I have a friend, old and retired, who keeps busy helping the poor. Let’s call him Ted because he wants to remain anonymous. Some of his ideas, he says, wouldn’t make many of his neighbo...

In a life with many valleys and a few mountaintops Alvin has met many people he thought were normal and others he thought not.

Other than death there’s no way to escape them unless you’re a hummingbird

After Yeats and Heaney, you wonder when the new one will come galloping out of Dublin or perhaps from yet another farm

I will never forget him but I can’t remember his name it’s been so long ago. Maybe I never knew it. But I think of him on days

Gramps knows a minister who collects classic Corvettes. He rents another garage whenever he buys another Corvette. He says his estate will sell the c…

It’s time to leave the man alone. He’s getting old, his wife says. He’s really slowing down. He’s always been a man occupied with one thing

Through the nursery glass Carlos Montero peeks at Consuela, his twelfth, in the arms of a nurs… Pink as a peony with brilliant black hair,

Walter Branham, a retired teacher, and his wife Victoria went to Applebee’s, the chain restaurant, for lunch one day last week. First time they had gone there. Usually they go to an eth...

In your mind you hear words snarling all day long but no poem arrives. The words are locked

Every day comes praise for Him everywhere in nature a cricket chirps a wren sings

“Damn the vernal equinox! Full speed ahead!” is all that Cootie Murphy would ever say when he sat on the last stool at the end of the bar in The Stag & Doe Inn. He wouldn’t say it very ...

Where did it go? I really don’t know. I lost it weeks ago in the middle of the night. Too tired to get up.