New Poem: Pioneer Valley's Emerald Crowns

This poem honors the western Massachusetts Grand Colleen tradition as a living act of regional memory. Town by town, the Pioneer Valley sends its daughters forward to Holyoke, not for spectacle, but to carry continuity, dignity, and place into the Saint Patrick’s Day parade. It is a portrait of geography, community, and shared stewardship, where history walks beside the present.

Pioneer Valley's Emerald Crowns

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.

New Poem: Karen Brown's Taekwondo

This poem was written to honor Karen Brown’s lifetime of discipline, teaching, and courage in taekwondo, and the deep personal meaning of her eighth dan test in Korea. It reflects not only athletic mastery, but family, heritage, and the long arc of commitment that stretches across decades and across the ocean. This is a story about showing up again and again, even when the body protests, and about traditions that bind generations together.

In Central Mass, a master named Karen Brown,

With fifty years' fire, wears taekwondo's crown.

From Michigan roots where bullies once loomed,

She kicked into greatness, her confidence bloomed.

Through drills and tough spars, with sticks for the guide,

She claimed countless trophies, her spirit untied.

To Worcester she ventured, teaching with grace,

Her kids black-belt strong, joining the chase.

Two schools she commands, in Shrewsbury and town,

Where students find strength, never backing down.

But the call came from Korea, the art's sacred birth,

To test for eighth dan, proving her worth.

At World Headquarters, forms danced in the air,

Her body screamed weary, but victory was there.

"Scary and grueling," she said with a grin,

Yet lifted by loved ones, she let the win in.

For Korea's our tie, where my wife's kin reside,

Her family's heartbeat, our cultural pride.

This honor from Seoul echoes deep in our soul,

A bridge 'cross the ocean, making us whole.

In taekwondo's homeland, where traditions ignite,

Karen's drive inspires, a beacon so bright.

Nine years till the ninth, she'll prepare with new might,

Our family's Korea connection, pure delight.

New Poem: The Dawn Redwood

A long-form poem inspired by Amherst’s Dawn Redwoods and their improbable journey from ancient forests to present-day shade trees. This piece reflects on deep time, community stewardship, and the quiet power of survival, rooted in specific places around Amherst.

I sing the Dawn Redwood,

and I sing Amherst that shelters it,

and the long patience of the earth that forgot,

then remembered.

I sing the tree that learned how to wait.

Once it walked the whole Northern world,

its feet in swamps, its needles brushing mammoth breath,

its cones listening to ice and fire argue over centuries.

Then silence came.

The books closed.

The pages of stone said, extinct.

But the tree did not argue.

It stood quietly in a hidden valley,

mist rising from Hubei soil,

while empires burned and railroads sang,

while clocks were invented and wars named themselves.

I love this about it,

that survival does not always announce itself,

that endurance can look like stillness,

that the future sometimes hides behind a mountain

until the right eyes arrive.

O Dawn Redwood,

you drop your needles each year like a practiced truth,

not clinging, not hoarding,

trusting the seasons to return what they must.

Green to bronze, bronze to bare, bare to promise again.

You stand now in Amherst,

flanking the doorway of prayer and song,

two witnesses at the Goodwin church,

your roots holding stories older than the cornerstone,

your height speaking faster than the town can write you down.

You were planted after memory forgot to list you,

yet you rose anyway,

as all necessary things do.

I see you from Woodside Avenue,

from Tyler Place,

from Belchertown Road where young ones stretch their limbs,

and I feel the town breathing through you,

cooling itself leaf by leaf.

O people of Amherst,

this is how time returns to us,

not as a museum piece behind glass,

but as shade on a sidewalk,

as red bark peeling in the afternoon sun,

as children learning the word fossil

and then learning that fossil does not mean gone.

I say the tree belongs to the future

because it remembers the past without being trapped by it.

I say the tree is a lesson in mercy,

in patience,

in the radical act of continuing.

Sing with me, Dawn Redwood,

you who were lost and found without changing your name,

you who remind us that extinction is not always the final verse,

that the earth keeps drafts,

and sometimes revises.

New Poem: The Grand Colleen

The Grand Colleen parade is a public celebration, but its story often begins in private moments of care and intention. This poem reflects on two students who chose history, stone, and lasting beauty over flash, and how those choices ripple outward into a city tradition.

In Holyoke where brick and river meet,

Where echoes of the mills still line the street,

A classroom desk becomes a starting line,

Where simple pencil marks begin to shine.

Not bright balloons or colors loud and fast,

But stone and towers reaching from the past.

They turned away from shapes that fade too soon

And built with weight, with patience, not a tune.

Celtic curves like footprints set in time,

Each careful line a gesture, not a rhyme

For noise or flash, but homage deep and true

To hands that built, to craft that still comes through.

One hundred fifty-three dreams took their turn,

Each hopeful sketch with something left to learn.

Again reduced, again the choice made tight,

Until two visions held the truest light.

The prize is modest, framed in glass and name,

A hundred dollars, brief parade-time fame.

But greater still, the honor earned that day

To help a city carry pride its way.

When down the street the Grand Colleen rolls on,

With music, flags, and crowds from dusk to dawn,

That float will bear more than a chosen queen,

It bears the love of those who shaped the scene. 

New Poem: Selling Cold

Before refrigeration, winter was work. Ice harvesting shaped ponds, towns, and seasonal rhythms across the Valley, demanding patience, skill, and a deep understanding of risk. Reading about its return as a demonstration at WinterFest felt like an invitation to look closely at how labor and landscape once depended on each other. This poem sits with that history, not as nostalgia, but as recognition of a time when even cold had value and meaning.

They called it harvesting,

though nothing was planted,

just winter thick enough

to trust your weight.

Steel teeth bit the pond,

slow and patient,

a six-foot saw teaching ice

where to let go.

Each block rose clear as glass,

light trapped inside cold,

a season lifted whole.

There was a time

when every pond mattered,

when winter was inventory,

when cold could be counted,

stacked, shipped, insured.

Men learned the math of danger:

two inches for a body,

four for a horse,

five for the faith

that a wagon would hold.

Grids scored the surface

like farmland reversed,

furrows cut into silence.

They farmed the frozen skin of water,

sleds sliding where reeds slept,

blocks hauled like livestock

toward barns packed with sawdust,

insulated hope against the thaw.

Ice moved by rail,

north to south,

Valley ponds cooling cities

that never knew their names.

Doctors lowered fevers,

tables held meat another day,

summer bent slightly toward mercy.

Then machines learned how to make winter

any month they pleased.

Rivers grew dirty,

ponds were spared,

and cold lost its price.

Now the saw returns

for memory, not survival.

A crowd gathers,

hands numb with curiosity.

Someone lifts a block

as if it might still be useful,

as if the past could chill the present.

The pond holds,

winter listens,

and for a moment we remember

that even ice had a season

when it meant work,

and work meant staying.

New Poem: 750 Lights Still On

This poem grew out of listening carefully to a public conversation about Hampshire College and the wider pressures facing American higher education. What stood out was not defensiveness or nostalgia, but steadiness, a confidence rooted in rebuilding, recommitment, and a belief that education should remain an active, unfinished process. Hampshire’s place within the Five College Consortium, alongside neighbors like University of Massachusetts Amherst, reflects a regional understanding that learning expands when it is shared rather than guarded.

They said the future had narrowed,

that fewer footsteps would come of age,

that curiosity itself was a risky investment.

But the doors stayed open.

In classrooms without borders

students sketch questions instead of majors,

learning how to hold uncertainty

without flinching.

Seven hundred fifty minds

lean into work that does not fit tidy boxes.

Faculty arrive not to deliver answers

but to sharpen questions,

money raised not to preserve the past

but to earn the right to keep experimenting.

The country debates the value of thinking,

counts enrollment like weather reports,

argues whether justice belongs in education at all.

Here, learning still belongs to the learner.

Across the valley, ideas travel freely.

A student crosses a river or a campus line

and the education widens,

not diluted, but shared.

What began in 1970 keeps moving,

not because it is safe,

but because it refuses to stop asking

what education is for,

and who it should serve.

Alive is not a slogan.

Thriving is not denial.

It is the quiet work of rebuilding,

light by light,

question by question,

with faith that a different way

is still worth doing.

New Poem: Polly Cooper

This poem reflects on the story of Polly Cooper of the Oneida Nation, whose knowledge and generosity helped sustain Washington’s army during the winter at Valley Forge. It centers care, instruction, and Indigenous wisdom as forms of courage often overlooked in traditional histories.

History likes its heroes armed,

boots heavy with intention,

but sometimes survival arrives

carried in a basket.

She walked the cold road

not toward glory

but toward hunger,

toward men who did not know

how to eat what would save them.

White corn is not mercy

if taken without knowledge.

Raw, it sickens.

Prepared, it sustains.

She understood the difference,

and that understanding mattered more

than allegiance or flag.

While winter tightened its grip on Valley Forge,

she taught patience to starving soldiers,

showed them how food becomes nourishment

only when handled with respect.

This, too, is strategy.

This, too, is courage.

The coin will show her offering corn,

a simple gesture made permanent in metal.

But the deeper imprint

was already made in bodies warmed,

in lives that lasted long enough

to remember her name

and forget the cost paid by her people.

She was not promised a future in return.

Her nation lost land,

lost kin,

lost safety.

Allies do not always survive the victory.

Still, she walked.

Still, she carried.

Still, she taught.

Let history say this clearly:

the country was not only forged by muskets,

but by a woman who knew

that compassion, correctly applied,

can change the outcome of a war.

New Poem: Montague Book Mill

This poem is a love letter to the Montague Book Mill, a place where books, music, food, and the sound of moving water come together in quiet defiance of speed and algorithms. It reflects on decades of personal connection and the enduring joy of getting lost on purpose.

By a river that refuses to hush, where the dam keeps time with a steady rush, a red mill leans into weather and years, holding more stories than counting appears. You find it by trying, by missing a turn, by letting the signal bars quietly burn. Gravel announces you've come far enough, the water says welcome in river-wide rough. Inside, the floors creak a knowing hello, as if every footstep's a tale they all know. The shelves don't align the way logic insists, they wander like thoughts that refuse to be kissed. Here books don't behave, they migrate and hide, they wait to be found by the curious-eyed. You reach for one spine, another one calls, and time loses grip on its minutes and walls. I've played here with bands, let the songs find their way, worked long-ago tables where plates held the day. Between chords and chapters the truth still remains, this place understands how attention sustains. The river keeps reading beneath every room, a low steady voice pushing sentences through. And up by the windows with coffee and bread, ideas slow down and decide to be read. If books are not needed, that's part of the joke, we need them like air once the world's finally spoke. The mill knows the secret, stays stubbornly still, a home for the lost and the willingly thrilled.

New Poem: PeaceBirds

Some artworks do not try to explain the world. They try to hold it. The PeaceBirds Project, with its thousands of folded cranes and its invitation to gather, grieve, and create together, felt like that kind of work. This poem grew out of thinking about paper as witness, libraries as containers for unfinished histories, and the slow, deliberate acts that make solidarity visible.

They begin as paper,

the kind meant for notes, for maps, for keeping track

of where you are.

Folded once, then again,

creased with care until grief learns a new geometry.

In the quiet of a library,

where history usually whispers from shelves,

hundreds of birds gather.

Not flying, not fleeing,

just staying together long enough

to be counted.

Each crane holds something unspeakable

without tearing.

A witness shaped small enough

to fit in the hand,

light enough to hang without falling,

patient enough to wait for company.

Maps nearby remember borders before they hardened,

rivers before they were renamed,

homes before erasure learned efficiency.

Paper knows this story.

Paper has always known.

People arrive carrying questions they cannot phrase,

and leave having folded something instead.

Grief moves from chest to fingertips,

activism from anger to action,

hope from abstraction to practice.

No bird claims the sky.

That is not their work.

Their work is accumulation,

the courage of repetition,

the quiet insistence that peace

is built by hands willing to fold again.

New Poem: When Lions Wake The Street

This poem was inspired by the Lunar New Year parade moving through downtown Amherst, where traditional lion dance brings blessing, movement, and continuity to familiar streets. It reflects on how ritual briefly transforms everyday places, reminding a town that culture is something practiced, not archived.

On a winter afternoon the town loosens its collar,

February holding its breath just long enough.

Drums arrive first,

not asking permission,

only reminding the pavement

that it has always known rhythm.

The lions come alive between storefronts,

cloth and color learning how to breathe,

eyes blinking awake to a new year

that hasn't decided what it will be yet.

They bow to doors,

to windows steamed with tea and laughter,

to cooks pausing mid-chop

to receive a blessing made of motion.

Luck moves on four legs today,

prosperity dances sideways,

joy is loud enough to echo off brick

and still gentle enough for children

holding mittens too big for their hands.

The street becomes a calendar you can walk through.

Each stop another promise,

each drumbeat stitching past and future together.

Not spectacle for tourists,

but a living practice,

carried forward because someone cared enough

to keep the steps memorized.

By the time the lions sleep again,

Amherst will feel subtly rearranged,

as if good fortune passed through

and straightened a few things

we didn't know were crooked.

Quantum In The valley

The Pioneer Valley has always been good at holding layers of time. Mills become studios, armories become data corridors, rivers continue whether we name them or not. Reading about the quantum and AI infrastructure quietly taking shape here felt familiar, less like disruption and more like stewardship. This poem is part of my ongoing interest in how land, history, and emerging technology intersect, and how progress can arrive without erasing its roots.

Beneath brick and beams from another century,

where boots once rang and lathes held court,

light now learns new paths through glass,

whispering futures the past can support.

In a basement built for heavier days,

power hums with patient grace,

old floors bearing weight they never knew

would one day hold the speed of space.

Copper gives way to finer threads,

hair thin lines that carry the world,

every message passing the Valley's spine

before it's streamed, posted, or unfurled.

This is not sci-fi dropped from the sky,

it's careful work, advance and prepare,

getting ready for what's coming next

by tending what is already there.

Atoms swell under measured light,

lasers speak in disciplined tongues,

calculations outrunning intuition

like new songs still being sung.

I've written songs for rivers and hills,

for mills that learned a second life,

this feels the same, a quieter verse

about land adapting without strife.

Eighteen trucks will roll in someday soon,

metal and code stacked pallet high,

plugged into a valley that understands

you don't rush growth, you amplify.

From armory walls to fiber lines,

from floodplain towns to quantum gates,

the Valley keeps doing what it does best

holding tomorrow without losing its shape.

Here, progress doesn't erase the map,

it layers time, lets histories meet,

quantum rising from old foundations,

light finding home beneath our feet.

Tables for Love

This poem reflects on the quiet role shared meals and intimate rooms play in long relationships. Rather than focusing on spectacle or destination, it lingers on the ordinary places where love learns how to last. It connects loosely to my ongoing How I Met Your Mother series, not as a song, but as a reflection on how time, patience, and shared presence shape a life together.

We learned our love at candlelit tables, where forks slowed down and voices too, where time arrived in courses measured and left us space to see it through. No neon signs, no need for showing, just linen, glass, a careful room, a waiter who knew when to vanish, a window holding back the gloom. In western towns where evenings linger, we practiced how to listen well, how silence could become a sentence no menu ever learned to sell. Between the bread and final sweetness the future leaned across the plate, not bold or loud or asking favors, just patient, knowing how to wait. These places taught us what love isn't, not spectacle, not borrowed shine, but something built in lowered voices and refilled glasses taking time. In every song I wrote for living, in every story told since then, there's always one more table waiting to teach us who we were back when. So let the lists and roses wander, let February make its case, we know the truth of love by heart now, it rhymes with staying, not with haste.

Mishoon by Fire

This poem grows out of a real event in Ashfield, Massachusetts: a traditional Mishoon burn, where a dugout canoe is shaped by fire in the presence of community. It reflects on Indigenous stewardship, cultural renewal, and the patience required to let land and history speak for themselves. Though it carries echoes of my ongoing “songs for the land” work, this piece is written as poetry, not performance, meant to sit with the reader rather than move them along.

They chose a tree that had already listened,

rings full of weather, patience, and time,

a trunk that knew how rivers remember

and how fire, when honored, can be kind.

In Ashfield the park will hold its breath,

May smoke lifting slow and thin,

not the smoke of loss or taking,

but the careful burn that brings shape back in.

A mishoon is not carved by force or hurry,

it's coaxed by flame and knowing hands,

fire teaching wood how to open itself

to water, to journey, to land.

Before maps, before towns learned borders,

before grants and calendars and dates,

canoes like this traced quiet futures

through coves, through bends, through the grammar of lakes.

Now the town makes room for the old instruction,

steps aside and lets it speak,

honors the first stewards of these waters

whose care ran deeper than words could reach.

I think of all the songs for the land I've written,

not to claim it, not to own,

but to stand with fields and rivers

and say this place is not alone.

This one won't be sung from a stage or porch,

no chorus to carry the tune,

but it rhymes the way fire and water do,

each shaping the other, each knowing when to yield room.

When the boat parade drifts into September,

and the mishoon meets the light,

it will carry more than wood and flame,

it will carry a memory done right.

A reminder that land remembers who listens,

that revival doesn't shout or boast,

it arrives as fire guided gently,

as a canoe returning to the coast.