Poetry goes back at least a couple of generations in my family. Beyond that, I couldn't say, but I know for sure that my mother and grandfather wrote poetry. They didn't so much write poetry, though, as play poetry. It was almost a game; they would write poems back and forth as conversations. They called them "pomes", and many of these pomes have survived, though my mother passed away in mid-1998, and my grandfather less than a year later. When I first read the collection of pomes, in December of 1998, I found that some of them were very funny, and I found it sad that I hadn't had the opportunity to play the game, too.

After a few hours, I realized that I could play the game, in a way, and I wrote these pomes, inspired directly by some of the pomes I had read, and my mother's jokingly self-proclaimed title, "Word Wizard".

Here's one written by my mother in 1989, about a pair of pet rats we had, Molly Moonshadow (black with a white belly-stripe) and Ruby Starlight (an albino.) "Iole" is Hawaiian for "rat".

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