Dawn

“Don't waste the pretty”
― Greg Behrendt

“Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Rim

are there horizons
where there is no horizontal

where mountains fold space,
hold distance up?

embedded in a canyon
our heads tilt instinctively.

here earth meets sky,
we can reach it; the rim

does not shimmer and recede.

we lean into diagonal lives,
relieved of right angles

eyes, arms, hearts drawn
upward, vectored to ridgelines

keenly aware of the slant
of time, its shape and substance;

it is a wedge; it moves
along ray-stroked slopes;

we pass into it,
are passed over.”
― Laurelyn Whitt