Another new adventure

Today feels like the quiet turn of a page I didn’t know I was ready to flip.

For years—decades, really—poetry lived on the edges of my days. It showed up in high-school notebooks, in scribbled margins during long lab nights, in fragments tucked away while I chased answers in test tubes and diagnostics. Science had the louder claim, and I gave it most of my hours. But the words kept returning, patient, insistent, the way grace does.

Then came retirement, a wider morning, and suddenly the poems demanded the center of the table. What began as one cycle grew into three books—Redemptions, Redemptions Deliverance, and Redemptions Refrain—together a kind of triptych exploring the same mystery from shifting angles: the weight we carry, the deliverance we’re offered, the daily return to both.

Redemptions, the first panel, is already out in the world, clean and spare as I hoped it would be. Deliverance and Refrain are following close behind, each widening the pattern a little further—breadth, depth, refrain.

This blog is the next small step. I’m not sure yet what shape it will take—maybe reflections on craft, maybe glimpses of the ordinary days that feed the poems, maybe just honest fragments when the words arrive faster than I can shape them into stanzas. Whatever comes, it will be part of the same adventure: learning to live openly with the questions that won’t let me go.

So here we are. A new page, a new adventure. I’m glad you’re along.

Douglas R. Brandt

Lafayette, Indiana

December 28, 2025