Saturday, July 29, 2017

UPON WRITING WITH YOUNG PEOPLE TODAY


WHAT I LEARN WHEN I WRITE WITH YOUNG PEOPLE

From your shared introductions, I learn Vulnerability.
On your list of Causes, I read Fairness, Equality and Freedom.
When you write, I hear Violence and Fear.
When you leave, I wonder about Gender, Ferocity and the Tribe.

Monday, January 09, 2017

ALONG THE ROAD POEMS...

Cemetery on Sam Hill in Worthington, Massachusetts
For many years, I have written "Along the Road..." poems.  They fit my belief of life being a journey and how we make our own paths by walking, traveling, moving along roads, unexpected or well-worn, throughout our earthly days. 

This past year I lost my way.  For many reasons the road disappeared.  I wandered, wondered and only now edge back to the page to find the words that ground me. 

Along the road in twenty-sixteen,
I somehow lost my way.
Lost my writing, lost my time,
lost my lovely wayward moments.

I wandered through snowy mountains,
 mud and soft Caribbean sands.
Snapped and trapped in the corporate gulag,
one cold Hell and back again.

Write that I lost my father,
thin like leather, gasping for breath
in the downstairs room on Trouble Street
 where breezes carried him birdsong
and the sent of early summer flowers.


In that dry year of twenty-something,
all the bad times re-exploded.
Tell how I lost my temper, flawed
goodwill and old illusions.

Say I still taste the sorrow, 
droning on harsh winter winds.
The soldier sheltering his trauma,
the girl on-guard, alert to fear.

One war ends in wounded peace,
where the grass is ever-greener, 
along the writing road, 
lost in dreams and should-have-beens, 
thick with gifts and demons.