Author: pollybrown2013
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Lucky
I’m still thinking about courage. Given when and how and where we are now, all of us, it’s not surprising. Some of the bravest people I’ve known have been eleven-year-olds. (Or ten, or twelve.) In 2001, the day after 9/11, I sat with a group of kids shaken but still thinking together: trying to come…
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Poetry and Courage: Four Memories
1 Some time in the late 70s, my father and his wife were visiting us in upstate New York, and we had taken them to see a small lake nearby. Walking along the shore, my father suddenly began reciting poetry, lines (I think, now) from “Thanatopsis” by William Cullen Bryant: To him who in the…
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Wake Up
Feb. 19, 2026 When Cheryl Perreault, stand-up comic and PhD psychology prof, turned to the dark side and began writing poetry, she also started performing in several legendary open-mic series in central and eastern Massachusetts. Often, her poems were accompanied by Steve Rapson on his guitar. From the start, Cheryl enacted the gospel of synergy,…
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Poems and a Few Green Beans
February 2, 2026 I’ve been thinking about resettling, about claiming or being claimed by a place, about what’s hard in that, and what can be good. Not everyone gets to choose where they live, and some individual choices are denied. So often, there’s no way of going back. And sometimes it looks or feels like…
Polly Brown / Poet 