When all the starlings, robins, jays Have given up and gone to nest, The crows refuse the calling night, Defer the final rest. Over the waiting conifers They improvise an arabesque, A final celebration to The dying fire in the West. Like fighter pilots when flight was new, Over the field they chase and dive, […]
I remember the day I started in on my career as an angry young man. In the summer of 1955 I was passing the hours between fishing and dinner on the veranda of Sunrise Camp, the rustic fishing resort outside Minocqua, Wisconsin, where my parents had met. We all went up there for a week
Walt Whitman’s poetry was a soothing dirge during the destructive American Civil War. As the world watched brother versus brother, Lincoln versus Davis, North versus South, Whitman emerged as the voice of the American conscience, vividly depicting the social-political landscape in poems like “Beat! Beat! Drums!” He even recorded a firsthand prose account of the
Walking with Whitman Read More »
This essay is dedicated to all the teachers, parents and students, who face one of the biggest challenges in our country’s history as this school year begins. Not since the polio epidemic of the 1950s and the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, have we had a more dire situation regarding the health and welfare of
Back to School 2021: Whose Turn Is It for Show and Tell? Read More »
The day is as big as she ever remembers one being. But it starts the same way all the others do, with him. “Mer-wee!” It’s only a slight slur today. That’s good. On others his speech comes out in thick moans that crawl across the smoke-filled air onto bare walls, once bright white but now
There is a Hand, my friends, which guides our destinies toward other ends than we planned. And I wish He’d cut it out. Bill Veeck, Thirty Tons a Day Talking recently with my publisher and friend, I said that I found most conspiracy theories tough to embrace, because in my experience people were unable to