NOTE: TODAY’S POST FOLLOWS BELOW:

Dear poetry-lovers,

          Thank you from the bottom of my heart for following my blog. Some of you have been daily readers since it began 9 years ago, some are more sporadic or more recent followers.  Thank you one and all. As you can imagine, it takes a fair amount of time to write and choose both an original poem (and select a photo to pair it with from my own work.)  Besides the blog, I spend a fair amount of time finding journals and anthologies which are looking for poems to publish and I’ve been honored to be included in hundreds of them from around the world.  If my work has moved you, made you smile or laugh or feel the depth of my writing in your hearts, then my work is all the more meaningful.
          Plain View Press published my second collection of poetry, Free of the Shadow,  this month,  It has been 16 years since I’ve taken the time to gather and organize my work into a manuscript and sent it to a publisher.  I was thrilled they accepted it and the response from people who have read early copies is beyond what I hoped for.  You can find it at B&N, independent stores and at Amazon for $17.99; check it out, if you like online HERE:

          But to thank you for being a follower, I am offering to send you a (signed, if you like) copy directly from me for $10.00, and I’ll pay shipping if you order it from me.  Just CLICK HERE.

Thank you again, my readers, whoever you are, one and all.

He keeps a ledger of his successes
and failures, that column hidden from sight.
He has heard God keeps a ledger of each person
and he cannot fathom a computer
capable of storing that many files, but God
has powers, and he supposes data centers
that mere humans cannot begin to comprehend.
He would like to get a look at the ledger sheet
God has on him, to see if his ledger
and the one God keeps could be reconciled.
He is afraid to ask, for God might just
sync his ledger with a mere mortal one
and he can guess he won’t come out
the winner in that comparison for sure.
So he keeps his own ledger, backs it up
regularly and hopes, secretly, that the file
will be corrupt, the backup unrecoverable
and he’ll wait and see that God has to say
when his time ultimately comes for the meeting.

TO MY SUBSCRIBERS/READERS

I began this daily blog on March 26, 2016. Since that date I have made over 3,300 posts (trying very hard not to be repetitive). With a new collection of poetry and short prose from Plain View Press entitled “Free of the Shadow,” now released, I will be devoting time to the book and cutting back this blog beginning on April 15 to occasional posts without a fixed schedule.