When I was in graduate school, my thesis included both poetry and essays. Influenced by the personal essays of James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, I loved the form, but pretty much stopped.

One cannot balance tragedy in the scales Unless one weighs it with the tragic heart.

I am tired of loving a foreign muse.

Dreaming men are haunted men.

Our fathers and ourselves sowed dragon's teeth. Our children know and suffer the armed men.

Remember that when you say "I will have non of this exile and this stranger for his face is not like my face and his speech is strange," you have denied America with that word.

American Muse, whose strong and diverse heart So many men have tried to understand But only made it smaller with their art, Because you are as various as your land.