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A Poem for a Thursday #292
I couldn’t find a lot of information about today’s poet. Jill Osier was born in Iowa and has lived worked in Iowa and Alaska. Her first book of poems, The Solace is not the Lullaby, was selected for the 2019 Yale Younger Poets Prize. She has also received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Listen. The rug is wet becauseI stood there. Becauseit started pouring. Becauseyour door was open and I wasunder a tree. Becauseit was raining. Because the rainand tree bothwere in our backyard. Becauseso was I. Because youweren't home. Because I knewyou were bowling. BecauseI walk your road. Because your roadgoes by your house. BecauseI felt like…
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A Little Bit of Spoiling
Earlier this month my son, daughter, and I finally made it back home to Connecticut for a week. It has been a year and a half since we have been back and that is way too long. We missed spending time with family and friends and visiting all our old, familiar, favorite places. We live in Ohio now but, for most of us, our hearts are still back east. It was a lovely week. We had a few family dinners. We visited my 99-year-old grandmother. I went thrifting with my aunt which is always one of my favorite things to do. My son visited some friends. We puttered around eating,…
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A Poem for a Thursday #291
Everything Dorothy Parker wrote seems to be made up of witty remarks and quotable phrases. She was known for her “caustic wisecracks and eye for twentieth-century urban foibles.” I do not like my state of mind;I'm bitter, querulous, unkind.I hate my legs, I hate my hands,I do not yearn for lovelier lands.I dread the dawn's recurrent light;I hate to go to bed at night.I snoot at simple, earnest folk.I cannot take the gentlest joke.I find no peace in paint or type.My world is but a lot of tripe.I'm disillusioned, empty-breasted.For what I think, I'd be arrested.I am not sick, I am not well.My quondam dreams are shot to hell.My soul…
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A Poem for a Thursday #290
The lovely thing about having featured a weekly poem for 290 weeks is that I have found some favorite poets. This comes in handy on days like today when I worked late and realized at almost 10:00 p.m. that I hadn’t written this post. Today I am going with a favorite I have featured several times before. Barbara Crooker is so good. I hope you enjoy this poem. GRIEF is a river you wade in until you get to the other side.But I am here, stuck in the middle, water partingaround my ankles, moving downstreamover the flat rocks. I'm not able to lift a foot,move on. Instead, I'm going to…
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A Mediocre Reading Year
I realize “mediocre” is not a ringing endorsement of my last year’s reading. After all, mediocre means “of moderate quality, not very good.” To be honest, that is a fair description of my entire year. Two surgeries and a back injury definitely put a damper on the year. However, I actually am happy with my mediocre reading. Some people might have decided that if they were going to be housebound for a large portion of the year then that would be the perfect time to read all the books they have been meaning to get around to. That is a perfectly valid life choice but it was not mine. I…
