Poem
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Saturday afternoon, my youngest son and I were preparing to powerwash our porch furniture before dressing them in a fresh coat of Hunter Green paint. As I struggled to remove the nozzle from the hose, two moles popped out of the ground at the top of the stone steps, squeaking and tussling for a brief
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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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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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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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In celebration of April Fools’ Day, I’m pulling out one of the few remaining Photo of the Day poems I wrote back in 2019, inspired by the best photographs on The Guardian‘s website. Back on February 13th, the image above led me into a whimsical (and clearly immature) reflection on collecting stool samples. Rather than
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Between wrapping up the third marking period at school, putting all my creative energies into finishing my series of fifteen constellation songs (TWO TO GO!), and the busyness of Spring with speech and debate tournaments, announcing baseball games, and the seasonal “to do” list, I figured I would benefit from a stroll down memory lane
the deepening ground 