Unexpected Intersections

This week Monday (June 20th) was World Refugee Day, an international day designated by the United Nations to honour refugees around the globe.  Our poem for that day in the poetry anthology that we read from every night after dinner was this poem by Brian Bilston .  The poem and his masterful use of poetic technique to powerful effect is best appreciated without excerpting, so I encourage you to check it out on his website. On our lunchtime walks, we pass a low wall near a cul-de-sac. For months now, someone has been clearing out things and giving them away, so we are used to walking past the wall and seeing books, DVDs, dishes and more with signs saying they are free to take home.  But today we saw something different. Today we saw a note, weighted in place with a rock. Here is a translation of the note (with names and places redacted for privacy, and some corrections to capture the actual meaning of the words): I came with children from the Ukraine. From the first of July we've

 It's been a busy couple of months, with several writing deadlines. Now, with deadlines met, I'm embracing the pause that follows the busyness of this spring.  When I think of pauses, my mind immediately goes to music. In musical notation, the symbols for pauses are called are rests. To me, rests are the punctuation of music - periods at the ends of phrases, breaks that allow us to process what we've just heard and to anticipate what might be coming next.  Pauses - rests - are full of potential. Like neurons, even at rest we are full of potential energy. Ideas hums and buzz beneath the surface. In the pauses, we can hear our own voice more clearly, and we can adjust our focus - zooming out or in on our life for a change of perspective. As I'm enjoying this pause, I'm also enjoying the new anthology edited by Tabatha Yeatts : Imperfect II poems about perspective: an anthology for middle schoolers . I'm honored that my poem "To the Pansy by the Front Door&qu