I've had the good fortune to attend TED half a dozen times. It is a most extraordinary experience for the people that are there, the talks shared, the theater of it all. I thought I'd share my take on the last one I attended. 

This poem was written as part of the Tupelo 30/30 when I had to write a poem a day for 30 days last November. 

I had such fun writing this sestina. A bit snarky, but meant to amuse. The sestina form came naturally as it provided the opportunity to be playful with words like "snug" and "hinge." 

"We don't typically decide on submissions this quickly, but we all had a chance to read your poem last night and we immediately fell in love." ~3 Elements Review Editors

In my Master Class, David Wagoner mentioned the classic hexameter in passing. I decided to dig into it and see if I could write a poem in hexameter. I dug up an old, old Greek Reader (W.H. Auden, editor) that still is scored with notes from my mother's school days and mine. In it, I discovered Pindar's Ode to the Athlete. I found it so perfectly suited for what I wanted to write about my youngest son's journey from athlete to a working design engineer in NYC. In fact, I stole liberally from it, interspersing Pindar's lines amongst my own. See if you can find them! I didn't achieve hexameter however. This appeared in Freshwater Literary Journal's 2017 edition.

This poem is my story of living a peripatetic life and then finding home back where I grew up, finding love and finding my way back to writing. It also is a play on the name Sea Born and threaded with illusions to Venus. I loved that West Trade Review chose to publish it in this issue with this cover.