The tributes keep coming …

A Belated Birthday Quatrain for Mike Peich

It's not the height, it's the view

you get at seventy, sweep in lieu

of excess, and a new mood, too:

inside the harvest-calm, what's true.

                                        Molly Peacock

There once was a man named Mike Peich.

Never a thing not to like.

Winnowy and able,

Diane sees Clark Gable.

Too bad he's no longer a tyke.

                                             Lori Vermeulen

Happy Birthday to Mike Peich

The tall skinny boy you were at twenty
looks from the bathroom mirror as you stand
trimming his white moustache at  seventy.
A toast to every grain of hour-glass sand!
                                              Marilyn Nelson

For Michael Peich, on his Seventieth Birthday

You live where I once lived, and fled, two hundred

Miles southeast along the Lincoln highway:

The outskirts of Philadelphia, starred by great

White boles of sycamores and ruddy barns

And white-washed cottages.

Housman wrote that—winter snow or spring-

Blossoming cherry—we can only hope

For three score years and ten,

Which only leaves me seven more, and you

Then none at all, so we must reason well:

Those rhymes are long out-dated, pre-pre-modern

As we are post-post-hoc, intent

On decades more, festooned with snow and flowers.

You should enjoy the highways where I went

And thrive among my blue remembered hills.

                                               Emily Grosholz

There are more to come. I will get to them before the day is out.