by the Night Writer
I saw the following poem on The Writer’s Almanac the other day and thought it was pretty good.
Naming My Daughter
(In the Uruba tribe of Africa, children are
named not only at birth but throughout their
lives by their characteristics and the events
that befall them.)
The one who took hold in the cold night
The one who [...]
by the Night Writer
Hah. I noticed that the following poem was featured in the Writer’s Almanac on Saturday — the day after the Mall Diva’s ultrasound. The author is no W.B. Picklesworth, but he does have a knack for the subject.
The Alien
by Greg Delanty
I’m back again scrutinizing the Milky Way
[...]
by Night Writer
It went from “cold” to “damn cold” overnight and when I got up this morning it was -12F here in South St. Paul. The “high” today is supposed to brush 0, which reminded me of this poem by George Bilgere:
Zero
First it was five above, then two,
then one morning just plain zero.
There was a [...]
Christmas 1963
Because we wanted much that year
and had little. Because the winter phone
for days stayed silent that would call
our father back to work, and he
kept silent too with our mother,
fearfully proud before us.
Because I was young that morning
in gray light untouched on the rug
and our gifts were so few, propped
along the furniture, for a second
my [...]
I was flipping through my copy of The Art of Worldly Wisdom the other day. It’s a collection of the aphorisms of Baltasar Gracian, who I have quoted here before. I rather liked this one:
…For virtue is the bond of all the perfections, and the heart of all life’s satisfactions. It makes a man [...]
What kind of writer do I want to be? My interests are so varied that I’d hate to limit myself to one niche, and in that Roy Blount, Jr. is another writing idol of mine. In a piece on Saturday noting Blount’s birthday, The Writer’s Almanac included this description:
Roy Blount has been a freelance writer [...]
As I mentioned earlier, I’m re-reading Mark Helprin’s most recent collection of short stories, The Pacific. One of the stories is especially apt right now as baseball’s regular season and the history of Yankee Stadium — the House That Ruth Built — come to a close. Entitled “Perfection”, the story is set in 1956 and [...]
Shifting the Sun
When your father dies, say the Irish,
you lose your umbrella against bad weather.
May his sun be your light, say the Armenians.
When your father dies, say the Welsh,
you sink a foot deeper into the earth.
May you inherit his light, say the Armenians.
When your father dies, say the Canadians,
you run out of [...]
Turning Toward the Morning
by Gordon Bok
When the deer has bedded down
And the bear has gone to ground,
And the northern goose has wandered off
To warmer bay and sound,
It’s so easy in the cold to feel
The darkness of the year
And the heart is growing lonely
For the morning
Oh, my Joanie, don’t you know
That [...]
What You Realize When Cancer Comes
You will not live forever—No
you will not, for a ceiling of clouds
hovers in the sky.
You are not as brave
as you once thought.
Sounds of death
echo in your chest.
You feel the bite of pain,
the taste of it running
through you.
Following the telling to friends
comes a silence of
felt goodbyes. You come to know
the welling [...]
