Selected Poems by Edward Waters (Click title to view)
| Osmosis The most dangerous temptations are so subtle as to seem almost passive. |
Once, Walking Down a City Street My first attempt at an 'environmental' statement. I've always been intrigued by how the passage of time changes a single locale. The idea for this particular poem, however, arose from a day in which I found myself on a sidewalk in downtown Atlanta mere hours after walking through a nature preserve maybe ten miles to the east. It struck me that, but a few hundred years earlier, one site would have looked very like the other. |
Sonnet I My premiere foray into this style. Some say beauty is only skin deep. I say anything that shallow does not deserve the name. |
Trees in Winter As with art, I know what I like. |
Apology We look to what we can see to prove what we cannot. |
Beyond Entropy Written midway through a four-year bout with clinical depression. In a moment of grace, it occurred to me that despair sees only the end, not what will come when the end itself is ended. |
King David's Mind All too often, we know exactly what we're doing -- no matter what we tell ourselves. |
Changeling According to folklore, a changeling is an imposter, substituted by faeries for a true infant. There are other similar usurpers we encounter every day and routinely mistake for the genuine article. |
Re-enactment On the occasion of a visit to Guilford Courthouse National Military Park. As with 'Once, Walking Down a City Street', place again mingled my sense of past and present. |
Pandora's Prize Many have heard of Pandora's Box. I was astonished, however, to discover how few reasonably educated people knew what last item that Box contained -- a detail which is to me the whole point of the story. Consequently, most readers fail to recognize in this poem the encouragement I was feeling as I wrote. |
My Compliments Composed more than five years before the death of Charles M. Schulz, creator of the 'Peanuts' comic strip. I'm sorry to say I never got around to sending him a copy. |
Two Trees Often I have seen aged trees which long ago had sprouted near to each other and eventually became, for all intents and purposes, a single growth. The beauty and poignancy of this strikes me very close to home. |
Speech Prayer is a small voice comforted by a Greater. |
One Written two days after the 11th of September, 2001 . . . and one week before Della Reese's offering under the same title. |