More poems can be found in my published collections We Interrupt These Wars and The Light of Borrowed Splendor. Essays about these topics are published in my best-selling work The Splendorful Path: A Five-Hundred-Year Peace Map in Six Words.

Why bother?

• Who will I become today?
• Eudaimonia (To Flourish)
• At Cluny’s Ruins
• To Coleridge
• What makes creatures curious?

Suffering

• Deep beauty in the broken earth
• Seasons of suffering
• Getting cheddared
• Black turtles
• Whose fault is it?
• I see the assassins have failed
• Old prescription bottles
• Nursing a courage hangover

Hope

• Where Cliffs & Cosmos Meet
• Cardiff Bay
• The Wind & the Waterfall
• Hope is a celestial arc
• El Morro
• Hope before winter
• Becoming joy

Work poems

• When more coffee won’t help
• Choosing ethically
• Building character
• In praise of the team charter
• Writing the apology I’ll never get
• Short accounts
• Stop the infinite argument
• Sharing bad news
• Performance anxiety
• Greedy blowhards
• How to read a heart
• From anxiety to intention
• Leadership and joy are byproducts

Historic examples of poems about being in the muck and wondering how to get out.

• The Honey Bee Motif of WB Yeats and Antonio Machado
• Re-reading Every Grain of Sand by Bob Dylan
• Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy by Richard Berlin, M.D.