Category Archives: Miscellany

Summer haiku

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Poet Kwame Alexander issued a call this morning on National Public Radio for haiku inspired by summer memories, but without using the word summer. As Alexander was finishing up his segment on NPR’s Morning Edition, I was just pulling into the parking lot of my office building, and the opening line “Watermelon drips” popped into my brain. I forgot it for the duration of my (11 1/2-hour) workday, but after coming home I opened my notepad and started playing.

Here are my three offerings. Continue reading →

Father’s Day: The memory that haunts me

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At the risk of calling down calamity on myself, I will say that I have been in three, or maybe two, car accidents in my life. (Knock wood.) The least serious was a minor collision in the parking lot of my office building on the afternoon of 9/11, when probably everyone in the United States was too upset to be behind the wheel of a car. I definitely was. The most serious happened when I was in high school, and a drunk driver blew through a stop sign at high speed, hitting the car in which I was a front-seat passenger.

Neither of those is the one that haunts me. Continue reading →

Dragon’s breath

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The setting sun
breathes fire
across the sky,
vivid red, orange and fuchsia flames
licking the backs
of clouds
over the calm, deep waters
of Lake Michigan.

Perched atop a sand dune
we watch
as it nods earthward
ducks its head under the blanket of the horizon
and turns out the lights.

April in the rearview mirror

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April – what a month. I ushered it in with my annual April 1 (bunny bunny) reading of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” then spent almost the entire remainder of the month reading and listening (and reading and listening, and reading and listening) to Leonard Cohen’s last book, The Flame. At month’s end, I had read the tactile book twice and listened to it on CD at least four times, if not five (starting in March). It was worth every minute. In between, I got to see Andrea Gibson perform, and read a lot of other poetry by a wide range of authors. I read poetry every single day of April, and it was a blessing. I also wrote poetry every day, although not all of it got published here. Here are all the pieces that did. There also were pieces I started and am still working on, pieces I discarded, and little snippets that found life only on my Twitter stream. Case in point:

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