I am a debtor. My life as a writer/lyricist has been infused with the generous gifts of others—some I’ve known intimately, some I’ve walked with for a time, some I’ve never met. But I own them a debt I keep trying to repay
     for giving me a poet’s eye,
          a poet’s words
               a poet’s pen.

They taught me to see beyond the object to the origin.
They taught me to recognize in the particle, the purpose.
They tuned my ear to hear not just the score being executed by the orchestra,
but the angel voices who first sang the music to the composer.

They taught me to pull back the camera of my eye
far enough from the seemingly unrelated specifics
to find big picture.

They modeled for me how to take the broken
fragments of a dream and push the shards
into the wet plaster of another day
to form a mosaic more beautiful
than the vapor of imagination.

THEY ARE THE POETS I HAVE KNOWN.

Here are but a few:
—My mother, who made me a designer wardrobe out of bargain
fabrics, masterpieces out of oil paint and canvas, legends
out of farmers, and funding for world change
out of a penny-a-day.

—Louisa Bowler, a high shool English teacher
who insisted that a fifteen-year-old
had something to say to the President.

—Milton Buettner, who barely escaped China
with his life when the Commune
rounded up the missionaries,
then inspired a class of Anderson College students
to write better than they ever thought they could.

—The father of Thomas Wolfe who never got to be
the sculptor he wanted to be, but spent his life
carving tombstones so his son
could write great American fiction.

—Lawrence Fogelberg, who spent his days
leading a high school band in Illinois,
but gave his artist soul so his son
whose songwriting inspired me
to capture life in song.

—Stuart Hamblin, whose cowboy ballads
confirmed my belief that a song lyric
could be a whole sentence and that the audience
was as smart or smarter than the performer.

—Garrison Keiller and Madeleine L’Engle who made me
trust the power of story.

—dozens of other poets whose skill with words
showed me that indeed the “pen is mightier than the
sword”.

And I owe a lifetime of gratitude to the man with whom I fell in love more than six decades ago because I recognized the poet in his soul–and the fine singers who have taken to the world what we have written in words and music. They have given voice to the song in my soul.

I wrote this lyric as a love song to all the poets I have known.