poems

  • Of all the colors of the rainbow, I fight with blue the most. Ironically, my closet is filled with dress shirts of various shades of blue, and it’s not even my favorite color! (For the record, I do have shirts of other colors, and my favorite color is actually orange.) We associate so many things…

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  • Green began when I looked out my back windows and saw the new grass pushing up through the straw we laid down in the late fall after our addition was completed: fresh life sprouting on the new contour of our backyard. I then began meditating on the “evergreen” nature of the color – constant through…

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  • Back to the color poems! I began my yellow sonnet meditating on the word itself. What if yellow were a greeting? What if it was a command? Then I considered all the things I associate with yellow such as warning signs, yellow jackets, lemons, old lace, egg yolks, and even the less savory uses of…

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  • After the positive response I received for my selection of five haiku in celebration of International Haiku Poetry Day, I figured there might be an audience for my haikunelle. If you search for the form online, you likely won’t find an official definition of the haikunelle, but I imagined the form six years ago as…

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  • My wife informed me that today is International Haiku Poetry Day. Believe it or not, I was completely unaware! She heard it from good friends of ours who, chose to celebrate with ice cream. (Yes, we’ll be heading out to the local ice cream parlor ourselves despite the sub-fifty degree weather here after I post!…

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  • I hate to waste things. The peanut butter jar is nearly empty? I’ll get the spatula and clean it out. (Makes it easier to wash out before recycling!) Have a few heels of bread? I’ll finish them off for breakfast. Is there a soft spot on that orange? I’ll cut it out and eat the…

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  • Finally! After a long hiatus spent tending the various fields of my life, I’ve found my way back to the deepening ground. So much was going on here over the last fortnight, including closing out a marking period at school and multiple birthdays, that it left me little time to just still myself enough (and…

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  • A few years back, the start of my school year was interrupted by jury duty. Rather than welcoming students back to the study of Advanced Placement English or British Literature after another seemingly-too-short summer (I know, I shouldn’t complain), I spent my days weighing the evidence in a civil court case. In all, I only…

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  • Last week a freight train stalled my usual morning commute. Of course, in the vast scheme of things, the few minutes I spent waiting at the crossing were nothing. But coupled with two other events over the past week, I found myself asking the question that I’ve used as the title of this post: am…

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  • For purists, you’ll never actually find the statement, “Elementary, my dear Watson!” in any of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s sixty Sherlock Holmes stories. As I read on multiple sites today, Holmes uses both phrases separately in the stories, but never together in this way. An interesting fact, but what has that to do with a…

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