Welcome Michael Escoubas! Our New Activity Editor

Dear Whispers’ Friends,

Michael Escoubas has graciously accepted my offer to be our ongoing Whispers’ Activity Editor.  Activities are an important part of our journal and a staff member will ensure a variety of different challenges and that we have an activity each month.  I am so excited about having Michael in this new role.  We are now a staff of two!

Michael will be responsible for our activities.  Please email everything else to me.  I hope you will be as encouraging to Michael as you have been to me.  I will leave you with Michael’s first poem published at Whispers and his bio.

Blessings and best wishes,

Karen O’Leary

Whispers’ Editor

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Moment of Winter Twilight

Spread your arms mighty oak,

like my father and his before him.

In you, I’m in their arms wrapped

warm in a shawl of blue-cream

fringed in white powder. Amber-glow

softens the rough-edged tree-line.

In the seam of time between night
and day, this twilight moment unveils

a vacancy long denied: the embrace

I never knew, like a puzzle-piece

put in place by nature’s sleight-of-hand,

a timely fit; this grown man now complete.
 

Ekphrastic poem read at Lemont Art Center, March 2015

After retiring from a 48-year career in the printing industry in 2013, Michael Escoubas began writing poetry for publication. His study of and interest in poetry goes back some 30 years. During this time he studied classical and modern poets learning from their works and from critics who comment about them. Michael writes poetry in part because his mother once said, “You have a gift for words; you should do something with that gift.”