The Geese
The Canadian geese are getting booed
by locals and tourists
from Montauk to Queens
because of the meaning
that flies overhead--
summer is now over.
It’s the week when the children’s camps
all along the East Coast have come to an end,
but school hasn’t started yet,
and so, it’s family week,
when anyone with any connection to Long Island is here,
remembering that the huge squawking Canadian Geese
really do fly from Canada to Florida,
right over New York,
definitively marking the end of the season.
The V-shape of the flock
has the children asking,
“Why do they fly that way?” and,
“How do they know?”
You think about explaining that each bird
feels the up-and-down of the sinusoidal vortex
twirling off the outside wingtip of
the bird ahead and to the side
and each bird adjusts its position
in the formation, constantly,
to ride, just a little, on the up-wash
it senses rolling off its flock-mate.
But then you simply answer,
“Because nature loves a graceful ending.”
The Light
When the sun is low,
whether rising or setting,
its light reflects off the dunes
and the grasses growing up through the top of them,
imprinting all that detail into your eyes.
At the age of 19, while a Junior pre-med student at UC Berkeley, Roger Sippl was diagnosed with advanced Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and was treated for thirteen months with a mixture of surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy, seriously challenging him in many ways. This changed everything but allowed him to live relapse-free to this day, forty-five years later. Between then and now Sippl started five software companies, taking three of them public, which was also an adventure. Sippl studied creative writing at UC Irvine, UC Berkeley and Stanford Continuing Studies. He has enjoyed being published in a few dozen online and print literary journals and anthologies over the years including the Ocean State Review and the Bacopa Literary Review.
See what he’s been doing at www.rogersippl.com
The Canadian geese are getting booed
by locals and tourists
from Montauk to Queens
because of the meaning
that flies overhead--
summer is now over.
It’s the week when the children’s camps
all along the East Coast have come to an end,
but school hasn’t started yet,
and so, it’s family week,
when anyone with any connection to Long Island is here,
remembering that the huge squawking Canadian Geese
really do fly from Canada to Florida,
right over New York,
definitively marking the end of the season.
The V-shape of the flock
has the children asking,
“Why do they fly that way?” and,
“How do they know?”
You think about explaining that each bird
feels the up-and-down of the sinusoidal vortex
twirling off the outside wingtip of
the bird ahead and to the side
and each bird adjusts its position
in the formation, constantly,
to ride, just a little, on the up-wash
it senses rolling off its flock-mate.
But then you simply answer,
“Because nature loves a graceful ending.”
The Light
When the sun is low,
whether rising or setting,
its light reflects off the dunes
and the grasses growing up through the top of them,
imprinting all that detail into your eyes.
At the age of 19, while a Junior pre-med student at UC Berkeley, Roger Sippl was diagnosed with advanced Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and was treated for thirteen months with a mixture of surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy, seriously challenging him in many ways. This changed everything but allowed him to live relapse-free to this day, forty-five years later. Between then and now Sippl started five software companies, taking three of them public, which was also an adventure. Sippl studied creative writing at UC Irvine, UC Berkeley and Stanford Continuing Studies. He has enjoyed being published in a few dozen online and print literary journals and anthologies over the years including the Ocean State Review and the Bacopa Literary Review.
See what he’s been doing at www.rogersippl.com