poems
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“That eye that told you so looked but asquint.” Goneril, from Shakespeare’s King Lear, Act 5, Scene 3 Studying Shakespeare provides a deep well of rich words on which to refresh one’s dehydrated vocabulary. There’s a reason we owe so much of our language to the Bard, and why the best insults come from the
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Rudyard Kipling’s If has been one of those poems (a deepening ground) I regularly return to, especially in difficult times. As a father of six, I would hope my children could aspire to the quality of life that Kipling captures in this 32-line poem of conditional statements. This is anaphora at its best! It’s a
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“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once
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As the calendar year rolled into June, so began the long awaited restoration and expansion of our home. For years we’ve been planning, and after the shutdown delay, the foundations are being laid and a dream is becoming a reality. My part in the deal (along with my three youngest children, especially) has been demolition
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Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail As a teacher, I’ve heard my share of commencement speakers. I wish I could
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Rest. Despite the unrest that fills the atmosphere, this is where I landed Wednesday night. After toiling for an hour or so with two different ideas, the stillness of an early-June twilight on my good friend’s porch demanded my attention and found its way onto the page. A few drafts later, and with my wife’s
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Disturb us, Lord, when we are too well pleased with ourselves, when our dreams have come true because we have dreamed too little, when we arrived safely because we sailed too close to the shore. From Sir Francis Drake’s Prayer, 1577. Safety is overrated. I understand the need for caution, but I don’t want perfect
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Times like this call for perspective. The following poem written back in 2017 inspired by a reverie with the desktop wallpaper on my iMac came back to mind this morning as I listened to different perspectives on these days, days brimming with fear, distancing, and uncertainty. When all the noise around me grows so loud
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On the eve of a long weekend when I know so little of my time will be spent at home, I present “Home,” my homage to the sanctuary and hive of life that sustains my soul in so many ways. “Home” expands upon the sterile dictionary definition of home, birthed out of a five-word poetry
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Grappling with loss… In the past three months, I’ve “lost” two people I deeply admired to cancer. Though I’m grateful that their suffering is over and I know they’ve “shuffled off this mortal coil” to skip the streets of gold, there’s still a natural grief. And though they have left this temporal realm, their lives
the deepening ground 