People don’t look to the long-ago poetry of Edgar Guest for soaring metaphors or complex pentameter. He was often called the People’s Poet because of his commonsense-able thoughts about life, rendered in the form of simple verse that was full of homespun wisdom and spiritual decency. When I was writing the What Would Jesus Do blog I remembered this poem from childhood about “the men who live their creeds.” Continue reading “Maybe This Says it Pretty Well” »
I intended to write this for Memorial Day but got sidetracked by the hoopla around the joy of Dakota’s graduation, so I’m offering it instead as a tribute on the 4th of July.
In these politically troubled times, it’s easy enough to forget that we can hate the carnage and waste of war, but still love and honor the courageous men and women who’ve served and sacrificed themselves in the name of a country they love and the freedoms they mean to defend and uphold.
I ran across this poem recently quite by accident and was so touched by it, I’d like to pass it on to you. It reminded me of a family incident a few years ago, that showed me how easy it is to overlook the true heroes around us, or perhaps, simply not know their stories, so we can honor them appropriately. Continue reading “The 4th of July Meets Memorial Day” »
You can’t grow up to be a writer of love stories, if you aren’t an incurable romantic.
Despite my own history of picking lemons in the Garden of Love – and oxytocin notwithstanding – I’ve found that I need to believe in true love. I have seen it – not often – but enough to believe it possible. My Apache friends say you only need to see one white crow to know all crows are not black.
In the darker days when heartbreak threatened to teeter me into cynicism about true love, and I almost succumbed to a disbelief in its very existence, it comforted me to remember that much of the world’s greatest love poetry had been penned by men – ergo, somewhere, sometime there have been men who loved-deeply, truly and forever. So it isn’t an impossible dream (at least that’s what I told myself.) One White Crow, is all you need.
So I offer you just a few of my favorite love poems for your heart’s delight:
Continue reading “Loving Love Poetry” »
My parents read to me and to each other — poetry for the most part — and I never went to bed a night without memorizing a poem, or a group of verses. If it were something lengthy like The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, I’d memorize a stanza a night, my hands-down favorite, this:
“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: Nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line
Nor all thy Tears wash out a word of it.”
Continue reading “Were You Lucky Enough to Have Parents Who Read to You?” »
