Shakespeare

  • Caught Up in the Call of the Sandhill Cranes

    For months, I’ve carried the call of the Sandhill Cranes in my heart. They were passing over my home on an early Saturday morning as I was leaving to proctor the SATs at my high school. It was a divine interruption – a hard stop on the feverish rush of modern life. Since then, I’ve

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  • Coming of Age: Timeless Advice from a Father

    We’ve created a false dilemma (aka the either-or fallacy): “Either you remain a child or you become an adult.” And in a time where adultescence has spread like an infectious disease, it seems fitting that we raise high the banner of adulthood and call these basement-dwelling game-playing job-quitting children into the responsibilities and expectations that

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  • Advice to Our Newborns: Johnson’s “A Poet to His Baby Son”

    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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  • The Stripping Away: Reflections on Aging

    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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  • Lunch Duty Reflection: Where Modern Art and DeathHack Meet #Art #Humanity #Lunch #School #DeathHack #Time #Soccer #Sonnet #Shakespeare #Poetry #Poem

    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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  • Photo of the Day Poems: This Sad Time #Poem #Poetry #Death #Disaster #Discontent #Hope

    All the images above come from The Guardian’s best photographs of the day posted on February 5, 2019, capturing moments of death, disaster, discontent, and division from England, Bangladesh, Canada, Paris, and the United States. Four years later, these atrocities continue to manifest all around the world, and those without a firm foundation and steady

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  • A Hurricane’s Warning: Found Poetry Turned Song #Hurricane #Found Poetry #Song

    Years ago, I earned some extra cash by working in the periodical section of the campus library while attending Grove City College. One quiet afternoon, I read an article in one of the newspapers we carried about Hurricane Marilyn that “wreaked havoc in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico” back on September 15-16, 1995.

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  • #LovePoems: A Tale of Two Sonnets

    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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  • When I began crafting this poem, I fully intended to mimic the style of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “General Prologue” to The Canterbury Tales: “When that August with his beastly heat…” However, I found the set meter and rhyme too restricting for the random wanderings of a father and his young sons up and down the stream

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