Poems

(I) He plots movement, holds forces, makes strategy, wants high ground when the time comes.   (II) You make a date.  You place an order.  You sit.  You wait for [...]

    I smell the dust of the ranch and the smoke of the hill still as I sit here and listen to congressmen.   I feel the bruise of [...]

    July 10, 1981   On this porch, on this cool summer day, when the moon is benign in afternoon sky, when birds sing from wire to wire, I [...]

“Requiem for David is the heart’s howl, a passage through mourning, a lesson ultimately in learning how to walk alongside pain with grace.” — Sandra Cisneros, author of The House [...]

At Christmas, there is me.   Then David. Then Mary Beth. Then Eileen. Then Tim. Then John. Then Rosemary. Then Laura. Then Marie. Then Kathy. Then Teri. Then Geri. Then [...]

Absent angel   Mary on the hill, her dying son, her aching bones and flesh, her flock of his friends looking to her for what?   She endured. The next [...]

David Reardon (January 23, 1951-November 21, 2015)   You were there, David, with me. I was there with you.   We were drawn together and pushed apart by circumstances, our [...]

Let me be clear: In the face of hate and fear, I choose hope and love.   But what about the Ku Klux Klan? What about the yahoos in the [...]

Caesar will do what Caesar will do. Do the lilies worry? Do the lilies give orders to the sun? The rain? The soil food?   The rain does what the [...]

winter afternoon in the classroom a half-sleep the nun speaks and rests the eight-year-olds bow heads over loose leaf write in the row along the windows in the second to [...]