Dating apps
From the cold phone
Snaps the attention
Of a lost soul
Looking for connection
A real life
Ressurection
But instead just brings
More of the same
Without any delay
Dating Apps
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Reply
Coast to Coast Storms
Featured
Storm brew
From sea to shining sea
A fallen snowflake
Soon will be
Joined with many others
Across the country
From Texas to North Dakota
New York to New Mexico
Here comes a late
Spring snow
Dogleg Left
To the dogleg left
On the side of the hill
With a pond easy sitting
At the edge of the chance
To take up the summer light
In the setting fit for a new eye
I see the golf course awake today
Sitting up in the dew to say again
How is the morning set in a glisten
The birds call out to those who will listen
And see the light of the day set upon their skin
The Morning Dew
The morning dew
Sets easy upon the summer grass
Fresh cut
With the chickens calling in the distance
The leafs bursting through with summer life
To take upon the golf course
Just after night
Refreshed the day
As a clean show will make
The summer sun glisten
Over the ponds of Elbel’s view
On the west end of South Bend
The golf course sets easy
Upon the land that lays simple and true
Father Gone Away
To a father gone away
Where do the memories go
When you are laid to rest
Beyond the vail of life
On earth
What is made of the thoughts to call
To say I love you
What happens to these feelings
With the last has taken all
A father gone away
In the depths of memory now
To the hole that remains
Ever present
Never to forget
Only to heal to know
When the heart must go forward
In love and solitude
With a father gone away
Podcast Episode: The Course Where I Grew Up
Pip: There’s a golf course on Miami Street where the dandelions know something about growing up. Nathaniel Paul Hoff put it into a poem, and here we are.
Mara: Today we’re looking at a piece that uses a place — a real, named municipal golf course — to talk about how games, fathers, and greens teach us something that has nothing to do with scorecards.
Pip: Let’s start with the course itself.
The Course Where I Grew Up
Mara: The poem opens in a specific geography — Miami Street, an old bookstore nearby, a city golf course called Erskine — and the specificity is doing real work before the bigger claim arrives.
Pip: And the bigger claim lands plainly. The poem reads: “I learned to grow up on these hills / These greens / Taught me how to be a man / To be polite.”
Mara: So the upshot is that the golf course is not backdrop — it’s curriculum. Politeness, presence, the shape of a person: all of it traced back to a place most people would drive past without a second look.
Pip: The poem earns that claim by being honest about the game first. “The idea so simple yet execution endlessly imperfect” — that’s golf, yes, but it’s also a pretty clean description of trying to be a decent human being.
Mara: What the poem does well is hold two timescales at once. There’s the seasonal — dandelion haze slipping into summer heat — and then there’s the generational. Time on the course is described as “on repeat,” but the memories kept from discarded scorecards are anything but disposable.
Pip: The father is present without being named as a lesson. He’s just there, and the speaker learned something by being alongside him. That restraint is doing a lot.
Mara: The closing lines pull the whole thing into focus: “a game can teach us / A lot more than how to swing / But rather how to live and be present / In a world that just keeps falling away.” The falling away is what gives the presence its weight.
Pip: A poem about golf that turns out to be about attention. That’s the move.
Mara: Place as teacher, presence as practice — it’s a quiet argument, but it holds.
Pip: Next time, we’ll see what other ordinary ground the site finds worth standing on.
The Course Where I Grew Up
Down on Miami Street
By the old bookstore
The grass grows stronger in the spring
Than anywhere else
On the golf course of the city
Where time is on repeat
The dandelion haze slips into the summer
Of heat and sun
Under the clubhouse
Is where it all begun
A love of a game
The idea so simple yet execution endlessly imperfect
I learned to grow up on these hills
These greens
Taught me how to be a man
To be polite
I owe many days to Erskine
To the scorecards that have been discarded
And the memories kept
Where I spent time with my father
And learned that a game can teach us
A lot more than how to swing
But rather how to live and be present
In a world that just keeps falling away
Upon a Time in Life
Upon a time in life
Comes great grief
Loss of a friend
A father and
A great man
Today I respect the life
That was lived
Tough and tough hard
But to know the tender heart
Of the ones we love
As we see them
Into the next world
Add a Little Hope
A little hope
Flies in the wind
Like a delicate feather
Upon the light of time
Bringing in the hopes of today
With the feelings of flying
To take on the moment is to
Agree to say
I have hope in my soul
Everyday
City on the Lake
On the edge of the freshest waters on earth
As vast as an ocean
On a gleaming bright day
Where the horizon fades softly into the sky
There is a city that rests
In unrest
On the shores of Lake Michigan
From the skyscrapers
Scraping away at the restless clouds
To the streets full of the city bustle
And burst
To take in the moments
From one to the next
Is the city of Chicago
From just beyond the rustbelt
Take in the moments
Every one intact
The Open Sea
The open sea
To me
Is the beginning of the rest
The soul needs
To see again
What has always been clear
To know that in death
Loved ones are still near
Holding
To the love we have
Like a sail clings to its mast
As the winds pull it fast
So I cling to the memories of yesterday
For my father would say
If you know not where you go
Anywhere can take you there
So today I seek the high sees
Free from humanity
On the waves of the ocean clean
Take me to where the souls live
The Game of Golf
Swing away
From the precision to the less precise
To take a game
So subtle
And elusive
To be that of life
In the clubs
That lay on the ground
To see the way one stroke at a time
To make a game of life
And life of a game
Golf yields the highest of returns
To learn
The lessons on life
A Cup of Songwriting 