The heat of summer setting into the day
Of Phoenix heat
Bringing out the dust
Of the summer rush
With a rush of hot air on your face
Taken in stride
Or taken in place
The heat of the summer sets in
For the time ahead
The Heat of Summer
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Tag Archives: Writing
A Great One
Lines straight enough to see
Down the middle of the fairway
Beyond the sand
There is a man standing
Waiting
The sun is setting over the Western skies
In the moments like these
You can’t tell to celebrate
Or cry
As I approached the figure
It became clear it was my father
Walking down the path
Towards me
I walked to the back of the green
And we embraced in the fall light
And fallen leaves
He told me the good news
Of a plan for a future I had wanted
We cried
As I write this story now
I have been struck down
As my father died
But I will remember that fairway
The setting sun
And I was lucky enough
That my father
Was truly a great one
Take the Fairway
Lining uncertainty
Followed by the lines of trees
Greens and fairways
Swing at the golf ball
Yet it lies
A mile away
From the starting house
Over the winds
And through the maple
Next to the pine tree
Lies the decent of dreams
How to take one mistake and limit
When temptation is around the corner
Sometimes we have to adjust accordingly
And be smart
About what choices we make
At the Intersection
Awaiting the light
Of decision made in time
Dirt roads leading me to my new path
Uncertain but certainly going
When one chapter ends a new begins
Yet it can be of no consequence
To see
What was left behind
So at the intersection of time and opportunity
I await what life will bring me
Carrying the weight of the past
And the loved ones who go before
But awaiting as well a new future
Bright to behold
Take Me To The Turn
Embrace the challenge
Of golf and it’s bitter edges
Take me to the turn
And start again
From the summer grass
Cut in the early hours
To the tee box setup in the light
Turn the day into a light of hope
Take on the joy of the game
Everyday
Price of Words
What we say
Freedom of the language
Is freedom of the head
The heart is the piercing
Sound that beats
In the depths of word
So I take the reminder
Of the words that we have
Freedom to speak
So undertake the moment
To say what you need to
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.
A Cup of Songwriting 