LEAP YEAR

                    It’s Leap Year and the twenty-ninth of Feb,
                    That extra day that comes but once in four,
                    The rookie misstep of a West Point pleb
                    That all uptight precisionists deplore.

                    But libertarians, more generously,
                    Applauding what is odd and whimsical,
                    Delight in such irregularity
                    That proves the cosmos less predictable.

                    Just so it is a sonnet should not be,
                    Despite conventional parameters,
                    A piece of metrical machinery
                    In which nothing untoward occurs,

                       For even in such strictly formal matters,
                       An extra beat won’t tear the verse to tatters.

(All right, I know: it's plebE, which doesn't rhyme.)

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ADVANCEMENT

                         What is advancement for humanity
                         If not a step toward greater sanity,
                         Which means discovering a higher health
                         Than mere accumulation of more wealth?

                         Both health and wealth imply a higher state:
                         A wholesome holiness we must create
                         If ever we shall fully realize
                         The lasting benefits of growing wise.

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SPRING BREAK

                    Spring Break for me does not suggest the beach,
                    But rather just a week I will not teach
                    And have more time to ponder and to write,
                    An introvert's idea of delight.

                    My students have excursions long since planned,
                    Some even wafting to a foreign land,
                    But I would rather read and write and sit
                    Composing sonorous lines both meet and fit.

                    “I’ve travelled far in Concord,” Thoreau said
                    To Emerson who thought he should instead    
                    Be sailing out to far-off foreign lands,    
                    The way that one’s provincial mind expands.

                         Yet close inspection of a narrow plot
                         Can be revealing of an awesome lot.

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GRATITUDE

 
                    However has the universe brought us
                    To life and ever-questing consciousness
                    Who are derived from swirling cosmic dust?
                    I cannot know; at best, I can but guess.

                    It surely is no accident, but meant,
                    The upshot of a purpose and a plan
                    No randomness and chaos would prevent,
                    Resulting ultimately in life and man.

                    And who knows what elsewhere in outer space?
                    Good Orderly Direction is a fact,
                    Mysterious indeed, but yet the grace
                    By which the universe’s odds are stacked

                         And for this miracle, what attitude
                         Is apt for us to show?  Why, gratitude.

BLACK OUT

                  How eerie when at night the power’s out
                  And even all the street lights have gone black:
                  It fills you with an existential doubt
                  That maybe daylight never will come back:
                  That moon and stars will nevermore be seen
                  And soon the darkened Earth will start to freeze
                  As towards death all creatures will careen
                  Despite our desperate measures, prayers and pleas.
                  But then the power’s back, the lights come on
                  And everything resumes normality,
                  While in the eastern sky a glimpse of dawn
                   Assures us that another day will be.
                        Still, in the largest cosmic scheme of all,
                        The whole shebang is destined for a fall.

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NOETIC SCIENCE

                       Apollo astronauts, we how have learned,
                       While circling the far side of the Moon,
                       Within their helmets’ speakers all discerned
                       An eerie kind of “music” with no tune:
                       Perhaps old legend’s “Music of the Spheres,”
                       A mythic melody from outer space
                       With power to captivate the hearers’ ears,
                       A harmony purveyed by god-like grace.
                       But such interpretation will not stand
                       The clear-eared scrutiny of scientists
                       By whom the supernatural is banned,
                       For science on firm evidence insists.
                           One astronaut, Ed Mitchell, came to view,
                           Instead, the whole cosmic shebang anew.

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MEET AND FIT

                Measures are my poem’s medium
                Whose feet-full meters patter out to rhymes
                Invoking tones that ban the tedium
                Of free verse, curse of these declining times.

                What suited Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne—
                The royal road of metric poetry,
                The way most all our current poets shun—
                May soon be lost to our posterity.

               And yet I’ll join with those few formalists
               Who joyfully march on the metric way,
               Each one of whom courageously resists
               A poetry that does not sing but say,

                   For only when there’s music in its spine
                   Will poetry resemble the divine.

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