On this last day of the year, my 39th on this planet, I want to take several moments to reflect on where I’ve been this year and maybe years past. Maybe at the end of this little jaunt, I’ll think about where I’m headed and many more us seem to be headed. The short version: … More From the last year to the new year
Do you remember the exhilaration of watching the Berlin Wall fall? Do you remember those moments when you felt as though the people behind the Iron Curtain would be free to speak their minds? To sing as they wished? To assemble and worship in a new free world? Do you remember they’d be free to … More No walls
Today is Poem in Your Pocket Day. So what’s in my pocket? “A Stone,” a poem I’ve been working on since last summer. A single stone can seem at once to be just itself while also being the story of its place. They are beautiful metaphors for the events of our lives. Stones are the poetry of … More Stones are the #poetry of experience
“Like the surface tension” Perched on her toes she watched liquid ribbons stream over silt and slate. Her fingers met the run’s meniscus, forming spandrels round her fingers’ tips. I know her touch among browning leaves falling from tulips and sycamores, feeling like the surface tension surrendering to her touch.
The last poem I posted, “The Omega Rite,” is something of this poem’s inverse twin. Their structures and themes come from the same place but move in almost opposite directions before meeting again. They are, then, the alpha and the omega of the poems I’ve written over the last year’s project, encompassing their themes and … More The Alpha Rite: See the end at the beginning and the beginning at the end
“The Omega Rite” The creation stretches its fingers to penits dicta in no uncertain terms: This is the end. There is noend. This is the beginning. There is nobeginning. You will see. But you will notsee it unless youseeitwritten. See it.Read it. Read … More The Omega Rite: A poem on the beginning as the end and the end as the beginning
“The long shadow” [Revised 10.21.2013] How many days will I have until he is not a boy anymore? How many days until he asks me questions I cannot answer? Or if I can answer them will I have strength, or the wherewithal, or the desire to respond as a father should, as a father might … More There are #poems that hurt to revisit. But I revisit them to grow.
I’ve gotten to spend some time with this poem over the last few days. Its simplicity spends time with me. What is beneath? What is above? And then I wonder – as I am who I am – what is falling in love like as an otter? Probably nothing at all. As social as they … More Otters again
There are days when the piece of the world you are in wakes you up. Over the last couple of years, Standing Stone Creek has been that place. It runs through one of a couple of pieces of old growth forest in Pennsylvania. There, hemlocks nearly 1,000 years old thrive. Outside of the Pacific Northwest, … More Sometimes in Standing Stone Creek
“Lovers” I just found a hickory and a maple,trunks grown together, conjoined as lovers at their hips,tension free from their backs while the hands of their roots clutch their subterranean buttocks for decades of loamy passion.For centuries they have thrived while performing the rites of the living.I see them, old beings beaming their smiles at the … More The conjoined trunks of trees remind me of being a lover
Peter Walks for Democracy 