Whmankeworldofwords's Blog

It’s been too long since I’ve updated my blog.  What are my excuses?  I’ve been writing and proof-reading a good deal.  Since the beginning of the year I’ve been working on a sequel to Secrets of Hawking Manor.  Two novels that I had finished writing last year and want to publish this year have taken many hours of proof-reading, work that is still in progress.  One of them, In Joy and in Sorrow, has already undergone three edits and is now in the final stages of a fourth and last one.  I’ve also done several edits of Beyond the Breaking Point.  I would like to do one more, or better yet find someone to do an edit for me.  I tend to get too close to the story, unless I leave it alone for many months.   If I work on a novel sooner, I miss mistakes.  It takes a good deal of time and special care to proof-read and edit  more than one hundred twenty thousand words.

In addition, I have organized my poems by topic, and begun to add photos or pictures as background for some of the poems.  I have written the poems over a period of many years.  Each one I wrote  when a thought, a feeling or a scene made a deep impression on me.  Forging an experience into a poem was a personal expression meant only to help remind me down the road of  my feelings to something meaningful to me at the time.  Until recent years I had not thought of sharing my poetry.  I had shared one or two only at rare times  in close circles on special occasions.  But those occasional readings resulted in repeated encouragement by others suggesting to me that I bring them to a wider audience.  I have recently decided to put them together in a book. This is time consuming work, but I do want to publish a book of poems this year, a book that I have titled All Things Beautiful.  Two of the poems I shared earlier.  You can read “A Christmas Prayer” and “Did the Bugle Weep for You”, when you scroll down the blog.  The poem following these paragraphs, “A Broken Promise”, I wrote in the fall of 1994.

A Broken Promise

There, on my table,

In the center stood

In crystal

On the polished wood,

A rose,

Exquisite in design.

Its head,

A crown,

More finely shaped

Then any by a mortal made.

Its strength,

A thorn, poised and secure,

A promise ring,

Of long life sure.

Its breath,

A healing for the soul,

A touch of love,

Sweet, beautiful and whole.

Each silken pedal

Perfectly the other wed,

But there on my table,

The rose was dead.