Issue 8
September 2001
Jim Lewis
The first poem I remember writing was at age 8. It was 3 or 4 pages long, a romantic thing about Robin Hood and Miriam. My mother insisted I couldn't possibly have written it myself. Despite her scepticism, I have continued to write, mostly poetry, with an occasional short story for contrast. I am a 49 year old Computer Specialist, Registered Nurse (male), musician, father and poet, though not always in that order.
For the past year, I have been a member of the editorial staff of the Cortland Review (http://www.cortlandreview.com ), an online Poetry and Literature Magazine.
and if i dream
some fear
and some desire
shakespeare's undiscoverd country
reluctant or eager in turn
to know its secrets
halting or hasting
to dreams they do not know
i feel no fear
feel no attraction
see only that someday
i must travel there
where all mankind makes pilgrimage
what comes will come
and if i dream
my dreams will all be color
bold and bright
brush and oil borrowed
from years of you and me
sorrow and ecstacy
small moments
and quiet glances
across a room
across eternity
the canvas is unchanged
what our lives have arranged
death cannot alter
All My Years to Come
Night does not fall without some thought of you,
nor sun rise after sleep without the same.
As easily as comes each minute's breath
unbidden, so your memory plays beneath
the consciousness of life that lately came
across the tedious toil that I knew.
The years that knew you not are not undone,
but unimportant since you stood before
me, hand outstretched to bridge the dreary stream
of everyday's alikeness where each dream
that rose toward me died against the shore;
I feared, like all those visions, to be gone.
But for your hands that reached to ease me from
life's river in its muddy roiling rush
the current would have swept me all away
and turned to darkness what was only gray.
Now expectations that within me push
the river back, will lead me also home,
And I will give you all my years to come.