Since I last posted, I’ve been trying to recover from a nasty respiratory virus that has left me with “a touch of bronchitis”; meanwhile, my computer suffered a truly nasty malware attack and had to have Windows re-installed. This brings to mind a favorite William Blake quote: “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.” I haven’t been to a demonstration in over a week, and sometimes I feel like my thoughts are wading through a sort of cognitive glue roughly comparable to the gluey stuff obstructing my bronchial passages.

Here’s a poem for the occasion, very loosely inspired by the form of the four-line Chinese poems I’ve been reading in Red Pine’s translation Poems of the Masters:

TIME MAGAZINE UNVEILS ITS “PERSON OF THE YEAR”: THE PROTESTER

Fat plumes of methane gas erupt in the soggy Arctic.
U.S. leaves Iraq, civilian deaths dismissed as a “cost of doing business.”
It’s only a cold–I hunker in my room and cough convulsively.
For 50 years, the painter Agnes Martin wouldn’t read a newspaper.