I just realized today that I never tell you about my poetry.  Perhaps because I’m planning to send it somewhere for publication, perhaps because I don’t think you’d be interested in poetry.  But if you’re interested in me, you probably want to know how I figure out what the problems are in the country I live in. 

So there’s a poem I wrote recently about an experience of long ago, when my kids were small about a guy who looked like my father but when he came up to my car he spoke in a heavily Arabic accent.  He asked my for help, that he’d lost his papers, and needed a ride out of the neighborhood before he got caught.  I brushed him off with an excuse, and was surprised that he let me go so easily.  I really was afraid he’d open the door and grab the wheel.  But I drove off and went to deliver a sandwich to the school for my son’s lunch.  But I kept thinking about him, and went home to see whether he was still around.  He was and there were police around him, searching him.  I kept thinking of my father and how he was arrested long ago, but I didn’t know what to do.  By the time I’d parked the car no one was there – no police cars, no man.  

I tried to put it all together in this poem – my helplessness, the reality of my fear, but also my sense of responsibility.  

I have written a great deal about being in situations that are very physically complex – the difficulty of acting morally in culturally complex situations.  I often go the other way – believe in people and it turns out well.  Less so lately.

These are really hard times to hang onto humanity.