Goodbye to All That

Some years passed, but I still did not lose that sense of wonder about New York. I began to cherish the loneliness of it, the sense that at any given time no one need know where I was or what I was doing. 

~Joan Didion

Quietness

Inside this new love, die. 

Your way begins on the other side. 

Become the sky. 

~Rumi

--

The drop that left its homeland,

the sea, and then returned? 

It found an oyster waiting

and grew into a pearl. 

~Rumi

Beauty's Nest

It hurts

the heart to see

something so vast and deep

can also be made of dirt. 

And if it can be

of the earth, the body

ponders, might

such a landscape

exist also within me?

~Robin Coste Lewis

The Wilde Woman of Aiken

You

cannot

prevent me. 

~Robin Coste Lewis

On the Road to Sri Bhuvaneshwari

Out of habit, the students pull out their American sympathy,

but then the driver says all the women sitting there

on the ground, dusty, with children in their laps, dangling

their ankles over the mountains, adorned--all--

wear enough gold, own enough 

buffalo to buy your whole house--cash. 

The night holds. Life is giving birth

in the middle of a warm dark road. 

~Robin Coste Lewis