this week’s (completely and totally optional) idea — all about a poet

This week’s idea has a two parts (which are both, of course, completely and totally optional):

Part I
Write a poem to, for, or about a poet.

Part II
Write a letter to a poet and then share it with the Poetry Thursday community on Thursday.

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For this week's prompt I've written a letter to Robert Frost, with a cc. to my father, in the form of a poem. In addition I've incorporated the last two day's PT prompt for daily poem writting in the fashion of NaPoWriMo. (yield, broken thread). As a prelude I've prefaced my amateurish attempts with a poem by Mr. frost which much more expressively tells the story I have written about.

Mr. Frost and my father showed me that a manly man could indeed write poetry. And not be any the less for it.

A Robert Frost Poem:

An Old Man's Winter Night

All out of doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering what it was
That brought him to that creaking room was age.
He stood with barrels round him -- at a loss.
And having scared the cellar under him
In clomping there, he scared it once again
In clomping off; -- and scared the outer night,
Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar
Of trees and crack of branches, common things,
But nothing so like beating on a box.
A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
A quiet light, and then not even that.
He consigned to the moon, such as she was,
So late-arising, to the broken moon
As better than the sun in any case
For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,
His icicles along the wall to keep;
And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt
Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,
And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.
One aged man -- one man -- can't keep a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It's thus he does it of a winter night.

A letter to Mr. Robert Frost , a copy to my Dad.

Notes, I write notes
To myself
To remember tasks that
need doing.
To the passage of time
I yield;
Accepting the graying of
My thinning hair,
The rheumy joints slowing
My movements.

"Tis the natural order
that my physical self
deteriorate apace my years.
The psyche yet grows
Producing,
Yielding , if you will,
the bounty from decades
Of learning/living.
Spewing forth poetry
and prose.


You, my mentor, my muse;
Introduced, yet again by
An elder
While you still lived and
Yourself, penned verse to
Touch my inner poet.
It was you Robert Frost
who mended the broken thread
between

My father and I.

My dad

Robert Ernest LaRock

by rel