“We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.”―Thornton Wilder

“Wonderful to be here”—Walt Whitman

That’s Thornton Wilder and Walt Whitman, and this is Professor Barbara Mossberg, with Producer Zappa Johns, and you’re at

HERE FOR THE PRESENT, for the Poetry Slow Down, the news you need, the news you heed, the news without which men die miserably every day—a good shoe—if the show fits, hear it! :

Perhaps Universe, in this dance team with consciousness, gets us to notice it, so that we see it is a present, when we are present, when we say HERE! When we are called on in life’s roll call, when life says your name.  Maybe reading a poem is a magic mirror in which you see yourself, your own name called, and you feel yourself here, seen, heard, the gift of your own presence, and that’s how I see you, O Poetry Slow Down, HEAR with me this hour, this moment,  a gift—A show in which we consider the wisdom of Ramona the Pest, Beverly Cleary’s four-year-old, twelve-year-old Emily in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, and life’s lessons to Dr. B when we don’t pay attention (the high costs), with poets’ Rx for Presence: POEMS’ ROLL-CALL FOR OUR PRESENCE, including Mary Oliver, Walt Whitman, Kabir, Wendell Berry, Rumi, Hafez, James Wright, Pablo Neruda, and more as poets in residence, with Professor Barbara Mossberg, Poet in Residence in spirit, for life, with the California Poet Laureate Program, in Pacific Grove, and broadcast live from Eugene, Oregon, at Riverbend  . .

HEAR HEAR!

Dr. Barbara Mossberg
Produced by Zappa Johns
June 17, 2018
© Barbara Mossberg 2018

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