When I was 30 years old, I moved to Doha, Qatar for 6.5 years… and nothing has been the same since… Both my kids were born there… and besides that, I wouldn’t know where to start… except to say this place haunts my dreams… I wish, on a weekly basis or more… that I could just somehow… GO BACK… and work in Education City… or some company in need of “training” or “instructional development”, or the like…

Despite the practicalities… despite the things keeping me close to the people I need to be close to… like… geography…

But anyway… this is a HAPPY post… all of these poems by me were published on a website called The Ghazal Page… which no longer exists… so… you will have to take my word for it that these went through some kind of artistic and/or peer review… with apologies to John Thompson… and Lorna Crozier… and many, many others… who have been much more respectful and intentional about their form…

I will say… in defense of that B.Ed student who wrote the first of these for an in-class activity… that he had no idea that he was going to end up in Qatar… or British Columbia, for that matter…

And as ever, my Inner Critical Old Man murmurs in the background…

None of this matters… It was and is all for the kids… and to that extent… you did everything right… and that place in the Middle East is still there if you want to check in sometime, someway, somehow…

*Please click on the links and/or media below if you are so inclined!

G