v. anastasi
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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 rhododendron bush from the dining room table…
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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 the constellations that appear in each season.…
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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 Oliver’s poems without marking it with a…
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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 my constellation series (Aries has been quite…
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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 tweaked things to better incorporate both the…
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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 more fully experience the sight and soundscape…
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The beauty of Pisces rests in the tethering. Flipping back through all my drafts of this song, one phrase remained constant: “tether me to you.” The story of Pisces goes back to the mythology surrounding Typhon, the most awful monster the world had ever seen, with a hundred dragon heads with black tongues and eyes…
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Today, at the persistent urging of my AP students, I took them outside to the courtyard to debate which poem of our Poetry “March” Madness showdown should stand as the piece that best captures the complexity of the human condition. It came down to “Perhaps the World Ends Here” by Joy Harjo (which I shared…
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Amid the blurring pace of life racing towards the finish line of another school year, I came upon this unpublished The Guardian Photo of the Day poem I composed back in 2019. I agree with T. S. Eliot: “April is the cruellest month,” with weekly timed essays to grade in AP English, final speeches to…
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I started work on “Cassiopeia” back in late February, reading up on the mythology behind the constellation. Once again, we encounter a vain and boastful character whose ultimate demise reminds us of the danger of vanity and unchecked pride. But what stood out to me as even more important was the cost of her vanity.…
the deepening ground 