Here’s a poem from the vault to go with the Civil War program that my co-blogger Dick will be involved with in April. I wrote this poem after visiting my brother David and his family in south central Virginia in the 1970s. He had recently taken a position as a…
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With the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon in late April 1975 getting near, the media reports and conversation in our own city are turning more often to that awful time in Southeast Asia. The suffering all around was immense. I was in my junior year at the then-University…
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Here’s a Spring-loaded poem from our far-flung correspondent at the Poetry Desk on the coast of northeast Maine, the faithful Tom Sexton. Our man Down East is counting on mud season to soften the base paths before the Red Sox open at Fenway.—PM . Goldfinches at a Feeder A…
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One of our far-flung correspondents, Tom Sexton, checked in with a new poem from the apple yards of Maine, where he is counting icicles and writing a memoir about growing up in Lowell. In the great tradition of apple poems by Lawrence High School-grad Robert Frost and others, Tom gives…
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It is still freakin’ cold out there, so I’m posting another Caribbean composition from the vault.—PM . Hibiscus Lane 1. One nimble gecko scaling a mosquito net remains the only lizard we’ve seen in a week on the island whose old name, Hewanorra, means “where the iguana is found.” Purple…
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In the early 2000s, my family was fortunate enough to visit the island of St. Lucia in the Caribbean Sea for several Februarys in a row. This morning, I was looking for something to post that would transport readers out of the Lowell snow zone for a few minutes.—PM .…
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The shame of the result in the court case about the future of the Pawtucket Falls Dam is the lack of trade-off and balancing of interests in the court’s decision. Enel is already generating green energy and making money on the hydro-power system, otherwise they would not be operating in…
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I lived in Pawtucketville for several years, from the late 1970s to early ’80s. I often write in response to a place or to make sense of a place, and that neighborhood was no different. I lived on the top floor of an old triple-decker, a sea-green block on a…
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Poet Ezra Pound said, “Poetry [or literature] is news that stays news,” and the doctor-poet of Paterson, New Jersey, William Carlos Williams, believed that the news worthwhile receiving can be found in poems. Following is an excerpt from a long poem that includes Williams’s well known lines about poetry and…
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Kate Hanson Foster graduated from UMass Lowell and gained her MFA in Poetry from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She lives in Groton, Mass. Her poems have appeared in California Quarterly, Comstock Review, and other literary magazines. Her first book “Mid Drift,” published by Loom Press in 2011, was selected that…
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