Category: Literature

There’s only so much we can do to better ourselves, and once we’ve done what we can, it still may not have been enough. Here’s a poem by Michelle Y. Burke, who lives in N.Y., in which a man who does everything right doesn’t quite do everything right. Nocturne A man can give up so […]

Whoever named you had either a sly sense of humor or perhaps none at all, but one look into your eyes told me what I needed to know. You live on puppy-time, chasing seconds into minutes – your sleek body coiled with energy, looking for reasons to spring into directions that defy direction. No breeze-blown […]

Throughout the long summer, did they know, these captive seeds so tightly squeezed, that they were meant to soar?

I love the sun and sand, waves lapping the beach, suggestions of Paradise; I love midwestern forests and prairies, the long lazy summers. But I am not a palm or even a hardy green ash, branches inclined upward, waiting for manna from heaven to rain down. I am a northern tree, limbs inclined outward and […]

I’ve spent my seventy years on The Great Plains and have lived all that time amidst vivid and touching stories about the settlement of our area, lots of them much like this one, about a long ago courtship and marriage, offered to us in a poem by James Doyle, who lives in Colorado. Love Story […]

I love to sit outside and be very still until some little creature appears and begins to go about its business, and here is another poet, Robert Gibb, of Pennsylvania, doing just the same thing. For the Chipmunk in My Yard I think he knows I’m alive, having come down The three steps of the […]

Before the Honeymoon I stumble on the rocky beach beneath the cliff, part of the Niagara Escarpment. On a shelf in the dolomite wall I find two oblong flat stones, each about the size of a hand, tied together with lavender ribbon the color last night’s sunset painted the bay. Beside the stones, an empty […]

One of my friends told me he’d seen a refrigerator magnet that read, PARENTING; THE FIRST 40 YEARS ARE THE HARDEST. Here’s a fine poem about parenthood, and about letting go of children, by Chana Bloch, who lives in Berkeley, California. Through a Glass On the crown of his head where the fontanelle pulsed between […]

A still-hidden village high atop a Smoky ridge took a name today, designed and lauded by a triumvirate: the local preacher, the town’s one cop, and a housewife whose husband plows the road down to Pigeon Forge. Hear the result of a single session of sweet tea and scratch pads and a great county nod […]