A poem is a cup of words open to the sky and wind in a bucket.

I grew up in St. Louis in a tiny house full of large music - Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson singing majestically on the stereo, my German-American mother fingering 'The Lost Chord' on the piano as golden light sank through trees, my Palestinian father trilling in Arabic in the shower each dawn.

why are we so monumentally slow?

Facts interest me less than the trailing smoke of stories.

My mother used to tell me when I went somewhere, "Please leave your foolishness at home." But how could I do that? It was stuck on me.

Poetry [is] more necessary than ever as a fire to light our tongues.

The hands are churches that worship the world.