Poetry
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Happy National Poetry Month! As we launch into this month-long celebration of poetry, there’s no better place to start than Billy Collins’s “Introduction to Poetry.” I don’t believe there’s another poet I enjoy listening to as much as I love hearing Billy Collins read his poetry. “Litany” was one of the first times I encountered…
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The discovery of the Endurance earlier this month is a prophetic message for us all. Even as the vessel itself was prophetically named Endurance because of what Shackleton’s legendary expedition would entail, so we too are on a journey that requires endurance, skill, and courage. In meditating on a few articles I read on The…
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Having just re-entered the usual rhythm of life after my children’s speech and debate tournament in Pittsburgh (and staring at the grim reality that grading five more thesis papers before tomorrow is looking less and less like a reality), I leave you with another selection from my series of photo poems inspired by The Guardian…
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When I first saw this photograph posted by Vova Zinger on his website back on February 10, 2022, I knew there was a poem waiting to be found. At the time, I didn’t exactly know where to go with it, but I knew it was there, lurking just beneath the surface of those rippled waters.…
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Spring is in the air! Here in Western Pennsylvania today, the temperature reached 71 degrees. We opened the windows and savored the fresh air and song of the birds. It reminded me of a welcomed distraction from earlier this week when I sat down to breakfast: a finch singing from my neighbor’s porch. And though…
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C. S. Lewis once addressed the topic of whether one should continue learning in the midst of troubled times in his sermon “Learning in War-Time” given at St. Mary the Virgin Church, Oxford, on Sunday, October 22, 1939. He would argue that, yes, we must continue to learn in spite of, or, perhaps, even because…
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Sitting down to breakfast early on February 18th, God served up a fresh poem just outside my windows. Wolf Creek had leapt its bounds and was slowly creeping up the lawn as a result of the hard rains and melting snows of multiple weeks. In the midst of attending my sons’ basketball tournaments, filing taxes,…
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Returning to The Guardian photo of the day poems I penned three years ago, I found the play on Aesop’s “The Hare and the Tortoise” a fitting theme for tonight’s post. Like the classic fable, there is a moral to be found in each poem. Yet unlike that beloved tale, the hart (or deer) and…
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On this auspicious day, allow me to submit my two favorite love poems. I teach these side-by-side in my British Literature course when we begin discussing the impact of relationships and romance on our lives. Unlike the allusion to Dickens’ classic A Tale of Two Cities, what I present here is NOT the best of…
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Tonight’s collection of photo poems comes from the week of January 31st through February 8th of 2019. I’ve affectionately titled this collection Birds, Bikes, and Bots, though the photographs themselves didn’t appear in that order on The Guardian website. Besides just enjoying the sound of that alliterative title, I also believe the way it transitions…
the deepening ground 