Not Far from Here
Not far from here a farmer likes to hunt.
The carcasses he cleans and skins himself
(but not until he hangs them out to dry,
to season them I think’s the reason why).
If only he could add a hint of grace
to his front-yard-deer-carcass-hanging place;
please, neighbors, won’t you all impress on him
not to use his children’s jungle gym.
Broken Glass
What could be sadder than a place
where death rolled through, a ton
of hurtling steel into the sun,
where racing blindness met disgrace
and two young children playing there
are now replaced by nothing we
may recognize with certainty
but broken glass and blank despair?
It took composer and college teacher Donald Wheelock forty years of writing formal poetry to reach the stage of submitting his favorites for publication. Formal poetry, once relegated to second fiddle in a career of writing chamber, vocal and orchestral music, has now demanded equal time. Indeed, it has taken over his life. He is trying to place two full-length books of his poems. He lives with his wife Anne at the edge of a Hayfield in Whately, Massachusetts.