Words by Winter

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So much pain in life, the kind of pain inflicted by humans upon each other because of differing theologies, feels unnecessary to me. Can't we all be who we are?

Words by Winter: Conversations, reflections, and poems about the passages of life. Because it’s rough out there, and we have to help each other through.

Original theme music for our show is by Dylan Perese. Additional music by Kelly Krebs. Artwork by Mark Garry. Today’s poem, Jesus at the Gay Bar, is by Jay Hulme and is featured here with kind permission of the poet.  I encourage you to check out more of his beautiful work. 

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It's a beautiful thing, how a poem written more than three thousand years ago can come shimmering up through the ages, an arrow to the heart. 

Words by Winter: Conversations, reflections, and poems about the passages of life. Because it’s rough out there, and we have to help each other through.

Original theme music for our show is by Dylan Perese. Additional music by Kelly Krebs. Artwork by Mark Garry. Today’s poem, Injustice, is by Piyassili of Assyria, 1218 BC, and is featured here as part of our Poetry in the Public Domain series. 

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Years go by and you live through so many things that don’t turn out as you hope, and you know this will keep on happening. The flip side of this is a kind of gratitude I could not have felt when I was younger, a combination of telescope and microscope: all the awfulness will always be there, and so will a thousand tiny beautiful moments.

Words by Winter: Conversations, reflections, and poems about the passages of life. Because it’s rough out there, and we have to help each other through.

Original theme music for our show is by Dylan Perese. Additional music by Kelly Krebs. Artwork by Mark Garry. Today’s poem, We Three Kings, is by Dante Di Stefano and is featured here with kind permission of the poet.  I encourage you to check out more of his beautiful work. 

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Oh, Ms. Parker. Ms. Parker! How do you do what you do? I read your poems over and over. 

Words by Winter: Conversations, reflections, and poems about the passages of life. Because it’s rough out there, and we have to help each other through.

Original theme music for our show is by Dylan Perese. Additional music composed and performed by Kelly Krebs. Artwork by Mark Garry.  Today's poem, Inscrutable, by poet, editor, and Algonquin Round Table founder Dorothy Parker, is in the public domain. Words by Winter can be reached at [email protected]. 

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Oh, childhood and the friends we made then. The friends I had when I was a child will be with me forever, even if only in memory, in a kind of longing way. 

Words by Winter: Conversations, reflections, and poems about the passages of life. Because it’s rough out there, and we have to help each other through.

Original theme music for our show is by Dylan Perese. Additional music by Kelly Krebs. Artwork by Mark Garry. Today’s poem, Naive, is by Tim Seibles and is featured here with kind permission of the poet.  I encourage you to check out more of his beautiful work. 

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I'm preparing my garden for winter as this episode airs, and feeling nostalgic for its summer glory, something that the poet seems to feel as well. 

Words by Winter: Conversations, reflections, and poems about the passages of life. Because it’s rough out there, and we have to help each other through.

Original theme music for our show is by Dylan Perese. Additional music composed and performed by Kelly Krebs. Artwork by Mark Garry.  Today's poem, The Garden by Moonlight, by poet and translator Amy Lowell, is in the public domain. Words by Winter can be reached at [email protected]. 

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Oh, the fathers. The fathers and those who stand in for fathers. My own father is gone now, and how I miss him. 

Words by Winter: Conversations, reflections, and poems about the passages of life. Because it’s rough out there, and we have to help each other through.

Original theme music for our show is by Dylan Perese. Additional music by Kelly Krebs. Artwork by Mark Garry. Today’s poem, Dressing My Father-in-Law for Burial, is by Benjamin Cutler and is included in his new collection Wild Silence, forthcoming in October 2024. It's featured here with kind permission of the poet.  I encourage you to check out more of his beautiful work. 

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Sterling A. Brown's work stays with me, making me think about childhood, and the things we leave behind, but why? 

Words by Winter: Conversations, reflections, and poems about the passages of life. Because it’s rough out there, and we have to help each other through.

Original theme music for our show is by Dylan Perese. Additional music composed and performed by Kelly Krebs. Artwork by Mark Garry.  Today's poem, Return, by writer, poet and teacher Sterling A. Brown, is in the public domain. Words by Winter can be reached at [email protected]. 

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All summer, he's hidden
his voice, no matter how I begged for
just one song.

Three lines from "Music Box" which, to me, encapsulate the love and anger and longing that siblings can feel for each other, all in the same moment. Families are complicated. 

Words by Winter: Conversations, reflections, and poems about the passages of life. Because it’s rough out there, and we have to help each other through.

Original theme music for our show is by Dylan Perese. Additional music by Kelly Krebs. Artwork by Mark Garry. Today’s poem, Music Box, by Rhett Iseman Trull, is featured here with kind permission of the poet.  I encourage you to check out more of her beautiful work. 

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Sometimes a simple poem, filled with a kind of resigned longing, belies the long meanderings of an extraordinary and complicated life. 

Words by Winter: Conversations, reflections, and poems about the passages of life. Because it’s rough out there, and we have to help each other through.

Original theme music for our show is by Dylan Perese. Additional music composed and performed by Kelly Krebs. Artwork by Mark Garry.  Today's poem, So We'll Go NoMore A-Roving, by Louis Untermeyer, is in the public domain. Words by Winter can be reached at [email protected].