Browse Topics

Sudan Journal

In Arabic it’s called a haboob. The three-day desert dust storm saturates the air with fine sand dust, filtering the sunlight. The Sudanese walk with their veils and turbans wrapped tightly around their faces, while scraps of last month’s uncollected garbage swirl around their feet. Scrawny stray dogs lean sharply into the wind.

Three Tales Of The Revolution

In 1913, my great-aunt Adela ran away with a boy intent on joining Pancho Villa’s revolutionary Army of the North. She was sixteen. The Revolution promised freedom from tyrants such as Díaz, Huerta, and her own father the rurales captain. Only her youngest brother did not disown her.

Odyssey Of Resistance

An Interview With Daniel Berrigan

Americans don’t generally think of the consequences of war. We have grown calloused souls, with the help of a duplicitous leadership, an inert Congress, a morally cloudy church, and the jingoistic media. Add to this our historically embedded racism and you have a poisonous brew indeed, hardening hearts against thought or concern for the slaughtered innocents of Iraq.

At War With Ourselves

The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty available now.

The Way Of Peace

Wherever we may live, each of us is aware that there is an ever-mounting confusion in the world. This loss of orientation, this degeneration of values, is not restricted to any particular class or nation. Wherever we live, at whatever level of society, we are aware of conflict and misery that seem to have no end.

Answering Phones In A War Zone

Bryant-Maddox makes war. It’s hidden under files of paper covered with legal jargon and beneath sappy 1970s love songs droning from ceiling speakers. It’s hidden under the respectability of secretaries and file clerks and men with ties who go to meetings.

The Fence Posts

Visiting my hometown of Daruvar, Croatia, in 1986, I was taken aback when a friend told me, “Go back to the States! We’ll have a war here. Serbs have lists of all the Croatian households. At night they will slit our throats.” I thought he was crazy. Now I think I was crazy not to see the warning signs.

Saturday Matinee

I don’t recall what film was showing that day. I like to remember it as a John Wayne epic, fairly spurting with cinematic testosterone. My platoon was too busy pelting uniformed enemy personnel and innocent bystanders alike with a merciless fusillade of navy beans. The cavernous Birmingham held more than a thousand kids, so there was plenty of chaos to camouflage our bean-shooter blitzkrieg. There’s nothing like the havoc wreaked by smooth-bore bean shooters in the free-fire zone of a dark, crowded, noisy theater.

The Vet

Facing Mike on my doorstep, dressed in my Lands’ End polo shirt and my all-cotton cargo shorts, I felt I was being visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past. Looking at this man, who must have been born in the late forties or early fifties, a man who grew up, as I did, on hula hoops and Twinkies and later the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and who now looked immeasurably old and broken, I knew we were feeling a similar pain just then. I knew he understood that we’d been through the same time and had come out differently.

Selected Poems