I'll be publishing some of my work later this year, but for now here's one of my poems.

This sonnet below owes a debt to two short poems: Wordsworth's My Heart Leaps Up, when he remarks upon the unchanging joy of seeing a rainbow, and then to Gerard Manley Hopkins' The Child is Father to the Man when he questions Wordsworth's notion. My poem is about the determination to write and the brief candle that lights our time to do it.

Three Generations of a Man

Across the road a house with one room full.
Furniture, draped in sheets, a story framed.
In my hand a book, my name on its spine.
My first. Other sheets that tell a story.

And then I see a man, weighed down by books,
Crossing the road, heading home, plodding here.
And now I see a child, amazed by books
And writing through his break. Please let me, Sir.

A key is in the door, so down I go
And throw it open to the man with books.
He kind of sees me, but just speaks, so slow:
Please let me write, he says, before I die.

I take his books, I take his hand, we rise.
I show him my book. He sits. He writes. Tries.