Sunday, July 19, 2026

REFLECTION in GLASS


REFLECTION in GLASS

Inside our small village church
Cornered southeast in Nebraska
Back in ‘63

I sat in a hardwood pew along with
33 others while my father
Preached the text;

My teen mind wandered to the wall
Up behind the pulpit at
An under-glass

Painting--Jesus as a shepherd
Leading many sheep along
A lush green path;

But strangely, an over image
On the glass came from a side wall
Caused by sunshine

Many children of all colors,
A startling picture
Over sheep;

I sensed that could be my bright future
Guiding the young to follow Jesus;
Later, I did

Caring for emotionally disturbed,
Becoming a youth pastor, and
A high school teacher


!st pub. in The Oak Bend Review,
Westward Quarterly, and
Pub. Poetry Collection--
Psalms, Yawps, and Howls

In the LIGHT,
Daniel Wilcox

 


Wednesday, June 24, 2026

Of Things Past and Future

 

Of Things Past and Future 

The monstrous golems
Of things past, the colossus

Of rot and bloat; gaseous dreams
Rising to dominance,
Oh gangrene remembrances.

These wretched night stallions
Galloping in human-kindless’ place

On the carnival-go-round
Of carnal (chambered) knowledge--
These stanchions under the brooding roof.

Awake in this penitential night
Human awareness scratched across

A black-boarded mind
Of inner side-show sky overcast
Waiting by the kafka-revolving door.

Endless spinning, the mirrored mis-hope
Of history’s leviathan launches

Bacchanal killing of the go-round
By skin-thin souls, carny totems of the
Masque, redded from 'poe' to pole 

But all to stanch this 'juglarnaunt'
This endless carousel of terror,

Only the parabolic words
Of one wanderer, a harlequin
Hanged by reasons of the world.


1st pub. in Half Way Down the Stairs
and then in Static Movement

 


Friday, March 20, 2026

March Pebbles Glistening

 

autumn's fall

crimson leftovers
fall, angle down
crinkling sidewalks/footpaths and lawns/grass
in
thundered color

--

when we pull up to Rhyolite
that derelict Nevada ghost city

where it lays stranded in blazing
withering intense heat

deserted, forsaken, desolate
though 100 years ago, from this Cibola

half a million ton of gold
got extracted here in 1905,

became an instant city
in barren desert by 1907--

got water mains, sidewalks,
electric lights, telephones, newspapers, 

hospital, school, opera house, swimming pool,
imported Italian marble and stained glass,

stock exchange, 3 banks, 2 places of worship,
lots of brothels, 35 gambling dens, 50 saloons—

El Dorado? No; 

The gold city was only a brief flash in the pan--
boomed, busted, and abandoned in less than

10 years, a faded park brochure states;
miner Tom Kelly built a bottle house from

50,000 discarded beer and liquor bottles;
and 70 years later, on the ridge behind

were created 12 chalky-white statues looking down,
“The Last Super” by Albert Szukalski,

a Belgian sculptor; through those paster-burlap
ghosts and crumbling structures, strong desert

wind blows, toward Death Valley, howling.

 


Monday, February 2, 2026

Narrative poems including The Lady in the Garden


 

The Lady in the Garden

A picture-post-card date near the wide
Serpentine sway of the wide Schuylkill River

Meandering through Central Philly's park garden,
Towered over by leaning elms, while 3 long canoes

Swift by to the paddling of Ivy League collegians.
Gazing at my dear companion in the Garden

A Quaker girl, Karen, chestnut-caped round
In waist-length hair like a swaying black ephod,

Vivid in her red chambray shirt and blue jeans,
Is an aspiring concert violinist but converses 

Passionately about King's March in 3 months.
Myself, drafted, a Conscientious Objector

Working with lost-saken kids in a mental ward,
Disturbed by their absent parents' bad living,

But am still so youthfully focused and narrowed,
More concerned with my companion's

Figured shape than humanity’s ship of state.
Gazing at Karen, hoping for love in the Garden

We sit cross-legged on the lush parkway green,
Getting ready to eat our carefully bagged meal 

Of 2 peanut butter and grape sandwiches,
As we discuss the ravages of far-off Nam

And Bob Dylan's 'hard rained' croons.
Sharing deeply with her in the Garden

But then I inhale a fuming putrid odor
Coming from behind us; I twist and see

About 6 feet away this bag of a lady in a filthy rag
Of a dress lunging slowly forward, hanging

Onto the ugly mesh of a shopping bag.
Her stench to high heaven wafts so rancid that

I pinch my nose tightly and turn away.
Gazing (instead) at my date in the Garden

But lo and behold! my dear violinist rises
And welcomes the old hag, “Hi Lady, please join us

For our Sunday snack here in the warm sun?”
 but I get all upside-down in my face

Gazing, surprised and frustrated in the Garden
As the homeless hag sprawls haggardly on the grass,

Next to us, her wretched, spotted shift
Wrinkling up her scraggly legs. She reaches

Out a grubby hand, grabs a sandwich,
And shoves half of it in her narrow jaws,

Chews open-mouthed and teethed.
I fume at this ugly interloper in the Garden

But then am shocked awake, almost too late,
Jesus emphasized on 'the least of these"! 

I join my dear musician's sharing our meal,
Thus we commune 3 of human kind,

Below trees of compassioning
In the modern Garden of hope.

 

1st pub.  in The Oak Bend Review
then in Dark Energy, a collection of Daniel's published poetry.
Get the book at Amazon.com and local bookstores.

 

 

 


 

Tuesday, October 28, 2025

Meditations on reality, life, history and the cosmos

 

In the stream of life, poetic lines of empathy and mercy counter the sorrow and harshness that claim our yesterdays and tomorrows—help us redeem this troubled present day, this thankful present moment. 

a lightwaveseeker


Of Princes and Frogs

*People are born princes and princesses until their parents make them into frogs.
--Dr. Eric Berne, famous psychologist and founder of Transactional Analysis

IF all of us humans are born princes and princesses at birth,
Conceived as innocent wondrous human beings,

How is it that every generation of caring parents change their
New born precious infants into  glucky messy "frogs"?

And of course, what of our blameful parents—mean bewitchers—
Who were once wondrous innocents, too, little babes and toddlers

In their own parents’ arms! And back, back, to
Many grand-grand noble parents, ancestry-past

Turned endlessly back hopping into tadpoles, then slimy frogs
(warty toads) once upon a time as ill-well

Down to the 1st human primates at least 100,000 years ago;
Not so grand beginning of all croakliness.

What unlovely history words for the froggy in us all.
So where did this repulsive ‘tail’ of our soon-to-frog ancestor start,

The tadpoled-former prince of humanness begin?
Back before the primordial pond changed into corrupt skyscraping

High tech zoos, where worse slime and grime still remain?

Go back and back, generation upon generation to the human start—
That doesn’t solve why frogginess croaks and hops through the millenniums,

Why millions of humans birth oh so good, but devolve into ne’er-do-bads,
Why way too many of the little ones grow, cycling down

To dysfunction, neurosis, selfishness, even suicide and war;
Why some humans throw money around themselves like green confetti,

Gorge to overweight, and spend spend for dieting in deluxe gyms
While others, skin and bones, pick small finger-fulls of corn kernels

Out of horse manure on the muddy road or become child-soldiers with guns,
Why the most religious slaughter millions for god or ideologies

And the civilized century of the 20th became most murderous.
What unlovely delusion words of the poison froggy in us all.

Yes, we’re dealing with the cussdedness of our human kingness
Says Mark Twain (of The Prince and the Pauper)

Of course, Dr. Eric Berne, the astute psychologist knows our inner self
Of the 3 sides of consciousness—our inner felt, tradition taught, 

And rational-thought; what Berne termed “Child, Parent, Adult"
the latter which seeks objectivity, evidence, rational, who tries to sort

Some sense from the human  historic quagmire of feeling, insight,
Prejudice, superstition, fantasy, delusion, and moral conscience;

That deep within resides, too, is the Id a little fascist,”
Destructive desire that ever seeks chaos and destruction

But where did this little reptile desire come from?
Creeedalists in heated discussion will point to Adam’s Original Sin

When the wily snake cast doubt and tempted us to dragonhood.
The Calvinists shout our reptilian fallenness came

By the predestined will of the Almighty Sovereign who ordained our evil
Before the Creation of the Cosmos, we little infants born sinful

Pre-damned to Hell’s fire forever solely for God’s eternal pleasure and glory.
What horrific despairing words for the froggy in us all.

Secular folk reason we are born into through evolutionary biology
where good blossoms and evil cancers

(The duo of opposites) so babes are both noble and nefarious,
Will become both princes and frogs together split,

(Though snake or dragon aptly fits more than a few);
What we human primates need to do is  strive for rational evidence,

Not the sludge-paupered pond, diseased with plague,
Though multi-millions fail to reach such a sought goal.

Tragically, in so many cases lost children struggle in dysfunction
Almost from birth because they were born unfortunately

To very froggy parents living brazenly wrong, in our malfunctional
Societies, ever tempted by the glutted media praising our worst inclinations.
What despairing words for the froggy in us all.

Then by 7 or 8, waken to moral consciousness; but
Perceiving finiteness, we turn to gimmie gain and then guilt,

Not getting beyond our selfish tempted pond
Even group egotism, false illusionary religiosity

Masks the slither and wily guile gone to bad, to even evil,
Lke Muslim jihadists, Nazi supremacists, Stalinist oppressors,

And endless other historic destructors.
What unlovely theoried words for the froggy in us all. 

Egocentric, selfish, we cycle down from the constant testing
To our own demise or if we seek the Good, meticulous Truth, 

Caring Just, embrace, responding to Ever’s mercy, rise in
Thankful compassion, bow and kneel in meekness to true transcendent  life,

Renewing our innocent conception and blessed births,
Becoming noble refusing our lower froggy destructive

Passions, in our full-hearted reasoned, thoughtful morally real actions.
What wonderful truth for the prince and princess in us all.

 Revised 2/22/26

Daniel Wilcox


Tuesday, September 30, 2025

Romantic Poems of Commitment, Affection, and Passion

 

two hands

after a fine guitarist’s set,
hidden music
muses
through the spheres

out in the audience
hidden in the middle, two arms
under a table with two full glasses
ignored

two hands commune
caressing
as if the one
and only touching
on earth,
before the fall

for an hour and a half
embodied, that
warm embrace of their fingers
and palms 

close slow dancing
no palming
but sheer magic
one body, one spirit, one mind


1st pub. in vox poetica

 --


A Song of Songs Into Olding

Intense clangor—the joyous movement
of rod and belle
of the brash and the subtle
caroled with rubied passion,
they ring with joy their supple skin.

Fertile in consummation, in oneness
these two-to-one
jewel their future
days with melodic movement.

Appealing with rings that couple gold,
One circle—unending, endless, eternal,
They spangle their handed time with madrigals.

The chiming lyric of the sapphire
adorns their sensuous moments.
Embellishments of gemmed time

lay close
jeweled bare on their skin,
on circular strands

Down
the years

Turning irritants, trials, and struggles
Into pure spheres of visioned music,
Shimmering pearls of perseverance

(Unlike the coldness
of the bland flatness,
the flaked shale
of many a marriage's mediocrity).

He and she chime in their aging,
wrinkled skin, touched creases,
caressed emeralds of cherishing,

lasting into the soft opalness
of Olding, their souls flow
warm with mellifluous serenity.

Precious
the seasoned-round romancing,

the ringing, rubied
Song of songs.

 

1st pub. in Word Catalyst Magazine,
and in outwardlink.net,
and Psalms, Yawps, and Howls

-- 


Ever After 

Waking up close to you,
Your ‘presence’ covered in our morning’s lips caress
Like the shimmering, luminous night's seal to a sleeping princess,


We’re warm, luscious honeycombed lovers,
Deeply treasured in life-long mellifluous romance
Truly our cherished delicious passion,

Chorus
And the moonlight on the water,
Moon shimmering on the lake
And the stars shine in our room
Through time to time to time 

Cherishing
Our heart-welling felt vow
Spectrumed rainbow of our arrowed hearts,
Protecting our intertwined soul and body

Not tempted, nor wayward
But delivered from every
Disloyal fragmented moment.

For transcendent now choosing,
True love so royal streamed
From time to time to time,

Through the first falling sky-up
On mount passion's verdant peak
High above the desert of briefness,
We begin newly blessed, giving life;

Chorus

And the moonlight on the water,
Moon shimmering on the lake,
And the stars shine in our room
From time to time to time

With the snapping of the corked top
And the delicious splash
Of  delicious wine on our sun-covered table,
And the burgundy bottle never empties
And our two communing glasses shine,

In the shimmering, luminous union
And the moon lights our room
And the stars’ shine on the lake


On our wedding night over and over and over,
You all in white lace
Warm in my embrace
And ever after.

 

1st pub. in The Shine Journal,
and re-published poetry book, selah river

 


"Roll Ever Columbia”

They bag fading lighthouses,
Explore more lone departed posts,
Live in their relationship of ship
To water and shore;

Brave roaring ocean storms
Bar none, faring better, more
Than boats-of-line passing through
That perilous channel ‘washing
Tons’ of Oregonian waves,
Churning in between,

But unlike historic river pilots
Who guided in-bound ships
Over that dangerous bar,
His home doesn’t dominate high
On Fort Astor’s exalted bluffs;

And her love hearkens back to 1812,
Long before any lensed high tower,
Back when townies lit up a blazing
Tree as the brilliant signal flare
To direct to an approaching schooner.

His love lights up her coastal way,
Rivering to her protected harbor;
Not like today in shallow America
Where too many a sparred couple
Forever shipwreck their ‘bows.’

He’s an in-bound ship-of-line
Braving the dangerous headland
And the deep rolling river, but above,
His wild woman glows aflame
Delights his vessel’s guided way;

There’s no disappointment;
Her shored cape opens with
Welcome, he sings the mark,
“Safe water.”

Oh so verdantly green,
Unfathomably deep,
For life;

Roll on,
Dear Columbia,
Ever and ever and ever.

--

*Don Bruno de Heceta, Spanish Sea Captain, was the first known
European to discover the mouth of the Columbia River in 1775.
*Captain Meares, on July 6, 1788 tried to find safe harbor on the
northern side of the mouth of the Columbia, but couldn’t so named the
place, Cape Disappointment.
*Woody Guthrie song “Roll on Columbia”

1st pub. in
cavalcade of stars poetry site

 


Summer of Love in Philadelphia

Twenty-two flights above Rittenhouse Square
in the spring of the fall you carved a smilin' pumpkin
candled at your windowed level,
a light in the times of horror and stress;

But below, we wandered our nights with
chapped hands interlocked, pocketed in my coat suede. 

We walked blind streets of revolutionary warmer, earlier days
and handled paddles, splashing and pulling canal water,
canoeing near the Delaware,
swishing and crossing where Washington
and we escaped near New Hope,

our newest way from countless foes
through spaces of pilings of bridges
of lush foliage over hung.

We were loving friends three times over
in the spirit and the soul and the city;
though warmed in closeness we never caressed,
for you talked of "betweeness," violin practice,
and your distant boyfriend on the west coast.

I called you evenings when I felt despair
when drafted instead of Nam, doing
alternative service, working with lost teens
handicapped by their errant parent's living.

But summer saw you in Quaker action
in raining D.C. for King's impoverished ones
and I never saw you ever after.

Yet your letters far crossed this land of Guthrie
from Reed in the redwoods of Oregon
To me back south in teeming L.A.
In the movement of the angels, where

I couldn't see clenched hands or shattered glass
like the new left riots of America in Isla Vista,

Instead I searched of the ancient ways so
coral deep in humanity's past based in that
tragic Cross spanning horrific centuries,
Jesus' kind hands outstretched and open wide--
we Jesus people.

No more passioned letters reach me,
And Oregon no longer knows you.
But I 'wonder' in this living life stream —

And will now hold you up in the Light,
For within my part of you so longs.

 

1st pub. in Wild Violet Magazine,
and in Quill & Parchment,
and in Psalms, Yawps, and Howls

--

Northeast Night

Under the glow
 entrancing of stars

Of that Whittier night,
Not Snowbound,

Globally warmed,
Sliding,
Not sledding,

Honeymooners
–Lasted, ever
Clung so close

Heating,
Like maple syrup
Snuggling

Within his
Large parka,
Smooching,

Below
A resplendent
Maple tree

 

1st pub. in
cavalcade of stars poetry site


Kiss your true love in the Light, 

Daniel Wilcox


Friday, September 12, 2025

MORE REFLECTIVE LINES of HOPE and TRANSCENDENCE

 

Perception in Late Night


I work the graveyard shift in ‘67
Stock shelves of “Marlboro Country”
For California slickers, tubes of
Ultra Brite “sex appeal”
Brushed by grim oldsters,

And Olympia, “it’s the water”
For partying young adults;

I close the flashy cooler,
Pick up the empty card boxes,
Crumple and dump them in the trash bin;

Across the street a Texaco filling station
Slogans forth rusted, “Trust your car to the man
Who wears the star,”

But its “vacant for lease” sign
Came from the only auto to ford
Those shallow words.

I lean on a metal stool behind
The checkout counter, no customers;
Its past
Midnight's hour; so I

Close my tired eyes,
Rub my warm forehead,
The feel of bone so arched like a vault,
My skull under skin

Almost Neanderthal,
And my sense of self in that inner cave
Of stored memories, procedures, and ads;
What will be left in my finite end?

Suddenly like a lighted tidal wave
Overwhelming self and night,
Wide  vivid  A  w  a  r   e   n    e    s    s


Incredibly oceans deep--
Immersed unending caring acceptance,
Infinite wonder G_D

 

Previously published in
Word Catalyst Magazine

In the LIGHT,

Daniel Wilcox

 

 


REFLECTION in GLASS

REFLECTION in GLASS Inside our small village church Cornered southeast in Nebraska Back in ‘63 I sat in a hardwood pew along with 33 oth...