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Jan 5, 2025 | 
record-eagle.com | Fleda Brown
Here’s an old poem to greet the new year. Greet, yes, even if we’re filled with dread or sorrow, there’s always a fresh start. Despair never got us anything. Tennyson’s popular poem, written the year he was appointed England’s Poet Laureate, is part of a long elegy to Arthur Henry Hallam, Tennyson’s sister’s fiancé who died at the age of 22. The bells are probably the ones that rang at Waltham Abby Church. The poem, as is often true of Victorian poems, is intended as a lesson.
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Dec 1, 2024 | 
record-eagle.com | Fleda Brown
We’re coming up on the holiday season. It’s a difficult time for a lot of us, especially this year. And maybe you’d think a person would be crazy to be joyful when the waters are rising, the climate is going crazy, school children are being shot, people are dying of starvation. I could go on and on. We could be weeping. We are weeping. We lose so much. We lose our health, our mothers and fathers, sometimes our children, even, and yet we find it possible somehow to forgive this fate, Kenyon writes.
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Nov 3, 2024 | 
record-eagle.com | Fleda Brown
Skip to main content You have permission to edit this article. 50° Traverse City, MI (49684) Today Cloudy with occasional light rain throughout the day. High 54F. Winds SE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 80%.. Tonight A steady rain this evening. Showers continuing overnight. Low 48F. Winds SSE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 90%. Rainfall near a quarter of an inch.
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Oct 6, 2024 | 
record-eagle.com | Fleda Brown
Mice. We just closed the cottage, and the mice are ready to reclaim what has been unfairly denied to them over the summer. I went to the hardware store to get peppermint packets to chase them off over the winter. Dryer sheets work pretty well too, so I put those under the blankets, too. A mouse and I stared at each other once, which is what happens in this poem. There is that moment, each of you scared of the other. “Subplot,” it’s called. What happens under the main plot.
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Sep 1, 2024 | 
record-eagle.com | Fleda Brown
My sister wrote last week to say it was 108 degrees in Houston. Those of us who live here, in gentler temperatures, can hardly imagine. Monica Youn’s poem crosses the line between real and imaginary, the way extreme heat might affect us. The poem opens with a vision. The angels. Have you ever imagined one in extreme heat? Except maybe in the tropics. Here they’re a bit like fireflies.
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Aug 4, 2024 | 
record-eagle.com | Fleda Brown
This poem appeared in my inbox, one of the several daily poems I subscribe to. I like to have a poem brought to me, one that I might not have read before. Sometimes I like them, sometimes not, but I appreciate their presence. This one is by the great Polish poet and Nobel Laureate — here’s how you say his name: chez·laa mee·waash. Books! We used to have hundreds and hundreds of them. We had bookcases built for them. When we moved to smaller quarters, we gave away more than 30 boxes.
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Jul 7, 2024 | 
record-eagle.com | Fleda Brown
Some of us have been married before. A lot of us have been married before, actually. This poem is about marriage, but it’s every bit as much about attitudes toward failure. Instead of remembering how we tried and the ways in which we succeeded, we tend to concentrate on our failures. The poem uses the myth of Icarus and Daedalus. Daedalus, an inventor, made wings out of feathers and wax for their escape from Crete where he and his son were being held captive by King Minos.
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Jun 2, 2024 | 
record-eagle.com | Fleda Brown
This is such an equivocal spring poem, which suits my mood entirely. Flowers are blooming here in this beautiful part of the world, while whole cities are reduced to rubble in others. But here is this young couple planting peas in their garden. Since they’re young, it’s as if no one’s ever done this before. I notice that the poem is spoken by a much older person. She says she couldn’t do this again, and can hardly bear to look at it.
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May 5, 2024 | 
record-eagle.com | Fleda Brown
You recognize this poem right away, I suspect. I recently re-read it and noticed that in view of contemporary events, it struck me with surprising force. I had tears in my eyes, actually. Emma Lazarus was commissioned to write a poem to help raise funds for the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. She initially declined and then finally wrote a sonnet commemorating the plight of immigrants. That 1883 poem, “The New Colossus,” was engraved on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in 1903.
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Apr 7, 2024 | 
record-eagle.com | Fleda Brown
April is National Poetry Month. I asked several of my local poetry friends if they would contribute to a combined poem. That’s not easy to do. You don’t have the single voice, you don’t know where it’s going. You just try to add something. Poetry is like that, I have to say. We poets are always trying to add to what’s been written before. We celebrate the grand poems of the past and struggle onward. We do this because we hear the music in language. We want to make our own music in response.
