Poem
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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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Modern miracles exist; we’ve just become too numb to recognize them. Whether or not you profess faith, the miracle of conception remains a scientific fact. To read about all the conditions necessary for conception to take place successfully and then all the steps in the process leading up to birth astounds me. As so many
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“Denounce the government and embracethe flag. Hope to live in that freerepublic for which it stands.” Wendell Berry, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” Though I’ve referenced this poem multiple times on my site, I don’t believe I’ve ever posted it in full. With election day upon us in America, the poem feels fitting. So
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Personally, I love the look of gabion retaining walls, but the work of filling them can be exhausting. We had a lot of bricks and old paving stones to begin the process, leaving the nicer looking landscape rocks for the visible sides. But when you have nearly twenty-two feet of gabions that are thirty-nine inches
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One of the joys of being a teacher lies in the different duties we absorb to fill up any free time we might waste preparing lessons or grading student work. Of course that’s not really the case; we all have duties to perform. It’s just hard, sometimes, when you have a stack of papers that
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Many poets speak of the challenge of being a poet, but few have captured the sense of being out of place and misunderstood like Richard Wilbur in his translation of Charles Baudelaire’s stunning poem from “The Flowers of Evil.” My wife shared it with me tonight, having heard it herself for the first time on
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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 and just being in nature is enough
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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 a small rural town at the least.
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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 our hawk from the less than stellar
the deepening ground 