I am late pub­li­ciz­ing the fact that three of my poems, “Like This,” “Free Rad­i­cals” and “Empty Rhetoric” were pub­lished on Poets for Liv­ing Waters. Here is “Free Radicals:”

Row­boats on the pond:
ran­dom par­ti­cles
danc­ing to laws
they couldn’t name
even if the god
that doesn’t exist
descended this moment
and him­self com­manded
them to speak

—and our son, sleep­ing,
nes­tles fur­ther back
in his stroller, ani­mals,
no doubt, track­ing with him
through his dreams
the mud of the day
we’ve just lived;
and when he wakes
he’ll read the story
back to us,
the nar­ra­tive com­po­nents
bounc­ing off each other
like these ves­sels
would do on the water
if all at once their pilots slept

—which, if we’re hon­est about it,
is how we got here,
bumped and bonded,
released from our rage
into this hope, this boy,
this: his own life.

Sub­mis­sion guide­lines asked for, along with three poems and a bio, a state­ment if you wanted to make one. Here is mine, cor­rected for the spac­ing errors that appear on the site:

Tikkun olam, a con­cept that is cen­tral to Jew­ish spir­i­tu­al­ity, means, lit­er­ally, the fix­ing of the world, and it refers to a reli­gious duty Jews are sup­posed to con­sider our­selves oblig­ated to per­form. In one strand of Jew­ish mys­ti­cal tra­di­tion, tikkun olam means the task of gath­er­ing the frag­ments of the shat­tered divine, the pieces of him­self [sic] that the god of the Hebrew Bible gave up in cre­at­ing the world so that the world could live and grow, and then using them to recon­struct the orig­i­nal god­head. On a more mun­dane, though no less sig­nif­i­cant level, tikkun olam is rep­re­sented by such things as the strug­gle for social jus­tice. For me, writ­ing poetry is also a form of tikkun olam. As Sam Hamill has writ­ten, “The first duty of the writer is the rec­ti­fi­ca­tion of names,” and he quotes Kung-fu Tze [Con­fu­cius], “All wis­dom is rooted in learn­ing to call things by the right name.” Find­ing my way through lan­guage to a fin­ished poem is the act of find­ing that name, whether it is the name of the way things were, the way things are or the way things might be. Poetry’s response to dis­as­ters like the BP oil spill, it seems to me, needs to encom­pass all three of those possibilities.

The Poets for Liv­ing Waters mis­sion state­ment is also worth reading:

Poets for Liv­ing Waters is a poetry action in response to the BP Gulf oil dis­as­ter of April 20, 2010, one of the most pro­found man-made eco­log­i­cal cat­a­stro­phes in his­tory. For­mer US poet lau­re­ate Robert Pin­sky describes the pop­u­lar­ity of poetry after 9/11 as a turn away from the disaster’s over­whelm­ing enor­mity to a more man­age­able indi­vid­ual scale. As we con­front the mag­ni­tude of this recent tragedy, such a return may well aid us.

The first law of ecol­ogy states that every­thing is con­nected to every­thing else.  An appre­ci­a­tion of this sys­temic con­nec­tiv­ity sug­gests a wide range of poetry will offer a mean­ing­ful response to the cur­rent crisis, including work that harkens back to Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina and the ongo­ing regional effects.

This online peri­od­i­cal is the first in a planned series of actions.  Further actions will include a print anthol­ogy and a pub­lic read­ing in Wash­ing­ton DC.