Human Remains - March 11 2026

 

Human Remains

March 11 2026

I was offered an urn with her ashes.

Human remains

reduced to elemental carbon

a few shards of bone. 

And an ornamental vase

on my mantelpiece

as if I needed a mnemonic,

as if given time

my memory would fade.

Do I regret declining it?

Was it hubris 

to think I didn’t need a place

to centre my remembrance,

an object

to keep her from turning more dream-like

than real?

Or are we too sentimental

about human remains?

The body

that’s not us

but mere flesh and blood,

that’s not our essence

but just the vessel that contains it.

Not the soul, if you’re religious

or the spirit if you’re not.

And not the ghost in the machine

a materialist like me

must simply accept

sight unseen.

So no fancy urn.

No marble slab

with a brief epitaph

that could never capture who she was.

But I did accept the ashes 

in a plain paper bag,

surprised

how light it felt.

Ashes

which I scattered in a place

I knew would make her happy.

Where they may even do some good;

her final act

to feed the earth

and then return to it.

I know I can’t keep her in my head forever. 

Know that I will also pass,

after which

she will be gone for good;

so in the fullness of time

it will be as if neither of us

had ever existed.

But then, nothing lasts  . . .

posterity runs out  . . .

and ever-after is a fantasy

we console ourselves with. 

Just as the urn 

for as long as it might last

will be meaningless to whoever is left.

Will be emptied, sold, or junked.

Or simply moulder

in a dark attic

gathering dust,

a cardboard box

in a damp basement

turning to rust.

So no urn, 

perhaps, not even any ashes.

But still, the lake she loved

and lived her best years beside.

Where I can look out

and every day imagine her

as she was in life.

I actually started to write this with my old dog Skookum in mind. An admission I know will be scoffed at by those who disparage the quality of love that can exist between humans and animals. All I can say is perhaps they’ll be fortunate enough to one day experience it for themselves. Nevertheless, it took just one line to concede that this might not play well with some (most?) readers, so it almost immediately became human remains.

I don’t believe in God or an afterlife. Perhaps this is why I’m so baffled by the reverence we show to bodily remains:  the need to recover dead bodies (even at the risk of other lives!), the elaborate burials, people’s concerns with what happens to “them” after death. Because “you” are gone, and the body that remains is simply a shell:  mere flesh and blood; an animal carcass;  meat.   . . . As I warned, irreverent!

I actually declined the ashes. In retrospect, I sometimes find myself wondering if this was the wrong decision. That it was a callous act of moving on. But at the time, it seemed merely sentimental to bother with them, an empty gesture that trivialized my feelings and didn’t honour her life:  that the ashes (whether kept or scattered) were no substitute for keeping her in my head, her memory alive. Because without me consciously travelling into the past, she might as well never have existed. The ashes couldn’t take the place of my responsibility to her memory, because — since the two of us lived a largely hermetic life — no one else would remember: I’m the sole custodian of her life. I also realize that, like all of us, both of us will eventually be utterly forgotten; but in the meantime (and perhaps more solipsistically) forgetting her would vaporize a big part of my own life, even as I’m still living it. 

If I had scattered them, it would have been in our lake. But even without that, I still imagine her there, in her element (she was a Lab, after all!). Which is where I end the poem. 

No Looking Away - March 10 2026

 

No Looking Away

March 10 2026

In the final desperate days

with the enemy at the gates

they hung the cowards and traitors,

even though it was already too late

for treachery to count;

limp bodies

along a line of lampposts,

swaying in the wind

like festive bunting

suspended flags.

Or like gutted pigs

dangling from hooks,

emerging from the killing floor

in a warm abattoir. 

Even amidst the rubble

with no power for light

lampposts still stood, 

lining the streets

in all their elegant filigree

and reassuring order;

fond reminders

of the time before.

A row of gracefully curved arms

projecting sturdily out,

as if the city fathers

had foreseen the need for gallows

when planning their boulevards

and grand promenades.

Afterward

when no one talked about the war

and swore they’d never been Nazis

or even sympathized

the smell of rotting bodies

somehow persisted,

sickly sweet

cabbage-like

rotten egg;

indelible

as the stink of tobacco

that absorbs into plaster and paint,

suffusing the room

no matter how much you air it out.

Sense memory

does not permit

absolution or denial.

There’s no looking away from smell,

and it lodges in the mind

like that furtive parasite

that burrows into your brain

and eats its way deeper.

It seems the true believers

who fought to the end

and thought purity the highest ideal

never tired of death

even when millions had died.

Did not believe in sparing the enemy,

and took it on themselves

to decide who that was —

the neighbour they resented,

a man they’d secretly envied,

their lover’s spouse.

Adolescent bullies

who never grew up,

and small men 

strutting in their uniforms

with jack-booted swagger,

exacting revenge

for their own insecurity

and imagined slights.

In the recent New Yorker, in an article entitled “Lying Low - what everyday life was like in wartime Berlin”,  Elizabeth Kolbert reviews Ian Buruma’s book Stay Alive: Berlin 1939 - 1945. 

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/03/16/stay-alive-berlin-1939-1945-ian-buruma-book-review

The following paragraph painted a picture that really stuck with me, and I immediately felt compelled to write.

In early 1945, as the Soviets closed in on Berlin, prisoners of war were forced to dig tank traps in the city’s rubble-strewn streets. These were referred to—privately, at least— as Lachsperren, or “comic traps,” because it seemed that the only use they would serve was to give the Soviets a laugh. The hunt for defeatists continued, ever more gruesomely. S.S. men and military police went around searching for deserters and “cowards.” When they found someone they thought fit the bill, they hanged him from a lamppost. Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, a German journalist who was part of a resistance group called Uncle Emil, wrote in her diary about encountering one such corpse. Passersby tried not to look at the body, which was swaying in the wind. “There are so many lampposts in Berlin, thousands of them,” Andreas-Friedrich noted.

Germany has done an admirable job of remembrance. (Japan, not so much.) We forget at our peril, and in this poem the persistence of smell becomes a metaphor for memory.  Even when you deny or look away, it’s there; and eventually emerges in things like post-traumatic stress, abuse or self harm, a desperate deathbed repentance. 

I’m not sure how to understand things like historical guilt and collective guilt, and I see how they can come to be resented. But in my opinion, we are all implicated anyway. After all, would you have really been a hero, or — immersed in that milieu — had the moral clarity and courage to oppose? Rather, we tend to go along to get along; conformity becomes contagion, propaganda indoctrination. This is the problem when we distance, demonize, and dehumanize the Nazis (or just caricature them), rather than force ourselves to see in them our common humanity:  to admit that we probably wouldn’t have been better. Just as if you lived in the early 19th century, you would likely never have questioned slavery. (Even though, admittedly, some enlightened souls actually did.) You are product of your culture, not some universal and absolute morality you were born with.

At the risk of sounding shoehorned in, I had to include this line: and thought purity the highest ideal. Because purity — racial, ideological — is the great bugaboo that’s common to all extremist movements, both left and right. Sometimes literally: Hitler was not just a racist, he was also a notorious germaphobe.  

I have to admit, when I wrote Small men in uniforms / and bullies with impunity, I also thought of the poorly trained and badly selected ICE agents in the US who were hastily recruited to fulfil Trump’s deportation quotas. What you get when you give authority to middle school bullies who never grew up. 

Culled - March 8 2026

 

Culled

March 8 2026

You can feel it, as well as hear.

There are the smells it brings.

While near the coast, it tastes of salt

dead fish

decomposition. 

And in the high Atacama

it sucks you dry,

parching throats and cracking lips,

turning eyes to grit,

and desiccating skin

until it bleeds.

But you can’t see the wind.

Just trees, bending before it,

smoke swirling,

leaves skirling over the ground.

So if seeing is believing

then there would be no wind.

And if a thing can be invisible 

yet still material

then who knows what we’re missing.

Perhaps we do have souls

and they might even outlive us.

Perhaps there really are ghosts,

trapped

with unfinished business 

in the haunts where they once lived

struggling to be heard.

We are mere specks,

bottom-dwellers

in a great ocean of air

that moves in tides, rivers, and gyres,

sweeps down mountainsides,

and rises by the sun;

all of it invisible

and ruled by a physics

too complex to predict.

Except this time we were warned.

As if knowing could protect us;

as if we weren't at the mercy of wind

and nature didn’t rule.

So when I woke up that morning 

and saw a dead spruce had come crashing down

 — half buried in the snow

with shattered branches all around —

there was only resignation.

And a grudging gratitude, however reluctant

that the towering tree

had barely missed the house.

That night

a high pressure system had come barrelling in;

the kind of wind

where can you shout your lungs out

and not be heard,

furious gusts

that could strip a roof of shingles

and hold all your weight

leaning face first

up on your toes. 

A wind that scoured the earth

and culled the woods

of its dead, infirm, and infested.

Yet despite the cacophony 

I somehow slept. 

So some might say a cleansing wind

while others see only destruction;

the fence it crushed,

the fallen spruce,

the smaller trees it blasted through.

The propane tank

it barely missed by inches.

And the morning after

the piercing whine of chainsaws

and the clearing of brush.

Just When You Thought You Were in the Clear - March 7 2026

 

Just When You Thought You Were in the Clear

March 7 2026

Things happen suddenly.

Or slowly, then all at once.

And sometimes, they don't happen at all.

In fact, more often than not

it turns out that way.

Just think of the possibilities

of all these could-have-beens.

The contingencies you might have imagined

that never materialized,

the forks in the road not taken

that would have led who-knows-where.

And the succession of forks,

extending its tendrils

in an ever-expanding web

until even an alternate universe

couldn’t hold them all.

The real question is

do things just happen

or must someone make them?

Can you simply wait

or is agency everything?

Remembering

that even best laid plans

are bound to fail. 

And remembering

that there are unintended consequences 

to any act,

adding more forks

you never even came to.

Even if the act

is choosing not to;

because passivity, after all

is just as much a choice.

So either way

agency or happenstance

the universe doesn’t bend to your will,

and you aren’t the master of your destiny

you thought you were.

Things just happen, the good and the bad,

and you’ll sooner or later find yourself 

blindsided, sucker-punched, and gobsmacked

just when you thought

you were in the clear.

When all you can do

is to gather yourself

and doggedly persevere.

There’s a shit storm pelting down

and you’re only choice is forging ahead,

hands

over your head

and eyes on the ground

hoping nothing hits you.

Which, of course, it eventually will. 

I loved this piece, one of the New Yorker’s “Personal History”. columns. Baseball and dogs, two great loves of mine.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/roger-and-the-smooth-fox-terriers#rid=944a6aa6-aa26-48ff-891d-b1ef71c270c9&q=fox+terrier

The following paragraph, which appears near the end, really struck me, and it was the seed of this poem. What gave it that weight? It was the suddenness of things. The arbitrariness. The randomness of an indifferent universe. Or, as the vernacular has it, how “shit happens”, and there’s nothing you can do. And I fully realize that only a congenital pessimist like me could ever have written this poem. (Tasha is a beloved fox terrier who serendipitously came to the author after a succession of losses. I think it’s my love of dogs that made this hit me particularly hard.) 

Last November 16th, I posted a picture on Facebook of Tasha for her ninth birthday. On December 1st, without warning, she died of internal bleeding caused by an undiagnosed cancer. She’d been especially happy that day, because her dog friend Staar was back from Thanksgiving. She had leaped and played and raced around Riverside Park and eaten a big breakfast when we came back home. She was fine all day and ate a good dinner. In the middle of the night, though, I woke up and knew something was not right. By four in the morning, she had died at the animal hospital, despite their urgent efforts to save her.

Honeycake and Tea - Feb 27 2026

 

Honeycake and Tea

Feb 27 2026



I sat discreetly in the back,

looking at the backs of heads

skullcaps

and men in black felt hats.

Mumbled along

as they recited passages

in a foreign tongue

that would hurt my throat to say.

And hummed under my breath

as the faithful joined in hymns

that were a dissonant mix

of the tone-deaf

 — not blessed by God, but enthusiasts nevertheless —

and a few gifted singers

whose voices carried the rest.

I was unsure 

when to rise and sit,

feeling spotlit

as I followed the backs of their heads

bob up-and-down

a beat behind.

Men with bald spots

fringed in grey,

and women

with fashionably coiffed hair

that strained the bounds of modesty,

in and out of their seats

with the knowing ease

of people born to it.

The davening fascinated me,

pious old men 

with long beards

reciting quietly

as they rocked back and forth;

communing with God 

one-on-one

as the spirit moved them.

 

I felt presumptuous being there,

uninitiated

in the customs and rituals

they learned as boys and girls

without even knowing it,

imbibed with mother’s milk

like thick absorbent paper.

My tribe, my people;

but I didn’t feel of them.

Perhaps more like an anthropologist

crouching behind a hedge

taking notes,

a documentarian

behind his camera lens.

Or even a voyeur

bound to be outed

like some peeping tom.

Where we all not only want to belong

but need to

I felt apart; 

an intruder

from the secular world,

as out of place

as a curse word in a sermon.

I’m not a man of faith

a ritualist

a joiner.

But a coreligionist, nevertheless;

by birth, that is

if not conviction.

But belonging is powerful

and identity hard to escape,

especially 

since the powers that be

won’t let you.

So I rose and sat

mumbled and hummed

held the prayer book in my hand,

trying to make sense

of the boxy-looking letters 

that run from right to left

I remembered just enough of

to pick up here and there.

The service seemed endless,

and in the over-heated sanctuary

I could feel a trickle of sweat

beneath the new black suit

I’d only planned to use

at weddings and funerals.

Afterward, there was honeycake and tea

and sweet kosher wine,

the timeless refreshments

even I could remember

from my unobservant youth.

Where I shook hands with strangers, nodding politely.

Listened to small talk

about sports and politics

I could have heard anywhere, 

the same celebrity gossip

as if among friends.

And watched the kids

with loosened ties and modest skirts,

tearing around

like captive animals

released into the wild.

But still felt I didn’t belong,

unsure

if I’d ever be back.

 

I wrote this after reading Nicholas Lemann’s New Yorker piece about growing up a highly assimilated Jew in New Orleans in the 60s and 70s. I grew up a highly assimilated Jew in Toronto around the same time.  https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/a-childhood-in-jewish-new-orleans

He talks about the tension between the established (and mostly German) Jews who desperately wanted to keep their heads below the parapet and fit in, and the more recently arrived Eastern European Jews who were less well-off, less self-conscious about their cultural differences, and more unapologetically tribal in their urban ghettos. To the established community, America represented security while Zionism seemed at best unnecessary, and at worst an unpatriotic and attention-getting expression of tribalism. During WW 2, their belief in Western enlightenment even made these highly assimilated Jews slow to accept the truth about the Holocaust. 

Later in life, Lemann returned to his roots. One of my older brothers did as well. I, on the other hand, am a diehard atheist; one of that surprisingly large but very heterogeneous and loosely affiliated group known as “Jewish Atheists”:  yes, somehow that tribal qualifier still sticks with us. And I also know that if another Hitler appeared, the “Jewish” part of that label is the only part that would count. When I say in the poem since the powers that be/won’t let you, this is what I meant: as much as we think we can self-determine, our identity is often defined by society at large. There is no escaping it.  …Nevertheless, I still count on liberalism and the intellectual legacy of the Enlightenment to prevail over time.

When Lemann refers to the first baffled dip of his toe into a Jewish religious observance, I identified. This is how I felt attending my nephews’ Bar Mitzvahs:  there was a sense of alienness and arcane knowledge in the whole affair, which I uncomfortably drifted through feeling I didn’t at all belong in that milieu. Lemann eventually became part of it. I didn’t. 

And belonging is essentially what Lemann’s piece is about:  the established Jews desperate to be accepted, to feel they belonged in New Orleans high society; and the newcomers, who commit themselves to the belonging offered by the Jewish nationalism of Zionism. Ultimately, the need to belong is one of the most powerful forces in human nature. And considering the tribalism it gives rise too, it’s an oddly unifying concept: everyone not only wants, but needs to belong  … in some way, to something. 

I took a few liberties in describing the service. In my brother’s Orthodox synagogue, the women don’t sit with the men, they are relegated to an upper gallery. I imagine their hair would in fact be modestly covered, or that they’d be wearing wigs. And the men would cover their heads with skullcaps (I ended up adding this after all), obscuring those shiny bald spots. Also, I’m not sure if “hymn” is the appropriate word.* 

But when I began the poem, this depiction of the congregation and that word were fine: I was going to make it more universal, so readers of all religious backgrounds could identify. (And it fits my memory of the High Holidays and Bar Mitzvahs at the Reform synagogue of my youth (also, coincidentally, called Temple Sinai) — the only services I ever attended.) As I continued to write, though, I realized the poem would be far more effective if I made it unapologetically personal. 

*Here’s what my AI helper turned up:

Jewish prayer and song use specific Hebrew and Yiddish words like zemirot (table hymns sung during Shabbat meals), piyyutim (liturgical poems), or pesukei dezimra (psalms in morning services), rather than “hymn,” which is primarily associated with Christian worship.

So What's With The Late Ones? - Feb 27 2026

 

So What’s With The Late Ones?

Feb 27 2026

So what’s with the late ones?

Because if it’s the early bird who catches the worm

why aren’t they all?

Perhaps they prefer sleeping in

after late nights

raiding the feeder.

Perhaps there are dilatory worms

who are partial to dusk,

and in the end catch their share.

Or could insects and berries

be just as good?

As a nocturnal person

I resent the implication

of the virtuous early riser,

and as a poet

resent the cheap rhyme.

After all

bird goes just as well dirge, scourge, and spurned;

surely a clever poet

could come up with a more nuanced type

than this earnest avian

hard at work

in the dark before dawn.

 

In my version

the bird getting her beauty sleep

is the more interesting one.

She will wait for rain,

then gorge

on a buffet of worms

forced to the surface.

The sin of pride

and then of gluttony.

A Sunday morning bird

at the all-you-can-eat brunch,

hungover

from the night before.

While the early bird is at church,

installed

on the hard wooden seat

of her straight-backed pew.

And as the preacher drones on

in the soporific voice

of no-nonsense piety 

she shifts and squirms,

trying hard to think up sins

she can convincingly confess.

Another day in the mood to write, but nothing urgent to say.  Who knows why this dumb cliché crossed my mind as I cast around for a spark. But it did, and I thought it would be fun to noodle around with. Seemed especially suitable after having collapsed into an exhausted sleep the night before, only to end up being out for almost 12 hours! 

(Btw, there’s no need to be so early after all. Cursory research reveals that “earthworms are most likely to surface when it is dark, wet, and mild rather than dry, bright, or very cold.” So dusk is as good as dawn, and rain is well worth waiting for.)

Before the Thought Even Strikes - Feb 24 2026

 

Before the Thought Even Strikes

Feb 24 2026

I am staring at the wall

 — looking, but not really seeing —

waiting for an idea to come.

Which they do, try or not,

popping into your head out of the blue

light rogue lightning 

or fairy dust.

Something from nothing, just like that.

Which is how the universe began;

because such things just happen

don’t ask me how.

And don't ask from where.

All I know is some neuron sparks

a synapse fires

and a tiny part of my brain lights up

before the thought even strikes me.

It’s as if instead of mine

divine inspiration has struck,

or some muse has graced me with a great idea.

Which is hard to accept

if you’re not a believer

or an ancient Greek.

After the Big Bang

the universe expanded at the speed of light.

Not into anything, of course

because there was nowhere to go.

Which is something only physicists understand

and an average man like me

is baffled by.

I suppose things just got further apart,

change became possible,

and time started up

  — running down the clock

to nothingness once more.

On the other hand, I know where thoughts go;

onto the page

into print

and into someone else’s head.

A chain reaction

that generates — amidst all the heat and strife —

at least a little light.

And like the singularity

when nothingness tipped into something 

the creative genius 

takes credit for his gift.

As if it was original.

As if there was no mystery

to abstract thought.

As if the mind

didn’t have a mind of its own

physicists can’t solve

and even philosophers futilely mull.

Which is saying a lot

since philosophers don’t have to balance equations

or make observations

of inner space.

 

I’m still looking at the wall

with the unfocused gaze

of an open mind.

Still patiently waiting 

for something come.

There were some (admittedly controversial) neurophysiological experiments that showed electrical activity arising in a relevant part of the brain before any conscious awareness of the intention. (“Benjamin Libet’s readiness potential experiment (1983) tested the timing between unconscious brain activity and conscious intention to act, sparking debates on free will.” - Wikipedia) It’s as if the brain has a mind of its own.

But even if this is a misinterpretation of the evidence or bold inference, when it comes to the idea for a poem, an image to embellish it, or the perfect word to complete a line, I often have no idea where these thoughts come from. Instead of feeling like they’re mine, it feels like they’re simply given to me: than I’m a stenographer, taking dictation. No wonder the Greeks attributed this mental alchemy to the muses, or we talk about being divinely inspired. 

This poem really did start this way. I felt juiced up to write, but absolutely nothing came to me. So I just sat, eyes and mind unfocused but receptive:  and in trying to be creative, the mystery of creativity itself became my original idea. Or if not an original idea (since it hardly is!), then the analogy of the something/from/nothing Big Bang.