Category Archives: Poetry

(I am participating in the March Slice of Life challenge via the Two Writing Teachers site.  Slice of Life is the idea of noticing the small moments. I have been a participant for many years and each year, I wonder if I will have the energy to write every day. This year, I am going to try to coincide it with my daily poetry writing, and intend to compose small poems on small moments. We’ll see how it goes …)

Day Thirty One

Not one wasted
word, but many
Not one wasted
rhyme, but many
Not one jaded
thought, but many
Not one poem
worth such love
but many
Not just one small
story unfolding
inside this insanity
but many
Not merely one of us
unaffected, unmoved,
unmoored, unafraid,
unbound, misunderstood,
but maybe all

Note: I was intending to write a poem, reflecting on the poems I’ve written this  month for Slice of Life, which started off in one relatively normal place on March 1 and veered unpredictably and out of control into a whole new reality. Which is where I find myself now, on March 31, writing a poem that didn’t want to play by my intentions. The lines just kept building, like a building about to collapse on itself, and I just went with the flow. For maybe it did what I intended, brought some closure to a month of writing poems of observation, that we are affected by the pandemic in the world. Not just one. But maybe all. Maybe all of us.

Peace (sending it your way),
Kevin

(I am participating in the March Slice of Life challenge via the Two Writing Teachers site.  Slice of Life is the idea of noticing the small moments. I have been a participant for many years and each year, I wonder if I will have the energy to write every day. This year, I am going to try to coincide it with my daily poetry writing, and intend to compose small poems on small moments. We’ll see how it goes …)

Day Thirty

Sometime, we wonder
what the small house
on a stick at the edge
of the road says about
the people around us –

Who discarded the college
application guide? the
peanut-free cookbook?
the Learn Hebrew Now,
scribbled with blue note
marks? the spy novel?
the beach read? the picture
book gone grey with age?

And what does it say
about me, a reader
picking through the bones
of abandoned tomes
in this small home,
eyeing titles through
the glass door, wondering,
do I really need just
one book?

I do

Peace (in words and pages),
Kevin

PS — earlier this month, I shared a demo of a song: Beneath the Ruins (There Lives the Sun). Yesterday, I worked in a more polished and produced version of the song and then recruited my lovely wife to sing harmony vocals with me, all as a gift of hope for ourselves, for the world, for you.

(I am participating in the March Slice of Life challenge via the Two Writing Teachers site.  Slice of Life is the idea of noticing the small moments. I have been a participant for many years and each year, I wonder if I will have the energy to write every day. This year, I am going to try to coincide it with my daily poetry writing, and intend to compose small poems on small moments. We’ll see how it goes …)

Day Twenty Nine

Unexpected winds of winter
may be best remembered
by broken sticks and branches
and pinecone piles, long buried
since late December –
now debris, freed from snow:
a seasonal backyard surrender

Peace (picking it up),
Kevin

(I am participating in the March Slice of Life challenge via the Two Writing Teachers site.  Slice of Life is the idea of noticing the small moments. I have been a participant for many years and each year, I wonder if I will have the energy to write every day. This year, I am going to try to coincide it with my daily poetry writing, and intend to compose small poems on small moments. We’ll see how it goes …)

Day Twenty Seven

It’s just smile after smile;
just mile after mile –
streets and sidewalks
and lawns lined
with faces not seen
in weeks – you wave
and wave and wave –
you find yourself smiling
with hardly strength
to speak, just motion
of mobile movement,
settling in with disbelief;
your front seat sadness
colliding with this madness,
even in temporary relief

Note: You may have seen school communities organizing these Car Parades, where the school staff keeps the social distancing by driving (each in own cars) through the community, to see students again, if only briefly. We did that yesterday, thanks to the organization prowess of a colleague. We had more than 50 cars driving for two hours throughout our town, following bus routes across the entire community. So many kids were ready for us (a message had gone out) and it was heartening, uplifting to see families together, waving and shouting and holding up signs of support for the school, and teachers, and for each other. It was the first time seeing many of my students since our abrupt closure on Friday the 13th (yeah, that day). What joy, mixed with sadness, too, that we find ourselves in this situation. I think we teachers needed it as much as families needed it — that connection reminder. We do the best we can do. (more)

Peace (traveling the distance),
Kevin