Outskirts Press, INC.

James Ten Eyck retired from his academic career teaching physics and computer science to pursue his life-long ambition to write. He authored The Life and Times of Walter Reuther: An Unfinished Liberal Legacy (Page Publishing, ©2016). Since publication of that book, he has concentrated on writing poetry. Footprints is the first published collection of his poetry. It is an eclectic sample of personal, cultural, emotional, and stylistic offerings, that ends with a plea for maintaining Western solidarity in support of Ukraine.

                        At Sea 
He walks the pier each morn, the harbor to
his left, the Bailey and the open sea before.
Once the captain of his sail, he knew
the hour of the tides along the shore,
the warnings in the sky, the signs that told
a sailor when to hoist or trim the sails.
He knew the pattern of the lights and color code
from Wexford up to Belfast on to Wales.
Today, the moment is a cloud that floats away.
Tomorrow hangs like fog upon the wave.
The past is anchored in the verse he learned to say
by rote in grammar school and somehow save
in his Deserted Village
where in row-by-row
the master sees the empty spaces grow