March 2021
Donald Wheelock
dwheeloc@smith.edu
dwheeloc@smith.edu
Bio Note: It took me, a composer and college teacher, forty years of writing formal poetry
to reach the stage of submitting my favorites for publication. Formal poetry, once relegated to second
fiddle in my career of writing chamber, vocal and orchestral music, has now demanded equal time. Indeed,
it has taken over my life. I have published a chapbook In the Sea of Dreams with Gallery of Readers
Press, and placed poems in Blue Unicorn, Ekphrasis and elsewhere.
March Ahead
The long awaited spring begins with as blue
a sky as any optimist could wish for,
were it not for what we all abhor:
the ironies pleasures tend to accrue
when contradictions play with what things seem,
revealing playful shadows on a tomb
or children’s deaths within a darkened room,
while we survive and thrive in quarantine.
But don’t despair; the force that slowly fills
a blade of grass with green—an infectious green
endowing fields with all they once have been—
will march ahead to claim the distant hills.
©2021 Donald Wheelock
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