© 2012 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… You do not tell a snake which way to twist its limb nor cats where they can or can’t walk. And the same holds true for the sonnet, its thoughts are its own. Through me you hear it talk … Continue reading
© 2012 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… Today, Monday, February 22, Edna St. Vincent Millay, had she lived, would have been 124. I was a little over a year old when she died. In my youth I swear I read somewhere that she had a heart … Continue reading
© 2012 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… On the R subway platform going north at Whitehall Street there is a girder whose peeling paint looked to me like a camel; it inspired me to recite Harlem by Langston Hughes although you won’t get to Harlem riding … Continue reading
© 2012 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… What follows is an ESL lesson I use with Fog by Carl Sandburg. I present it from the point of view of a teacher talking. The objective is to get the student writing, and that process is divided into … Continue reading
© 2012 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… wind isn’t skinwind touches skinwind I loved Yoko Ono before John Lennon did. I read about her in the school library in 1965 in a Time magazine waiting for the elementary school bus to take me home … Continue reading
© 2012 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… Light several candles and notice that each candle’s flame is different like individuals, all flame but none the same. All we can do is flicker and whatever fears and doubts we carry cannot stop us, but merely go along, … Continue reading
© 2011 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… Jingle Bells was written as a Thanksgiving song by James Lord Pierpont in the autumn of 1850 in a tavern in Medford, Massachusetts, a town popular for its sleigh races. Dashing through the snow In a one-horse open sleigh … Continue reading
© 2011 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… Chico, a graffiti artist, recently graced the sidewalk with a rattlesnake. It’s such a friendly looking snake I don’t feel dread or danger walking over it. “Will it bite me?” is a question someone with a guilty conscience might … Continue reading
© 2011 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… Saint Jerome’s translation of the Gospel of Saint Luke, Chapter 2, verse 14 is a direct translation from the original Greek: Gloria in altissimus Deo et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis, Glory to God in the highest and … Continue reading
© 2011 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… … Sandpiper The roaring alongside he takes for granted, and that every so often the world is bound to shake. He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward, in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake. … Continue reading
© 2011 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… I scanned 30 drawings that Akram drew thinking people might like looking at them. Akram never drew anything before I gave him a sketchbook with some pens and pencils to help him relax while he studied for his medical … Continue reading
© 2011 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
Last Monday morning I told myself that I was going to write a sonnet over the week completing three lines a day ending with two lines on Friday. Each morning I’d write and post them on Facebook with short videos … Continue reading