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The fragility of life surrounds us. It’s easy to numb ourselves to it or be inoculated by fleeting pleasures. But the reality of death remains. Does that mean I spend all my time living in despair, fearing the quiet feet of death? Of course not. Life is beautiful…
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On the eve of beginning my twenty-fifth year as a teacher, I am reminded of Billy Collins, looking back on a long career in the following poem. I haven’t taken the time to total all the students I’ve taught over the years, but I’m sure they would populate…
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We interrupt this pizza night to bring you a special guest: a Cooper’s Hawk. Admittedly, I’m not 100% sure that our visitor was a Cooper’s Hawk. My fellow writer and friend James and I spent part of our most recent Dunkin’ Drafting evening searching allaboutbirds.org trying to identify…
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Saturday afternoon, my youngest son and I were preparing to powerwash our porch furniture before dressing them in a fresh coat of Hunter Green paint. As I struggled to remove the nozzle from the hose, two moles popped out of the ground at the top of the stone…
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There’s something that draws me to hawks. And yet, this morning a hawk was drawn to our side porch! Admittedly, I know exactly why the hawk chose to hang out on the corner post overlooking my neighbor’s lawn: baby rabbits. We’d been watching their furtive movements around the…
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Six years after beginning my constellations project, it is finished. I completed “Orion” on April 4, 2018; I finished Aries on June 24, 2024. Now that the compilation is complete, I’ll be turning my attention to developing shows around each of the three EPs I have planned around…
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For Father’s Day, my daughter went hunting for hawks among the poetry of Mary Oliver. (She knows my affinity for those majestic birds of prey.) Instead, she found the wonder of the spoken word in the poem below. Somehow I read past this piece in my collection of…
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Father’s Day 2024 found me back in Wolf Creek after a wonderful meal with my family hosted by my son and daughter-in-law. What a wonderful slow day! The gift of summer. Although I went upstairs after my three-hour sojourn in the stream to write the final song of…
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In honor of all the graduates around the world, I present this piece originally written in 2019 as part of my series of The Guardian Photo of the Day poems. I was never completely content with what I initially wrote, so I went back to the conclusion and…
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I would have loved to share the thirty second clip I took of Wolf Creek panning from the dam in the image above down through the smaller dams my sons and I created, on to the waters that slow as they pass the tire swing so you could…
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the deepening ground 