hard times

The way a single frail crocus struggles up through black matted leaves in our garden looks much like the world struggling to throw off this obdurate global recession.  The accumulated crust and weight of old death seems impossible to penetrate. I slog on.  Fittingly, all my work of late has concerned war or hard times. A few days [...]

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The gardener poet: Vita Sackville-West

Not yet September and already the garden is strewn with fallen leaves. It has not been quite the summer I had envisioned (long hours reading poetry in the partial shade, sipping chilled chardonnay, listening to water drip endlessly from stone into pool). Too many demands on my time: I work two jobs, seven days a [...]

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Return to the garden

Today marks the true beginning of Spring for me — the first day in the year when I pick up my old leatherbound notebook and return to the garden to write.  Old Mr Chumbles, our sole outdoor cat, who has had a very long & bitter winter to endure ensconced under the front porch in [...]

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. 7. From the Spoon to the Marne: poems of my grandfather’s war

Of the thirty-odd poems located along the Spoon River, perhaps a third center around the figure of my German grandfather, and of those a good many concern his experience in the First World War and the lingering effects of that experience once he had returned. The following poem, a narrative in blank verse, portrays my [...]

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. 7b. Another tale from Spoon River: “The Revelation of Sam Hackett”: a pastoral parable of violence, war & the devil

This poem, like many in the Spoon River series, grew out of a true story about my grandfather. This one took place during the Depression, on my grandfather’s farm where he ran a sorghum mill. Many of the hired help were “gypsies”, or at least that is how they were known. They weren’t migrants, but [...]

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. 7c. Ruins on the Somme: a lost war poet rediscovered

Of the many thousands of times that I have drawn a dusty nondescript book from a poorly-lit shelf in a used-bookstore during the past forty years, only once can I claim to have pulled down and opened an entirely unknown classic of American literature.  Not that I recognized it as such at the time.  Nor even now, on the eve of its re-publication by [...]

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