Thoreau’s Pumpkins by Ginny Lowe Connors It is thought that Henry David Thoreau was the first American to plant Potiron Jaune Grosse, a variety of large yellow pumpkin. Six seeds from France began it all. No abracadabra required, no alacazam— just a bit of manure, some hoeing, a little rain, and…
I Am Waiting By Lawrence Ferlinghetti I am waiting for my case to come up and I am waiting for a rebirth of wonder and I am waiting for someone to really discover America and wail and I am waiting for the discovery of a new symbolic western frontier and I am waiting for…
Fracture Ellen Bass When the grizzly cubs were caught, collared, and taken away— relocated they call it— their mother ran back and forth on the road screaming. Brutal sound. Torn from her lungs. Her heart, twisted knot, hot blood rivering to the twenty-six pounding bones of her feet. Just weeks before I watched a…
Daytona 500 by Kayleb Rae Candrilli Where we’re from, we know ballet as Dale Earnhardt gliding through the traffic of Daytona; we know dance as our hands moving across a table of drunk Miller Lites. This is universal because I say it is. When my mother called me Kayleb for the first time, I remembered…
Death is coming and leaving the tavern, death leaving and coming in. by Frederico Garcia Lorca Many years ago I wrote this poem into one of my little notebooks. There are nine of these small notebooks, small enough to fit inside of a rear pocket of my blue jeans. I liked the poem by…
Reading this poem a few days ago, I knew the poem deserved feature in a blog post. This poem shows the bastardization of language, a symptom of the decay of comity and of peacable order in our towns and cities. The controversy over the status of the door, consciously or unconsciously an attempt to…
Six of us, a wide ranging discussion last night. The topic was death; more precisely, pondering whether death gives meaning to life. The discussion was satisfying. We did not resolve the matter after an hour and a half of back and forth. Briefly in the midst of the session we touched on guns, mass…
Always something comes to mind, for which I discover a few words to compose a paragraph or two. Poets are the true seers of a generation giving definition to the world such as it is, suggesting what is likely in store. Upon reading this poem I knew, “this is it.” This is what I’d…
This passage from T. S. Eliot’s poem The Dry Salvages is one of my favorite. There are many phrases in these lines that are analogous to an arrow striking dead center to the bulls eye. The poem overall is a meditation upon a seafaring way of life. The point of view offered proposes to be…
Dunbar By Anne Spencer Ah, how poets sing and die! Make one song and Heaven takes it; Have one heart and Beauty breaks it; Chatterton, Shelley, Keats, and I—Ah, how poets sing and die! Anne Spencer, born on February 6, 1882, on a plantation in Henry County, Virginia, was a poet from the Harlem Renaissance movement. She published…
