Bed in Summer by Robert Louis Stevenson In winter I get up at night And dress by yellow candle-light. In summer, quite the other way, I have to go to bed by day. I have to go to bed and see The birds still hopping on the tree, Or hear the grown-up […]
MoreToday’s guest poster is my sister Ceci. Ceci is the oldest of eleven and I am number nine, so she has a history with the family that I know nothing about. For instance, I never knew a beloved book of my childhood, a book that seemed like it was part of the furniture, belonging to […]
MoreA two-poem salute to fathers on this Father’s Day 2019. With poems as wonderful as these, that’s as good as twenty-one guns. This excerpt from Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” belongs in the wild, in air cleaned fresh by summer rain. But with no countryside excursion possible, I taped the poem to the edge […]
MoreFor My Daughter by Grace Paley I wanted to bring her a chalice or maybe a cup of love or cool water I wanted to sit beside her as she rested after the long day I wanted to adjure commend admonish saying don’t do that […]
MoreI’m an Anglophile. I like repression, I suppose, depth under calm facades. My favorite writers—Austen, Dickens, Penelope Fitzgerald, Jane Gardam, David Mitchell, Barbara Pym, Andrea Levy to name a few—have always been Brits, and now my favorite education secretary—if one can admit to such pedantic tastes—is English as well. British education secretary Michael Gove […]
MoreRarely does my neighborhood offer peculiar sights. There’s a walker who charges down the street with ski poles in the middle of summer and a very tall cross-dresser I haven’t seen in years. During swim team season toilet paper hangs gracefully from trees, and in the spring girls in prom dresses duck into limousines. That’s […]
MoreMy mother used to have us children memorize poems in the summers. I don’t remember if we got a reward or not (learning to dive merited a candy bar, so I suspect the same for poem-memorization), but we didn’t resist. The easiest poems to memorize were A.A. Milne’s from the wonderful When We Were Very […]
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