John Goggin has sent me the first two parts of what may turn out to be an interesting project: a group-written epistolary novel.
It’s currently posted on the page list down the right-hand column as “Letters From Home.” Take a read. If you’re interested, you might think about joining the project.

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This is an extension of opening the web log to all poetry suggested by reader Patricia A., who offers this translation. We thank her for her contribution.
The Panther
by Rainer Maria Rilke
In the Garden of Plants, Paris
His gaze has from the Passing of the Bars
grown so weary, it can’t behold anything anymore.
To Him, is as if [...]

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a choir of leaves
makes the unseen known with soft
but forceful deep sighs
the wet, dismembered
marionettes jump up and down
on the pulled clotheslines

a herd of cotton
treks hurredly across the
blue sky darkening

a lulling dance of
blurry shadow tree limbs on
the wall leads my dreams
Poetry by Patricia A.

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When you hear it
Does it thunder?
Or bring that chill up your neck?
Does it whine in a key
you know is real?
Is the world split open
by its crack?
And did it begin
as a small worm in your heart
A throb that pulses your brain
and grows and throws
its shadow, too,
on the shapers of your world?
Well its power is
the breath of [...]

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The world and this Web log are not finished with National Poetry Month, so I’m asking local poets to send in some verse for the immediate gratification of seeing it on the Web. John Goggin, my other brother, did quite well yesterday, sending no less than three poems (or pomes, as he lovingly labels them) [...]

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Trumpeter Jeff Lofton stopped off for an evening of music at Shenanigans in Brownsville Wednesday night and served up another night of coolly impressive jazz. Lofton makes good choices in many dimensions, from the charts he plays to the chops he applies to them. What comes out is very soulful. The crowd was large and [...]

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