I have so long wondered about
the grief one nurses, wanting
to run to ask you
what I can do
but not asking you,
receding in fear instead
Tag Archives: poetry
Somewhere by the sea
Before the question
and after the answer
two make love
in salt-sea air
They’ll want what you can’t give
And the other will be too true as well
Lines of communication
Once in Germany a Spanish man
asked this American
how to use the phone.
Now I’ve studied Spanish
in my day,
but the year of the day was long before,
in ’84,
and now I live in Holland.
In Holland they speak Dutch.
That means not much to a Spaniard,
but sadly Dutch
words were the only words
I could think of to help the Spaniard.
I had thought at Pentecost
God had set it aright,
but clearly we’re still lacking light
when an American in Germany
speaks Dutch to a Spaniard!
Tulips gobble water
This is rude
compared to other flowers.
But we’ll not dismiss
so striking a guest.
Wine, olive oil, salt and pepper
Not the last, but the four
middle things,
accompaniment to our daily bread
It’s hard to be a dad
It’s hard to be a dad.
It’s hard to do the right thing.
It’s hard to know what the right thing is.
Sometimes you think you know.
But then you see you got it wrong.
Shall we get a new house?
Throw away all the crap of the past
and live like pure people of the present?
Slash means line break
This is not so violent as it sounds,
just as the little smiles
above unaccented syllables
are only suggestions of the pleasure
one gets from poetry.
Prayer flags
Utrecht Journal 