Thank you all for being here, for sharing your kindness with us in this room. I'm worried about the people who are standing up, however. Maybe we could make... There are some spaces up here if anyone would like to sit down. Thank you. On the rug? There's plenty of room on the rug. I just can't imagine wanting to stand up, though, right now. To be here with Paul Haller, to be on the way to Tassajara for the fourth... To see many friends in poetry from Tassajara, from Flight of the Mind in Oregon in the old days, from other wonderful poetry crossroads places is an enormous privilege, a pleasure, so much fun. What a nice way to gather. If anyone had told me 28 years ago when I went to... I teach for two weeks, I mean, two months at UC Berkeley that someday I could be reading poems here in the Zen Center.

[01:06]

I would have been astonished. It was a place already on my radar screen that I wanted to enter to meet. And so coming here and going to Tassajara over the past four years has been a great, great... treasure to me. I couldn't find a place to live in Berkeley those 28 years ago, but finally was lucky enough to discover one kind friend on Spruce Street who would rent me an extra room in her house, Dolores Levitt, and she has come tonight, and I welcome her for taking in a stranger so long ago and becoming a lifelong friend. I wrote a poem for Dolores after... my stay at her beautiful home, that had a last line, it was called Spruce Street, Berkeley, and it had a last line which also connects to Zen Center here. There is a place to stand where you can see so many lights, you forget you're one of them. And thank you all for bringing your lights here tonight and your own lives with poetry.

[02:14]

Being with, yes, Yes. Well, Paul has suggested that since this evening had the title Poetic Awakening, I do have a couple of things to say relating to that specifically, that at some point during this reading, I will ask Paul to carry on with whatever I've just read or said, and he will take his microphone and do a poetic awakening experience with you. So he has to be in a state of high alertness through the reading. And I guess so do you. I don't know what he's going to do with you, but that is where the poetic awakening part comes in, as well as the fact that every poem is a kind of awakening, or many awakenings, and reading a poem is an awakening. Today, Dana Veldin and Paul and I had the pleasure of going over to McSweeney's, a place that's been on my... mental map with publishing and work with children and writing and having many images of what it would look like in the offices of McSweeney's and having them confirmed underscored everyone was so hard at work in such deep focus over there was a great pleasure of the day thank you again for coming tonight Paul Haller said last summer when words lines phrases keep popping up

[03:40]

during sitting, you don't take it personally. You let it be a gift from the universe. And I think that's what all of us who fell in love with poetry somewhere along the way feel about the lines that are given to us, whether they're just popping into our minds or coming to us from another poet or somebody putting them on the table at dinner and you open an envelope and there are lines of poems there. It's a gift from the universe and poems try to take us to that place very directly and intimately. I've had a long time relationship with convergences that happen in airports and on airplanes or in places of transit passage. When you're preparing to depart, you're getting on the BART train or you're sitting across from someone and you just overhear one line. And so I wanted to tell you from this morning on the plane at, I believe it was 5.30 a.m., And I was reading an interview in our newspaper with our previous president, who now has a book coming out, which I had not known that he had a book coming out.

[04:52]

And there was an interview with him, and it said that his greatest regret was not finding weapons of mass destruction. And as I was pondering that... Across the aisle from me, a mother who had three young daughters under the age of six with her, two sitting with her, and one in the row ahead of her, who had immediately begun interviewing her seatmate, a charming girl. The mother started speaking through the crack loudly. Stop talking to him. Stop talking to him. Nobody wants you to talk to them. And when it's 5.30 in the morning and you hear a refreshing little voice saying interesting things and you've just read a line that you cannot, for the life of you, for all your many years on the planet, understand, you want to hear that small voice interviewing a new friend.

[05:55]

So to hear a child be told, nobody wants you to talk to them. I just started thinking, well, poems often give us something to talk to or they often talk to us. in times when we've been told something like that, or a few things like that. And Paul and I were supposed to actually meet in Ireland a few months ago, or a month ago. He was doing his work there, and I was supposed to be visiting a literature festival in Galway, but then there was the volcano. So we couldn't go. or I couldn't go at all, but Paul ended up going late to his events. And he had told me if I tried to meet him, I had to look for the intersection of Derry Fubble and Drum Ghoul roads. And that was good enough for me. I felt I didn't even need to leave the country. I was happy. But going through some old notebooks, I ended up having what Paul called, when you have unexpected cancellations in your life, you can look at it as a secret garden.

[06:57]

Suddenly you have a secret garden at home where you can look through old papers, read things you've been waiting to read. So I was reading through a notebook, and I'd been working at a poetry festival in Albra in Suffolk, England, a couple of years ago, and I went to mail some things from the post office. So this is for you, Paul. And the sign over the window at the post office said, important notice, antisocial behavior will not be tolerated here. Neither we nor our customers are here to be verbally or physically abused. And it just struck me that many things had gone on in that post office that... Even with a poetic imagination, I could not begin to fathom. Those are the kinds of notes that I collect as a poet. All kinds of notes. And I wanted to read a poem by Leonard Nathan.

[07:59]

Many of you may have known Leonard's poems. He was the head of the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. I met him 28 years ago. And this is one of his poems called My Kind. This is for anyone here who's had any family complications or conflicts lately. That's why I brought this poem. My Kind. Memory is a tiny room lit by a wan lamp. The radio plays soft static, but no one minds. Father yawns. Mother yawns too, but hides it behind a hand. I knew already I was not their child. My kind never yawned. Alert. We waited for our time and wait still. I yawn thinking about it. And I do think that would be a good moment to say that one poem about your grandfather.

[09:08]

Would you? Is that one? So it's just so perfect. It is? Yes. We were doing three line family histories spoke in the voices of the person you were writing about at Tassajara two years ago. And this was one of Paul's. I end work at five. I have a beer at six. When would I have time to start a war? And that was for his grandfather. My grandfather was living in Northern Ireland during the Second World War, and there was a policeman posted outside his door, so I assume that was to stop him from starting a war. That's great. Hidden. If you place a fern under a stone, the next day it will be nearly invisible, as if the stone has swallowed it. If you tuck the name of a loved one under your tongue too long without speaking it, it becomes blood, sigh, the little sucked-in breath of air hiding everywhere behind your words.

[10:23]

No one sees the fuel that feeds you. Fuel. Even at this late date, sometimes I have to look up the word receive. I received a deep and interested gaze. A bean plant flourishes under the rain of sweet words. Tell what you think. I'm listening. The story ruffled its 20 leaves. Once my teacher set me on a high stool for laughing. She thought the eyes of my classmates would whittle me to size. But they said otherwise. We'd laugh too if we knew how. I pinned my gaze out the window on a ripe line of sky. That's where I was going. I think it was here.

[11:24]

I always pictured that ripe line of sky being in California. And the only time I've ever visited Japan, I was disturbed. to realize I had not carried a pencil in my baggage and always feel ill at ease without a pencil and a pencil sharpener, and suddenly found a two-inch pencil on the ground as I was walking along thinking that. Always bring a pencil. There will not be a test. It does not have to be a number two pencil. But there will be certain things, the quiet flush of waves, ripe scent of fish, smooth ripple of the wind's second name that prefer to be written about in pencil. It gives them more room to move around. Janine Lentine appeared at Tassahara the first year we did our poetry circle there.

[12:29]

had brought the beautiful book she had done with Stanley Kunitz of his poetry and his garden, one of the last books. And it was such a grace to meet her. So I thank you, Janine, for being a friend all these years since and the kind words you said about mystery and miracle as they keep happening. So this is called Johnny Carson in Baghdad. What if we had sent Johnny to Baghdad instead of all those other folks, all that hardened apparatus, all those dun-colored supplies? It would have cost less even if we paid him what he was worth. Maybe we could have sent a curtain with him so he could walk out everywhere, surprising people with his cheer. lifting his eyebrows when someone said something weird, handing Saddam a monkey or a tarantula at an appropriate moment, asking the right questions that would make things fall into focus, inspiring the vast Middle Eastern laugh so buried in these times.

[13:44]

Who do you trust? He might have put on that turban, too, or dressed as a woman now and then, and things would have gone better. If they got rough, he could invite the little bear to drink out of someone's coffee cup. And I promise no one would have harmed him or wanted to. He would never have broken down a door or been cruel to a prisoner. But when everyone was laughing, might have done some sleight of hand to move people. to a better place, make them look agreeable, more like one another, the way they truly are, instead of this stupid wreckage that lessens us on both sides of the sea. Don't you wish? Thanks to Janine for mentioning. my father, who loved Dolores as well and would have loved this place.

[14:50]

What kind of fool am I? He sang with abandon, combing his black, black hair. Each morning in the shower, first in Arabic, rivery ripples of song carrying him back to his first beloved land, then in English, where his repertoire was short. No kind at all we'd shout, throwing ourselves into the brisk arc of his cologne for a morning kiss. But he gave us freedom to be fools if we needed to, which we certainly would later, which we all do now and then, perhaps a father's greatest gift, that blessing. Red brocade. I recently went to a visit with a group of immigrants in New Hampshire.

[15:53]

It's surprising the places where you find vast immigrant communities gathering in the United States these days. Lincoln, Nebraska and Manchester, New Hampshire are two where I've met the most from the most countries. But they presented me with this little tiny piece and they said, is this brocade? We've been discussing it. I think it's a ribbon, but it looks like brocade. And I just love that they would have been talking about it. The Arabs used to say, when a stranger appears at your door, feed him for three days before asking who he is, where he's come from, where he's headed. That way, he'll have strength enough to answer. Or, by then, you'll be such good friends, you don't care. Let's go back to that. Rice, pine nuts. Here, take the red brocade pillow. My child will serve water to your horse. No, I was not busy when you came.

[16:57]

I was not preparing to be busy. That's the armor everyone put on to pretend they had a purpose in the world. I refuse to be claimed. Your plate is waiting. We will snip fresh mint into your tea. Oh, that's okay. Thank you, though. Can everyone hear all right? Is the sound all right? Thank you. One thing I appreciate here at Zen Center is I think there's always a way of people making, people make you feel welcomed and as if you've come home when you come in. I felt that the first time. Fresh. To move cleanly. Needing to be nowhere else. Wanting nothing from any store.

[17:59]

To lift something you already had. Set it down in a new place. Awakened eye seeing freshly. What does that do to the old blood moving through its channels? This January, I went to the Rabat American School in Morocco for a week and a half of working with students. And it's always interesting to just land and go to a campus where you know no one and... visit so many classes, meet so many students at once, be reading so many poems, responding to their poems. And in the fourth grade class, it was a big session all the fourth graders put together. There was a young man who volunteered first to read. His name was Omar. And his poem was something like this.

[19:02]

I noticed in the teacher's faces a big surprise that he had raised his hand and I called on him first and he jumped up. He had been there since September. This was January. I didn't know it was the first time he had ever raised his hand. And his poem, the school is taught in English, but most of the students also speak French and Arabic. Some speak Berber, too. His poem was something like this, a paraphrase. He had moved from Egypt to Rabat. Egypt, you are calling to me like a bright yellow flower. Across Algeria, across Libya. I can still feel your petals. I can smell your scent. Every day you call to me. But I have to suffer here in sad Morocco without you. Someday I will return to everything you gave me.

[20:03]

Egypt, keep calling. I am listening. I saw the teachers wiping their eyes and didn't realize this was the first time he had spoken and saw the students looking at him with amazement and many of them jumped up to read their poems and it was time to go out to lunch and I saw them flock around Omar and say... You don't have to sit in sorrow in Morocco. Morocco is not sadder than Egypt. We have white flowers out in that field. Have you even noticed them? We'll take you. Come on. We didn't know you were that homesick. We didn't know you were that lonely. And so I stayed behind to gather my things, and the teacher said... This is just amazing. Look, they welcomed him. This is the first time they've welcomed him. And I said, well, why? This seems like a friendly school to me. Why hadn't they welcomed him? She said they had never heard his voice. He wouldn't open his mouth. And so they said, maybe everything will change now.

[21:08]

And that was Tuesday. And by Friday, I could see people were standing in line who got to sit next to Omar at lunch at the outdoor picnic tables. And I think about the power of one little poem to change a boy's life in a classroom. And I think about the poems that changed our lives as children in classrooms, how many of us felt connected to a wider world because of something that we discovered on our own in the library, something a wise teacher handed us and only us or read to the whole classroom. Back when I was seven in Central School in St. Louis, falling in love with Emily Dickinson and wandering the halls saying, I'm nobody, who are you? Are you nobody too? Then there's, no, I never could have dreamed that it would take me till just about two months ago to go to Emily Dickinson's house in Amherst and stand there looking up at her windows and walk around the house and go to her grave, that called back line that's on her grave, and feel...

[22:14]

as if somehow, because of poetry, she had been my sister all my life, because I'd carried her words. I think that's a gift that can never be measured, what poetry gives all of us, if we're lucky enough to find a few poems that speak to us and carry them with us, carry them along. During a war, best wishes to you and yours. He closes the letter. For a moment, I can't fold it up again. Where does yours end? Dark eyes pleading. What could we have done differently? Your family, your community, circle of earth. We did not want. We tried to stop. We were not heard by dark eyes who are dying now. How easily they would have welcomed us in for coffee, serving it in a simple room with a radiant rug.

[23:23]

Your friends and mine. And this is for the street. I'm sure many of you read about Mutanabi Street, the street of bookshops. that was blown up sometime during the war years in Iraq. Books, and this is a quote from a news story, books and stationery, some still tied in charred bundles, littered the streets. A single sentence, which mesmerized one mind for hours, will not be seen again in that edition, will not be tucked into the bookshelf of the friend we will not meet. On the street, we will not know. What blows to pieces goes fast. They'll give it names. Successful mission. Progress. Insecurity.

[24:25]

What lingers long. Quiet hours reading. In which people were the best they hadn't been yet. Something was coming. Something exquisitely new. Something hopeful anyone might do. and the paper flicker of turning. Kim Stafford up in Oregon has said that one of the great gifts of being a reader in life is that you know how chapters go in books. And if you're in a really rough one, you just keep turning because you know the mood will have to change somewhere in this book. And that sense of the readership of our own lives is one that often stays with me. And so this is a recent poem, recent two poems, that connect with the ongoing hope that I've carried since early childhood that regions of conflict in the world could...

[25:35]

someday improve and find ways of cooperation. I think we try to do that in our schools, our cities, our places of daily work. We always hope our countries might follow that example. My father was very, very articulate when we were children, talking about how Jewish people and Arab people were not only cousins, but really brothers and sisters in the same families. And someday we had to learn to share the house, and the house had to welcome everybody. And I was personally disappointed that he died before he got to see a really better day there, but have been writing things relating to that issue or just issues of clarity. for all of our regions. Living in Texas, we hear a lot more about what's going on in Mexico than people living in Minnesota seem to hear. I was talking to some recently, and we're profoundly concerned about the relationships among citizens and communities in Mexico and our own state's relationship with Mexico and what's happening in the Gulf now, the community of fish and...

[26:50]

see life. You can just translate these things over to any place of catastrophe and conflict at any time, I guess. So just these two recent poems. I was going through papers, notebooks, and found a scrapbook of all the letters to editors my father had written in his first years as an immigrant to the United States. And this surprised me because I had no idea he had kept this scrapbook. And I couldn't believe he had never shared it with us since he always urged us to send letters to editors as children. And since he always worked for the newspapers wherever we lived, we had to send them to newspapers in cities where we did not live, which was somehow strange. Why would I, a child in St. Louis, be sending so many letters to the Kansas City Star all the time? Well, it was because I couldn't send them to the St. Louis newspaper anyway. to find his own scrapbook and to read these letters of a man now younger, at that time younger than our son is now, was haunting.

[27:57]

And then to find some other letters that he had taped into that scrapbook. And this was about one of them. Not knowing. On April 16, 1953, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote a letter... to my father, answering one of his own. No, she said, I do not think Arab refugees should be permitted to return to their homes in Israel. There are few homes to return to. His face, perfect burn of indignation. He would carry his home into the next millennium and never enter it again, though it remains intact till now. She numbered her answers. Two, I do not know if it is advisable to internationalize Jerusalem. She had worked for black youth, the unemployed. She helped to found the United Nations.

[29:00]

She stood up for Marian Anderson when they wouldn't let her sing. My dad, at 25, trying to support a wife and baby in a tired American city, dreamed his own place international so he might be included again. He wanted to sing. In 2010, the same questions dangle in air. Three, I do not know if there should be an Arab Palestine as an independent state side by side with Israel. very sincerely yours. She signed the letter with a shaky hand from her perch at Val Kill Cottage, Hyde Park, Dutchess County, New York. Such a nice address, unencumbered by numbers. Eleanor did not know. She was honest about not knowing. She would die at 78 from bone marrow tuberculosis.

[30:05]

He would die at 80, still frustrated, still writing letters. We live on, puzzles of power unraveling around us, building new walls, proclaiming, protesting. One phrase worth clinging to, side by side. My mother says, he wrote her often. This was not her only reply. And in the series of strange spring travel events, not going to Ireland because of Iceland ash and emergency landings in planes, and I was also managed to be trapped on Block Island, Rhode Island. Has anyone been there for any time? During that nor'easter, that came through, and there were all kinds of visionary things happening on Block Island. After our poetry workshop had finished, no restaurants were open for the season, so there were many stranded poets wandering around, seeing things happen like telephone poles be plucked out of the ground and burst into flame above our heads in 80-mile-per-hour winds.

[31:23]

It was scary out there, and there was no way to get off. So for three extra days and nights, We watched the weather, and on the day when finally passage was possible again, although somewhat iffy, we all waited down at the dock, very anxious to get on the first ferry that could take us away, and realized we had not spent many thoughts thinking about all the people who had been away trying to get home in that sort of selfish way of the human animal. We were full of our need at the Block Island Ferry. But they had to get off before we could get on. Friendly citizens poured down the ramp. Residents eager to return home after a great storm kept them separate from the place they love. Howling nights, extra days of waves till the ferry ran again.

[32:28]

And such a blessed fairy, big, double-decked, white fairy, cheered by both sides, those stranded on island too, who had mostly been thinking, let's face it, of ourselves. In streams of families and couples they came, disheveled, ruddy, grateful, in hats and winter jackets, fathers saying to daughters, what do you need for school? Shall we run by the house? Lugging mainland groceries, fishing poles, dress clothes. Some had attended a wedding, not imagining tripled nights away from home. Jokes about underwear. I'd run out from people hauling ice chests, suitcases on weary wheels, residents so ready for their own coffee cups, pillows, couches, books. Their dogs had traveled too, now sauntering onto island ground, sniffing briskly at people, posts, the chipper way a dog says home.

[33:37]

Inside that flush of joy, My father strangely came, a sudden surge of missing him, so sharp it caught me by the throat. Hounded by exile, worse than waves, he knew the grief of waiting, years and jobs, for a fairy's bright horn of arrival, a ramp to be thrown down. Who would think it? A simple ramp. the people crossing. At the Block Island Ferry, I wept for Palestine, Iraq, millions aching for passages home, rarely honored in their pain and their deaths before a ferry came. While all around people shouted, welcome back, it's about time. What did you do for all those days?

[34:40]

So journeys, ramps, ferries, and strandedness. Ferries, ramps, journeys, strandedness. And strandedness. Mm-hmm. So letting those words and images... rummage through the drawers of your memories, your imaginations. What do they conjure up? So here's what we'll do. You have three words, OK? How would you string them together? And then we'll just, at random, you can say what it is you wish to say. And we'll pass the microphones around so we can all hear. Stranded on a ferry ramp, I journey into strandedness.

[36:09]

Arriving as group. A ferry journeys and journeys and journeys until... The tooth fairy has landed. Sea legs to land legs. Sea legs to land legs. I'd like to take your father and all those stranded down the ramp. Very stranded on a ramp.

[37:17]

Then up. Very cross the mercy. Bush, right? Ridiculous. The ramp into the water, the boat. Cold, slow wind. Fire, wind, water. Effervescence. Winged migration.

[38:18]

Home at last on fairy wings. On the ramp. no weapons of mass destruction. The pause at the threshold is the journey. Let's swim. Boiler plate footsteps. on the ramp on the Staten Island Ferry, my stranded memory from the sixth grade. Ramp lowers to land, people yearn for the sea. Telephone poets bursting into flame, mitsu, mitsu.

[39:43]

Home found in the mind. Home's etched in the wall, but they can't leave the island. Ramps, but no rampage. Gedalia becomes Charlie, Bolansky becomes Blake. Lost on an island, I missed the ferry, stranded. Furnies are transitioned. Waves lapping the bottom of the ramp, watching, waiting, nothing yet. ferry from this shore to the other shore.

[41:03]

Can you imagine what a good time it is doing that poetry workshop with Paul? He always comes up with these amazing things. Thank you all. That was beautiful. It was very, very beautiful. chorus of voices. I feel held, feel buoyed, feel buoyed by your voices. It makes me think of something a man at a reception said this year after a poetry reading. He came up and said, I'm a biologist here on campus. I don't really go to many poetry readings, but as a poet, do you think there's anything wrong with saying poetry is simply fun? I said, no, there's nothing wrong, and you have demonstrated that so beautifully. a couple more pieces to come here and feel a sense of selection of this place to be for so many people here and devotion here made me think of this small poem but the book is entirely losing its binding today here it is

[42:23]

called His Life. I don't know what he thinks about. At night, the vault of his face closes up. He could be underground. He could be buried treasure. He could be a donkey trapped in the Bisbee mine, lowered in so long ago with pulleys and belts, kicking till its soft fur faded and eyes went blind. They made donkeys pull the little carts of ore from seam to seam. At night, when the last men stepped into the creaking lift, the donkeys cried. Some lived as long as 17 years down there. The miners still feel bad about it. They would have hauled them out to breathe real air in the evenings, but the chute was so deep and they'd never be able to force them in again. Companions.

[43:35]

She lived with words in a tall white house. Hundreds of books lined her shelves. They smelled like time. They smelled like rain. Fanning the pages, she smiled. I was ten when I found this friend. Cherry pie steaming on top of the stove. We sat till it was cool. She lit up like a lantern when I rang. Tell about your teachers, your work. Have you seen that dog that bit you under the eye? The plates were stacked beside the pie. Her husband had died before we were born, but she didn't live alone. She lived with words. And this is for a couple of friends here. I do think it's important to say that this poem, I never felt it was written by me.

[44:38]

I felt it was sent as a kind of ferry to help me during a very hard time. It was spoken into my mind. It was spoken to me in a way. And so I just scribbled it down with that little pencil that was all I had left. It was written in Columbia. And... called kindness. Before you know what kindness really is, you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness, how you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop The passengers eating maize will stare out the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road.

[45:48]

You must see how this could be you. He too was someone who journeyed through that night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. Before you know kindness, as the deepest thing inside. You must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore. Only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread. only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say, it is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere, like a shadow or a friend. I received a letter this past year by a man who said, I'm a grammarian, and there is a grammatical error in the poem, Kindness.

[46:56]

would you like to know what it is? And I wrote him back and I said, yes, but no. And also in my collection of favorite emails of the last few years, and I know many people here probably have the mixed blessing feeling about emails, this intimate, instant connection. But whoever would have thought we would have spent so much of our... adult lives deleting things. It seems like a weird enterprise. So much deletion all the time. The daily deletion period. But I like to collect some unusual ones, and there are so many. And one that came said, I've selected this poem of yours to write my essay on. And so this is the poem. Would you please... do your best work writing the essay. No, please do your best work.

[48:03]

It is half of my grade. This was a community college student. And I wrote back and I said, no, I have already done my part of the assignment. This is your half. You do it. But you do make a lot of friends you would not have had otherwise and feel grateful for all of them. So thank you all tonight for your generous listening and laughing, laughter. I do think I'll say, before I read this last piece, many of us here copying down what that child's mother was saying to her this morning and having copied down what children say for so many years, being a secret secretary for our son when he was two and three and four, Now copying down what the six and three-year-old little girls say around the block all the time. That can often be a very uplifting enterprise just to eavesdrop on children, write down what they say.

[49:10]

If you're having trouble sometimes with your own compositions or your own language or your own sense of the freshness of language, just a little bit of doing that, just babysit. A little bit of doing that will turn the tide or change the the wavelengths in the room. So I'll just say the first stanza of a piece that I wrote long ago, 20 years ago now. It started, the poem was called So There. And the first stanza is, Because I would not let one four-year-old son eat frosted mini-wheat cereal 15 minutes before supper. he wrote a giant note and held it up. Love has failed. Then he wrote the word love on another paper, stapled it 20 times, and said, I staple you out.

[50:21]

Gate A4. Wandering around the Albuquerque airport terminal, after learning my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement. If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A4 understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately. Well, one pauses these days. Gate A4 was my own gate. I went there. An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing. Help, said the flight agent. Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be late, and she did this. Actually, we all wanted to do that. I stooped. to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly. The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly used, she stopped crying.

[51:39]

She thought the flight had been canceled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the next day. I said, no, we're fine. You'll get there just late. Who is picking you up? Let's call him. We called her son. I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and ride next to her, southwest. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it. Then we called my dad, and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out, of course, they had 10 shared friends. Then I thought, just for the heck of it, Why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her? This all took up two hours. She was laughing a lot by then, telling about her life, patting my knee, answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamoul cookies, little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts from her bag and was offering them to all the women at the gate.

[52:50]

To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the lovely woman from Laredo. We were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling, there is no better cookie. And then the airline broke out free beverages from huge coolers, and two little girls ran around serving apple juice, and they were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend, by now we were holding hands, had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing with green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere. And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, this is the world I want to live in.

[53:53]

The shared world. Not a single person in that gate, once the crying of confusion stopped, seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too. This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost. Thank you. Thanks again. Thank you so much. What magic. Thank you so much, Naomi. Thank you for your poems. But even more, thank you for that effervescent spirit that you infuse and turn words into something that moves our hearts and lightens our minds and brings a smile to our face.

[55:07]

Thank you so much. And thank you so much for coming. Yes. And if you want to know more about Zen Center, just look at the walls and read the various pamphlets that are lying around. That is exactly what we do. We sit and look at the wall. It was kind of an in-joke. But there are a vast array of pamphlets informing. You want to say something, dude? Informing you of what goes on at Zen Center. And if you want to make a donation, somewhere back there in the dark, there's a basket with the word Donna on it, just to be obscure. But apart from all that, thank you very much for coming.

[56:09]

And please come again. Please keep that poetic muse rattling around and bursting forth in inappropriate moments. Thank you.

[56:20]

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