Ready to Make Friends with Poetry? ⟶
When God insisted on Winter I think Jesus chimed in and invented ice skating rinks (or at least the ice–well, of course, the ice!) All that whirling and twirling jumping and spinning going on. Pratfalls and crashes and grown ups and children whizzing by and falling– re-upping their bodies umpty-million times. Fun and risk and…
Ripping paper tears, tape(d) to the back of yesterday, rends asunder the frame of today’s reality. Too bad the glue that held the lives in place, frame-wise, could not extend to the flesh and blood heart-wise. ~~~~ going through family photos and sorrowing over the lives of people torn apart by life. There but…
House finches flit, flit, flit and hummingbird whirrrrrs, hovering over birdseed an arm’s length away. Red finch jets elsewhere, bearing left at the bushes and the chickadee perches, eyeing the feast. Crows alight silently on the trees straight ahead, swooping at nothing as they loudly announce the morning. The waterfall sound of freeway cars and…
When you have walked through the valley of the shadow and death came anyway (not to you, for you did.not.die) and there is breath in you to greet the day. when you survive the shredding of your soul to its core and the disappearance of dreams, all other challenges– man made, God-breathed– like snow— can…
Write the world a story –one of your very own– with a beginning like no other. Paint a picture only you can paint with brushes dipped in days and nights of liquid life when it pools and puddles. Illustrate the middle and tell us how it is, with all the color, the light, the dark…
Friends and family leave words on screens and phone lines, dropping voices and laughter like golden pendants rippling across the surface of my morning. Bookends of baking–pies first and the turkey last– include potatoes, The Green Bean Casserole and sweet potatoes in between. Chimes outside echo on the warm wind of a rare November day,…
In late fall a few years ago I had the pleasure of hosting the diminuitive L.L. Barkat, a woman with a contagious laugh, a love of poetry and instigator of the Mischief Cafe (among other things.) The Mischief Cafe is sort of a traveling road show with tea, toast and poetry. Laura and I had…
Building a marriage is timber over time, the on purpose-ness of candles on the table on a run-of-the-mill Saturday night illuminating the daily gift that says, “I made something for you.” It’s a pile of firewood carried through the cold, banked against the night’s chill. Opera music, loud on the stereo while dinner cools and…
I wanted to write like Annie Dillard away alone aware– not here in the middle of this city/suburbs life. Leave the concrete and multiplying cars with their inhuman noises, seek a vista, a vale of color and light, to inspire and bring forth words like a flowing brook across quiet pebbles. But I’m here in…
My cough appears each hour with the annoying regularity of a political ad. Its persistence is wearing me down. The election is over, the advertisements are gone. No more enduring the monotony of a grating sound I do not want to hear. (did I tell you I have a cough?) I did my part–voted the…