Stop and Render Aid by Frank Wagner . Every traveler knows about certain points along the road, where the asphalt cracks, where the broken bottles crashed, where the chicken did not make it across. This is where the sun blinds the eyes, or the rain gets too thick that it…
From University Hospital in Waterford, Ireland, Alex Hayes of the staff sent us a poem he wrote in the midst of the virus crisis. We know Alex from the anthology Atlantic Currents: Connecting Cork and Lowell, just published this month. He has several poems in the collection. A graduate of…
Writer and painter Chath pierSath, a regular contributor to our blog, works on a farm in Bolton, Mass. The Saddest First Day of Spring By Chath pierSath . The saddest, grayest first day of spring I’ve seen, Watching for the virus that has gone viral, Invisible particles unleashed in space On…
art and Emanuel a tale of Fort Wood, Missouri by Michael Casey . when you are making seventy-six dollars a month the idea of spending one hundred dollars on a wall poster when you don’t even have a wall sort of stupid but he sees a leaflet on my…
As panic sweeps the United States and the world in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic, our regular contributor George Chigas of UMass Lowell was reminded of the poem “Fear” by Charles Simic, the Serbian-born Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who has taught at the University of New Hampshire since the 1970s.…
Please welcome Kathleen Aponick of Andover to our roster of writers. RPH Postcards from Haggett’s Pond By Kathleen Aponick —after a recurrence of cancer I’m by the water on a path once a railroad bed thinking of trains whizzing by, passengers deep in thought, tense perhaps over work, family problems,…
Fred Woods is familiar to many of us who served in the Lowell revival campaign in the Roaring ’80s. He goes back earlier in Lowell as part of Team Tsongas during Paul’s runs for the U.S. House and Senate—and he was there for the presidential push in 1991-92. Although known…
One of our regular contributors, Chath pierSath, is back in Bolton, Mass., after several months in Cambodia. We have light snow today, but with the mild weather this past week Chath was out pruning on the farm where he works. He sent this poem about the seasonal work on the…
We have a new poem from Tom Sexton in Alaska, an avid reader of the blog and regular contributor. Tom’s Lowell poems will be published by Loom Press later this year in a collection titled Cummiskey Alley. Tom grew up in the city and now counts among his honors his selection…
Thanks to poet Joseph Donahue (Lowell/Duke University) and Tony Sampas, archivist at the UMass Lowell Libraries, we have another writer to introduce to our blog readers: William Reed Huntington (1838-1909). Born into a prominent Lowell family, William was the son of Hannah Hinckley and Elisha Huntington, a doctor who served…