SPOTLIGHT -
Adrift in Winter
"All anyone wants to know is when spring will get here..."
Dress Rehearsal
"...they’ve returned like songbirds, exhausted from flight but wild to swagger the songs they carry..."
Love in a Time of Climate Change
"...so close that your emissions of carbon are mine, so close your sea rises with my heat.”
"Tender Fences"
"...barriers that create space for healing placed close enough to hear everyone’s cries of longing and love..."
Kindness
"Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things..."
Michiko Dead
"He manages like somebody carrying a box that is too heavy, first with his arms underneath..."
Tender Fences
A Poem for Pulse
"...Love can't block a bullet, but neither can it be shot down..."
"Pareidolia"
"And with one slow blink my reality shifts..."
First Inoculation
".... I’m consigned to wait while the baby gets an injection..."
Pareidolia
"...But tonight I’m twenty years and two hundred leagues from the sea, her painting suddenly a family portrait—weather-beaten me in the middle with worried-window-eyes..."
One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII
"I love you as one loves certain obscure things, secretly, between the shadow and the soul..."
Listening To Terry Gross
"Back in the 70’s, before I knew my own voice, I listened to yours..."
November
"... when winds spread the word and brown fields bristle like dense fur down the back of the earth..."
Tonsure
"Forever you find your father in other faces..."
Listening to Terry Gross
"Before I knew my own voice, I listened to yours while we learned our trades..."
The Zoom Reading
"...They speak in poetry. Do they know I am there, listening?"
Sea-Fever
"I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky..."
A Barred Owl
"The warping night air having brought the boom, Of an owl's voice into her darkened room..."
Prompts for Doctors Who Write
"Write yourself scared the first day of med school, dying to cure the world..."
Prompts (for Doctors Who Write Poetry)
Being a poet isn't a 9 to 5 job.
Nursing Home Frontline
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori: It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.
Backyard Mercy
"A fruit fly fell in my fine crystal glass, half full of five-dollar wine..."
Daybreak in Alabama
"...Rising out of the ground like a swamp mist, and falling out of heaven like soft dew..."
War Stories
"I’ve told these war stories for decades, made them tales of friendship, savvy, good luck, and brotherhood’s strength..."
Beginning
"The moon drops one or two feathers into the field..."
Fraternity Paddle
A true war story is never about war...
First Grade
"Until then, every forest had wolves in it..."
Prayer/Oracion
"I want a god as my accomplice..."
A Pair of Unmatched Socks
"...couples become capable of 'cognitive feats' beyond that of a single individual."