Frank Fairfield - "Short Life of Trouble"

James Salter, from "Cassada"

“…Soon after, there was the uneven ring of the field phone and the first scramble went off, two ships flowing down the runway, fleeing from a roar that washed over the field like a furnace thrown open, making the corrugated walls tremble.

Isbell stood watching as they crossed the trees together, the wheels coming up. An hour of absolution in the clean, holy morning. An hour and a half. How often he had relied upon it himself, a taste of the immaculate with unknown cities far below and in cold silence the first mist vanishing from the hills.”

- James Salter, Cassada

Wet Leg - "Pond Song"

Henri Cole - "Doves"

Gray and white, as if with age, or some preserving
of the past, as in Beowulf, our hoary ancestor,
hoary as in a bat or a willow, or the venerable
hoary dove that flew straight into my picture
window today and then lay dead on the front porch.
We buried it—in some distorted version of its normal self—
folded in a white cloth napkin in the backyard.
Still soft enough to be cut into like a cabbage, I thought,
I’m glad I’m not dead. Listen to them now,
higher up in the trees, biting and scratching,
with their unmistakable twitch of life. Don’t fear
nothing, their twittering voices cry. The true spirit
of living isn’t eating greedily, or reflection, or
even love, but dissidence, like an ax of stone.

Leilehua Lanzilotti - "Ko'u Inoa"

Real Estate - "Suburban Beverage"

Elizabeth Cotten - "Shake Sugaree"

The Waterboys - "December"

Rabbi Edward Feinstein, on The Book of Jonah

Jonah inverts God’s world. Death becomes life. Curse becomes blessing. The attributes of God—reverently celebrated in the Torah, and recited again and again on these holidays, Adonai, Adonai—El rachum v’hanun (God—compassionate, kind, forgiving), the attributes of God’s love—are derisively and sarcastically dismissed. They are rejected. He’d rather die than live in a world governed by a loving God.

God is astonished and asks him, “Are you so angry?” The Hebrew is more powerful. “Haheiteiv charah lach—Is your anger so dear to you?” Heiteiv comes from tov. Literally, the question is: Has anger become your goodness? Has hate displaced the good in you?…

The book ends with God’s frustration, God’s distress. It ends with God’s question. But it isn’t God’s question to Jonah anymore. It is God’s question to us. Why can’t you love?

The question isn’t asked out of rage, or disapproval. It is asked in tears, in divine tears of sadness—when God looks into the world and sees what we do to one another.