“Grow old along with me! 

The best is yet to be, 

the last of life, for which the first was made. 

Our times are in his hand who saith, 

'A whole I planned, youth shows but half; 

Trust God: See all, nor be afraid!'”

-Robert Barret Browning

A Study of Shoulders

You underestimate your shoulders. 
They are not a series of 
muscles, ligaments, tendons, 
where the humerus and scapula meet. 
They are emptying fields, 
living sunlight, blazing 
altars for hands, lips, 
a curving distance of sighs and weights, 
a thousand brush strokes 
of velvet and weather, 
a world where you 
carry your heart. 

--Terresa Wellborn 

Those Winter Sundays

Those Winter Sundays
by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early And put his clothes on in the blueback cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he'd call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house, Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love's austere and lonely offices?  Thanks for all those winter Sundays, Mom and Dad. I love you.

Choose Something Like a Star

Choose Something Like a Star

by Robert Frost - 1947

O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud --
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to be wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.


Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says "I burn."
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.


It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end.
And steadfast as Keats' Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.