Love
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On Valentine’s Day I became a grandfather. Our first grandson! My wife was blessed to be there to prepare for and help with the delivery, as well as provide extra support for the first week of Liam’s life. By late spring, I will be a grandfather twice over when we welcome our second grandson into
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Tonight I came home from work to the day-to-day needs that swarm me almost as soon as I open my car door. The younger boys want to head to Walmart; my middle son’s basketball practice begins at 5:30; my wife and daughter have their book group meeting this evening, so we need to order pizza
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All the world’s a stage,And all the men and women merely players:They have their exits and their entrances;And one man in his time plays many parts,His acts being seven ages. Jaques, from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7 Time. Shakespeare notes the Seven Ages of Man. Others refer to the four seasons
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“I don’t think poetry lives on the flat page…any more than music lives in the notation. I think a poem has to be breathed into the air – it has to kind of shimmer into being as sound exchanged in the one atmosphere between people.” Malcolm Guite, from “A Spell in the Studio with Phil
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October ended in melancholy. I had been entertaining depression for at least a week, allowing him to raid my cupboards, sleep in my bed, run my life, and steal from my bank account. Melancholy, or depression, may be associated with the color blue, but I was running in the red in terms of hope and
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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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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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Though you likely won’t find this excerpt from Tennyson’s immortal poem In Memoriam A. H. H. on any top ten list of love poems (by the way, here’s a list I liked), I would argue that section 27 deserves the honor of being labeled one of the most powerful love poems ever written. Tennyson commemorates
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Advent: December 24 By Vincent H. Anastasi 2022 We have set our gifts around the base of the tree – small tokens of love waiting dawn’s unwrapping of the Desire of Nations.
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We’ve all played the fool at some point in our lives, especially in the name of love. Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers sang of it long before I sat down with my guitar and composed the following song. Sometimes we’ve played the fool for power, fame, or glory, fleeting as they are. Like King Solomon
the deepening ground 