April is apparently Poetry Month, so it is giving me the excuse to get some poems posted to the website. For a couple of these, I’ve been meaning to get them up for some time.
But let’s start with the first one —
“In the Now” was written as a tribute to the late Jack Gilbert. As mentioned in my “In Praise of Friends” post, he was a good friend from my Premise fellowship and pretty much led the screenwriting group that came out of it, the Writers Forum. Jack had a quality of immediacy. You always sensed that there was nothing else on his mind at that moment. It showed in how he related to children and pets.
He will be greatly missed
“The Forsaken” was written many years ago as a Good Friday poem. I posted it on LiveJournal in 2009, just as text. I’d been looking for a suitable background that I liked for the poem and didn’t find one until last week.
As for the poem itself, I probably would not choose rhyming couplets now, but I seem to recall that I was experimenting with them.
The last of the most recent additions is “Moonlit”. This sonnet is even older than “The Forsaken.” I’d seen friends give up on writing dreams, and it made me think about aspirations. I didn’t want to become someone who gave up on possibilities.
The photograph for the background was taken by my friend Stanley Anderson, who graciously allowed me to use it thus. Even though the text of the poem mentions “silvery” color, and the photo has gold tones, I didn’t mind. The image is well worth the slight incongruity between words and image.
