Duality
Poems
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
Eye
You lecture about light
And love and Gods and sun.
You speak of saints and halos
And brilliantly colored rainbows.
You sit there pious and protected,
The world's ills pass undetected.
You speak of calm and clarity,
Yet you remain your favorite charity.
You ensure your interests are represented,
And you care not for the discontented.
Turbulent winds swirl around you,
Yet you stay oblivious to the rage that surrounds you.
You sit in the center of the storm,
Where you remain well fed and warm.
You engorge yourself on grapes and cheese,
While others pick at the pieces of their shredded dreams.
__________
Dandelion
When I was young and brave
And my world was fun and new,
I'd pick a bunch of dandelions
And offer my flowering hands to you.
Through the eyes of a little boy,
The world is full of wonderment and beauty.
When he grows to be a man,
The wonderment is replaced by duty.
The difference between a boy
And the man he's soon to become,
Can be as different as the dark of night
And the blaze of the noonday sun.
For when a boy glances at a dandelion
He sees a flower - beautiful, yellow and sweet.
The man sees nothing but a weed,
Which he crushes under his feet.
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Book Details
About the Book
Richard Betts, in his graceful and deeply moving
second collection, continues his thoughtful and philosophical approach to
poetry. This book represents an
eloquent outpouring of 56 new poems that are much more personal and
introspective than his previous writings.
It is a testament that invites readers to share his vision of
experiences we all have in common:
strength and weakness, joy and sorrow, desire and disdain, faith and
skepticism, tenderness and tenacity and life and our own mortality.
Much like his first book, Betts’s poems are
constantly on the attack, and his subjects are as various as his
viewpoints. “Vision” focuses on the
heartbreak of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), “Omnipotence” and “Crumble”
investigate the question of suffering versus faith, “Correct?” looks at the
dangers of political correctness and “Disbelief” focuses on the numerous
questions one asks following the tragic death of a loved one. Betts avoids slowing his poems down with
indecipherable symbolism, opting instead for works that, with his carefully
chosen words, are fast paced and powerful.
About the Author
Born on December 8, 1964, in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, Richard Betts Jr., the second of four boys, was raised in the
working-class section of Mayfair in northeast Philadelphia by his mother,
Harriet, a classroom assistant in the Philadelphia Public School System, and
father, Richard Sr., a truck driver for Pepsi-Cola.
He attended public school in Philadelphia, attending
Hamilton Disston Elementary School and Abraham Lincoln High School, graduating
in 1978 and 1982, respectively. During
his senior year of high school, he was awarded the Teamsters Local 830
Scholarship Fund Award and enrolled at Temple University in Philadelphia. Following his freshman year at Temple
University, Betts transferred to Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where he
earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism in December 1986.
In 1989, he married his college girlfriend, Pamela
Sue Weisgarber, a native of Sharon, Pennsylvania, and the couple settled in the
Tacony section of northeast Philadelphia.
Their first son, Kennedy Christopher, was born in May 1996 and their
second son, Ian Richard, was born two years later in August 1998. The author and his family moved from
northeast Philadelphia to Warrington, Pennsylvania in 1999, where they
currently reside.
This is his second book. His first manuscript, The Poetry of Richard Betts, Jr.,
was published in February 2001.
Following the release of his first book, he was inducted into the
Abraham Lincoln High School Hall of Achievement in May 2002. He is employed as a Purchasing Specialist by
the Delaware River Port Authority of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.