Category Archives: Poetry

Wheel of Water For God’s Creation Grass emerges from the winter snow.Blades lengthen. Flowers grow.Trees in the wind sway and sough.The summer of life is all we know.Autumn breezes start to blowand all of life begins to slow.Brown turf is … Continue reading →

Clicking Hyperlinks John 15:9-17 Above all, love is seen in the loveof the Father. When we click on the word Father,it opens on the Father’s love for the Son.When we click on the word Son,it opens on the Son’s declarationthat … Continue reading →

1066 Historians lust for great events,the violent one percent,so nothing happens nearly every year. Stamford Bridge and Hastings stretched a month;whatever happened years beforeor since that raven glut? For each combatant, hundreds morewere not involved, as Norseman, Norman, Celtand Saxon … Continue reading →

NOTE: I wrote the following poem a few days after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. President Vladimir Putin and Patriarch Kirill I, the leader of the Moscow-based Russian Orthodox Church, claim they are waging a Christian holy war in … Continue reading →

Summer Romance Of all my days to middle age,you gave me less than ten.So little time from moon to rising moon.A meteor flared and fellon an August night now thirty winters dead.The lingering light:for that I give you thanks.

[haiku] the hard-breathing troutexplaining deathto a child NOTE: This is a true story. When our son Matthew was eight years old, I took him fishing for the first time. I had to explain what happens to the trout after it … Continue reading →

The Hills of the Central Coast Under a raspberry haze, row after rowof the smooth-sanded hills of the Coast Rangecompress into a flat two-dimensional view.Except for the accidental live oak hereand there, bare grassland is all I see.Telescoped ridgelines are … Continue reading →

The Illusion of Separateness The ancients called it ekstasis,or outside oneself.But does that really happen?Are we ever outside ourselves? Lovers do not live in time—coitus, and then a shift in focus:the clock starts… Glint of sun off a jumbo jetturning … Continue reading →

Bus Poem: My Iranian Gentleman In his soft-spoken, conspiratorial voicehe told me his name,but it flew in one earand out the otherand I failed to ask again.To this day he is: my Iranian gentleman. His jackets were a blend of … Continue reading →

[tanka] deep grasses chokethe broad pathwe used to walkour past is lostin a seamless field of green

Just Asking Questions Change, development, and growthis everywhere we lookin academics, the business world,science and technology,in music, the arts, in history,and in our own evolution from youth to old age. We think nothing of it! And yet, persistently, we are … Continue reading →

NOTE: “Circle of Love” is one of my poems for choir. The words are set to Handel’s “See, The Conquering Hero Comes!” Play this music and sing along: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8p1BedwyFKY. Circle of Love We offer communion to a weary world in … Continue reading →

The Way The way eludes the snareof language. It is hard to catch the wheeling birdsscurrying up helixing stairs, but harder still to catch the way with words.The heart that hangs stretched and framedis not the heart of hearts; the … Continue reading →