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.

Later our dreams begin catching fire around the edges, they burn like paper, we wake with our hands full of ash.

During the Gulf War, I remember two little third grade girls saying to me - after I read them some poems by writers in Iraq - 'You know, we never thought about there being children in Iraq before.' And I thought, 'Well those poems did their job, because now they'll think about everything a little bit differently.'

Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.

Poetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer, on its own.

why are we so monumentally slow?

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.