Bay to Ocean Journal: How to Celebrate Spring, A History by Carol Casey
Author’s Note: Until moving to San Francisco in the winter of 2024, Carol Casey spent most of her adult life in Maryland, where spring was the season she eagerly awaited. As a child, however, she found the death of Jesus to mark one of the saddest times of the year. While an editor for a university […]
Spy Poetry: In This Brief World by Deidra Greenleaf Allan
Editor’s Note: In the spirit of the approaching new year and its opportunity for resolutions and personal change, this poem explores the poet’s journey toward self-acceptance and happiness. This is the last poem from Spy Poetry for the foreseeable future until more funding is available. Thank you for being such careful and appreciative readers. I […]
Spy Poetry: Insha’Allah by Danusha Lameris
Editor’s Note: Let us carry our tender hopes into the new year and whisper to whatever god we believe in to let them come to fruition. Insha’Allah I don’t know when it slipped into my speech that soft word meaning, “if God wills it.” Insha’Allah I will see you next summer. The baby will come […]
Spy Poetry: The Journey by James Wright
Editor’s Note: I fell in love with this poem on first reading it. Its simple yet evocative language, the subtle shift in significance and meaning of the word dust, and the unforgettable image of the spider, touched by sunlight, stepping lightly through the accumulations of her wind-blown ruins, as Wright advises us to do. The […]
Spy Poetry: Sheep in the Winter Night by Tom Hennen
Editor’s Note: The poet paints a cozy farmyard scene. We’re lulled into a sense of calm with amusing descriptions of the sheep. The allusion to the Christian religion makes us think of another night in a barn, long ago. What are the sheep listening for in the dark? Their wooly backs are full of light, […]
Spy Poetry: From Our House to Your House by Jack Ridl
Editor’s Note: Many of us will remember these halcyon days of our 1950’s youth. Yes, there was the Cold War, your better-off neighbors were building bomb shelters and we practiced hiding under our desks during nuclear bomb drills. But after-school afternoons spread out ahead of us like lazy Sundays. We’d ride our bikes to buy […]
Spy Poetry: Touch Me by Stanley Kunitz
Editor’s Note: I have always loved this poem, and I was privileged to hear Kunitz read it at the Dodge Poetry Festival many years ago. His voice is lost to us now, but not this poignant, lovely tribute to a love sustained over the years. Summer is late, my heart. Words plucked out of the […]
Spy Poetry: Delores Jepps by Tim Seibles
Editor’s Note: Such a charming paean to first love and that innocent time before the “real world” sets in and the mystery of the “other sex” is dispelled by familiarity. It seems insane now, but she’d be standing soaked in schoolday morning light, her loose-leaf notebook, flickering at the bus stop, and we almost trembled […]
Spy Poetry: Prairie Spring by Willa Cather
Editor’s Note: This poem offers a wonderful contrast between the hard, thankless labors of adulthood and the insuppressible hopefulness and beauty of youth. Prairie Spring Evening and the flat land, Rich and sombre and always silent; The miles of fresh-plowed soil, Heavy and black, full of strength and harshness; The growing wheat, the […]
Spy Poetry: In the Winter of My Sixty-Seventh Year by Susan Browne
In the Winter of My Sixty-Seventh Year I feel the cold more I stay in bed longer To linger in my dreams Where I’m young & falling in & out of love I couldn’t imagine then Being this old only old people Are this old Looking at my friends I wonder Wow do I look […]