I’m grateful to two literary magazines and an anthology for rolling out the welcome mat to four of my new poems in the last few weeks.

“Finding Love at 66” appears in Chameleon Chimera: An Anthology of Florida Poets, published by the South Florida Poetry Journal (scroll to the end of page 1). Green Hills Literary Lantern picked up “The Great Tit” (it’s not what you think!) and “Early in the Pandemic,” and Crosswinds Poetry Journal published “Final Hearing,” which is not available online.

With the blistering heat outdoors, I might as well stay inside in the air conditioning and keep writing!

Thanks to the “Republican Journal” newspaper in my hometown of Belfast, Maine, for publishing my early poem “Summers at Swan Lake” in its pages.

Much gratitude goes to Judy Kaber, the city’s poet laureate, for requesting the poem after she found it in one of my books in the independent bookstore Left Bank Books in Belfast.

You have to love a small city large enough to celebrate poetry and poets, independent bookstores and readers. I know I do!

For years I’ve been threatening to write poems to go with my photos, but it’s been really tough to mesh the two because I take wildlife photos and I don’t write wildlife poems (some feature wild life, but that’s another creature altogether). I’ve finally done it, though, and “Great Egret” won first place in the City of Orlando Words and Wonders Poetry Contest. Will it be another seven years before I write a second one? Time will tell …