of those poets you've mentioned Tami - Ocean V, and also Andrea Gibson. Thanks for adding the names! And sharing this brilliant excerpt.
Hello Padraig, I'm so glad to be introduced to Zusanna Ginczanka. You ask what poets we read who bore witness. I read Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva. (Both of whom I've translated) and of course Pasternak. I also have 3 notebooks in Polish which my mother wrote while in hiding during the second World War. Some day I'll translate those.
Those notebooks, Eileen, my god. What a thing to have, and work with.
The grounded confidence, clarity, and insistent aliveness of the work you shared called up Aracelis Girmay for me. Her book, “Kingdom Animalia,” was recommended to me by another wonderful poet, my friend Mónica Gomery, at a time when I was feeling overwhelmed by loss and searching for my own willingness to keep my heart open to new life and new love.
The last stanza of Girmay’s poem, “Elegy,” is one that I’ve come back to many times:
“Listen to me. I am telling you
a true thing. This is the only kingdom.
The kingdom of touching;
the touches of the disappearing, things.”
Oh I love that book! God she's so good.
Thank you for sending me to both poems. Sometimes, things are sent to us at just the right time.
I'm glad to hear they arrived on time for you. May they be of use.
Profound...thanks!
Loneliness
A dinghy, unmoored
tossed between trough
and swell on an angry sea.
It will not last-hull slats
scattered like flotsam,
formless remnants
of what was, now
at tides’s whim,
Who will remember?
Krikor DerHohannesian, First Generation
(A long time ago there was and there wasn’t)
Krikor is a poet, a lover of words that express remembering as in his small chapbooks, Ghosts and Whispers and Refuge in the Shadows.
Krikor is my partner of many years. I, a small town midwestern country girl. My roots go back to the Mayflower so it be told. How our roots got entangled is a mystery to both.
In earlier times, before Krikor, I sat sesshin in the Koko An Zendo in Honolulu with Aitken Roshi. There I met W. S. Merwin, zen practitioner and poet.
On the theme of Remembering….
“….as I stand eating the black cherries
from the loaded branches above me
saying to myself Remember this.”
W. A. Merwin, Garden Time
Merwin has passed. Krikor is in his late eighties. I, too, an octogenarian.
Fall approaches, gardens go to sleep memories remain, deeply rooted
Inchoately waiting for rebirth
Thanks Juju - what powerful line: "Who will remember?"
And it's lovely to read some Merwin here too. Thank you.
Franz Wright’s book of poetry, God’s Silence, is an examination of life and death’s mysteries. While he gives signs of hope eternal, he beautifully deals with his/ my questions about truth and realty. To quote him here, I chose a couple of lines from “The Walk.”
“I walked outside today, and the void was shining
Immortal and infinite
word
And I have heard
God’s silence
like the sun.”
I certainly ponder as I wander over his words.
Oh I love that book Missie!
I'm looking for The Walk and all i see is Night Walk. Is The Walk a poem or collection?
It’s a poem in his book “God’s Silence” page 76 if you have the book.
Just bought it on kindle
Thanks!