While much of the poetry that I write is deeply personal, this one stems from an experience I had helping a friend and colleague through the collapse and beginnings of reconstructing his marriage.
Twenty years he towed the line,
In the lead or just behind,
Purpose bent to meet his task,
Ever solid, firm, steadfast.
Many nights would find him still,
At his work for hours 'till,
Exhaustion bid him pause a while,
Then homeward trudge without a smile.
Daybreak bids him e'er again,
Drawn as moth to candle's flame,
Weary eyes in a care-worn face,
Search for meaning in
…
Read the rest
Large even from an airplane window seen,
sixty miles away.
Built to send people where nobody's been,
the vacuum of space.
Buses could park on the stripes of the flag,
if it laid down.
A symbol of pride, a nation's great brag,
look what we did.
Here they built monsters of metal and flame,
they tore at the air.
Hyperbole claimed we would conquer and tame,
the vastness of space.
Pushing man and machine to limits then past,
They risked all to explore.
Lionized pilots who flew fearless and fast,
some died on the way.
The men are gone -
…
Read the rest
For years I’ve been trying to convince Liz to let me “sleep in” until eight or nine on Christmas morning. Liz, however, is firmly in the camp of the early Christmas risers. I don’t think she ever once has allowed me to stay in bed past six thirty, even before we had kids. Since we’ve had the kids, she’s even developed a habit of waking them up because they have the audacity to sleep in. What kind of holiday is it when you have to stay up late the night before shrouding trinkets in ridiculously patterned paper only to wake … Read the rest
A few months ago a friend was having car trouble. She was broken down on the side of the road, and her husband was at work in town and couldn’t get there to rescue her any time soon. She called Liz who went to pick her up. That’s where I got involved.
Her husband is mechanically inclined and experienced with minor repairs and routine maintenance, but he hasn’t done a lot of troubleshooting of major failures. He had spent two days doing what he could, trying to figure out what was wrong and get their car back on the road. … Read the rest
Peter's Prose, Poetry, and Random Ramblings