I am grateful tonight to Editor Richard Edwards for publishing “The Writer” at Every Writer!
I’m quite happy that Mr. Edwards felt my poem might appeal to the readers of Every Writer — especially considering what an important resource Every Writer has been to the independent literature community since 1999.
You can find the poem right here:
“The Writer,” by Eric Robert Nolan
I’m honored tonight to share here that The Piker Press has graciously published my poem, “Smiling Among Inert Shipwrecks.”
Once again, I’m indebted to Editor Sand Pilarski for allowing me to join the creative community of this wonderful weekly journal of arts and sciences.
You can find the poem at the link below:
“Smiling Among Inert Shipwrecks,” by Eric Robert Nolan
“Love and Death.” Oil on canvas.
There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.
— excerpt from “Where the Sidewalk Ends,” by Shel Silverstein
Photo credit: Monika Wahi [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D
Houghton Mifflin Company.
There is one baby skunk who regularly crosses the street just after nightfall between one neighbor’s yard and the one opposite. I keep trying to get decent pictures or video when I spot him (from a discreet distance, of course). But no luck — my phone camera just doesn’t do terribly well in the dark. Hence the illustration below.
As you know if you’ve ever seen one, skunk look like shaggy, very unkempt cats. (The correct plural here is indeed “skunk,” although either “skunk” or “skunks” is acceptable; I checked.) They don’t move terribly quickly either — I guess speed wasn’t something they had to evolve, given their well known method of pushing back at trouble.
I thought of warning my neighbors that their yard is a thoroughfare for skunk, because that seems like a good thing to know. But that sounds too much like an insult, and these people have guns.
I’m also not sure why Burroughs’ illustration below appears to show baby skunk inside of a vast hornets nest, because I’m reasonably sure that’s now how it works with skunk. Although I’m admittedly no naturalist, so who knows?
[Update 10:30 PM: Now there is a skunk in my backyard!!]
I’m serious. Look at the picture below. This is from a pothole that was fixed yesterday.
If it were any hotter out here, it would be King’s Landing.
Remember, guys. Replenish your electrolytes by drinking lots of Mercury Retrograde.
It is by a blend of lively curiosity and intelligent selfishness that the artists who wish to mature late, who feel too old to die, the Goethes, Tolstoys, Voltaires, Titians and Verdis, reach a fruitful senescence. They cannot afford to associate with those who are burning themselves up or preparing for a tragedy or whom melancholy has marked for her own. Not for them the accident-prone, the friend in whom the desire for self-destruction keeps blistering out in broken legs or threatening them in anxiety-neuroses. Not for them the drumming finger, the close-cropt nail, the chewed glasses, the pause on the threshold, the wandering eye, or the repeated “um” and “er.”
— Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise, 1938
