Welcome

To any who might be interested— hello, I’m Jack Walters, a retiring (expiring) senior citizen of Cape May, N.J. Now in my nineties, having outlived most of my friends and family, herewith some of the poems I’ve carried around with me after my career as a journalist, which ended back in the ‘eighties. My wife and I subsequently returned here, where we’d spent our summer childhoods. She’s now in a nearby nursing home and I’m rattling around in our cottage where an occasional housekeeper cleans up the periodic mess of soup cans and newspapers while I try to adjust to the loss of—my manual typewriter. I’ve never become used to its successors—electrics, word-processors, and now computers. Truth is, I never should have survived the last century. All this technology is too much…

Anyhow, I stashed away the poems, dusted them off time and again, and have rewritten them ad nauseam during the course of earning a living doing something else. Now, for want of something better to do, I’m left with this senile desire to get my poems read. At least, according to this crazy plan of mine, it’ll give me something to do every day—in addition to hobbling around on a cane with my sciatica or nodding in front of the bloody TV. So, every day, beginning today, I’ll type out, here, one of my poems, without too many typos. My first offering is called “Saigon.” It’s about suddenly remembering having once seen a wire photo of a Buddhist nun’s self-immolation by fire during the Vietnam war.

Jack Walters Poetry