A New Bookstore, A New Poem

Please consider SLOW RIVERS as a holiday gift for the parents and grandparents in your life. Poems of Michigan, family and aging . . . there’s even a poem about grandchildren and Christmas cookies! Purchasing details are found below.

Not long ago, my wife taught me that it’s ok to remind those from our past how special they once were in our lives, that we all benefit from that sort of encouragement as we age.

TO A HIGH SCHOOL GIRLFRIEND 

I saw your sister 
at the store today.
She told me you are sad
at turning seventy soon,
much of life behind you now
with so little left to come,
and I wish I had told her
you are still seventeen
whenever I think of you,
laughing and lovely
in the afternoon sun.

Speaking of high school, this one’s just for fun. I may have published an earlier version of this poem here previously, but I’ve made substantial changes and hope it’s improved.

ARRIVING AT THE GYM
Dexter, Michigan

A woman behind the desk
greets us with a grunt 
and a withering scowl

leading me to wonder
if my wife stole her boyfriend
fifty years ago in high school

for no other explanation
makes any sense at all.

Information on purchasing SLOW RIVERS, Poems from My Sixties can be found at josephneely.com. Please consider ordering SLOW RIVERS through your local bookstore or online from bookshop.org, a website which benefits local bookstores. Regardless of how and where one purchases SLOW RIVERS, I am grateful.

SLOW RIVERS is currently in-stock at Three Pines Studio in Cross Village; the Good Hart General Store in Goodhart; and at Schuler Books in Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids and West Bloomfield. Send me an email at slowriverpoems@gmail.com for a list of other Michigan stores at which SLOW RIVERS is usually in stock.

A New Bookstore in Dexter (hurray!)

Courageous Books is a new independent bookstore in Dexter, Michigan, near our home. Dexter also boasts another independent bookstore, The Fox and the Feather. We are fortunate.

On a recent trip to Courageous Books, I bought Anne Lamott’s latest. Help, Thanks, Wow, is a short book on prayer and praying. I was hooked by the third paragraph of the prelude, where she wrote, “It (prayer) is communication from the heart to that which surpasses understanding.” That grabbed me.

I stood in the bookstore, picking up books to get a feel for their content, admiring the different ways books are designed and assembled, and ultimately deciding which book(s) to buy. I couldn’t have done that online. Readers of this blog know that I urge purchasing my book from local bookstores. Bookstores sponsor reading groups for local kids, while some billionaires – including that billionaire – donate money to causes and politicians I oppose. Enough said.

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A new poem every so often.
(No regular schedule right now; life gets in the way.)

Joseph Neely, all rights to original material reserved.