DRAGONS
-In memoriam, Francis X. Hogan (1913-1974)

On Sunday mornings in March my father
would take a homemade kite broad as his back
up the hill near Reeve's Farm.
This was how man learned of flight
he told me then.

Racing down that hill to catch the wind
where there was none to speak of,
the kite (gradually lifting) caught at last
on a thermal from the sea his running almost reached.
He told me breathless watching it rise:
The Chinese were the first.
They made them shaped like dragons
which in those days roamed the whole earth
free and flaming.

And from the hill above Reeve's Farm
I knew them, floating in the mist over the ocean,
soaring down where the waves spoke of the sun,
gold and restless
and beyond the waves, too, to where he looked.

In school, he said, pulling on the string
which tugs at me still.
In school they will tell you
dragons do not exist.

"This long awaited gathering of Michael Hogan's poems contains his most memorable and disturbing work. Hogan built his reputation among small presses and chapbook publishers, creating finely crafted poems full of demonic power and dark beauty. Hogan is a poet who learned the hard way about the saving power of poetry. This book appears at a time when Hogan resurfaced (in Mexico) and his presence is troubling because he reminds us that poets who write to cut people with the truth can never go away. Hogan understands what it takes to make us listen and he has never given up."

- Ray González, The Bloomsbury Review

"At a time when much of the poetry being published is that of frustration and despair, it is ironic that this clear, positive and even triumphant voice should come out of the absolute darkness with a message of day-to-day survival which cannot and must not be ignored. Michael Hogan carries the reader past irony to the eye of the storm and past hope to a place of enormous calm and strength. Each of his carefully burnished poems glows with its own inner light - the light of exile, the light of triumph."

- Richard Shelton