Entering Winter with a Line from Gwendolyn Brooks
written by: D.R. James
Horizon’s burst-smear of pink nonchalance
forgets We are things of dry hours and the
involuntary plan. In winter’s vise
I’ll wrestle — flail! — stampedes of elegies,
pendulums of memory, sidestepping
swathes of snow-fall brindled with late oak leaves’
yieldings: autumn’s ceding. But from this blunt
and silhouetted terrain, ranging out
tactically, cautious in my happenstance,
I will still delight — plod, but still ignite.
D. R. James, recently retired from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, lives, writes, bird-watches, and cycles with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. His latest of ten collections are Mobius Trip and Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press, 2021, 2020), and his prose and poems have appeared internationally in a wide variety of print and online anthologies and journals
Latest posts by D. R. James (see all)
- Atop Mt. Harvard, May 1976 - August 31, 2023
- May - May 1, 2023
- Mallards, Mounted on a Chimney Wall - March 13, 2023
