Lodgepoles
Jacobson House
Norman, Oklahoma
© C.C. Brooks

“Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.”
                       -Yevgeny Yevtushenko

THE BARBER

Carried a stone in her pocket to remind that 

problems weren’t so big in the vista of geologic time.

She wore sacred things.  Rings with precious stones. 

Turquoise to see the blue sky.  Fire agate to see the
sunrise, even on a cloudy day.

I said I came to Tulsa to pay respects to Yevtushenko.  

To whisper thanks from a friend for his poem

“Babi Yar” about Nazi atrocities committed
upon her ancestors in Kiev.       

She said, “You know, he used to sit right there,

watching me cut hair for hours, finally saying, your
scissors are a painter’s brush.  You are an artist.”


NYT article on the passing of Yevgeny Yevtushenko:

 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/01/world/europe/yevgeny-yevtushenko-dead-dissident-soviet-poet.html?_r=0

North Canadian River Bottom

© C.C. Brooks

"What do you really want to do for a life work? Break everybody's heart for a dime? You could always break mine for a nickel and I'd bring the nickel."

-Ernest Hemingway writing to Marlene Dietrich





“Ah, it’s tough out there,

a good muse is hard to find.
Living one word to the next,
one line at a time.
There’s more to life than whiskey,
there’s more to words than rhyme,
sometimes nothing works,
sometimes nothing shines,
like Hemingway’s whiskey”

-from the song “Hemingway’s Whiskey” by Guy Clark

"Hemingway's Whiskey":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVdaEZ2NF1w