Reflections
Poems, Prose, and Music by Ron Pierce
Poems
Moments (a collection)
Moments II (another collection)
My Castaway (ever feel lie you have lost "yourself"?)
Starshine (a poem/song to confort one who has lost a love)
Wanderer (a poem about searching)
Poem/Songs
The Steelie King Comes to Town (a children's "high noon" ballad)
Beware the Wily WhereWhenWhy (a song about a strange creature that lives in our minds)
Over and Over (a song about cleansing)
Love has Got to Shout (a song about letting go of fear to love)
Puffs, the Magic Cereal (as a child, did you ever have just one particular food you could eat all day?)
Shorts and Musings
In 1980, after quitting a 13-year career at IBM, I used a typewriter to put together a collection of poems and prose from the 1970s. This was titled "Moments" and was shared with Delana, who would later become my wife and the mother of our three children. A selection of that compilation will be found at the "Moments" link.
"The Steelie King Comes to Town" is a kind of High Noon of marble-playing, based on some real experiences in my youth, and an important lesson in life. The ballad has a meter similar to "The Cremation of Sam McGee", by Robert Service, which I loved as a youth. The Steelie King ballad was first composed around 1974, over a period of a several weeks, while commuting to and from work from my home in the Santa Cruz mountains to IBM in south San Jose.
"Beware the Wily WhereWhenWhy" is a poem/song that is part of a children's story, and relates a problem we all tend to wrestle with: indecision.
All of the poems and songs pretty much wrote themselves; once the first "line" came, the direction (and tune) would slowly unfold. There was never a preconceived "ending" in mind. I think any of us can do this, if we write down something, and play with it; and see where it wants to go, without expecting to "finish" in one sitting, and don't get discouraged --- probably none of us would ever have learned how to talk or walk if we knew how silly we sounded and looked. Writing the Ballad of the Steelie King is informative about the "free flowing" writing process.
Here are a couple of poem/song writings from my days at IBM:
If you enjoy nature photography, peruse our images of Yosemite and Big Sur.
