Lenore retired last May from several years of teaching high
school language arts, AP English Language, and creative writing. As a creative
writing teacher, she continually encouraged her students to enter the various
poetry contests open to them, usually with excellent results, and attended both
the Redrock Writers Seminars and Poetry in the Park, bringing students as often
as possible. Being a literature major, she developed a deep and lasting
love of poetry in every form, but with a busy teaching schedule, she seldom
wrote herself.
Upon retirement, Lenore became a regular member of the Dixie Poets
and has grown to truly enjoy that facet of poetry also. While she admittedly
still prefers the reading, interpretive and analytical aspects, she feels that
her writing is improving with the relaxed, accepting atmosphere she has found
among her fellow poets and their excellent critiques. Lenore chaired the Student Division of Chaparral Poetry for the Redrock Seminar this year.
Unquiet Rain
It pounds without mercy,
this unquiet, on the unsuspecting earth,
as unmercifully the deluge continues.
Newly-opened roses languish defeated in the angry red mud.
Summer colors retreat back into their green buds,
seeking the solace of a womb too soon departed.
The burrowers who sought shelter at the
first split in the sky dig, frantic, unknowingly, into their
tombs.
The neighbor’s black Labrador wails unheard at the patio
door,
quivering as much from the pounding liquid as from the
pounding cacophony.
The early heat wave unfairly sired blossoms unready to
bloom,
giving a false sense of spring to a dormant land,
awakening fervor this earth is not yet ready for.
In a few months this same land will be parched,
the sensuous red dirt a cracked and dull dun.
But now, in early March, the Southern Utah desert
rages under a relentless beating that brings the recent
mountain spring snow into prematurely swollen lakes and a
full river,
a spring setting unprepared for summer’s passion.
Robert Lynn Brown spent most of his pre-college years on the family dairy farm/cattle ranch in So. Arizona, where he learned to love livestock, physical labor, and life. He earned an MA degree in Spanish literature and linguistics from BYU. After teaching high school Spanish and English for 10 years in Arizona, he joined the Foreign Service of the US Information Agency and spent the next decade directing English teaching and cultural exchange programs for the US embassies in Iraq, Colombia, and Indonesia. During this period, he also served intermittently as a traveling specialist in the teaching of English as a foreign language, directing seminars for local teachers in Argentina, Ecuador, Mexico, Brazil, and Vietnam. He continued his 30-year Foreign Service career in diplomatic positions in Brazil, Mexico, and Nicaragua, plus a variety of administrative functions in Washington, DC, retiring in 1995. Eighteen of his poems have won recognition in church, state, and national competitions. In 2012 Robert published a 300-page book of poetry entitled RHYMES and REASON. He’s now a member of Word Weavers Chapter in Utah Valley.
