Daniel A. Harris’s first collection of poems, Loose Parlance, appeared in 2008. He has published some of his poetry in The California Review, Midstream, U.S. 1 Worksheets, Kerem, Blue Unicorn, Living Text, Evansville Review, Regarding Arts and Letters, Higginsville Reader, Prelaton, Love’s Chance, Blueline, Silt Reader, Tiger’s Eye, and Poetica. He has written books on William Butler Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Alfred Tennyson, with extended essays on the Anglo-Jewish poets Grace Aguilar and Isaac Rosenberg. He founded JEWISH VOICES: 200 YEARS OF POETRY IN ENGLISH, his education program of presentations and short courses for Jewish organizations.
A sample from Daniel A. Harris...
Leaves
The leftover leaves cartwheel,
scratch hopscotch on crusted snow
as sandpipers peck through sand,
churned receding surf. They stall
but dash again—shed by winds
that bluster skeleton trees.
Patience, urgency are theirs
more easily than his, the man
who stalls climbing the woman
and can't bear let flag his old
impetuosity, he plunging
with a kid's abandon.
The leftover leaves cartwheel,
scratch hopscotch on crusted snow
as sandpipers peck through sand,
churned receding surf. They stall
but dash again—shed by winds
that bluster skeleton trees.
Patience, urgency are theirs
more easily than his, the man
who stalls climbing the woman
and can't bear let flag his old
impetuosity, he plunging
with a kid's abandon.