This is work I've written over the years, some of it twenty five years old, some of it relatively recent. It's all copyrighted (notices appear in the footer of each document), and if you want to do anything with it but read it on-line, you need to get my permission first. Otherwise -- enjoy!
Selections in boldface indicate a poem's title. Selections in italics indicate an untitled poem listed by its first line.
This was inspired by something the evangelist at my church at that time, Milton Jones, said one Sunday morning during the sermon. As I recall, he was preaching from Matthew 23, talking about hypocricy and what it meant.
I wrote this when I was a sophomore in high school and daydreaming during class.
Just beneath the Golden Gate Bridge over San Francisco Bay is a huge, boiling whirlpool at certain times of the day, created by tidal forces in the area. The day I wrote this, I'd been out sailing on San Francisco Bay with the man I loved, a man who didn't love me, as had become increasingly clear over the summer. This was our last date.
This was inspired by one of the finest sermons I've heard in my life, a sermon titled, "The Man in the Middle", and given by Milton Jones at the Northwest Church of Christ in spring of 1985. I was and remain fascinated with the theme of "radical moderation" -- a refusal of extremist ideology while embracing extreme love for God and commitment to serving Him.
I wrote this during one of the roughest times of my life, taking care of the dying two-year-old daughter of my best friends.
Living in the Pacific Northwest you see a lot of rainbows, but I've seen two from an unusual perspective. During college, one Sunday some people at my church and I went to the coast to visit a small church there. On the way back, we literally drove through the end of a rainbow. It was so extraordinary that Bob pulled over, and we got out and looked. I ran through the foot of the rainbow, and all around me the water in the air sparkled like some mythical Sultan's treasure cave.... Four or five years later, while living in Seattle, one morning I saw a triple rainbow over Green Lake, and wrote this. The main theme, of course, isn't rainbows. It's a guy. I seem to write my best poetry when I'm falling out of love. <wry grin>
I don't remember the specific circumstances when I wrote this, but it's based on the story of Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac, in the Book of Genesis.
I'm a sucker for interesting faces, and especially eyes. The only decent haiku I ever wrote.
In the late 1980s, for several months I helped my two closest friends take care of their daughter, who had brain cancer. I wrote this a few months after she died....
A tribute to an extraordinary human being I "met" via a commercial on-line service, and then met in real life when a bunch of us got together in Southern California for a trip to Disneyland. Hans, or "Tink" (as we called him), had a friend dying of aids in a local hospice. The friend had no family, and Tink desperately wanted to visit him before he died although the hospice said he was unable to have any visitors except for family members. So we went to the hospice, hoping to talk them into letting Tink in, only to find that his friend had died that morning. We spent the afternoon talking about all kinds of things; a crisis of this kind creates a "foxhole" and you can get to know people amazingly fast.
I wrote this about what happened one afternoon when I was sitting on a rather inaccessible beach on the central Oregon Coast, a beach I knew about only because my friend Christine Olson had taken me there once when I went home with her to visit her family for a weekend. I went there with two other friends of hers after her funeral -- she died in a motorcycle accident just a few weeks shy of her twentieth birthday. While I was there, this happened. Really. No, I don't have an explanation.
Another one of the poems I wrote my sophomore year in high school while thinking about something other than my studies.
At one point my Spanish was fluent enough to allow me to try my hand at poetry. I wrote this during a discussion of Sartre or Camus or someone like that, in humanities class my sophomore year in college. I probably wrote in Spanish because I knew my professor didn't speak it.
While flying north from San Francisco to Seattle in summer of 1988, the plane passed on top of a cloud formation as the sun was sinking below the horizon. The last rays of the sun dyed the clouds below red and orange, while the clear sky above shaded from deep blue to almost black.
During the great famine in Ethiopia in 1984, the first of the string of famines in Northeast Africa during the past decade or so, Milton Jones gave an extraordinary sermon on the Book of Lamentations and the Babylonian captivity of Israel, relating it to the current famine. I doubt he intended some of the questions I asked, but they seemed obvious to me.
Written on a winter morning overlooking the Sauk River in the northern Cascade mountains of Washington State, when I was in college.
I wrote this after a sleepless night "camping" in my car parked on a back road in a beautiful little fishing town in Northern California.
I wrote this sitting on the beach during a camping trip.
The Duino Elegies are some of the most complex and difficult work I've ever attempted to translate, and I don't know how successful this effort was. Other elegies will follow.
I'll put some up when I get around to HTML'ing it.
I spent ten years as a member of a religious movement which later turned into the International Church of Christ, a controversial group which many former members believe to be a cult. This is the story of my years in this movement.
A brief outline of the basic doctrines of Orthodox Christianity as they developed in history.
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Last modified on Thursday, October 23, 2008 at 8:40 AM PDT.