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...

There is a poignancy in Natasha Trethewey’s “History Lesson” that I find irresistible – it is beautiful and evocative and sad and triumphant all at once. I think that what I appreciate the most is how she says so much – about an important relationship, about memory, about...

I don’t know what made me think of this poem today. Perhaps it’s that we’re moving into the days of high school graduations, when 17 and 18 year-olds venture out into the world ready to seek out a job, serve their country, or venture into the territory of higher education, or...

Stephen Crane made his literary mark at age 23 with his brilliant book on war, The Red Badge of Courage. Though he was rejected for service for poor health, Crane saw more than his fair share of the horrors of war as a correspondent covering conflicts in Greece, Puerto Rico, Spain, and Cuba....