January 2025
Bio Note: When I was growing up my mother told me folks were dancing in the streets the day I was born, May 28th, 1945. VE day was May 8, 1945. Close enough. I believed her. Inexplicably, I still do. My 9th poetry book is due out in 2025. My poems can be read online and in print in many journals and anthologies. I have been the featured poet on The Writer's Almanac and Cultural Daily.
Words and Music
Poetry can keep life itself alive. You can endure
almost anything as long as you can sing about it.
—James Wright
Technology has allowed
her simply to touch
my name to reach me.
Her name lights up on my phone.
I hear her frightened voice
from 3000 miles away
telling me she is losing words
repeating herself, forgetting.
I know all this.
All of us know.
But on this early morning
call she tells me that
she is writing poetry,
filling notebooks with poetry.
Magically, she says,
when she is writing
words seem to flow.
And when she hears familiar music
she finds herself singing
recalling lyrics word for word—
rising out of her chair, dancing.
I imagine her waltzing
through that old house
cluttered with memories,
photos on every wall generously
inviting her into the words and music,
joys and sorrows of her life,
re-defining
“living in the moment”
when the “moment”
she inhabits has long passed.
Originally published in 2020: An Anthology of Poetry with Drawings by Bill Liebeskind.
Foul Play
KATHMANDU, Nepal (AP) — Human waste left
by climbers on Mount Everest has become a
problem that is causing pollution and threatening
to spread disease on the world's highest peak, the
chief of Nepal's mountaineering association said
Tuesday.
—NYTimes, March 3, 2015
The lacy low-lying clouds that
fog the thin air over Everest
taunt oxygen-starved cells.
One laborious step at a time,
pemmican-fueled, under heavy packs,
Sherpa-led pilgrims hoist skywards.
The mountains’ ribs lie
helpless upon Earth’s crust as the
feces of adventurers befoul blankets of snow.
Familiar images
of mountaineers perched on the summit,
grinning, waving and planting flags flash by
as we learn (and have always suspected) that
while they bask in the glory of the impossible,
shit happens.
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