About
Over the years, as I have worked on writing books of poems, I have written poems that remained unplaced in any book.
The poems of grief gave me one way to cope with the deaths of my sister and my wife. My sister Sherri, Harriett Chereleen McKnight, was born on 23 February 1951 and died unexpectedly on 3 May 1999 of a heart attack and stroke. She was a special education teacher and collapsed alone at school over her computer keyboard.
My wife, Gretchen, was born on 25 May 1944. I met her in the summer of 1984, she moved in with me in November 1985, and we married on 23 December 1989. Gretchen died on 17 August 2005 of respiratory failure due to chronic lymphocytic leukemia, having been diagnosed with the disease in the fall of 2003.
I wrote the “not quite haiku” mainly on my first smart phone, which was suited for a short form that I could peck out quickly.
Love poems are from many periods in my life. There should be more of them here; when I find more I will add them.
Links and shortcuts
In any page, you can click on or touch links to jump around in this book.
- Each entry in the contents links to the poem.
- The title for a poem links back to the contents, highlighting the entry for the poem.
- Words in the headers and footers link to the index, the contents, a listing of books by the author, to this page, and to the previous and next poems in the book.
You may find the following keyboard equivalents to be convenient. Here I use the symbol ⌥ for the option key on Mac/OS or the alt key on Windows, ⇧ for the shift key, and ⏎ for the return (enter) key. Arrow keys are ◄ (left), ► (right), ▲ (up), and ▼ (down).
| Context | Keys | Jump to / Behavior |
|---|---|---|
| cover | ⌥ ◄ | Books by Tom Sharp |
| ⌥ ▲ | About Tom Sharp | |
| ⌥ ► | about this book (this page) | |
| ⌥ ▼ | contents | |
| ⇧ ⌥ ▼ | contents | |
| contents | ⇧ ⌥ ▲ | cover |
| ⌥ ▼ | select the next item in the contents | |
| ⌥ ▲ | select the previous item in the contents | |
| ⌥ ► | open the selected page | |
| ⌥ ⏎ | open the selected page | |
| poem | ⇧ ⌥ ▲ | contents |
| ⌥ ◄ | contents | |
| ⌥ ▲ | open the previous page | |
| ⌥ ▼ | open the next page |
The poet
Tom Sharp is Native American of Aleut heritage, a member of Seldovia Village Tribe. He is the author of numerous books, including Spectacles: A Sampler of Poems and Prose, Taurean Horn Press (ISBN 0-931552-10-9), a novel, Hans and the Clock (ISBN 979-8580172484), The book of science, SciFi (ISBN 979-8694935210), Things People Do (ISBN 979-8687425568), The book of beliefs (ISBN 979-8683553593), The I Ching (ISBN 979-8573510620), Aleut Artifacts (ISBN 979-8575608998), Aleut Words (ISBN 979-8582103394), and First Nations (ISBN 979-8682924769).
You may email tom/AT/liztomsharp/DOT/-c-o-m-/ to share comments on this work.
