Six of my poems are included in the latest Magnolia Review

Six of my poems are included in the latest Magnolia Review available for free download HERE. The theme of the issue was " A Day That Changed Me."

• "On the Edge of 1969" - on a day shortly after Woodstock when I realized I would never be cool
• "Beneath the Six-Sided Farmhouse" - on visiting my grandparents and meeting death in their basement
• "April 22, 1994—For Linda" - on the day my wife and I began our life together
• "The Context of February" - on the day I realized my first marriage was truly over
• "October 25, 2001, at 6:45 p.m." - on the day my father died
• "Today (September 11, 2001)" - and this one is obvious

My thanks to Editor Suzanna Anderson for continuing to support my work and for allowing me the honor of selecting this year's Ink Award winner.  

Review: Blue Horses

Blue Horses by Mary Oliver
My rating: 3 of 5 stars 

Mary Oliver's poetry is often deceptively simple, earning a Zen-like wisdom from emotions and images quietly presented. Her latest collection returns to nature and to the most enduring human emotions--love, wonder, the awe-ful truth of our mortality and the power of that knowledge to make us truly see.

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A poem for the pandemic

Caregiver’s Song

When voices like children

hear themselves in a trickling creek,

I laugh at the wisdom

of their foolishness—

and everything becomes still,

the sun gone down, the moon falling as dew,

my eyes gone black waiting

for my counting off till morning.

Come home, children, home free

before you are caught outside

by dark birds flying their hunger.

The creek sings in children

who laugh again and shout for haven

in the hills that laugh all echoes back.

And I may sleep some night at last,

counting off cold stars past morning.

published in the Hurricane Review

David Anthony Sam

Ends Today April 17 - Four of my kindle books free – Here’s sample from Memories in Clay

Ends Today April 17 -  Four of my kindle books free until Friday – Click HERE

Here’s sample from Memories in Clay - poem about my father originally published by the Wayne Review:

Fatherhood

There was the valley,
the Youghiogheny cutting
through rounded mountains,
the red clay my father dug
with pickax and shovel
to force a home from
the grudging hillside.

The time was new, the clay
dark red with iron,
the wind warm enough
for summer, but not so
hot you'd think of death.
My father grunted with
each heft and swing.

He sculpted that clay
with the same careful
touch he used when he
etched our busts in
redwood. He showed me
the meaning of the red clay,
the river in the valley

cleft, the rounded mountains.
He showed me the tracks
of the deer, the shy brown
flash of doe between
green undergrowth. He
showed me how to find
wild onions by their

leaves, and how to
recognize wild cherry
trees by their black
bark and sweet sap.
And with the sunburnt sweat
of his rippling back,
and with each heft and swing,

he showed me how to cut
a home from a red hillside.
So with a shaping word
I have tried to hew
a human place from high sun
and the hunger within
the world's rich clay.
 

What can a poet do to make any difference in a pandemic? Four of my kindle books free until Friday April 17 – Here’s sample from Dark Land, White Light

A collection of my early poetry free on Kindle until April 17 along with 3 other books; Dark Land, White Light

Here's a sample:

"Death of a Mountainclimber"

I feel the oldness finalize within me,
white as glass chip ice,
and I follow the bone track home.
I am going now.

High, a last climb, a last series
of handgrasps, a last ringing of steel,
a last living above the clouds;
I am going now.

The steeple cliffs sing silently,
reaching (as I’ve always done) higher,
pointing stone Gothic intonations to lead my eyes.
Before, when I reached the top,
the world continued below,
but I had grappled beyond it.
In the past, when I have found my soul,
it was alone on a peak.

Now I am going,
a mourner and a celebrant both.
I pass the last living—the tree line.

The brown rock and the blueburning glacial snow
split the world off from the peaks.
I pass the world to the peak.
Here, alone, I’ll find my soul,
the soul that was never soft-touched
but often knew the love of ice and cold-clawed rock.

Here, alone, I’ll leave my flesh
to tumble with the glacier
and melt its unity below.

What can a poet do to make any difference in a pandemic? Two days left to get four of my kindle books free - Here's sample from Early in the Day

What can a poet do to make any difference in a pandemic? Two days left to get four of my kindle books free - Here's sample from Early in the Day:

"Bend, Oregon: The Fourth of July 1972"

Tall pines, bed needles beneath,
ash below rock precipice:

He has come to an end of
denials, and flows with the cold
stream of melting ice.
He cuts deep with the rivulets.
He molds crevices in mud.
He tears with the falling water
and leaps rapids of rock and time
diving for the valley.

Surrounded there by sorties
of mosquitoes, water wrigglings
of snakes, he drifts through swamps
in lazy near stagnation
to the waterfall, and midair dances.

He becomes mist.
He powers the small generators.
He runs to the city
and becomes the river,
suspends the swimming children
and the sailboats highing to the wind;
and he reflects fireworks by night.

What can a poet do to make any difference in a pandemic? Two days left to get four of my kindle books free - Here's sample from Finite to Fail

What can a poet do to make any difference in a pandemic?

Two days left to get four of my kindle books free - including Finite to Fail: Poems After Dickinson

Here is a sample from Finite to Fail:

"Emily's Ghost Machine"

i am nobody
so you can misread
letters randomed as words
fall of musty dictionary

i am no one
or two or trinity
zeroed before decimal point
or after all where minimal

i am not this or that
nor noun nor name
so easily returned
without comment

i am not placed
in certainty or
misplaced in doubt
but lost between

i have nothing new
but what is borrowed
stolen worn
as rags motley fooled

i envy you who
fall out these cracks
into bright light
for i have shadows

for i am shadows
this in contrast
left to beg for space
where not allowed

i am no one
to sing of nothing
but make these mumbles
assonant to life

i am nobody
to ask if you
wear my anonymity
as saving grace

Get something to read--Four days left to get my poetry collections on Kindle for Free

There are still four days left to get my poetry collections on Kindle for Free.

Get my poetry collections for free on Kindle Now until April 17, 2020 and have something to read.

True Ignorance

“True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.” Karl Popper​

Stuck at home? Get my poetry collections for free on Kindle between April 13 and 17, 2020

Stuck at home? Get my poetry collections for free on Kindle between April 13 and 17, 2020 and have something to read.

My poem "Climbing the Red Dog Road" is available now in From the Depths

My poem "Climbing the Red Dog Road" is available now in From the Depths (on page 4). You can read a free digital issue but consider purchasing a copy to help the press out.

This poem comes from a memory of driving to my mother's parents' home above the Monongahela River in Pennsylvania when I was about 9 years old.

Hirshfield on Writing Poetry

"I discover my questions by entering my questions." Jane Hirshfield 

Kunitz on Poetry

“Poetry explores depths of thought and feeling that civilization requires for its survival.” Stanley Kunitz

#HopeChallenge: Post a photo from where you are in quarantine that shows 1 thing that gives you joy in spite of everything.

#HopeChallenge: Post a photo from where you are in quarantine that shows 1 thing that gives you joy in spite of everything. 

Review: From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest

From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest by T.Z. Lavine
My rating: 4 of 5 stars 



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Ain't No Sunshine Now He's Gone

Bill Withers, Who Sang ‘Lean on Me’ and ‘Lovely Day,’ Dies at 81