Like so many other people, the year and a half pandemic has thrown my sense of time way off. I’m so far behind in posting newly published poems on this blog that I find myself now playing catch up. I am both honored and happy to have had such fine journals select some of my work to publish in 2021.
both of us relieved
we made it to this side
of the pandemic –
falling back in love
with spring’s soft greening
Published in Ribbons, Tanka Café, Spring 2021
Moonbathing, Issue 23, Fall/Winter 2020
hot roasted nuts
heaped into a paper cone –
all that burning anger
you hold onto
so tightly
Photograph by Monika Topolko
As an aside, I am realizing my age is showing. Do young people today even know about folks roasting chestnuts (or other nuts) and buying a brown paper cone full of piping hot nuts to eat on the street? I first came across this in Istanbul when I was young. The scent, heat, taste on a chilly autumn afternoon was one of those moments that has stayed with me all my life. Europeans had this custom, but does anyone still do this? The fragrance was so tempting.
One of two tanka appearing Eucalypt: A Tanka Journal, Issue 28, 2020
in the attic I find
your small Wellies
with little frog faces—
oh, those happy puddles
when you were only three
Note: We lived near Hampstead Heath in NW London for a full academic year, 1989-90, with our (then) three year old son, Adam. Oh, how he loved rain puddles and stomping in them in his little green Wellies. Getting exercise each day was never a problem with a child who loved the outdoors no matter what the weather. This poem is for him.
Prune Juice, Journal of Senryu, Kyoka, Haibun & Haiga
Issue #30, March 2020
both parents
dead at sixty one –
imagine my surprise
the day I turned
sixty-two
A Poet in Time 