Poetry

Elegy for Smoking

The Mercy

The ship that took my mother to Ellis Island
Eighty-three years ago was named "The Mercy."
She remembers trying to eat a banana
without first peeling it and seeing her first orange
in the hands of a young Scot, a seaman
who gave her a bite and wiped her mouth for her
with a red bandana and taught her the word,
"orange," saying it patiently over and over. Read more about The Mercy

August

When my eyes are weeds,
And my lips are petals, spinning
Down the wind that has beginning
Where the crumpled beeches start
In a fringe of salty reeds;
When my arms are elder-bushes,
And the rangy lilac pushes
Upward, upward through my heart; Read more about August

Written by Lady Mary Mortley Montagu in July, in an arbour
Methinks she goes to meet a lover. Read more about A Hymn to the Moon

Tolkien Gateway Read more about A Cautionary Verse

May 24, 1980 must have been Joseph Brodsky's birthday. Looks like he was born three years before I was. We are of a generation. He has endured what I doubtless could not, and yet I too live in gratitude. Read more about May 24

Kirsten Vanderscheuren was one of the admins of Casual Writers' Critique here in Madison. We met on Saturday afternoons. I knew her for less than two years, and only for a few Saturday afternoons. Being a devotee of Live from the Met in HD, I had to skip the last two of these, and looked forward to the April meeting when I was planning to read the last of the short story I had been working on here. Kirsten will never get to read it, and I will not be able to follow the adventures of her talking animals and their rebellion. A bout of pneumonia with lethal side effects took her from us. Read more about I Am From

I do not read the papers in the morning, but I do check the NYT and WaPo headline sites. I was looking for a poem for March and, looking out on the still-frozen barricades of snow, and feeling this March wind on my face like a fusillade of shattered crystal, I chose this poem of death read with "cold, sharp eyes." Read more about Every Morning

If there ever was a day to post this poem, this is the day. It is the coldest day of the 2019 Polar Vortex. Twenty-seven below zero this morning in Madison, Wisconsin, and that's without wind chill. Bemidji, where a little brother lives, is even colder.

The Cremation of Sam McGee Read more about The Cremation of Sam McGee

Lady On the Church Steps

I had seen her before in the spring and summer
The homeless lady sitting on the church steps
She would ask for help from people going into the church
She mostly was given spare change and occasionally a dollar or two
No matter how small the amount given, she would give a genuine smile and say thank you