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

Quote: Sylivia Plath Poem: T A Delmore

Sylvia Plath said, "Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise."



Shopping Cart Blues

Hold my hand and squeeze
Cantaloupes. Push the cart
As I disappear underneath.
Ridged steel and unpaid
Groceries, essentials
Dad would mutter throwing
A bag of potatoes to my back.
Wurlitzer sounds bring me down
Isles that once held that big fire
Truck over frozen peas. Holiday fare.

Take me where you will
To the end
Of meat counters
The beginning of checkout lines.
No one pushes me down
Linoleumed isles anymore.
I am the giant to smiling eyes
Under the haul of carted food.
Gone are the organ sounds
Of Montavani in return
Is the smell of Havarti,
And too many memories.

Autumn Poem by Tom Delmore

AUTUMN IN THE WINGS



I am looking for autumn
in the staghorn sumac,
the gold of the vine maple,
the absence of apples.
A creeping cool that turns



furnaces on and stale odors
out. Fall has found me,
taking a ritual
of beauty, beyond the buoyancy


of my parents dreams, older than
the Bible. Autumn renowned
till cold puts pigment to mounds
blended for burning
or bagging.

All this pressed, years past
between wax paper
and taped to school windows.

We are in Austin Texas this week.

Quote: Toni Morrison Poem TA Delmore

Toni Morrison wrote, "They straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places ... but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. ... All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place." I posted this quote in Abbey of the arts blog.




Who’s Sport?

She does Tai Chi with less guilt.
Baseball books sell better in winter.
Her husband would never understand
DiMaggio a coffee spokesman.
Forever, his sultan of swat.

Soft feet on red brick
The thrill of the grass
Or the grasshopper position.
He can catch fly balls
She can move energy.

She will eat
Her husband one day
Mantis-like, sell
His baseball books
And keep her Mr. Coffee.

Till then his kiss
Is a double latté
No foam.