#massachusetts
In the year of twenty-six, when the shamrocks bloom once more,
From Holyoke's old canals to the hills beyond the shore,
Every town in western Mass has named its Colleen fair,
To lead the Saint Patrick's march with flowers in their hair.
Chicopee sends her daughter by the river's steady flow,
Westfield brings her own from where the mountain breezes blow,
Northampton's lass steps lively down the streets of brick and stone,
Amherst crowns her scholar with the ivy overgrown.
Greenfield calls her maiden from the meadows rich and wide,
Pittsfield lifts her daughter where the Berkshires rise with pride,
South Hadley, Easthampton, Longmeadow in their turn,
Send their fairest forward for the green to brightly burn.
With sashes tied in emerald, crowns of shamrock bright and true,
They walk the Holyoke pavement where the crowds are gathered new,
The daughters of the old country, the blood of Erin strong,
Marching proud together in the parade so long.
From Agawam to Ware, from Palmer down to Lee,
Each valley town has chosen one to set the spirit free,
Their eyes are bright as morning, their laughter clear and high,
They carry all the beauty of the western Massachusetts sky.
The drums beat out the rhythm, the pipes begin to wail,
The banners wave above them like the green upon the gale,
Through the streets of Holyoke where the paper mills once stood,
These Colleens of twenty-six are marching for the good.
They pass the old cathedral, the bridges arched and high,
The factories now quiet beneath the winter sky,
Yet on this day in March the city comes alive again,
With every Colleen smiling, the past and future blend.
So sing their names in honor from Deerfield to the south,
From Shelburne Falls to Hadley, from the river to the mouth,
The Pioneer Valley's daughters, crowned and standing tall,
Lead the Saint Patrick's glory down the streets for one and all.
In twenty-six they gather, the fairest of the land,
A chain of western emerald held fast by loving hand,
And when the last note echoes and the sun begins to fade,
Their memory lingers softly in the green parade.
Feb 8
Feb 8, 2026 at 11:24 AM UTC
In Shelburne Falls the river keeps its own calendar.
Spring announces itself before the leaves,
before the town believes it.
The Green River swells and speaks louder,
a rough syllable rolling through open windows,
water practicing its long memory on stone.
When I lived nearby I learned to sleep inside that sound,
the way you learn a friend's breathing,
the way place becomes a body you trust.
Years later the street remembers how to listen.
Bridge Street, patient as a bench,
holds a new quiet without erasing the old.
A door opens where glass once caught light
and the floor already knows what to do.
You do not need much to begin, only room enough
for breath to find its length.
Harmony arrives without fanfare,
as these things often do.
A search that kept returning, a listing that waited,
a timing that felt like being met halfway by the day.
Green paint warms a wall. Mirrors learn humility.
Shoes line up like good intentions.
Inside, bodies come as they are
and discover that balance is not a pose
but a practice of staying.
The teacher speaks with the steadiness of someone
who has learned how care can exhaust itself.
She invites others in, shares the floor,
lets the work be distributed like sunlight.
Vinyasa on a Monday evening,
restorative when the week leans too hard,
meditation early when the town is still rinsing sleep
from its eyes.
A dance class steps lightly into the story,
Pilates and parents and small hands to come.
The schedule is a living thing,
a hedge you trim and tend, not a wall.
Outside, the village keeps its agreements.
The bridge carries flowers because someone decided
that beauty was worth maintaining.
The river is protected because people remembered
that love can be organized.
Conservation is not a slogan here,
it is a habit, a way of saying
this will still be here tomorrow
if we behave as if tomorrow matters.
I think of the house we kept near the water,
how spring nights roared like encouragement.
How mornings smelled of wet leaves and resolve.
How the seasons did not hurry us
and yet asked us to pay attention.
Living there taught me that a place can be generous
without being loud about it,
that goodness grows when it is allowed
to be ordinary and shared.
Inside the studio a breath lifts, then settles.
A body learns where it is,
how to be strong without forcing,
how to rest without quitting.
This is the work of towns too,
of streets that hold room for new uses,
of leases that pass hand to hand
without losing their grace.
It is how a village keeps its balance,
not by standing still,
but by moving together,
listening for the river,
and choosing, again and again,
to make space for what heals.
Feb 5
Feb 5, 2026 at 11:29 AM UTC
The end of an era. ….
If these walls could talk…..
there are certain places
Places that come alive
just before the moon reflects brightest
And out come the creatures of the night
Until the cranes and wrecking ***** put an end to the parties full of passion and misery
Fueled by fuel from Mexico and now China and the occasional trailer which escapes explosion in the Arizona desert
And just like the destruction of the rainforest
A different sort of habitat,
yet one just as natural
is destroyed
Where do these creatures go ?
In a country
Where adapting and social jockeying
has become harder and harder.
At least from the bottom.
Everything is harder from the bottom.
Just ask someone who’s there.
But somehow nature finds a way to survive and a place to go
And Like the barnacles and clams taking over the great lakes
so come to plagues on Massachusetts Avenue.
Development .
Progress.
The incandescent red light bulb just went extinct on US 1
Jan 12, 2024
Jan 12, 2024 at 1:56 AM UTC
The sun's setting,
though it may leave you darkening,
is the start of the burning
far under your soles.
The browning now crinkling of
Summer's endlesseeming greening
is but the start of Springtime's
asylum in Xylem.
Phloem's sweet ware will
flow in 'em somewhere
down the line.
It’s pithy, I know
but life is born in death.
And though, come Fall,
trees seem seemingly sapped,
there's an inspiration transpiring.
The firepit's cooling
it's embers cast only shadows
and shades of memories of warmth
and story
and light...
None gather round, the gloomy.
The dormant circle
an ashen reduction
of oak and of fir
but its blackdust when wetted
(yes, ink!)
and dipped in by brush
will one day,
with luck,
be the source of a poet's
enlightening words.
The monarchs have gone -
a silent orange rustle
and, all at once,
the milkweeds go dry;
the once-green
stalks stand stock still,
Rods of Asclepias whose
seedlings are ever
the earliest snows.
Leaving home:
wherever the Earthbreaths may
take them -
bleak, brokenhearted,
hope in a coma...
How unlike the joy of the
flutterbys whose time now
has fluttered by, a chorus
as uttered by
the ungiven hope
who, though unasked,
has wandered the winds
to bring its daughters
(each healing, each hopeful)
a deathgiven panacea
to lands now in their
own limited unlimited Spring.
And you! I know
your (sic) fiercely pretending
not to be crying.
Hell, to never've cried.
I know your lifework is
'manly' (your words) or
some other idiocy (my words)
and unbroken. Hell, unbent.
But think on this:
if she's gone far enough,
far enough along,
far enough away;
enough time gone by
since you broke into One
('broke in two' is NOT how it feels),
if enough not enough Her
has passed,
then she's also
more than halfway back
to you,
to Whole.
Nothing can go,
nothing is lost
for there is no
'away' within this Here.
No one now, either
at a loss -
for the knowing
is nigh.
Even the knowing
cannot be going
for long 'fore returning;
the yearning is turning
from far-off to nearby.
The Sky lives as well
in every dark puddle.
Its blues, now on Earth
where all even All is at Home.
Nov 2, 2018
Nov 2, 2018 at 1:31 PM UTC
If spirits can walk the earth after life ends,
Or even before, to soar in flights unhindered
By physics, let me dance then!
To reel, arms out, on a vivid green lawn
In a garden before a comfortable house,
Where lush flowers grow and summer reigns,
Touching rows of Constable trees that tower, emerald,
And violet-shadowed even at noon or painted
In twilight, soft before a rising moon.
I would skip over roads and find that field
That lies, protective, above the Connecticut,
Watching as it winds lazily northward.
Then, being sure that all is right,
That the corn is tall and full,
I would speed up to a rounded hill
Above a Victorian barn in Leyden,
Ten acres of rye grass for the cows.
I would stand at the summit and gaze
Far away, down the sleeping valley in its haze,
To the little towns and glittering in
The sun, my alma mater, towers
Of attempted wisdom, of spires and dreams.
Then I might then bathe in a little lake
Where I once romped with friends
After a wedding, **** and laughing
While puzzled farmers watched and leered.
As before I would flee to the river that wound
Down between the hills, splashing through
Pools in shade and sun, basking on smooth stone
Whose marbled veins glow in the canyon light,
Remnants of an ancient era, of pressure and time.
Then on I’d go, bounding from one hilltop to another,
Turning north from the cesium-laced Deerfield,
Passing Vermont’s border to stroll the streets
Of Brattleboro, Putney and Newfane.
I might find a canoe and glide up the West River,
Somehow floating above the rapids and dam,
To rest on the flat water as the sun sets,
Skimming lightly, watching the trout rise
To sip dancing insects or hear the splash
Of a bass as it flicks the surface with its tail.
And then I would sit with the ones I love,
Silently, breathing in the mist that rises
As the sun slips below the hills;
Sunset-colored, elliptical echoes
Catch the low swells like waving glass.
I would wait here until morning returns,
Not ready to leave this beauty or the world.
Sep 8, 2018
Sep 8, 2018 at 12:09 PM UTC
the fishtank is whispering to me
i tell it i want to go home
the filter shudders a laugh
i am throwing myself against
concrete barriers to feel
blood gasping for breath but
i drown it in the shower
punishing tender flesh with the faucet
if this place is supposed to be beautiful
no one told my heart
and I feel the weight of my ugliness
in the pit of my stomach
an egg hatching, shredding insides,
fully deserved.
Oct 17, 2017
Oct 17, 2017 at 5:31 PM UTC
Do you hear it?
The hiraeth
Here it lies
City lights
The shining bokeh behind your eyes
Can you hear it?
The hiraeth
Here it lies
The rustling leaves
Of Franklin’s oak trees
Will you hear it?
The hiraeth
Here it lies
The snow knee deep
Childhood friendships we shall keep
Can you hear it?
The hiraeth
Here it lies
The ducks of bronze and feather
Make memories of hometown brighter
Jun 13, 2017
Jun 13, 2017 at 9:37 AM UTC
A glorious hstory of jew in his array of spirit today
that rose on a dream where bona fide with proprietorship it posted its golden way in a suburban place near the bay.
This glorious monument of her time with mayoral sublime
and a museum grew a Buckminster Tavern extemporizing resound
she lie in midst of my siren that denizen Yankees.
Jun 4, 2017
Jun 4, 2017 at 8:46 AM UTC
The hills peek
Their heads out above
Still clear waters,
Tombstones tall and
Tremendous enough
To stand for the loss
Of five whole towns
Beneath the calm lies
Rusted railroads,
Crumbling foundations,
Fading blueprints of a
History long forgotten
It’s quiet on the Quabbin,
Silent front and stark divide,
Monument in mourning
Flooded, forlorn, fated
To be forgotten
Apr 16, 2016
Apr 16, 2016 at 2:58 PM UTC
You are a waterfall
Cascade out of open Berkshire mountain faces,
Stone lips painted red by your words.
They say red is the color of love but I can't feel anything but
Empty
Indifferent
Inside when I see the blood in the corner of your mouth.
You don't care
Chase your narcotics with tequila,
Follow your *** smoke with an inhaler,
I watch you drift.
Do you remember 5 year old me
Hugging you round your knees and
The way you ran to grab me when I tumbled into the creek behind your house?
I do
Your hands are warm where they brush mine
When you ask me to refill your glass
I didn't know you drank ***** by the travel mug now.
4 ice cubes.
I lean in the bedroom doorway and watch the mice scurry beneath your couch
And I think about how those same warm, now-swollen hands
Built this place.
Forgive me.
I have intruded on your aging privacy,
Gray hairs in the 3-day stubble on your bloated chin
As you gasp quietly, eyes shut over decades of memories.
Your steroids have inflated your stomach more than the lungs they were
Supposed to heal and
You shuffle so slowly down the stairs I
Shift uncomfortably as I wait impatiently to get around you to the car
Fleeing the air of decay and the whiskey on your breath.
New England roads are good for thinking.
Surrounded by ageless forests I think of my aging family,
Of you, Grandfather,
Your hacking cough sounding like the Massachusetts thunder
Across the lake.
2 hour car ride to see the rest of the
Degrading homes once owned by
My father's father's family;
Your family.
I see a waterfall in the distant Berkshires.
We are part of 1 family,
But I can't feel the love I see in my father's eyes, red from tears at your impending funeral.
Jul 28, 2014
Jul 28, 2014 at 7:48 PM UTC
Boston, land of the Big Dig,
home of tight knit groups who call each other family with no blood relation.
Winter teaches you how to shovel your car out of snow banks with red raw hands and a pizza box. Teaches you balance as you slip and skid your way down city sidewalks laced with ice, black like onyx.
Girls with big **** and short dresses shiver on the T, their puffy white breaths begging for warmth while their counterparts stand snuggled in down jackets zipped up to their nose. Spring brings rain and the snow becomes muddy slush splashing against your car that can never really be clean. But then the flowers come and you forget about the cold as the humidity sinks in like a fat man into his favorite recliner.
The swamp is ever noticeable in Summer as everyone walks in knee high mud, trudging slowly to the Boston Pops.
Fall is perfect. Crisp colors and the sweet smell of apples and pumpkins last for months as cheeks turn rosy and hands find safe harbor in pockets.
Boston land of men and women not boys and girls
Home of seasons at spectrums end and the only place that will always be home.
Jul 17, 2014
Jul 17, 2014 at 12:56 PM UTC