New Poem: "The Forbidden Fruit of Life"

 

The Forbidden Fruit of Life

 

I listened with rapt attention to an honest

man of the mind talking to a clever journalist

(who makes an obscene living interviewing

people like him) about his book On Consolation:

Finding Solace in Dark Times, and we do live

in dark times with this global pandemic that

has stretched society beyond its limits; but it

was on a personal level that this honest man

of the mind stressed his historical claim that

finding consolation for life’s unbearable suffering

was relative to one’s personal paradigm. As irony

would have it however, this honest man of the

mind had yet to explore the perilous paradigm

of who we are not, and not until he firmly grasps

the nettle of man’s dual nature will this honest

man of the mind console his grieving soul

with the forbidden fruit of life.

New poem: "The Winters of My Content"

 The Winters of My Content

 Looking out my bonus room window

this morning from what Virginia Woolf

called a room of one’s own to write in,

I saw the first snowfall of the year,

and my mind flooded with memories

of the winters of my content when I’m

most free to write at will, my thoughts

for poems, stories, novels, memoirs,

and essays flowing with as much vitality

as the life force in spring. How happy I

am to see all that white, ever so clean

and restful to the eyes after the glorious

colors of our Georgian Bay fall, having

blown and picked up the last of our leaves

the day before our first snowfall!

New poem: "A Writer True to His Calling"

 A Writer True to His Calling

 

I walked gingerly through a barren no-man’s

land of the great writer’s dismay as I read MORE

MATTER (Essays and Criticism), by America’s

distinguished man of letters, his journey through

memories of his own published works, ideas

that he nurtured with loving care that he saw

fading into the sink hole of lost time, wondering,

in his usual elegant prose, was it worth the effort?

But he also said to Jeffery Brown in his PBS

interview, “There is a kind of spiritual health

in trying to express reality. When you feel you’ve

captured it, if only in a phrase or correct adjective,

there is something very happy-making about it.”

The great American man of letters wrote stories

“to give the mundane its beautiful due,” and

dismayed or not, sink hole or no sink hole, he

wrote because he never tired of “creation’s giddy

joy,” and he did not die like another great American

writer so depressed and paranoid that he blew his

brains out with his favorite shotgun, but with

the grace and dignity of a writer true to his calling

to the ENDPOINT (and Other Poems) of his

satisfying well-lived 76-year-old life.

New poem: "Shadow of My Past Life"

 

 

Shadow of My Past Life

 

I would never have seen the shadow

of my past life had she not told me,

the change in my personality because

of my grey whiskers. “I want you

to shave tomorrow,” she said to me.

“You’re not yourself when you’re

like this. You’re grumpy and miserable.”

It puzzled me, not seeing the causal

connection of my long grey whiskers

and disposition, and I stared at my love

in confusion. But knowing how keen

her to be in her innocence of sight,

I looked at myself in the mirror and saw

that she was right. The person that I

saw was a stranger to me, an old self

from a past life who struggled in vain

to be me; so, I shaved my grey whiskers

in the morning, and my happy new

self stared back at me.