Big Dipper by Kenneth S. Robson

Kenneth S. Robson
Author photo: Lorraine Greenfield

 
In Big Dipper, Kenneth S. Robson offers us a generous helping of poems from a lifetime of writing. Here are rue and joy, sorrow and laughter, and new beginnings at the end of things. This work is a testament to ongoingness. In it, forebears live and die again; birds fall and soar; and the poet, despite the reluctance of his body, laughs and sorrows and cheers with all the energy of universal youth. He dips into life, gets to the heart of it, and finds it good, even if difficult to digest at times.

Big Dipper - cover
Front cover photo by the author

Kenneth S. Robson was born in Chicago, Illinois and now lives and works in West Hartford, Connecticut. He attended Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine before devoting half a century to patient care, teaching, scholarship and public service—twenty years at the Tufts University School of Medicine and a decade as Director of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at The Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut. He has authored and edited many books and papers in his field. Dr. Robson was appointed Professor of Psychiatry at the Tufts University and University of Connecticut Schools of Medicine and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine. His passions include his family, poetry, boxing, fishing, Red-tailed Hawks and the Boston Red Sox. He believes.

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BOOK STATISTICS

ISBN 978-1-936482-34-4

Copyright © 2012 by Kenneth S. Robson

5.5" x 8.5" chapbook, 36 pages

 

 

SAMPLE POEMS

 


Osprey

I watched you scavenging today
for yesterday’s dead bass
(bobbing on the morning swell,
one milky eye fixed skyward).

Plucked from his river bed
you raised him up like Lazarus
and bore him off as if he lived
and you had killed again.

Teach me your sleight of hand.
I too would settle for the dead
if I could carry them to some high tree
and wake them there.

 

Portrait of the Poet
in Loco Parentis

New wrinkles
to my morning
face the music—
the departed
on my case again
base their insistent claims
for change of face
(in dying’s tiny
increments)
on principles of
eminent domain.

Old Hawk

I saw an old hawk yesterday
hunched low against the cold,
his boldness gone.

It’s sad to see a hawk that way—
eyes glazed,
feathers matted, frayed.

Age is an ultimatum—
and he must wonder where
his next hot meal is coming from.

Auschwitz-Birkenau

The trains are gone,
their tracks remain
and all the dead.

A stray dog sniffs
and lifts a leg to pee.

Across the road
an old horse shrugs off flies
and goes on grazing.

The Lynx

Fine and dandy
uptown pimp,
struttin’ your stuff
in shades of gray
and silver stole
the show is holy
cats like you stop
doubting toms
dead in their tracks—

struck dumb
by God’s
gray thumb.

 

 

Baboon

Did you ever see
a mother lose her child?

I saw a baboon in the wild
carrying her young’s remains
clutched in her teeth—
its limbs swung to and fro
with every step.

From time to time
she paused to lay him
on her lap to groom
as she would in life—

it was too soon
to seat death
in her living room.

After the Fall

Today, a late October afternoon,
autumn does its falling
by the book.

One leaf defies law’s gravity—
rising on an updraft
for a second look.

November

Shades of gray.

With one late start—
a red azalea’s
change of heart.

One bloom
and none
too soon.

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