White Rose in the June Light

Sugary white
in the June sunlight,
the rose is dancing
before the green mirror that
is the pond, the water
dappled grey and lime and
yellow.

I can tell you all this
and you might see it
the rose and the light
and the water's surface,
But how can I
possibly describe
the sweet
smell of this five-petaled flower?

Each morning,
I stop and carefully pull
a new white rose
up to my nose and I think
Why are
there no
words
for the miracles
that are scent?

Red Bird Alert, a poem

Peace went flying

from the house

when

that curious red bird

came crashing through the front window.

Last week.  I think it was last week,

I cannot be sure I only know

that nothing has been

quite right or quite horizontal

ever since.

Ever since that bird arrived

I’ve been lying

upside down,

trying to understand

why the door keeps trading places with the floor and

why the fireplace and the big grey vase

have rolled together.

All was clear sailing before.

And then, out of nowhere,

SPLAT!!

Glass shattered instantly.  Clear shards tinkled like wind chimes

and clattered together in a heap on the rug.

I was asleep when it happened

but instantly I snapped awake

and fled from my bed, barefoot, in my nightgown, downstairs, drawn by

that unexpected explosion.

I still see the bird lying there dazed on the living room floor.

I was terribly upset

for I have heard that birds sometimes

visit in mysterious ways and that sometimes they bode

illness or

fevers

or unnamed evil things.

I lifted the bird gently into my hand.  It weighed less than one breath,

the one

that I am still holding right now

while the heart of

the bird

or me,

or somebody

drums

and drums

and drums

“something is

coming

something is

coming

coming.”

The noise it comes from

some

not

so

distant

place

that is not nearly

far enough

away. 

I touched the soft head

of the bird

trembling in my palm.

Calmly,

I stroked its crimson feathers.

They felt like stiff red velvet.

One wing lifted.  Fluttered.

It was the color of dried blood.

As frightened as I was, I wanted to keep that bird,

Stubbornly I thought it might help

deflect some injury

that was yet to

be determined.

I carried the bird through the house

wondering:

how do we ever

avoid

a real disaster that is coming

our way faster than we can run?

People say no, you can’t.

People say, you ought not 

to mess with fate.

Nor should you ever hold birds.

People say, they, the birds, bring exotic germs and

illness.  But these are comments from

small-minded people who inhabit territories of fear, and

worry about rearguard actions.

I carried the bird to the door and placed it carefully

outside on the doormat that reads “Welcome” in rubber letters.

It was a warm bright morning.  I got dressed, I made coffee. 

I went to see if the bird was still there.  I bet he was and

He was. 

I watched while the bird stayed through breakfast,

Shifting.  Poking.  Pecking at things.

I ate half a buttered English muffin.  I cut a tiny piece and fed it

to my new friend.

By the time I had my car keys in hand, jangling,

and I was heading out to work,

the bird was gone.

I never heard it leave or saw

another thing.

But that night,

as I finally got to sweeping up the glass,

I noticed, next to one shard,

there was the black eye of the red bird

lying, staring back at me.

Suddenly, I could see myself

shattered, trapped inside the black eye of the red bird

lying, rolling around, staring back at me.

Next time...

By Camincha

It has been a long time

since she's seen a teenager eating like that:

hunched over. He ate slowly, calmly,

as if the whole world were at peace,

seen through his eyes. His movements were

precise, deliberate. Every bite he put

into his mouth he masticated carefully.

He took the teakettle and poured himself

a cup, watching the liquid fill the space

as if there was nothing more important in

the universe at that moment. It took

his complete attention. He took some sips,

they met with his approval. He sipped slowly.

Replenished the cup as needed. Savored it.

She hasn’t seen anyone so self absorbed

in a long, long time. She's forgotten that

tea is to be savored, a mudpie to be

relished slowly, reverently and calmly.

Tea and mudpie, she’ll try to remember to

savor them, to masticate them with precise

deliberate movements. Next time she will try

not to rush through the day: getting to work,

organizing files, pleasing boyfriend, checking

e-mail, getting groceries, paying bills.

Next time she'll

savor her tea, slowly, reverently, and calmly

eat her mudpie.

Next time…she'll try to be self-

absorbed.

Next time…

Camincha is a pen name for a prolific California-based writer.

Come on, Just Write It Already!!

I am sitting here at the meditation table, staring into the never ending burning candle, and wondering why can't I just write it?

The ending to this Sister Mysteries story, that is.

Why am I procrastinating? Why can't I just write the scene where Sister Renata goes down the hill and faces her accusers? She is armed with proof -- the journal pages -- that she didn't kill Antonie. The journal will prove she should go free.

Are you kidding? You're procrastinating for good reason -- her proof is as solid as burning candle wax. And as soon as she gets there (to the court, a few steps from the gallows) she's going to get thrown back in jail. And maybe get hung from a rope. 

True. But I've always known that the nun would go free, so it's time to discover how exactly that happens. (The candle just went out but I dumped the liquid wax out and relit the wick.)

The ending is tricky because something out of this world (as in magic realism) is going to happen and I'm not sure exactly what that magic is. I know one thing, it has something to do with the Virgin Mary.

I'm on the verge of writing it, but these things (chapters, scenes, novels, books, stories) can't be forced. For me, the best scenes emerge out of visions, vivid images in my head. In my first novel, Dreaming Maples, I didn't write any scene until I had seen it first in my mind! It was as if I had a movie going in my mind and all I had to do was write down what was happening.

A lot of this book emerged the same way.

So maybe the key here is simple: just sit at your meditation table and see if you're able to see something. And if you aren't, so be it, just sit outside and stare at the daffodils and get your work done and enjoy your day and sooner or later something will happen. And hopefully, Renata will go free.

It's About Time We All Helped to Free the Friedmans!!

Jesse Friedman, who served 13 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit, is now awaiting a decision that could overturn the conviction. Please take a few minutes to acquaint yourself with this story and please consider visiting the website, Justice for Jesse, where you can sign a petition supporting Jesse's case. A video explaining the case is available on the Huffington Post. 

My friend Elaine Friedman is a petite, sweet-tempered woman with a blunt pixie haircut and a rolling Long Island accent that spills over into delightful squeals now and then.  She is soft spoken and kind-hearted and she's suffered terrible heartache.

Her first husband, Arnold, and her son, Jesse, went to prison in 1988 after authorities found them guilty of molesting children in an after-school computer class held in the family basement. The "crime" -- which never went to trial -- was a huge sensation in Long Island in the 1980s. Some time later, director Andrew Jarecki made a documentary film called "Capturing the Friedmans" which brought the family's dysfunction to the big screen. The film was nominated for an Oscar in 2003.

One night in July of 2003, Elaine and I drove to a theater up in Williamstown, Massachusetts to see the movie together. Until that night, Elaine had not had the courage to see the movie in a theater. To say that the movie was disturbing doesn’t begin to describe the whipsaw of emotions I felt that evening as Elaine and I watched the tragic and horrifying details of her family's misfortune splayed before us.  The movie incorporates extensive video footage that Arnold shot of the family all through the years.

One of the main reasons that Jarecki made the film was to help Elaine's son Jesse. There was never a single bit of evidence to suggest that Jesse, who was a teenager at the time, molested anyone. He has maintained his innocence all along, and now Jarecki is leading the fight to have Jesse's verdict reversed.

A review of the case is underway by New York's Nassau County District Attorney, Kathleen Rice; as Jarecki points out in a piece on the Huffington Post, the current DA's review follows a 2010 ruling by the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals that evidence in the case was "extraordinarily suspect," and that there was "a reasonable likelihood Jesse Friedman was wrongfully convicted." The DA convened a committee to review the case and included on that panel Barry Scheck, director of the Innocence Project. 

Jarecki has provided the DA's office a ton of new evidence supporting Jesse's innocence. Indeed, he tracked down and interviewed numerous individuals who were supposedly molested by Jesse and his father in the computer class. Now grown men, they deny ever having been touched by either of the Friedmans. In one case, Jarecki notes, a successful doctor in his 30s told him: "As God is my witness and on my children's lives, I was never raped or sodomized, and I never saw a kid sodomized or molested. And if I said it, it was not because it happened, it was because someone else put those words in my mouth."

It now appears as though overzealous authorities  made it their duty to convince the boys to say that they had been molested.

Jesse is out of jail now, but he still lives with a fiercely negative stigma: under Megan's Law, he is classified as a Level III Violent Sexual Predator.

I've met Jesse and he is soft spoken and kind, much like his Mom. I hope you will visit Justice for Jesse, and sign the petition that could finally set him -- and his mother -- free.

Cain and Abel and the Boston Brothers

As I contemplated the events of the week this morning, I found my mind going to strange places.

First of all I kept seeing the face of the younger brother lying in some hospital bed in Boston. He has the face of "an angel," according to so many accounts by former friends and acquaintances, school chums and some of his family members. Or it's the face of a demonic fiend, a ruthless criminal, according to authorities and so many news reports and quotes from the deeply traumatized people of Boston.

And yet, on this Sunday morning, I realize that I am not thinking of this young man with hatred. I keep going to that hospital bed and seeing what amounts to a lost soul, a person, yes, who committed one of the worst atrocities our nation has known, but at the same time, a person who may have been unduly influenced by an even bigger lost soul, his older brother.

Perhaps I am finding myself in this ambiguous place because those first grainy video photos of him shocked me because for a couple of moments the young man vaguely reminded me of my own 23-year old son. Both young men are dark, handsome, tall. That connection evaporated quickly and like so many millions of others this week, I hated the younger brother to his core. I wanted more than anything in the world -- and perhaps more than for any crime I've ever heard about -- that the two men would be caught quickly and brought to the full weight of justice. My own daughter and son-in-law were in lockdown all day Friday in their new home on Beacon Street, days after  witnessing the runners go past their front door.

But this morning I am finding it harder to hate Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. My mind oddly enough crawls toward the Torah, the Hebrew Bible, and thanks in part to John Steinbeck -- and his novel, East of Eden -- to the story of Cain and Abel. East of Eden, the title, is taken directly from the Bible. Indeed at one point Steinbeck suggested to his publisher that the book should be entitled Cain Sign.

Steinbeck wrote an accompanying book to East of Eden, called Journal of a Novel: East of Eden, which documents his thoughts as he wrote the novel.  Steinbeck's editor and long-time friend, Pat Covici, told Steinbeck that he wanted him to deliver the manuscript in a box, so Steinbeck went to great lengths to construct a mahogany box. On top of the box he engraved four Hebrew letters, which spell out the Hebrew word, "timshol," literally translated as "thou mayest," suggesting Steinbeck's core belief that human beings, endowed with free will after the fall from the Garden of Eden, are continually faced with moral responsibility in the form of choice between good and evil.

Indeed, as Terry R. Wright notes in his 2007 book Genesis of Fiction, the notion of choice "might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a [wo]man. For if 'Thou mayest' -- it is also true that 'Thou Mayest Not.'" 

What has all this got to do with the Boston bomber?

Everything. Unequivocally, the bombers chose wickedly evil. But that leaves us asking how should we should choose to respond (aside from the full weight of criminal prosecution.)  We leave it to police authorities and the courts to mete out his punishment, but how do we talk about him, how do we feel, what should we think?

I was drawn today to open the Torah, to reread Chapter Four, Verse Ten, the passage that lays out God's punishment of Cain for slaying his brother Abel.

"Then He [God] said, 'What have you done? Hark, your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground. Therefore, you shall be more cursed than the ground which opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand." God curses Cain to "become a ceaseless wanderer on earth."

Cain replies "My punishment is too great to bear! Since You have banished me this day from the soil, and I must avoid Your presence and become a restless wanderer on earth -- anyone who meets me may kill me!"

It is the Lord's reply to Cain that perhaps is most instructive: "The Lord said to him 'I promise, if anyone kills Cain, sevenfold vengeance shall be taken on him.' And the Lord put a mark on Cain, lest anyone who met him should kill him. Cain left the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden."

It is this notion that the world's first murderer, Cain, is marked, and in being marked, he is forever a lesson to us in the ultimate choice between good and evil. As one commentary notes, "his mark is not a curse, but a protective sign of God's enduring care.

Amidst our desire to punish him, and our curiosity about how this boy went so bad, there ought to be some thought that we should refrain from "killing" the bomber with each one of our thoughts. Rather the Bible's instruction would seem to be that we should just be reminded once again of what Steinbeck wrote in East of Eden, that "We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly re-spawn, while good, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is."

Instead of hating the bomber, it's better that we focus our "lovingkindness" (a Buddhist concept of loving all living beings) on the many suffering families, the myriad heroes who came to the aid of bombing victims on the scene, and the authorities who waged an extraordinary search to catch the bombers before they could wreak any more destruction. 

Rather than hating the bomber, it seems better to me that we should love the lesson about choice that he so painfully teaches.

Chapter 66: Sister Mysteries "Please Don't Let Me Hang"

When I open my eyes, Teresa is standing beside my bed in the convent. My mouth is as dry as the sheet that covers my straw mattress, the mattress that prickles the skin of my back.

Teresa is crying, her face as wet and pink as a ham. 

Sniffling, she turns away so that I won't see her cry but of course I know full well because she is using the bottom half of her white apron to wipe her eyes.

"Will you come with me today?" I whisper out of my cottony mouth. My heart drums inside my chest.

Teresa nods. "Of course." She sets the back of one hand against my cheek. Her own cheeks are glistening in tears.  "It's all his fault," she says, sniffling, wiping her eyes again with the apron. "If it weren't for Father Ruby, Mother Yolla would let you stay here she would protect you I just know sh..."

"Shhhhh," I lift my hand to stop her speaking.  I shake my head. "It's too late for that. It's too late." I push the covers back, I stand

I stand convicted of a crime I didn't commit, I will hang

if I return but return I

I don't stand instead

I sit on the bed for a moment thinking I have no choice but to go back today

I stand up, my stomach quaking. Señora told me to take the missing pages of my journal to the authorities so I will

"I will fix you anything you like for breakfast," Teresa says.  "I baked corn muffins but I'll make you..."

"Nothing, I couldn't possibly eat." I shudder. My eyes meet hers. "I am so..." I am about to say frightened but if I say the word, then it will just hang there in the air scaring me further. Instead I try to think what I want my last meal

"Fix me a cup of oatmeal please?"

She nods and leaves the room and I sit back down on the bed. Somehow I have to dress I have to
I must get in the wagon and go back to jail.

I slip the dress that Arthur bought me over my head. Soft calico little blue flowers red hearts soft cotton sleeves covering my elbows. Ever since I was arrested, I haven't been allowed to wear the habit I wore

just like Teresa wears today, the two of us once glued together

no more.

Soon I am in the kitchen where Teresa is stirring oatmeal on the wood stove. The corn muffins she baked earlier smell so pleasing that I lift one to my mouth and take a small bite.  Teresa begins lifting the oatmeal into a bowl. I sit down at the table and stare into oatmeal this is more than a cup, this is a whole bowl, I feel I may throw up

Teresa sets a cup of coffee in front of me. 

Arthur enters the kitchen, clutching the brim of his hat. "Good morning ma'am," he says, his dark eyes opened wide. "I was hoping I'd find you here in the kitchen."

I nod. "Yes," I say trying for a smile, but not succeeding.

Clearing his throat, Arthur drops his gaze to the floor. "You know that..." he starts, and stops and starts again, "that if you...I mean, if you have any inclination to....uh...go or leave without..." here he shrugs, nods. "God knows I would take you wherever you wanted to go, anywhere that..." His voice trails off.

"No," I say, emphatic. Again I try for a smile but nothing at all happens on my face. I push the bowl of oatmeal half-way across the table. "I must do what Mother Yolla says." And in that moment I realize that I am willing to go back to jail not because of what Mother Yolla has said -- that she cannot protect me --

[CHAPTER 63 lays it out bare]

but because of what Señora said when she woke up out of the coma last night

I KNOW SHE WOKE UP I KNOW SHE SPOKE TO ME I SWEAR SHE SQUEEZED MY HAND SHE WOKE UP

[READ IT FOR YOURSELF IN CHAPTER 64]

Arthur fingers his hat, the brim stained.  His eyes are pools. He says nothing, but stares at the floor again.

I turn to Teresa at the sink. "I think we should go right now, because I can't stand it another minute."  Poor Arthur just stands here, he would do anything to have me say that I would go somewhere anywhere with him I could never go I could never marry Arthur so how could I go anywhere but where

I have to go back and face it, the crime for which I'm not guilty

Teresa isn't sniffling but she when she speaks now her voice is raspy. "We must stop by the lawyer's office first, he should be there to escort you."

"I'm not sure that is necessary." I take another small bite of the corn muffin.

"Please Renata, you've got to listen to me on this." Teresa's expression is fierce.

I inhale. "It won't make any difference, he is so ineffectual I don't see..."

"PLEASE RENATA." Teresa steadies her gaze on me. "We've got to. We will need all the help we can get."

"And please if you would, let me take you in my wagon," Arthur says. "Please ma'am, I beg you just to let me do just this one thing."

I study his weathered face, his frown. This is a good face a good man one that I could never marry I am devoted to doing holy work no matter if the nun's life is over for me forever.

"Alright," I say, inhaling. "Alright. But let's just go." 

Teresa unties her apron. "I'm ready, I'll be outside."

I stand and go to my room and kneel beside my bed. I carefully lift the straw mattress and dig deep into the straw where the missing journal pages lie, just where I hid them, so many months ago so that I could protect Señora because she wasn't going to get any trial at all, being a Mexican woman who could speak hardly any English

[READ THE MISSING PAGES IN CHAPTER 65 WHICH TELLS HOW ANTONIE DIED HE WASN'T MURDERED

WELL MAYBE TECHNICALLY HE WAS BECAUSE HE WAS ALIVE WHEN WE DISCOVERED HIM IN THIS WARM POOL OF BLOOD]

I would say that

he wished himself dead.

Señora begged me when she woke from the coma last night she said

[IN CHAPTER 64 ]

Señora spoke in Spanish 

[and I cannot say it myself 

sp I had to go on the Internet and get one of those English to Spanish translations:]

Tome la revista páginas tomar ellos les muestran a las autoridades por favor, Renata que todos conocemos, se me que terminó Antonie, he mantenido la hoja hice el final cut y él venció en un charco de sangre en mi regazo,

["Take the journal pages take them show them to the authorities please Renata let them show the whole world so they know that it was me who finished Antonie, I held the blade I made the final cut and he expired in a pool of blood in my lap]

As we prepare to leave, I see Mother Yolla standing in the courtyard. She seems frozen, a dozen feet away. As Arthur helps me up into the wagon, she is as still

as a statue, she looks so tired, so sad, her face is pale, she looks so much older than she

just stands there watching, she doesn't wave we don't wave back not

able to protect me, Father Ruby forbid her from letting me hide in the convent.

Arthur snaps the reins the horse bolts forward and the three of us, me in between Arthur and Teresa bounce on the rutted path leading to the dusty road.

We are headed back to the jail, to the courthouse to deliver me, to deliver the missing pages of the journal to try to convince them
some
HOW? SOME WAY
HOW I AM NOT SURE HOW CAN WE POSSIBLY
WHAT CAN ANYONE SAY TO CONVINCE THEM
=======

that I

don't deserve to hang.