Melissa Crockett Meske

The Dirt Still Looks the Same Melissa Crockett Meske

This poetry collective moves through the first half of a lifetime. Collectively, the author's verses move through everyday life with eyes wide open, but sometimes perhaps with a slight squinting rather than in full focus. The poems wrapped in this cover were selected by the author as her first 50, expanding the first half of her writing years. It is the hope that you will come away covered with layers of love, bitterness, hope, cynicism, cautiousness, lust, respect, positivity, doubt, loneliness, sadness, happiness, ecstasy, pride, resilience, tranquility and perhaps even utopia after traveling through its pages. "There is a Time" is from Meske's earliest years as an author, written in her late junior high years. Some of the Haiku and works such as "Travelling Words" and "In Absence of Love" are among her latest pennings, and prose commemorating momentous people and momentous times in life is waiting inside for your consideration as well. "A Most Special Day, But Without You" reflects upon a most memorable occasion where the author also shares the joy that comes when a one-time poet writes his first lines-something the 60-something farm-raised Army vet turned welder never thought he would do, for his stepdaughter or for anyone. Facing his last days, he still managed to take on the challenge. As we move from birth to death, we face the challenges brought on with each day we are given. We love. We play. We hurt. We make mistakes. We learn. We succeed. We fail. We pick ourselves up and try again. The dust and dirt that gathers on the soles of our shoes, in our eyes, on our skin, and hidden deep within our closets and our minds ends up looking the same when we view it from the mountaintop at the high points of life or with an upward gaze as it accumulates over us while we're laying six feet underground.