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With Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. being remembered tomorrow in a special way across the nation, I went back to a prose poem written after a family visit to Washington, D.C., in the early summer of 2004, another presidential election year. We were months away from seeing Barack Obama make news with a…
Read More »Here’s the third group of South Common haiku from the Facebook postings in November and December. If we ever get a pile of snow this winter, I’ll try to write another batch with the Common in white.—PM . South Common Haiku Set (III) . Who has not looked up and seen…
Read More »South Common Haiku Set . Red bow on blue door sunlit beyond the frost park on a new-year day. . —Paul Marion (c) 2012
Read More »A New Year’s Eve tradition was popularized on this day – December 31, 1929 – when band leader, Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians played “Auld Lang Syne” at the stroke of midnight in the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City. “Auld Lang Syne” is a poem written by Scotsman…
Read More »In November and early December, I posted a new haiku almost every day on my Facebook page. I gathered up the first batch and posted them here on rh.com about a month ago. For those who do not use Facebook and may be interested in the poems, following is another…
Read More »Under the title “Dissolves,” the new sections of Joe Donahue’s long poem “Terra Lucida,” are due in January from the publisher Talisman House in New Jersey. Joe is on long-term leave from Lowell, based at Duke University, where he researches eternal questions. The reading public rarely catches up to a visionary poet in…
Read More »MassMoments reminds us today that the Puritans of Massachusetts led by minister Increase Mather thought the celebration of Christmas a vulgar, pagan-like and “profane and superstitious custom.” Over those early years the custom was never totally stamped-out. In the early 19th century when the revelry – especially drinking and merry-making …
Read More »I wrote the first draft of this poem in 1976, and worked on it on and off for a long time. I had in mind the extensive outdoor lighting displays in Dracut (the town) and Lowell, but, especially as it evolved, the dense array of Christmas decorations in Pawtucketville, between Mammoth Road and…
Read More »Today December 17 is the birthday of American poet and editor John Greenleaf Whittier – born in Haverhill in 1807. He was also an ardent advocate for the abolition of slavery in the United States. hittier worked in Lowell as an editor for the Middlesex Standard in the mid-1840s. During this time…
Read More »From the daguerreotype taken at Mount Holyoke, December 1846 or early 1847. The only authenticated portrait of Emily Dickinson later than childhood, the original is held by the Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College On this day – December 10, 1830 – poet Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst,…
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