There is a candor about Stephen Dunn’s “At The Smithville Methodist Church” that I find incredibly attractive. He is candid about his own lack of faith, his own skepticism, without being antagonistic. But he is also candid about where lack of belief falls short:...

We had a very different Fourth of July this year. My daughter, Katie, was participating in the annual Youth of the Year competition at the Minnesota North Start Morgan Americana Horse Show. Which meant that we spent most of the day with her at the MN State Fair Grounds in recording-setting 100...

While out for a run this morning I came across several poems etched into the sidewalks of our neighborhood. I’ve seen them before but this time I stopped to read (a good excuse for a breather, among other things!). I thought I’d post them as this week’s poetry, as they seem...

I don’t know how it worked out this way, but I always seemed to get “stuck” at the dinner table with my uncles and father. It was summer, and we were gathered together at a cottage in Cooperstown, NY. The cottage had been bought by my great grandfather in 1906 and our families...

Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” resonates with the remembrance of ungrateful youth. All the boy could recognize is that he had to get up early, probably to go to Church when he didn’t want to, fearful of angering his father, sullen because of that fear and the ache of not being...