Ready to Make Friends with Poetry? ⟶
Monet’s Haystacks (or On Keeping at It) Monet painted haystacks one by one from 1890 to ’91, In all kinds of weather, Spring through Fall, Summer and winter he painted them all. Twenty-five haystacks—that’s a lot of paint But he simply kept going, this artistic saint. He prayed with his brushes and oils and such…
Complaints are afoot in certain close quarters That my poems don’t rhyme, they’re merely imposters. The grandchildren ask me, “Is that how you write one? I’m not really sure, Nana, your kind’s the right one.” “There’re no matching endings, really no reasoning. It’s like eating roast beef without any seasoning. Tasteless and boring, and lacking…
Dear Kind Readers, as you may know (and for those who are new here–welcome!) my second book of poetry, Mining the Bright Birds: Poems of Longing for Home found a publishing home earlier this year at a small press in Oregon. I wrote about the background of the book in June (three months have flown…
God with us in the broken place. E manu el, Yahweh whose hand steadies and steers us while we lift our face. Prayers rise. We cannot transform a heart but we can tend and feed the bodies housing hope, care for roses, prune and weed, wash and fold, clothe the people who inhabit our petitions….
I swerved around a swallowtail today, its goldblackblue mosaic translated across the glass and gone. Street’s curbed outline caught the corner of my eye as the colorburst startled me to noticing, awakened me to a sight just past the neighbors. A sudden glimpse of canines at their master’s feet—heads anon, ears aperk—then they rose and…
The Scarlet Cord There was no faithline or family promises passed on through prayer. Only a bloodline from Creation’s start, A scarlet thread bound and wound together, a cord the color of life made by a Weaver who dyed it red with blood. Woven with the loom of love, a lifeline coming my way~ over…
Susan Cowger confesses she was the ‘black sheep’ in the family, not quite fitting into the mold of family vocations–nurses, pharmacists, sensible people. Instead, her first language was art, a calling that led to a BA in Fine Art (1977) from Montana State University and subsequent MFA in Poetry with a secondary emphasis in Art…
When it comes to those things that bring me joy, I’m not sure whether I fancy birds or books more. Perhaps equally. I have books with ‘birds’ in the title melding those two—a love of reading and a fascination with my avian friends. There is much I learn from both—life lessons from the birds, echoing…
“What if there were no poetry? What if all life were prose? Some people wouldn’t mind. One friend told me her son didn’t know how to do imaginative play. He lined up his action figures and then shrugged and walked away. He didn’t know what else to do. Poetry gives you an idea of what…
Laurie Klein and I first met online after I’d been following her work in print for a number of years. We share a common decade and a love of poetry and song. I then discovered she was blogging and we’ve been corresponding ever since. Laurie is the author of the prize-winning chapbook ‘Bodies of Water,…