Incomparable

Incomparable
Originally uploaded by vajra.

watching roses fade
as summer warms and wind blows
petals fog and clouds

Preparation

Preparation
Originally uploaded by vajra.

each passing second
takes one more life in Burma
monks walking
their bowls
empty

they are begging
look give and remember
don't turn away

Cat Friday

Si Se Puede

Pale Orchid

Pale Orchid
Originally uploaded by vajra.

pressed flower between the pages
of an old book
thin
papery
petals
you can read
trtought

Just Dive In

Just Dive In
Originally uploaded by vajra.

time has a rhythm
a beat incessant and
variable
like the surf
you just have to ride it

Ferocious

Ferocious
Originally uploaded by vajra.

some days the anger
simmers steadily until
one bubble breaks and
then

another

Patience

Ox-Eye Daisy
Originally uploaded by vajra.

we visited the graves
of fallen heroes today
in memoriam

the old soldiers are
falling as the newly dead
await remembrance

Balanced

raising arms above
my head I stand poised
precariously
on my toes steadfast
determined to balance
in the early light

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Vile Rethuglicans

On the Wings Of a Dove

On the Wings Of a Dove
Originally uploaded by vajra.

Summer winds hot
with ashes and desire's fire
the still pool beckons

Keith Olbermann Tells It To HRC

Dance Hall

fearing to breathe in
standing stilled before you
light falling on petals

Dance Hall
Originally uploaded by vajra.

Cat Friday

Sweet Nap
Originally uploaded by vajra.

Erasure

Erasure
Originally uploaded by vajra.

a trace lingers pale
rough blending into the paper
like memory

It's Just a Flesh Wound

Pop Art
Originally uploaded by vajra.

mass and balance
light against darken against
no motion except dance

What's Up, Tiger Lily?
Originally uploaded by vajra.

at the market tamed
a tiger in flower
waiting to devour
every last bit of
resistance

Shining Bay

I ain't got a lousy dime
but I've got the will
to walk to the top of the hill
most of the time

Got the Blues For My Baby
Originally uploaded by vajra.

Wow! Just Wow!

Gaily

Gaily
Originally uploaded by vajra.

oh, live to laugh
gaily and often
to smile
at the sight of
a simple spathe
or vibrant flower

Lioness

Lioness
Originally uploaded by vajra.

one breath and the cat turns
one eye slightly open to
notice the servant

Apricot Mousse

Apricot Mousse
Originally uploaded by vajra.

it's hot today
every cranny
baked cardboard
save
the blue space
beneath the trees

Cat Friday

Lazy Afternoon
Originally uploaded by vajra.

Newborn

Newborn
Originally uploaded by vajra.

petals surround
the new rosebud like a crown
ignoring the thorns

Delices

Delices
Originally uploaded by vajra.

tonight I saw
a young doe walking among
the headstones

just a single doe
delicate and poised
to run across the grass

He Was There as Edwards endorsed Obama

Great Lakes, Great Times, Great Scott: I Was There as Edwards endorsed Obama

We're Fired Up And Ready To Go!

MoveON

Verge

at the curb
cars roaring
ignoring
the stop sign
and the lively
rose

Busking
Originally uploaded by vajra.

Sun King

Sun King
Originally uploaded by vajra.

if I open my eyes
I see the sun warm and glowing
in your gold petals
when I look up the
sky duplicate beauty of
golds contact with blue

Listening To Poems

I listened to Judy Dench
read from Tennyson
tonight the words
round and
full of vowels
knocked against my heart
saying

open

Mothers Day Roses, #3
Originally uploaded by vajra.

Politics

Faded
Originally uploaded by vajra.

suburban shoppers
refuse to register
angry or complaisant
it's too much work
to sign
your name
or vote

Little Poem

Guadalupe
Originally uploaded by vajra.

every today
roses and roses and more
hay fever heaven

Cat Friday

Danny Boy: Lookin' Good
Originally uploaded by vajra.

Allowing Air To Pass Through

Screwdriver
Originally uploaded by vajra.

I moved books
today
dusting shelves arranging
volumes by color
choosing white cream beige
gray black

one shelf for pottery
another for old records
clean neutral restful
letting the room
breathe
again

Sunsets

Gina's Garden Series, #3
Originally uploaded by vajra.

each perfect evening
dipped in orange or pink
bruised blue tangerine

Piling On

Rose For Jana

Rose For Jana
Originally uploaded by vajra.

summer's roses like
clouds of dark celestial
petal's fainting with
joy or fragrant satisfaction

Yes We Can!

Yes We Can!
Originally uploaded by vajra.

Breathing Space

One Pink Rose
Originally uploaded by vajra.

accepting
the magazine on your desk
will not be read

or the one beside the chair
or the stack
neatly in chronological order

on the ledge
unread
but weight bearing

like unconfessed sin
suddenly spoken
and shrived

placed in the basket
with brief remorse
and empty shelves

Apricot Parfait

Apricot Parfait
Originally uploaded by vajra.

carefully cleaning
my desk so I have breathing
space and time for it

Yellow Mandala

Yellow Mandala
Originally uploaded by vajra.

only a nap will
do though it's a beautiful
Sunday outside somewhere

Windoze or Mac?

Aletheia

The All-White Elephant in the Room

By FRANK RICH

BORED by those endless replays of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright? If so, go directly to YouTube, search for “John Hagee Roman Church Hitler,” and be recharged by a fresh jolt of clerical jive.

What you’ll find is a white televangelist, the Rev. John Hagee, lecturing in front of an enormous diorama. Wielding a pointer, he pokes at the image of a woman with Pamela Anderson-sized breasts, her hand raising a golden chalice. The woman is “the Great Whore,” Mr. Hagee explains, and she is drinking “the blood of the Jewish people.” That’s because the Great Whore represents “the Roman Church,” which, in his view, has thirsted for Jewish blood throughout history, from the Crusades to the Holocaust.

Mr. Hagee is not a fringe kook but the pastor of a Texas megachurch. On Feb. 27, he stood with John McCain and endorsed him over the religious conservatives’ favorite, Mike Huckabee, who was then still in the race.

Are we really to believe that neither Mr. McCain nor his camp knew anything then about Mr. Hagee’s views? This particular YouTube video — far from the only one — was posted on Jan. 1, nearly two months before the Hagee-McCain press conference. Mr. Hagee appears on multiple religious networks, including twice daily on the largest, Trinity Broadcasting, which reaches 75 million homes. Any 12-year-old with a laptop could have vetted this preacher in 30 seconds, tops.

Since then, Mr. McCain has been shocked to learn that his clerical ally has made many other outrageous statements. Mr. Hagee, it’s true, did not blame the American government for concocting AIDS. But he did say that God created Hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans for its sins, particularly a scheduled “homosexual parade there on the Monday that Katrina came.”

Mr. Hagee didn’t make that claim in obscure circumstances, either. He broadcast it on one of America’s most widely heard radio programs, “Fresh Air” on NPR, back in September 2006. He reaffirmed it in a radio interview less than two weeks ago. Only after a reporter asked Mr. McCain about this Katrina homily on April 24 did the candidate brand it as “nonsense” and the preacher retract it.

Mr. McCain says he does not endorse any of Mr. Hagee’s calumnies, any more than Barack Obama endorses Mr. Wright’s. But those who try to give Mr. McCain a pass for his embrace of a problematic preacher have a thin case. It boils down to this: Mr. McCain was not a parishioner for 20 years at Mr. Hagee’s church.

That defense implies, incorrectly, that Mr. McCain was a passive recipient of this bigot’s endorsement. In fact, by his own account, Mr. McCain sought out Mr. Hagee, who is perhaps best known for trying to drum up a pre-emptive “holy war” with Iran. (This preacher’s rantings may tell us more about Mr. McCain’s policy views than Mr. Wright’s tell us about Mr. Obama’s.) Even after Mr. Hagee’s Catholic bashing bubbled up in the mainstream media, Mr. McCain still did not reject and denounce him, as Mr. Obama did an unsolicited endorser, Louis Farrakhan, at the urging of Tim Russert and Hillary Clinton. Mr. McCain instead told George Stephanopoulos two Sundays ago that while he condemns any “anti-anything” remarks by Mr. Hagee, he is still “glad to have his endorsement.”

I wonder if Mr. McCain would have given the same answer had Mr. Stephanopoulos confronted him with the graphic video of the pastor in full “Great Whore” glory. But Mr. McCain didn’t have to fear so rude a transgression. Mr. Hagee’s videos have never had the same circulation on television as Mr. Wright’s. A sonorous white preacher spouting venom just doesn’t have the telegenic zing of a theatrical black man.

Perhaps that’s why virtually no one has rebroadcast the highly relevant prototype for Mr. Wright’s fiery claim that 9/11 was America’s chickens “coming home to roost.” That would be the Sept. 13, 2001, televised exchange between Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who blamed the attacks on America’s abortionists, feminists, gays and A.C.L.U. lawyers. (Mr. Wright blamed the attacks on America’s foreign policy.) Had that video re-emerged in the frenzied cable-news rotation, Mr. McCain might have been asked to explain why he no longer calls these preachers “agents of intolerance” and chose to cozy up to Mr. Falwell by speaking at his Liberty University in 2006.

None of this is to say that two wacky white preachers make a Wright right. It is entirely fair for any voter to weigh Mr. Obama’s long relationship with his pastor in assessing his fitness for office. It is also fair to weigh Mr. Obama’s judgment in handling this personal and political crisis as it has repeatedly boiled over. But whatever that verdict, it is disingenuous to pretend that there isn’t a double standard operating here. If we’re to judge black candidates on their most controversial associates — and how quickly, sternly and completely they disown them — we must judge white politicians by the same yardstick.

When Rudy Giuliani, still a viable candidate, successfully courted Pat Robertson for an endorsement last year, few replayed Mr. Robertson’s greatest past insanities. Among them is his best-selling 1991 tome, “The New World Order,” which peddled some of the same old dark conspiracy theories about “European bankers” (who just happened to be named Warburg, Schiff and Rothschild) that Mr. Farrakhan has trafficked in. Nor was Mr. Giuliani ever seriously pressed to explain why his cronies on the payroll at Giuliani Partners included a priest barred from the ministry by his Long Island diocese in 2002 following allegations of sexual abuse. Much as Mr. Wright officiated at the Obamas’ wedding, so this priest officiated at (one of) Mr. Giuliani’s. Did you even hear about it?

There is not just a double standard for black and white politicians at play in too much of the news media and political establishment, but there is also a glaring double standard for our political parties. The Clintons and Mr. Obama are always held accountable for their racial stands, as they should be, but the elephant in the room of our politics is rarely acknowledged: In the 21st century, the so-called party of Lincoln does not have a single African-American among its collective 247 senators and representatives in Washington. Yes, there are appointees like Clarence Thomas and Condi Rice, but, as we learned during the Mark Foley scandal, even gay men may hold more G.O.P. positions of power than blacks.

A near half-century after the civil rights acts of the 1960s, this is quite an achievement. Yet the holier-than-thou politicians and pundits on the right passing shrill moral judgment over every Democratic racial skirmish are almost never asked to confront or even acknowledge the racial dysfunction in their own house. In our mainstream political culture, this de facto apartheid is simply accepted as an intractable given, unworthy of notice, and just too embarrassing to mention aloud in polite Beltway company. Those who dare are instantly accused of “political correctness” or “reverse racism.”

An all-white Congressional delegation doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the legacy of race cards that have been dealt since the birth of the Southern strategy in the Nixon era. No one knows this better than Mr. McCain, whose own adopted daughter of color was the subject of a vicious smear in his party’s South Carolina primary of 2000.

This year Mr. McCain has called for a respectful (i.e., non-race-baiting) campaign and has gone so far as to criticize (ineffectually) North Carolina’s Republican Party for running a Wright-demonizing ad in that state’s current primary. Mr. McCain has been posing (awkwardly) with black people in his tour of “forgotten” America. Speaking of Katrina in New Orleans, he promised that “never again” would a federal recovery effort be botched on so grand a scale.

This is all surely sincere, and a big improvement over Mitt Romney’s dreams of his father marching with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Up to a point. Here, too, there’s a double standard. Mr. McCain is graded on a curve because the G.O.P. bar is set so low. But at a time when the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll shows that President Bush is an even greater drag on his popularity than Mr. Wright is on Mr. Obama’s, Mr. McCain’s New Orleans visit is more about the self-interested politics of distancing himself from Mr. Bush than the recalibration of policy.

Mr. McCain took his party’s stingier line on Katrina aid and twice opposed an independent commission to investigate the failed government response. Asked on his tour what should happen to the Ninth Ward now, he called for “a conversation” about whether anyone should “rebuild it, tear it down, you know, whatever it is.” Whatever, whenever, never mind.

For all this primary season’s obsession with the single (and declining) demographic of white working-class men in Rust Belt states, America is changing rapidly across all racial, generational and ethnic lines. The Census Bureau announced last week that half the country’s population growth since 2000 is due to Hispanics, another group understandably alienated from the G.O.P.

Anyone who does the math knows that America is on track to become a white-minority nation in three to four decades. Yet if there’s any coherent message to be gleaned from the hypocrisy whipped up by Hurricane Jeremiah, it’s that this nation’s perennially promised candid conversation on race has yet to begin.

White On White

White On White
Originally uploaded by vajra.

few roses are truly
white most tinge yellow
or pink
some a hint of blue
still the sight of one
clear against dark green
is breathtaking

Sleeping On It

Sleeping On It
Originally uploaded by vajra.

I've noticed that
callas and roses grow well
together or
seem to although one
requires sun and the other
shade like any marriage

Cat Friday

Danny Boy Toonsis
Originally uploaded by vajra.

White Peacock

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It's All About the Light

Dream On, #2
Originally uploaded by vajra.

Is Spring the season
of perfection days and nights
fragrant with jasmine

roses so filled
with fragrance I'm drunk with joy
ecstatic light dancing