Leaves

About the Book

A three part history in what some refer to as poetry: Part one, beginning 30 years ago, Part two, 1999, the last year of the century, Part three, for those who weren’t even born thirty years ago. Tested out on local school children who grab a pencil and start out on their own. The locality, rural Washington County Missouri, stays the same. Time never does, and the poems, like leaves falling in season, swirl about in history, while roots supply the nutrients for new buds, poems which aren’t even born now.

About the Author

It was 1940 something when a letter from Aunt Edna blessed all this scribbling. I’d written to her about a clear, bubbling spring that flowed from the base of an oak shaded knoll in our West Bloomfield, Michigan woodland. Edna, who experienced seizures, and lived at the State Hospital in Caro, wrote: “reading your letter was like walking in the woods with you.” After than, an encouraging English teacher, Miss Dorothy McCannon, at Roosevelt High School, Keego Harbor, Michigan, blushed and read aloud something I wrote for her. Talk about being pointed in a direction. Six decades later, I am still applying graphite to paper.