Seymour Shubin

Seymour Shubin

by
Seymour-Shubin

Seymour-Shubin
I and we have lost a friend, brother, contributor and poet.It is with a heavy heart that we embed this page. Seymour is embedded in my heart. We published his first poems in 2011 and have rejoiced when they came.

We will not publish for one week in honor of our friend.
The last poem he sent to me was written in 2012

I have been doing this for a long time in internet time, since 1997. I have always published poems as they came in rather than have issues. When they don’t come in I write poems myself. I am the earliest example of how very close to people you can become on this thing.

You can love people
you’ve never seen,
or have seen once
on this thing.
Love them as surely as the sun
if that is sure

I have heard of this place
they call heaven.
If this man is not there
I respectfully
decline the invitation

Seymour, my friend,
they are saying your 93 years was a long life.
For me it was three years
that I knew you
and that’s just not enough
and, to me,
you died so young.

david michael jackson

Wasn’t It | by Seymour Shubin

by
Why Me

Wasn’t It?

I remember, when I was a kid,
hearing that if you wanted to be anything
in medicine or any of the sciences
you had to go to Germany
you had to study there.
But it was of no interest to me
since I was just a kid.
But it came back to me
like a blow
when some months later
I saw a man sitting in what was
described in the newspaper
as a Jew in a garbage wagon
being paraded by what were called
brownshirts.
But that was just an ugliness,
I remember thinking.
After all, that was the world
of the sciences,
wasn’t it?
What could ever happen there?

Why Me

Barbara Brett‘s review

Aug 22, 13
5 of 5 stars
Read in August, 2013

 

“A poem…begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness…. It finds the thought and the thought finds the words,” Robert Frost wrote nearly a century ago. The words are as true today as they were then, and they are a particularly apt description of the forty gems in Seymour Shubin’s eloquent and moving poetry collection, Why Me?. This is the first time that Shubin, best-selling author of crime fiction, has turned his hand and his heart to poetry, and it is as close as he has ever come to autobiography. Every poem opens a window on a thought, a longing, an incident that though unique to the poet also shines a light on the life of the reader and awakens the warmth of recognition in his or her heart. From the poignant “Wait Your Turn” that opens the collection to the heart-rending “Joel” that ends it, the book is a journey of discovery for its author and of rediscovery for his readers. Why Me? Shubin asks, wondering why he is still here when so many other loved ones have gone before him. But every reader of this book comes away with the answer: “It’s because we need the insight and wisdom you give us in this beautiful book, Seymour Shubin—and we long for more.”