Look for much more on this blog in the coming weeks - politics and essays will be added in the near future.  Meanwhile, here is a rewritten version of a poem that I posted some time ago.   Afterglow They say the spirit lingers after death, Or so I hope; there’s so much more to […]

Not long ago, I posted about the influence that poetic form has on the effect of a poem.   At that time I said that I intended to do further experiments with translation of a poem from one form to another.   Here is my next attempt. The starting point is a light verse I posted almost […]

I wrote the first version of this poem around twenty years ago in San Antonio, Texas. My late wife, a city councilwoman at the tine, was attending a National League of Cities convention, and I had accompanied her. My father and stepmother drove up for the day from their home in Kingsville, about 180 miles […]

I distinguished between story poems and autobiographical poems here.  The small sonnet that follows is from 1969.   Perhaps Surprise Would Please Her More The house is old, and grey, and tall. Her room is on the upper floor. He starts to ring, but, after all, Perhaps surprise would please her more. His feet raise […]

The following poem was my reaction to the Kent State Shootings in 1970.  It is yet another sonnet ( I seem to have written a lot of them).  If I were writing the poem today, I would make the secret urge line more ambiguous, and I would make the link to Kent State more explicit.  […]

Sometime back, I announced that I was going to post autobiographical poems on this site from time to time.  You can expect more of them in the near future. This post is the first of a series of poems that I call story poems.   The difference is this: an autobiographical poem tells a story about […]

(from 2004-2005) Old men, not young, should go to war. The young are fearless, older men have learned acceptance.  Even when They're faced with death, it cannot mar The record of the life they've led. They'll fight with calm, the almost dead. Young men will often go too far, Old men, not young, should go […]