We moved into our house twenty years ago. I was a teacher, and spent the summer at work in the yard. I supervised the external make-over. I did what I could to make the inside of the house shipshape. I spent a lot of time driving to the hardware store and lumber yard. I noticed that on many of my drives out of the neighborhood, I often saw the same young woman out on a walk. She was around thirty. I mentioned her one day to my wife.
“You mean that woman with the dark hair,” Cath asked, “in the…
Number 10 in my protest series of sonnets.
Fain I stood; proud and tall atop the hill.
Such vantage point, I watched the twinkling lights.
For I’d been charged with keeping beacons filled,
safeguard henceforth, each lamp burn stellar bright.
Fair was the post, lamps vouchsafed to my care.
Ne’er once did I let one lone light quiver;
whilst in my presence, breathing selfsame air,
’twas oft a gift to be true care giver.
We weathered many storms, my lamps and I,
Illness, snow fall, lightning, and the rest
In times of grief, we clung as one and cried;
we prayed that all might be heaven blest.
There is great joy, to keep those lamps a’lit.
May my stone read thus, when my life is writ.
— — June 2020. [David L. Stanley:DStan58]
None of us can save the world alone. Yet, all of us must try.
Number 9 in my #BlackLivesMatter protest series.
Sonnet 72 — i must try
For too long, I found myself heartbroken
each time I heard another racist storm.
At every onslaught, I was more awoken;
today, I fight. This cannot be the norm.
Black men lynched; I am dead amongst the trees.
“Tis my life snuffed; cops shot Breonna dead.
That’s my son I see, crushed by blue line knees.
When hate prevails, all souls on Earth are bled.
I cannot stand and witness one more death.
…
If you can make it through the early morning, with nothing but your racing thoughts for company, you can do anything.
Sonnet 71 — the bleak times
Two in the morning, words lose their meaning.
Three in the morning, they are but raw sounds.
Four in the morning, one should be dreaming,
Five in the morning, when one comes unwound.
The hours of darkness let one’s mind wander.
Not always to the most cheerful of sights.
It’s in those bleak times one starts to ponder
If one wants to fight through one more dark night.
You saddle your courage, get…
Today, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, 2021, is the most important of these memorial days since its inception on 2005.
Never Again, yet we see nazis,
goose-step down the street.
Our streets, America, Our streets this time;
not streets seas away.
Never Again, we hear them;
their jack-boots thud concrete.
They go storming on hate-fueled feet.
Never Again, we say aloud.
But once more, they’re alive and proud.
And once more, we hear their crowd:
“The Jews will not replace us.
6 million were not enough.
Send ’em to Camp Auschwitz
The Yids, they all must die.
“The Blacks, we gotta…
ON POETRY, PRESIDENTS, & AMANDA GORMAN.
Poetry is the first, best, and oldest communicator of the feelings that are otherwise impossible to fathom. Poems are also the best way to communicate events that have passed long before our time. Every culture across the globe, across all times, has their epics which still resonate today.
In more modern times, the Truth of America during the mid-1800s is best told through the words of Whitman. …
Hate is taught. Hate is learned. Hate solidifies injustice. On the anniversary of what would have been Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 92nd birthday, this is a good time to revisit this piece, which I wrote in 2014.
My neighborhood is diverse. Black families live in the first two houses to my south, followed by a Lebanese family. Northwest and across the street lives a highly observant Muslim family. A Greek family lives across the street to my southwest. Around the corner live several Indian families. I like where I live. It reminds me, daily, that the world is a…
My Dad died two years ago, January 14. He loved to sail, I loved him; no surprise, then, that on his yahrzeit, I wrote about his love for the sea. Thanks for reading, and if you’re of a mind, hoist one for my Pops.
Click here to hear me read my latest sonnet -https://youtu.be/-qn1HSWzlFw
Thank-you.
Covid_19 Poem 6
This was written in April, 2020, just as the US entered the Covid_19 pandemic. I have been tagged as “relentlessly optimistic” and I tried to picture our world, days after the deaths had stopped.
The sick is gone. Please come, please sit with me.
Here, let us sit in sun and feel the rays.
Too warm? Then let us sit beneath the trees
and find our calm, once lost in viral haze.
Let us cry for them, they who art not here,
for those who doth succumbed to this disease.
They make a home upon a funeral…
Dstan58
DStan58 is a teacher, a writer, a dad, a voice-over actor and poet. He's a melanoma survivor and a pulmonary embolism survivor. He's bringing sonnets back,
