“Daily Exercise”, “America”, “I Tell My Children”

SPACES BETWEEN US / image by Amalie Flynn

daily exercise (haiku)

my morning poems
have begun to sound like Tweets
fragments of bird song

America

we best reflect

the spaces between us

when we stand

together

I tell my children

to clean their own rooms
to play fair and make right
to always do
the best they can.

And then I apologize
that I am not leaving them
a better world
than my own.

Randy Brown

Randy Brown embedded with his former Iowa Army National Guard unit as a civilian journalist in Afghanistan, May-June 2011. A 20-year veteran with a previous overseas deployment, he subsequently authored the 2015 poetry collection Welcome to FOB Haiku: War Poems from Inside the Wire. He also co-edited the 2019 Military Writers Guild-sponsored anthology Why We Write: Craft Essays on Writing War. As “Charlie Sherpa,” he blogs about poetry at www.fobhaiku, and about military-themed writing at www.aimingcircle.com.

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