Kyle Kimberlin

I want my dog back now.  This has gone on long enough. Something must have gone wrong and the world is ignoring my sadness. She passed away in spring so already  we missed the summer together  and it’s well into fall. She shouldn’t  have missed barking at the kids  in their costumes last week.  Thanksgiving and Christmas won’t be the same. She’s one of the family and how can the…

“Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us. So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloudshadows, passes over your hands and over all you do.”– Rilke Letters to a Young Poet

I just finished watching the last of the eight episodes of One Hundred Years of Solitude on Netflix, based on the novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This is my favorite novel of all time, a work of surpassing genius. So was the TV show, if it hadn’t been based on this book. Everything about the show was excellent – the acting, directing, sets, costumes, lighting, music , and editing were all…

The writer isn’t made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century. — E.L. Doctorow

“It is summer.How many summers does a little dog have?”— Mary Oliver Some nights it seems like a century,sometimes it feels like yesterdaythat I watched the cross of deathshadow your face and fixyour soft brown eyes with night. Sometimes memory is the patchof dry ground between cacti,at times it stands and singslike bands of light within a waveand crests when I speakyour little name to the…

“Terrible things are happening outside. Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart. Men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.” – Diary of Anne Frank January 13, 1943

“And it is exceedingly short, his galloping life. Dogs die so soon. I have my stories of that grief, no doubt many of you do also. It is almost a failure of will, a failure of love, to let them grow old—or so it feels. We would do anything to keep them with us, and to keep them young. The one gift we cannot give.”― Mary Oliver, Dog Songs: Poems

Because poetry too often pullsthe punch but never lies, our dogis dying of heart disease.Brookie moves about the houseand yard afloat in diuretics.Her heart has grown too largein all her briefly eager love. The words of this poem looked blackwhen you began to read. Now theyappear to be a cloudy cataract blue,like the old spoon your grandma usedto make soup for you on rainy days.The words begin…

What is the poetry of time merely passing? What birds alight and sing in vain? Does a face reflect in dusty surfaces and will flowers find forgiveness in this rain? We’ll spend the day and time will pass and nothing in this world will cause us pain. J. Kyle KimberlinCreative Commons Licensed This is interesting. I found this little poem in my Apple Notes and apparently I wrote it but I don’t…

“We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.” – Jorge Luis Borges Do you know Borges? I am very slowing reading through his Collected Fictions and it is changing my brain. Highest recommendation.

Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler) wrote a relatively unknown book called The Beatrice Letters, which I haven’t read and can’t find (maybe used?) in the usual places where I find books. I’ve only seen it reviewed; nevertheless, it inspired the poem below. Intertextuality is hilarious, isn’t it? Here is a brief discussion of The Beatrice Letters, by one of the best booktubers out there. I mean out…

I’ve been thinking about thinking and maybe breathing some life back into the old dead blog. Do you ever think that Earth might be the only place in the whole universe where anything thinks? We are each a life, rising up like a wave, rolling, crashing, receding. Enlightenment comes when the wave realizes it is ocean, yes? So here we are, made of stars and driving our meatcycles around on a…

I’m not sure it matters anywaywhat we wonderwhat we mean to say. I’m not sure it mattersdon’t you knowwhat we fear or where we go. But there are clowns and angelseverywhere teaching leavesto tumble down and birds to dare to claim the sky and showing roses how to turn their faces fade and die. J. Kyle KimberlinCreative Commons Licensed Well this doesn’t feel right for Easter but what can you…

The red-tailed hawk turnson a thermal above the wildbrushy ground and cries There is nothing you needNothing is precious but timeNothing is worth dying for but loveNothing is worth living for but peaceNothing belongs to you but now I have lived with this mysteryfor so many years: Where do old hawks go to die? J. Kyle KimberlinCreative Commons Licensed

Below is the last poem I wrote in 2022; it was a lean year for creative output, to say the least. My bad. And I don’t know if anyone is still reading this blog. At one time it had 7,000 subscribers but I have been neglectful. I hope that 2023 will be better. One of the things I’ve been trying to teach myself is that writers/poets have to practice their scales just like musicians. Of course that…