The speaker of this poem comes from a long tradition of wisdom and reverence. His face is aglow; we can see his hands; and his voice, in its calm assurance, is the instrument of a vital, timeless teaching. May the children who hear it blossom and grow, and their light shine forth ’til the end. For what he said still stands. ~ [ 2007 ]
November 2016: Poems and Passages: it’s worth mentioning, I think, that each piece contained therein enjoyed its “day in the sun” when it was published individually in my previous blog, Recently Banned Literature, which I keep these days as a personal, private archive. Why I offered them less than two years later as a collection is explained in the preface, so I need not go into that here. That they […]
Ah, for those precious moments alone, with every dream, every hope, and each imagined failing. As if for the first time, you see your house on the edge of the moor, suppertime done, the dim lamps burning; it’s almost on a hill. You close your eyes, and hug the gnarled trunk: your father, the wind in his hair. How young he once was! How old he is now! And your […]
We make our music, and play our way to dusk; when the mists gather, we seek the warm glow of the hearth. Late at night, one by one, the coals close their eyes. The train flies west. We hear it through our open window. No sleep. Only peace, flight, breath. Grandpa said he’d be right back. He was talking about the sun, I guess. ~ [ 2004 ]
It might be coincidence, and probably is; on the other hand, why would I have awakened from a dream this morning in which I was repeating the Japanese word kangai, of all things, when I, to the best of my memory and knowledge, have never encountered the word? “Strong feelings; deep emotion,” one definition says, which is mingled with a sense of “nostalgia or contemplation.” And now I look at […]
Here are three favorites from my fabled pencil-and-index-card period, in which, like a demented phrenologist, I traced and embraced the divots, pits, and grain, to reveal — what, exactly, is for you to decide. A starry night? An ocean of crows? A rider that makes his own road? Look again. Take your time. Each is revealing. Each is disturbed. Each contains great hypnotic power. Are you awake? Asleep? Here? There? […]
At this late date, Verses strikes me as a kind of modern-day Genesis. Of course it’s a work of memory, and is therefore autobiographical. In its making, the images arose in abundance, each seemingly rife with its own hints and suggestions, until all I could do was hang on for the ride, thinking, If this is Genesis, then I want to read the whole Bible. But for that to happen […]
The dictionary in question is Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, published by G. & C. Merriam Company in 1924. It weighs just under fifteen pounds; the front cover is frayed and attached by only a few threads. I’ve since acquired older dictionaries, published early in the nineteenth century, in English and Spanish, and others of a more recent date, in French and German. Armenian, Japanese, and Russian […]
Believe it or not, upon its first publication, An Absurdist Play was liked well enough by a high school teacher that he used it in a poetry segment of his English class. The experiment failed, as I thought it might, and for his valiant effort, the teacher was met with puzzled expressions perhaps not unlike those suggested in the stage directions of the poem itself. I doubt the teacher really […]
In terms of poetry, I find the seventeen-syllable habit a good one, and I’ve written many in this mode and haven’t found it limiting. I call them haiku, and several have been published here and elsewhere as such within that very fluid definition. Splitting hairs over form is something in which I don’t engage. Times change; language changes; people change; stones, ponds, stars, cherry blossoms, remain the same. Haiku or […]
William Michaelian 