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.

The shards of her life were scattered
around her feet as though the glass
he always thought half full had been
thrown in anger against an unyielding wall.
She knew it did not have to be that way,
that she could, in time, resurrect what
had once been, though with a new
partner, but the work would be arduous,
consuming, and she was not sure that she
was up to the task, lulled into the now
ravaged complacency that held no purpose.
She wanted to understand why it came to this
but there was no real hope of doing so
and trying would reopen a wound
that had only recently stopped bleeding
out her heart and her broken soul.
She would move on, not out of hope but
necessity, open herself up and see
what might fill the void of her existence.

First appeared in The Wayfarer Art and Literary Journal – Beyond the Reef, Issue 1, 2024
https://heyzine.com/flip-book/5b1b36587c.html