After sixteen years, Angela Merkel’s time as German chancellor is coming to an end. She had decided to step down a year ago, and I wish her well. I hope she will now find the time to enjoy her private life with her husband. Whatever her reasons are for the end of her career, may it be forever her secret.
Tag: <span>poem</span>

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well

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

My grandmother puts her feet in the sink
of the bathroom at Sears
to wash them in the ritual washing for prayer,
wudu,
because she has to pray in the store or miss
the mandatory prayer time for Muslims
She does it with great poise, balancing
herself with one plump matronly arm
against the automated hot-air hand dryer,
after having removed her support knee-highs
and laid them aside, folded in thirds,
and given me her purse and her packages to hold
so she can accomplish this august ritual
and get back to the ritual of shopping for housewares

Reach me down my Tycho Brahe, I would know him when we meet,
When I share my later science, sitting humbly at his feet;
He may know the law of all things, yet be ignorant of how
We are working to completion, working on from then to now.

My most beautiful hiding places,
places that best fit my soul’s deepest colors,
are made of all that others forgot.

I never wanted an Alexa or a Siri, they come with our phones and with Amazon Fire TV, yet they have be shunned by us to live in silence, waiting forever to hear our voice allowing them to come to live, doomed to wait for whatever short-lived life they -and we- might have.

When summer’s end is nighing
And skies at evening cloud,
I muse on change and fortune
And all the feats I vowed
When I was young and proud.

Great people will always be mocked by those
Who feel smaller than them.
A lion does not flinch at laughter coming from a hyena.
A gorilla does not budge from a banana thrown at it by a monkey.
A nightingale does not stop singing its beautiful song
At the intrusion of an annoying woodpecker.
