Galen Garwood, The Journal Interview, Marrowstone Press

October. Northern Thailand. Rainy season. Slate-gray clouds, full of water, hang low over the earth. The river, thirty feet in front of my house, is nearing flood stage and the little damn the villagers cross to get to the rice paddies lies beneath the water. The usual roaring from the spill is now a vast and silent surging of water looking to hop over the banks. It wants to and will if the rains continue. I’d rather it not. I’ve been there. Flooding is beautiful but destructive. It is, of course, a cyclical dance, repeated over and over for millennia, but is this dance becoming more and more a Whirling Dervish of imbalance?

I pray for the many who’ve lost so much in recent weeks to Nature’s indiscriminate fury and her lamentations.

Just as the earth’s lamenting repeats itself, so too does the darkness of humankind. I ran across this remarkable poem by William Carlos Williams published in 1944, the year I was born.

In Chains

What blackguards and murderers

under cover of their offices

accuse the world of those villainies

which they themselves invent to

torture it—we have no choice

but to bend to their designs,

buck them or be trampled while

our thoughts gnaw, snap and bite

within us helplessly—unless we

learn from that to avoid

being as they are, how love