These poems—there are more than seventy here--are not only well-made, but are brutally honest, rich in their presentation of the natural world, and marvelously imaginative.
Dave SchelhaasAugust 7, 2024
A few years ago one of my granddaughters was told by her Christian school teacher that Christians voted Republican. Walking out of the classroom, one of my granddaughter’s friends said to her, “I’m sure glad my parents and grandparents are Republicans.” “But my grandpa is a Democrat,” she replied. “And he’s a Christian.” Most Reformed Christians in this part of the country hold views similar to those of my granddaughter’s teacher. To be a Christian and a Democrat hardly seems…
Dave SchelhaasSeptember 1, 2016
Twice in my reading life I have come upon descriptions of communal singing that have aroused in me a deep longing to join with the singers, descriptions of a kind of choiring so spontaneous and natural, so full of the joy or pain of the moment, that I thought, “Only this singing, nothing else, could so completely feed the bodies and souls of the singers.” I wish I could have lived in such a community, for singing, like nothing else…
Dave SchelhaasOctober 31, 2015
in our Florida retirement village we were on the patio ice cubes clinking in our gin and tonics conversations rising sinking from a tree next door a shriek and a flurry and down on the ground a hawk with a dove in its talons red-shouldered hawk we decided the hawk stood still the dove soft beneath him wrestled and rested wrestled and rested but the hawk calmly waited “ooh, poor dove” someone said “soon be dead” someone else said still…
Dave SchelhaasFebruary 28, 2015
Smidt’s burning bush has tongues of flame that dance and leap in autumn’s winds. The oaks that shed their dull brown leaves seem to look askance as this tall bush so boldly flaunts her red. I do not take my shoes off as I pass – though Moses did when “I Am” told him to – but stop before I hurry on to class. “Perhaps a voice will tell me what to do,” I muse, not for a moment thinking…
Dave SchelhaasFebruary 4, 2015
MAY 2012: AS WE SEE IT by David Schelhaas I spent February of this year in Florida, hanging around with old folks most of the time—after all, I am an official member of AARP. One of the things I was told by an elderly acquaintance in Florida was that the whole idea of global warming had come from an eighth grader's term paper. And he believed it. I asked him if he ever watched NASA launch spacecraft to go to…
Dave SchelhaasMay 1, 2012
Here's a statement I hear rather frequently where I live and work: "Well, of course, I'm no 'tree hugger,' but..." and then follows a mild expression of concern about some part of the creation. For many people in my part of the country, being known as a "tree hugger" is a shameful thing. I'm not sure why they feel this way, but I suspect it grows out of a fear of being identified with people--"radicals"--who have chained themselves to old…
Dave SchelhaasDecember 1, 2010
William Jennings Bryan, if he is known at all these days, is remembered as a buffoon, the fundamentalist opponent of Clarence Darrow in the famous Scopes trial as depicted by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee in their (screen)play, Inherit the Wind. But that picture of Bryan is dreadfully inaccurate, and Michael Kazin has written this fine biography "to gain a measure of respect for Bryan and his people." Quoting historian E. P. Thompson, he would "rescue from the enormous…
Dave SchelhaasAugust 1, 2009