Compassion crowns the soul with its truest victory.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 represented precisely such a hope - that America had learned from its past and acted to secure a better tomorrow.

Whereas the insufficiency of a love neither sustained nor supreme cannot be ignored, the same should not be taken as cause to avoid one's total spiritual contractual engagement to this world.

An outrageous instinct to love and be loved blinded your arms to lines of propriety––Women and Men, Christians and Jews, Muslims and Buddhists, white, black, red, brown. An outrageous instinct to love and be loved executed your brain every hour on the hour.

Poetry and art nourish the soul of the world with the flavor-filled substances of beauty, wisdom and truth.

Now come the whispers bearing bouquets of moonbeams and sunlight tremblings.

In an age when nations and individuals routinely exchange murder for murder, when the healing grace of authentic spirituality is usurped by the divisive politics of religious organizations, and when broken hearts bleed pain in darkness without the relief of compassion, the voice of an exceptional poet producing exceptional work is not something the world can afford to dismiss.