Quote: William Steig Poem: Tom Delmore

William Steig said, "If I'd had it my way, I'd have been a professional athlete, a sailor, a beachcomber, or some other form of hobo, a painter, a gardener, a novelist, a banjo-player, a traveler, anything but a rich man."

The poem below is from my forthcoming boook A Poultice for Belief


The Second Plague:
Frogs Swarm
Out of the River
When the frogs came up
From the river,
Their leaps took wing,
Sending them everywhere.
Every human footfall concealed
A crunch, a squish.
Frogs hung upon bodies
like ornaments
With no boundaries.
Magicians reproduced
Frogs, and said: ha!
Pharaoh spoke: I will release
Your people to worship.
Stop this frogging!
It stopped. All smelled the rot
of the Pharaoh’s renege.

Book to be published

I got an email that my book A Poultice for Belief is going to be Published by March Street Press. I am looking at galleys of some of my poems. One was published in DRASH last May.

Quote by-Graham Greene Poem- Tom A. Delmore

Graham Greene realized early in his writing career that if he wrote just 500 words a day, he would have written several million words in just a few decades. So he developed a routine of writing for exactly two hours every day, and he was so strict about stopping after exactly two hours that he often stopped writing in the middle of a sentence. And at that pace, he managed to publish 26 novels, as well as numerous short stories, plays, screenplays, memoirs, and travel books. He said, "We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to."

Curing the Eyes

These young crows
Walked like the blind
Before Jesus, among
Dust and gravel.
Curing
Their beady black eyes
To see what is not visible.
Patrolling sameness
To find something useful
Something agitating-
Something their parents
Will steal from them.

Afghan T A Delmore Quote Stanely Kunitz

Afghan

Wrapped in your crocheted plait
I nestle into my first experience
Of you.
Knitted into life by my mother’s
Hands, each pearl a piece of animation
From black border to mosaic center.
Couched afghan, lover’s web, smother
My shivers.


Stanley Kunitz said, "Poetry is inseparable from my life force, and that began very early. It was a great gift, and it has sustained me through the years, and the losses that have attended those years."
He said, "The poem comes in the form of a blessing, like the rapture breaking through on the mind."
And, "Old myths, old gods, old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our mind, waiting for our call. We have need for them. They represent the wisdom of our race