Dick Holmes

DICK HOLMES

Feb. 2024 : Dick on the Meher Center, Myrtle Beach, Sth. Carolina. Photo taken by Anthony Zois.

BORN : 1949

MARRIED : Bronia

CHILDREN : Bud & Ruby

GRANDCHILDREN : Abiyana, Lila, Evelyn & Mirabai

AMERICAN

Dick Holmes is a poet and retired ESL teacher & teacher trainer at the University of South Carolina’s English Programs for Internationals. In June 2022, Dick and his wife Bronia moved to Colorado, where they now live next door to their son Bud, daughter-in-law Kasia, and granddaughters Abiyana and Lila.

Dick Holmes says that his Recipes for Gratitude book could as well have been titled “Honeymoon with Meher Baba,” written as it was during a period of spiritual awakening eventually leading him to Baba. Many of the poems in the book are devotional ones composed in gratitude for Baba’s grace. Other, less overtly “Baba poems” included in the book are nonetheless inspired by His Avataric message.

“For me,” Dick writes about Recipes for Gratitude, “poetry is a spiritual quest, a form of language for communing with the Divine Beloved. As such, composing a poem is as much a listening meditation as a writing activity. The words that come may evoke a wide variety of settings, situations, personas, moods, and themes, but the common denominator in composing every poem is the feeling of gratitude. ‘You are pen and ink and You are the gifted writer,’ declares Avatar Meher Baba addressing the Divine Beloved. These words of Meher Baba’s are an inspiration to me, both as an expression of the ultimate truth that God is the sole real Author and as an invitation from God to join Him in the art of inviting the listener/reader into the inspiring, loving Silence of His Word. Poetry, like food, tastes best when it’s prepared with love, and love plays an especially important role in this book of poems centered around gratitude. In fact, love is actually the main dish here and gratitude a sauce to be served with it. Another way to say it: Love is the cook who came up with the recipe for poetry itself. Or love is cook, pot, appetizer, dish, sauce, recipe, and poem all in one. It’s especially this feeling of love’s all-in-one role in the poetry writing practice that motivates me to take pen in hand and join the interplay of love and gratitude.”

After the publication of Recipes for Gratitude, Dick felt that Baba wanted him to work within a niche of writing poems that, while continuing to evoke His spiritual message, would appeal to secular readers as well as to Baba lovers. Consequently, the books that have followed Recipes contain more literary poems of various kinds and fewer direct references to Baba.

As of March, 2024, these books include Flowers Grow Wild, Full Moon Story Night, Aaliyah on the Road, Mill Creek Poems, Home In, and Meanderment.

“Poetry,” he writes, “is my meta-sensory soul food, go-to foreign language, free-range study, humbling balancing act, and continual pilgrimage to truth and beauty. The inspiration for each of my poems arises like morning mist from the pool of impressions left by my experiences in life. Once an inspiration gets my attention, I make a poem of it by mediating a creative interaction between improvisation and artistic composition. My guiding aim throughout the process is to transform seemingly insignificant impressions into waking awareness and meaningful expression.”