Happy Monday! Happy March! I was going to post an extra Book Review Monday! today, but I keep hearing their names.

I hope you had a good weekend despite the fact our country has yet again bombed another country. I heard the news like most of you first thing Saturday morning. My emotions included sorrow, anger, disbelief, belief, despair. What to do with all that jumble of reaction? Thankfully, Carolina weather was gorgeous on Saturday so the best place for me was outside where there was plenty of space and sacredness for all those feelings to somewhat dissipate, and in their place, appeared the names.

This is the smaller section of a stump I wiggled out of the dirt on Saturday; some large roots were still attached and extending about three or four feet across the yard. They came out too. I filled a large old mulch bag with tiny shoots of my yard nemesis, the chinaberry, that were laying a rough-napped carpet. Even through my bibs, I felt the wet earth seep in as I knelt and pulled. How very much like the names.

My cousin’s son, Chris, stationed in Jordan. His mom heard from him Saturday and yesterday. He’s alive and in a bunker.

A writing friend, Ruth, living in Jerusalem with her hubby and two teenagers, goes back and forth to her bomb shelter, shelters with other families, taking her laptop with her each time she hears the sirens wail.

My poet friend from Israel, Michal, whose niece still lives over there, waking up with rubble and glass scattered across her bed from her apartment being hit. She’s now a Palestinian refugee.

My friend’s dancing instructor, Vladimer from Russia but he’s lived in the United States for years. Until recently when he went home to visit, expecting to return this month. Now he’s not sure when or if he’ll make it back. His hometown is about 100 miles from the Ukraine border where rockets, drones, and planes fly overhead constantly.

The woman I met last summer, Ameera, from Gaza, but she’s lived in the United States since she was much younger. Much of her family still lives over there and she visits regularly. I don’t know which home Ameera’s in right now.     

Bomb shelters. Bunkers. Rockets. Drones. Sirens. I can’t imagine living in that constant state of alertness; how taxing it must be on mind, body, and soul. What can we do?  For one, we gather.                                                                                                         

Yesterday afternoon was the official book release for Kakalak 2025, the poet and art anthology I’m privileged to co-edit. (This is our cake. It was as delicious as it was beautiful. Lancaster folks, you know Sylvia’s Cakes and Things.) Anne, the publisher, used the word community often as she talked about the poets and their guests in attendance, and the larger Kakalak family. For the last several years we’ve held the book release in Lancaster’s Cultural Arts Center, an ethereal event space created from a former Presbyterian church, built in 1862. Holding this celebration in this space honors that sense of community. As Julie, one of last year’s other co-editors, commented ‘reading in this space makes our words and poetry sacred.’ Two poems in particular, Joy’s Commercial Immigrants, and Michal’s poem in dialogue spoke of community beyond our comfortable ones.

Community. How close to the word neighbor. Who is my neighbor? Thinking about this past weekend and roots and the fact that, unless we’re a member of the Indigenous Peoples, we all have roots from somewhere else that extend across oceans. I think of how small the world becomes when we know people’s names. I will hold those names, and those whose names I don’t know, in prayer.

It feels good and right to be back here on Monday where I belong. I hope you have a great week. May you and your family–and neighbors–be safe. I’ll be back on Monday and I hope you’ll join me at my window. Unless something else happens, next week’s post will be lighter. Do you like pickles?

If there are any poets or artists out there, here is an invitation for Kakalak 2026 whose submission window just opened yesterday. Here’s where to get further information. We’d love to read and see your work!