DICK  HOLMES

 

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

 

chardiho@gmail.com

 

 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 WildFull Moon Story NightAaliyah on the RoadMill Creek PoemsHome 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.”

 

 

 

 

BOOKS  PUBLISHED

 

 

 

MEANDERMENT

 

 

2023

 

Published by : Telectromagnetica

63 pages

 

 

 

HOME IN

 

 

2022

 

Published by : Pure Heart Press / Main Street Rag Publishing Co.

96 pages

 

 

 

MILL CREEK POEMS

 

 

2021

 

Published by : Pure Heart Press / Main Street Rag Publishing Co.

98 pages

 

 

 

A MOONLIT TEAHOUSE ANTHOLOGY OF SACRED POETRY

 

by Silent Lotus (Editor), Dick Holmes (Editor), Gary Hunter (Editor), & 3 more

 

2015

 

Published by : NINASH Foundation

226 pages

 

 

 

AALIYAH ON THE ROAD

A poem by

DICK HOLMES

 

2016

 

Main Street Publishing Company

91 pp.

 

 

FLOWERS GROW WILD

 

Story Poems by : DICK HOLMES

 

ILLUSTRATED by : DALE DRAEGER

 

2014

 

Main Street Rag Publishing Company

143 pp.

 

 

FULL MOON STORY NIGHT

 

Story poems by 

DICK HOLMES

 

2014

 

Published by : Main Street Publishing Company

 143 pp.

 

 

RECIPES FOR GRATITUDE

Poems

 

DICK HOLMES

 

2007

 

Published by : Pure Heart Press

343 pp.

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