Poetry, biography, and children's book author
The past is but a house in gray tempera— once a home, now a barren figment of your mind, cast in muted pigment, the melancholy echo of a time and a place you cannot reach. How sad it seems the artist couldn't save your memories— the flowers in the dooryard, and the trees and green… Continue reading The Past Unreachable
A century later, a bouqet of roses cling like lovers in heat that’s dense. A dance card and gloves, the portrait of a young woman who sits on a Delaware fence. A postcard written in script upswept as pinned up hair, “Come home to me, please.” A cavalry jacket, the wool stiffened by time… Continue reading What They Couldn’t Take with Them
I long to hear the ancient wind that sighs throughout the tops of old forest trees and fills the primal canopy of leaves with melancholy echoes—hollow, high. The history of the world is in this wind. The force we cannot see is yet so vast it's touched every present, every past and secret since before… Continue reading Deep Forest Wind
“The Eagle has landed,” the old man says, his voice moon gravel, his step as if lead is lining the shoes he drags on the floor. Slowly he inches away from the door, and clutches his cane like substitute bone, slumps on a stool and opens his tome: “Twelve Steps”— the first just to… Continue reading Moment of Reckoning in a Coffee Shop
Who gave you a kaleidoscope and yellow roses when it snowed. In whose jacuzzi you once sang "Desperado." You won't know. You used to play a Guild guitar; you probably won't remember though. The birthday when you crashed a Jeep, pleated like a Pepsi can. A row of purple stitches like embroidery on your pelvic… Continue reading What’s Forgotten When You Age
What ashes fall upon the winter snow that traveled through the ozone to our door from liquid fires, raging as they flow like rivers by the California shore? A wedding dress in flakes as fine as whispers, the fragments of the crib a father framed, all the photo books, brothers and sisters. Alas—these ashes… Continue reading Ashes Rain, Coast to Coast
“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” Song introduced by Judy Garland, 1944 To some unknown address they’re made to go— our troubles, seized like mental contraband and smuggled quickly to a foreign land, miles away from merry lights and snow. Maybe all our troubles will escape like criminals, to a cyber cloud, (everything else is… Continue reading From Now On, Our Troubles Will Be Far Away
Hushed as dawn, the hawk glides, her wings superior and wide, and calibrates the wind’s heft and sees the rabbits scatter, hide. Drifting free as feral breath, and feathers falling after death from sacrificial doves—we mourn their partners and their empty nests— she hovers high above the shore without a wing flap, leaving… Continue reading Signature: A Red-Tailed Hawk
2011-2018 Yemen “Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul.” -Emily Dickinson You stare at my bones and then turn away. But look for the bird with swallow blue feathers. I feel the flutter---here, under my hand. It perches, but wants to escape, and be gone. You’ll see it soon, you won’t… Continue reading I Was Amal, and My Name Meant Hope
Who pauses to pay homage to the trees buried in a concrete cemetery— those that were a leafy sanctuary brought--by civilization--to its knees? Where were the mourners, when the forests died— the noble warriors mankind didn’t save? No flags or flowers placed upon their graves, no one recited last rites; no one cried. Departed souls,… Continue reading Sonnet for the Lost Woods