Author’s Note: “I live just across a cove from the Delaware City Refinery, so it’s often in my thoughts. It’s been bought and sold several times during its sixty-four years; and in 2009 it was shut down. A buyer was eventually found, and it reopened two years later. I kept thinking about those two years, ... [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “After a retinal tear took me dangerously close to blindness in my right eye, I was instructed to see an ophthalmologist twice a year to ensure the surgical repair that saved my sight ... [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “ ‘Stone Sijo’ is my attempt to highlight the materiality of language by using only monosyllabic words. I think of each word as a stone, and the poem itself as an edifice constructed of carefully-placed stones. Sound is foregrounded. The stanza form is that of a sijo, but I linked five of them... [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “Departures” explores the leave-taking that people often confront in their life journey, be it career-related, a redefining of one’s self or of a relationship, or a trading of the past and present for some hoped-for future. In this story, one man on the cusp of retirement has his notions of self, of happiness, and of what constitutes fulfillment shaken to the core. He finally experiences transcendence, once when he rediscovers compassion and again when he frees himself from the constraints that kept him focused on the ground beneath him instead of on the stars above... [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “This poem suggests that though beauty has its own power and is flush with pleasure, it is held in check and made to suffer by the superseding strength of a brutal and jealous god. ... [Continue Story]
Author’s note: “I’ve always been fascinated by forces of nature whether water, wind, or fire. Much of my work is centered around some aspect of nature. A sunrise or sunset enthralls me; the thought of an earth without wild animals is unconscionable. This essay arose from a desire to present various truths about fire, and that resulted in these ten short sections. The style is hybrid, for readability.”
“This was written before the West Coast fires, and though fire will always be a serious issue, I was looking at it from a distant perspective as a varied, though important, topic.”
The Fire Anthology
I TAKE IT THIS IS YOUR FIRST TRIP THROUGH A FIRE. It’s what some would call peppery... [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “This poem—a pantoum—has two sources: my first experience of love and marriage, and the remarkable Henry James novel The Portrait of a Lady, which gave me courage and language to speak ... [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “When my beloved husband was dying at age 59, I felt compelled to write…in the middle of the night…about living in the bardo of dying. (“As the Moon Has Breath,” published by Main Street Rag.) As years go by, new memories about our life together keep emerging. “Wow” was written as I pondered how calm we both were upon hearing his grave diagnosis. That calmness, looking back, was a tribute to the depth of our connection, and our shared spiritual practice that included facing, with fear, courage, tenderness and awe, the fragileness and impermanence of life. (Steven’s father died suddenly at age 57 two weeks before our son’s birth.) I write with immense gratitude to my dearest Steven, who announced at his 50th birthday party, it was his decade to practice dying and then began dancing like a phlonic bird with widespread wings.”
WOW
"NOTHING MUCH SURPRISES ME ANYMORE, except for the day my fanatically fit, nutritionally balanced husband was diagnosed with a Stage 4 brain tumor, but even then…"[Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “This poem grows out of my fascination with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, a couple of unparalleled greatness. Franklin, a paraplegic ... [Continue Story]
Author’s Note: “We live in a migratory center for several of nature’s long-distance flyers, most famously the monarch butterfly, the subject of an earlier poem of mine. In 2016, I read a newspaper article about the Godwit, a bird that travels almost non-stop to South America after hatching in Canada’s Hudson Bay and visiting our shores for food and rest. No one knows how it does this. As a retired brain surgeon, poet and forty-year Chesapeake sailor, I was naturally drawn to the Godwit as a poetic subject.”... [Continue Story]
