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Sample poem:
THE LIVING WOUND

Whether through serrated remarks
or the back of his hand
we all live with wounds from the father.
If we found ourselves controlled
or abandoned to live on our own,
his ghost sits with his sons and daughters.
Was it simply that we loved the same woman,
our mother, his wife and ever-fading lover,
tearing us apart when we became men?
Did he survive or devour his competition,
or was it we that turned away, rejecting the old,
tamping and trampling him in our haste to be the future?
It’s taken too many years,
but the father is forgiven for reacting with such vengeance,
taking so personally the inevitable strikes and blows of the son.                                                                                                        

Author’s Note

The following pages come from a collection of thirty years of random thoughts and expressions usually scribbled down on paper napkins, backs of shopping lists, margins of phone bills, and scraps of paper bags. Mostly, poetry comes in violent outbursts of emotion that must be written down the very instant it arrives or be lost forever.

Poetry is a fast-moving river with the opportunity to dip a cup once in a while. Without seizing the moment the river moves on, the feeling disappears.

Sometimes only a single line is retrieved and the rest of the poem must be painfully squeezed from that moment. The best poems, and you will recognize them immediately are ones that come through as complete expressions, when one slides to a stop on the side of the freeway or races into the house to find paper and pen to write them down.

The job for me as a poet is to be prepared at all times for those few moments a month when lightning strikes, the river floods it banks, and the words flow in a seemingly endless list of lines, straight from the heart, separate from thought. Great poems come in bunches, five or six at a time, then months might go by before another good moment strikes. I may write every day, but most become fodder for the shredder.

Perhaps the job for you as the reader is to search out poems that strike deep into your heart, cherish their resonance and seek new discoveries. A good poem might even give voice to the poet that lives inside you.