October 2020
Bio Note: I live in the woods a little east of Saugatuck, Michigan, and have taught college writing, literature,
and peace-making for 36 years. My wife, psychotherapist Suzy Doyle, and I have six grown kids and significant others and six
grandkids and in our scarce free time like nothing more than cycling the miles and miles of backroads here near Lake Michigan.
My latest of nine collections are Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press, 2020), Surreal Expulsion (The Poetry Box, 2019),
and If god were gentle (Dos Madres Press, 2017).
Wait For It
The forecast hovers between soggy and gratitude, verges on awe, balances muted light against lopsided gladness. Meanwhile (though Cosmos clatters its remote stones, and Existence casts its Theater of the Unheard from among the docile), the man’s morning’s pouring itself into day—and he stares off, fathoming the frayed front sliding past outside has flagged in him imponderable streaks of fleeting joy.
Originally published in Red River Review
One Breath
One lake, one wave, one drop—one grain, one more ripple in the sand on a beach, one beach, one shore—one path, one stair, one step, one board, one nail in the grain—one blade, one cluster of dune-borne grass, one passage—one cottage, one porch, one chair under shadow of an eave—one breeze, one heat, one sun—one day, one morning, one hour, one thought in the mind of a soul, in his living, in his being, in his life—one sky, one current, one breath.
Originally published in Waymark: Voices of the Valley
©2020 D. R. James
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the
author (email address above) to tell him or her. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is the beginning of community at Verse Virtual.
It is very important. -FF