Ode to Harpeth Hall

You students, you plaid, you dress uniforms
You Souby lawn grass, you magnolia shine
You red bricks, you Ann Scott Carell library
You Wallace, you Massey, you Bullard 
You green hills, and rain, and snow sometimes
You cardinals darting from tree to tree
You middle school girls skipping and free
You AP scholars, you Harkness discussions
You United States history, your voices so bright
I sing your praise for days now past
Though some may say he’s a California lad
The truth is, he’s really quite sad
Harpeth Hall you have made your mark
And hark, you who I taught, I may be gone
but you still have my heart

Ciao San Francisco

24 years later i left
without a sound, wearing a
mask like I’d robbed the place
no longer the 23-year old
point reyes camping in the rain
studio-living kid applying to
grad school while dancing at
the elbo room, time has
passed, but that city of hills
dwells forever inside me
yes, it will always have my
heart, but just like everything
we had to part

House Says Goodbye

It is only a house, wood, paint, single pane glass windows,
but ten years pass and it is no longer ours, no longer

that two-story blanket that covered us in our laughter,
held our bare feet on floorboards that knew our family’s

groove, from Gangnam Style to I ain’t your mama, no I
ain’t your mama, not anymore. Sold, our Spanish

American War casa, Victorian era, master bedroom in
the San Francisco fog, where I daydreamed through

tree leaves and power lines, pondered this and that, scribbled,
loved and prayed on dark rainy nights. This place held

us in moments, just moments that always go on to the next,
the goodbye was always waiting, we left and it said hello.