Category Archives: Verse

Then and Now

I have very dim memories of the Apollo program, but the image that really sticks with me is of the engineers/technicians that manned positions in Mission Control. This poem is the result of contrasting my impression from 50 years ago with my impression while watching the first SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch last year. Then and Now The dawn of monster rockets All steel plates, bolts, and wings Patches and rivets and ridges Thunder, ice, paint, and flame Shaken off a

Wallet Lottery

In a March 2017 interview in the Italian magazine “Scarp de’ Tenis,” Pope Francis argued that giving money to someone begging on the street is “always right.” What if the recipient of your gift decides to uses the money to buy a glass of wine instead of food? If “a glass of wine is the only happiness he has in life,” the pope replied, “that’s OK. Instead, ask yourself, what do you do on the sly? What ‘happiness’ do you

A California Whine

My reason for traveling cross-country by car in 1996 was that I had 6 cases of wine that I just couldn’t bear to part with. Unfortunately, the only way to transport wine out of Virginia back then was to be a distributor. Nobody would take it, and it probably would have spoiled anyway. So…I decided to bring it with me in the car. As I approached the California border, I had a little fantasy about what I would say at

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