My body aches,
My throat is tight.
Cancer has not loosed
Its heavy grip.
Cure not even
on the agenda.
And the spark persists;
The need to write;
To express as poetry,
the neither here
nor there place we live
Under the circumstances.
December 31, 2022
poems for friends 
Thank you Harry, for your persistent spark.
Love, Alice
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Thank Harry. I celebrate the spark tonight!
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Let’s keep turning the pages together, Harry!
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The Fisherman
By William Butler Yeats https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/william-butler-yeats
Although I can see him still— The freckled man who goes To a gray place on a hill In gray Connemara clothes At dawn to cast his flies— It’s long since I began To call up to the eyes This wise and simple man. All day I’d looked in the face What I had hoped it would be To write for my own race And the reality: The living men that I hate, The dead man that I loved, The craven man in his seat, The insolent unreproved— And no knave brought to book Who has won a drunken cheer— The witty man and his joke Aimed at the commonest ear, The clever man who cries The catch cries of the clown, The beating down of the wise And great Art beaten down.
Maybe a twelve-month since Suddenly I began, In scorn of this audience, Imagining a man, And his sun-freckled face And gray Connemara cloth, Climbing up to a place Where stone is dark with froth, And the down turn of his wrist When the flies drop in the stream— A man who does not exist, A man who is but a dream; And cried, “Before I am old I shall have written him one Poem maybe as cold And passionate as the dawn.”
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This poem is so beautiful and so poignant. Thanks. And keep writing! Love
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Thanks DB, It’s from the heart, literally and figuratively.
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