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…
Pepper and Poems
115 Articles
115
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…
by Alicia Ostriker To be blessed said the old woman is to live and work so hard God’s love washes right through you like milk through a cow To be blessed said the dark red tulip is to knock their…
“It was a couple of springs ago. I was driving into New York City from New Jersey on one of those crowded, fast-moving turnpikes you enter it by,” writes Frederick Buechner. “It was very warm. There was brilliant sunshine, and…
This Sunday finds me in Atlanta helping a daughter move into a new apartment. Unpacking yesterday, she couldn’t find an Important pair of black jeans. Her favorite pair. It’s kind of a disaster! (They’ll turn up, of course; surely they…
What do you yearn for? Here’s a little poem by Louise Glück that made me think twice… Lament Suddenly, after you die, those friends who never agreed about anything agree about your character. they’re like a houseful of singers rehearsing…
“Think of poetry as fishing. What really pulls is the fascination of touching a deep, unseen world with monofilament line. It’s wonderfully dark down there, so I can’t see what might be coming along that I can possibly hook and…
Students have left campus following the end of the term, and summer classes have yet to begin. An eerie quiet holds in the early morning… The daylilies think about greeting the day, the last of the columbine ring their tiny…