Provoking Compassion: An Invitation

The poems selected for this publication are designed to make you think, feel and contemplate experiences from perspectives of those who cannot speak for themselves, yet who experiences and challenges have had a profound impact on their lives and by sharing will provoke you to draw upon their lives to challenge your life.

I have titled this collection of poetry Provoking Compassion, an invitation

"Compassion," for me, is more than the standard dictionary definitions of sympathy, empathy, concern, kindness, and other such words. Compassion, as I have come to know it, calls for understanding, a deep ability to so identify with another person that her or his experience is your experience. It entails being moved by passion, establishing a relationship, and carries a prompting to act.

By "provoking," I am inviting you in and drawing you out, soliciting you to become one with a poem and to wrestle with what it awakens in you. I want you to hear, see, touch, taste, smell, and then respond, reflect, and have reverence for the experience arising for you from the poem.

An "invitation" to what? To where-ever a poem takes you, with the hope that at least one of the poems provokes you to better understand an experience or something about yourself, to being moved to identify with another, to want to act, to rage against injustice, or to love.

I've organized the poems in this volume into eight themes:

Faith and Despair

Relationships

Dementia and Aging

Death

Abuse / Clerical Abuse

Homelessness

Poverty and Discrimination

Potpourri