Learning from the Ancestors around us

How can I develop more optimism as I approach every challenge?

How can I cultivate more kindness, generosity of spirit, and seemingly infinite patience and grace?

Oh, Robert Judd, 
what lessons can you teach me? 
How did you learn these magnanimous skills? 
Even though we met only through your obituary,
I ask you to be my teacher. 
I invite and welcome you 
as one of my protective forces, 
supporting me 
on this journey 
of life.

About this poem:

Inspired by this email obituary:

It is with profound sadness that I write to say that our Executive Director, Robert Judd, died suddenly on Saturday, August 24. He was 63. A distinguished scholar of early modern keyboard music, Bob had served the American Musicology Society as Executive Director since 1996; indeed, he served as our heart and soul as well. The breadth of knowledge, optimism and keen analytical mind with which he approached every challenge over those twenty-three years will be sorely missed. Even more, however, we will miss his kindness, his generosity of spirit, and what one member called his "seemingly infinite patience and grace.

This poem is part of my Solstice solar year poem cycle, where I write a poem a day from June 22, 2019 to June 21, 2020. The poem a day may get posted on a different day than it was written, or several poems might get posted on the same day. And if I choose to submit a poem to a literary journal, I delete it from this blog before doing so. That's my project. I hope it touches your soul and makes you think.

And maybe inspires you to write more poems of your own.

Global Climate Crisis Roulette

Place your bets!

Spin the wheel!

What will it be?

80 degrees on the Oregon Coast? Get out your tanning lotion!

Assorted tornados and floods demolish your home?

Extreme heat and drought drain the aquifers, sinking your city?

Hey! Maybe you’ll grow bananas in Alaska!

Last remaining glacier melts into the rising tsunami seas?

It’s a crap shoot, this Global climate crisis roulette wheel.

Place your bets!

Spin the wheel!

You could get lucky today!



But the house always wins.



Brought to you by Transnational Corporations, Inc.

Patent Pending

About this poem:

This poem is part of my Solstice solar year poem cycle, where I write a poem a day from June 22, 2019 to June 21, 2020. The poem a day may get posted on a different day than it was written, or several poems might get posted on the same day. And if I choose to submit a poem to a literary journal, I delete it from this blog before doing so. That's my project. I hope it touches your soul and makes you think.

And maybe inspires you to write more poems of your own.

Full Moon Falls from the Sky

Standing together in the living room looking out the window

Wind blowing hard from the west everything flipping around thrashing in the gale

Dust rises from the asphalt road as high as the telephone wires

Dust so thick I can not see through it

The road is unusable, too dangerous, no visibility

High in the sky the full moon shines in the northwest

Suddenly it falls in an arc to the west

Then it reappears back in its northwest high sky position

only to fall again

in rapid moonset

How can this be?

At this latitude the moon is never that far north.

Has the Earth tilted on her axis?

Speeded up her rotation?

Maybe that is causing the high winds.

No.

The winds are coming from the west.

If her rotation speeded up the winds would be coming from the east.

Maybe the moon has shifted her orbit and is speeding around the earth?

No.

Then she would show her phases as she set in the west of the night sky.

She stays full round bright.

How does the moon pop back into her position high in the northwest sky as the west wind whips the trees in fury and clouds the road with impenetrable dust?

I don’t know.

I have no explanation.

Just like the woman who the news says shot her brother dead on Friday and shot her aunt and grandmother, too. Doctors counted nine bullets in grandmother’s pelvis.

Like the full moon falling from the sky, I have no story to explain why.

About this poem

This poem is part of my Solstice solar year poem cycle, where I write a poem a day from June 22, 2019 to June 21, 2020. The poem a day may get posted on a different day than it was written, or several poems might get posted on the same day. And if I choose to submit a poem to a literary journal, I delete it from this blog before doing so. That's my project. I hope it touches your soul and makes you think.

And maybe inspires you to write more poems of your own.