A mole is in the garden. I am at the nursery buying flowers. It is Spring. Here are three poems to tickle the mind this morning… How A Thought Thinks By Kay Ryan A thought is dumb, without eyes, ears,…
Pepper and Poems
There comes a point in the night when you just give up (speaking for myself, of course). Your tricks and techniques for getting back to sleep have failed. What’s next? Acceptance. For me, that looks like turning on the lamp beside the…
Billy Collins’ newest collection, “Musical Tables,” sings tiny melodies with perfect pitch. “Small poems are drastic examples of poetry’s way of squeezing large content into tight spaces,” Collins writes in the afterward. “The small poem is a flash, a…
“And when we give each other Christmas gifts in his name, let us remember that he has given us the sun and the moon and the stars, and the earth with its forests and mountains and oceans – and all…
When the sun is just right in December and you’re walking around the block in your old neighborhood (where you grew up) you’ll see boxes that give wings to words, woodland animals visiting for a season (or longer) and magical beasts…
An October visitor has lately surprised me, sipping sage in the garden as the maples and oaks and hackberries and dogwoods show red and yellow and gold… Each day I wonder: is this our last together? And think: perhaps that…
Nearly a month without rain in Nashville, the trees in their autumn glory look thirsty. My pups stir up a small dust storm each time they go out, pups and dust both finding their way back into the house. The…
It’s hard when you do the right thing and end up in the wrong place. My friend Mary Raymond stops in at Bacon today with a funny and heartfelt essay on how she got herself into a tricky situation, and…
Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) Glory be to God for dappled things – For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced…