Oct 13, 2015 | Italian Sonnet, Sonnet, The Work of Greater Minds
In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone, Stands a gigantic leg, which far off throws The only shadow that the desert knows:— “I am great OZYMANDIAS,” saith the stone, “The King of Kings; this mighty City shows ...
Oct 13, 2015 | Sonnet, The Work of Greater Minds
I met a traveler from an antique land Who said: “Two vast and trunk-less legs of stone Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those...
Jun 26, 2015 | Hymn, Quintains, The Work of Greater Minds
How sweet and awful* is the place With Christ within the doors, While everlasting love displays The choicest of her stores! Here every bowel of our God With soft compassion rolls; Here peace and pardon bought with blood Is food for dying souls. While all our...
May 10, 2015 | Mom, The Work of Greater Minds
I was told that all the firsts would be hard. Today is my first Mother’s Day without my mom. Billy Collins, in his poem “The Lanyard,” has captured my own feelings better than I could myself. In it he tells how, as a child, he’d thought that...
Mar 25, 2015 | Spring, The Work of Greater Minds
To what purpose, April, do you return again? Beauty is not enough. You can no longer quiet me with the redness Of little leaves opening stickily. I know what I know. The sun is hot on my neck as I observe The spikes of the crocus. The smell of the earth is good. It is...
Jan 22, 2015 | Grief, Mom, Quatrains, Rhymed Couplets, The Work of Greater Minds
It is a place where poets crowned may feel the heart’s decaying. It is a place where happy saints may weep amid their praying. Yet let the grief and humbleness, as low as silence, languish. Earth surely now may give her calm to whom she gave her anguish O poets,...