I often wonder which is my favorite But today I know It is now The cooler mornings The crisp nights The scent of overripe fruit the crackle of a fire the call from a V of geese flying toward a gibbous moon Yellow school busses yellow leaves yellowed stalks of… Read More
The sun wakes early yawns its way across the sky one lazy beam after another a basket of hours set on the porch lighting the first the floor now the window now the vase Hours to to plant to grow to water weed and mow Hours to watch buds turn… Read More
An eye opening An arm stretching Then a leg A shoulder We rise from sleep Hips sway Birds sing Frogs croak And there are fawns new and dew spotted Mamas watching as green emerges Gossamer buds Buttoned eyes opening to the warming sun And mud emerges and sap flows and… Read More
The scent of stillness The taste of cold The long pause between icy breaths Storms stalk the sky Heavy burdens buckled on its back Landscape disappears Hills, roads, fence lines, your home Above Trees sway Sway Shiver and sway an arboreal dance Limbs gracefully grasping Then letting go
by Naseem Rakha, Oregon Capital ChronicleJuly 26, 2022 Anyone who’s read George Orwell’s “1984,” the dystopian novel about life under an authoritarian regime, knows that to survive, one had to accept whatever Big Brother said no matter how big the lie. Proof you’d come to fully embrace the all-controlling Party… Read More
by Naseem Rakha, Oregon Capital ChronicleJuly 13, 2022 I woke up the morning of July 4th feeling cynical about “Independence Day” after the recent slew of Supreme Court decisions that essentially eviscerated long-standing constitutional rights and protections considered core to our democracy. With Dobbs v. Jackson, the Supreme Court’s newly… Read More
by Naseem Rakha, Oregon Capital ChronicleJune 30, 2022 The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe made it clear that the “wall of separation between church and state” that founding father Thomas Jefferson described as integral to the Constitution, has been breached. The majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson came from… Read More
I have begun to write commentaries for The Oregon Capital Chronicle, a member of The States Newsroom and one of 28 states providing in-depth and fearless coverage of state and national politics. In the past my commentaries could occasionally be found in The Guardian, The Washington Post, the Oregonian and… Read More
Never in the four years of the Trump administration did I imagine our sides engaging in a war. Rhetorical sparring, sure. But not physical combat.
And so, on this day, I fill that hollow space in my chest with heat from a thousand thousand thousand suns: