a poem is a sermon
The air is thick with history, with years of sweat and toil. Old ghosts play hide and seek in sheets that show more recent use; the wiser tourists avoid alleys and shun Bourbon’s roil. Old men of different colors sit on their front steps and broil, and stare across at one another, hearts filled with […]
Presented for your consideration, two parts of an otherwise normal weekend, filled with taxiing teenage daughters, reading online journals, laundry, pondering work (yes, I am a closet workaholic), sleep (a necessity after the grueling workweek of endless conference calls and quality assurance “light” reading of things like Software Management Plans and 500-line Gantt charts), cooking, […]
The beastly summer months are creeping in; I can sense their hot breath and lolling tongue like a pit bull lurking behind a cypress fence waiting for the wood to rot away so it can lunge into my peaceful spring yard. © 2004 – 2013, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.
An hour gone past midnight; the songbirds try out new trills: sparrow, robin, mockingbird, wren, finch and whip-or-whill all whistle at their favorite tunes now that the traffic’s pace has slowed to stopping. The pale moon reflects in pools of fallen rain left from the evening storm, their mirror surfaces broken by the floating corpses […]
Their America is seventy-percent against them, but they do not know, these kids in New Orleans their ebony faces eager or sullen or lost in some other world lugging heavy booksacks on their narrow shoulders facing teachers tired of trying to pretend reading of themselves in textbooks they cannot translate into their short-term teen idiom […]
She with fond memories of elders now gone, & I with my own youth to call back to mind, bought a ten gallon dogwood last year, late in spring (& though maybe later than some would advise for a tree that the hot summer’s swelter might fry, we thought of it grown and the flowers […]
Once New Orleans weather starts to warm it becomes quite bearable in shirt sleeves to linger under the carport at night enjoying a cigarette in the dark while the light scent of jasmine fills the air and the bustle on the main streets is slowed (in those few short weeks before summer starts, and the […]