The mouse doesn’t really bother anyone. It doesn’t
go around holding up banks or shooting people
in the face or locking them up in dank jail cells
and sticking electric prods to their genitals. It doesn’t
build jet fighters and bomb our cities in the name
of peace in the middle of the night while we are sleeping.
It doesn’t plant toy mines to blow our children’s arms off.
All the mouse wants is to share with us some shelter,
food, even the warmth of its nervous body. Yet we plug up
the cupboards so it can’t eat, and we chase it around
the living room with a broom and remove all the chairs
till it has nowhere to hide; then we club it to death
as it squeals. Or we set up traps with something it likes
to lure it into strangulation and burst its eyes out
of its head. And against what? A few light scratchings
heard in the ceiling once in a while keeping us company
at night? Two or three crumbs of bread taken from
the kitchen floor? And after the mouse, there are the ants
to be poisoned, the bees to be gassed and burned.
Later, the dandelions to be choked by spraying. And after
that, after that, there must be something after that.
The Mouse and the Human
The latest from america
With Pennsylvania widely considered the most crucial of the seven 2024 swing states and America feeling stuck in a winter of discord haunted by the specter of political violence, I decided to report on the election from Punxsutawney.
Francis has revolutionized the College of Cardinals by passing over large archdioceses like Los Angeles, Venice and Milan in favor of picking men from the peripheries who reflect his pastoral orientation and concern for the poor.
The violence has claimed the lives of thousands of innocent victims, but it also “struck a profound blow to the common feeling of belonging to the Holy Land, to the consciousness of being part of a plan of Providence.”
On “Preach” this week, Father John Unni reflects on his homily from three years ago. “I like what that guy is saying, but I find it even more challenging,” he says. “I’m wrestling with these readings in a different way, a deeper way.”
According to Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th edition:
poem—a composition in verse;
verse—a line of metrical writing;
metrical—relating to, or composed in meter;
meter—systematically arranged and measured rhythm in verse;
poetry—metrical writing, verse.
The selection made by the editors of America may be creative writing of a thought, but is it poetry?