Hurricane
Dear Eugene, Here I am, writing at an hour when I don't usually write, with tons of stuff I want to write about but not the heart and energy to sift through the rubble and find a gift meaningful to you. I can never be a poet; I know that already. You've published a book of poetry and said it took you, what, 55 years(?), to come up with those 100 pages. That's very prolific, compared to whatever output I am yielding so far--if I should be so shameless to take liberties with the word "output." Life has its way to drain poetry out of everything. Now I am not blaming life. When there is no life there is no poetry. But it is also true that much of life's circumstance is not conducive to giving the light of day to the dark corners of heart. Am I suggesting poetry should only be about the melancholy? I hope I am not; though I must say it often feels like so to me. Maybe the word is not sadness, but thoughtfulness. Yet so often the birth of a poem...