Words Are My Life
I have been writing poetry since going back to college at age 40. That was over 20 years ago. Harrisburg Area Community College brought out my love for writing. Before I knew it I was the editor of the school newspaper and tutoring other students in English and creative writing. My day job as a laboratory courier involved driving 200 miles a day around central Pennsylvania. While cruising through the mountains on an autumn day the smell of the forest wafted through the windows and into my brains.
The mountains smelled like wet leaves today.
It made me want to linger,
To float in the incense of autumn present
Among childhood leaf piles
In the crackling crisp Novembers,
When time stood waiting
For the lazy boys to catch up.
I wanted to walk in the woods today,
To savor the simple hunger
Of leafy fires in smoky pyres,
Amid the leaf-drifted times and miles,
As if memories within
The mountains could make
The busy boys catch up.
It was the start of a flood that has never stopped. I had no lack of encouragement from my English comp teacher, Sunshine Brown, and HACC’s librarian, Judy K. Bard. I won awards for poems I submitted to the campus literary journal, Thoughts Beyond Insanity. Following that my work was published twice in the literary journal, Harrisburg Review and The Villager, published by The Bronxville Women’s Club.
When I left college life took a variety of interesting twists, I spent time as a paralegal, Went into the antique trade for 5 years, moved to the opposite coast, worked in a plywood mill, and in the cabinet shop of a yacht manufacturer. Along the way, my pen has occasionally slowed down but never stopped.
I have kept myself busy with words writing blogs. These prose efforts include Adventures In Antiquing which discusses the buying and selling of antiques and Seaward Adventures, which is about ”Wind, Water and Sailing as Soulcraft” which features some of my nautical poems. My most recent effort in blogging is Poet In Place, poetry in the plague year.
I recently won third place in Tidepools, the literary journal of Peninsula Community College in Port Angeles, Washington. I find words waiting to come together in rhythm and rhyme wherever I go. I do not strive to be avant-garde. I was brought up on Whitman, Dylan Thomas, Emily Dickinson, Yeats and Robert Service, and a host of British and American word-spinners. I am not much on form but I say what I see. I am always busy and will probably never catch up.