Kirjahaku

Dahlia's fourteen year struggle with breast cancer inspired her husband to compose a tribute to her courage and her essence. She will always hold a place in his memory. Perhaps this memoir will provide insight and comfort to others who have experienced a similar loss. Enjoy the moments you have with your family and disregard the trivial. Life has a habit of shaking our world and sometimes we don't take the time to walk slowly and smell the lilacs.

A few years ago, after the great flood of 2011, I went on a four day tour of the Mississippi Delta accompanied by a good friend whom I will refer to as P.A. We left Memphis early one morning and headed down Highway 61 on our way to Greenville. As we traveled down 61, I recalled many years ago passing through this area and it had not changed. P.A. was my guide pointing out that Mississippi is a special place and much maligned by others.The hot sun, unpainted buildings, scattered shacks, small towns half empty, miles of cultivated fields, blues echoing in small towns, friendliest people on the planet, the arts, Oxford and Ole Miss, Blues venues like the Shack-Up Inn, and Ground Zero, and the unspoken sadness from a brutal past, all contributed to the poems in this brief collection.Some are from personal experience, or a response to life in the Delta, others from what I learned from P.A. It is my hope as you read each poem you will see the Delta with all its beauty, all its faults, and I hope someday experience its culture first hand before time brings change and the Delta fades into memory.

Interest in the passage of time possibly occurred when humans first wondered at the rising andsetting of the sun and observed the changes in seasons. With the advent of civilization, devices to measure time and divide it into measurable increments have advanced from the sun-dial to the atomic clock providing a means to give temporal time a sense of past, present and future in a universally comprehensive manner.We as individuals measure our existence by our appointments, our cooking, our relationships, work, vacations, and as a reminder of our finite nature, aging, with the hopeful promise of anafterlife in eternal heaven time.These works are meant to explore time, with questions of mortality, expressions of emotion, the concepts of finite life, of eternal afterlife, and of space-time.