NORMAN ROSS

NORMAN ROSS Poems

NORMAN ROSS Biography

After he graduated HS in the Bronx, Ross joined the Navy in Nov.1942. He was discharged in Nov.1945 after having flown 60 combat missions in the Atlantic, the Pacific, the North Sea, the English Channel, and the Bay of Biscay. For his service he has been awarded ten Air Medals and two DFCs-Distinguished Flying Crosses. Following the war, Norman spent six months in the Bronx Kingsbridge VA Medical Center with what was then known as “battle fatigue' and now as PTSD. Upon his discharge Norman attended Columbia University where he earned a Ph.D in English Literature. He was married in 1947 while going to school, and he had four children. After teaching a year at Columbia, he began teaching high school and college in 1952 and retired 30 years later. He served as Chairman of the English Department at North Shore HS on Long Island, and was an Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at CW Post College in Greenvale, NY. Divorced in 1978, Dr. Ross retired to Florida in 1982 and married Rhoda a year later. He led a fairly peaceful life in Delray Beach until 1988, when his Marine son-in-law Col. Rich Higgins was captured and murdered by terrorists in Lebanon while he was serving as Commander of the UN Peacekeeping forces there. Since then, Norman has seen the commissioning of the USS Higgins, a guided missile destroyer named for his son-in-law. His eldest daughter, a 20-year veteran of the Marine Corps, retired as a Lieutenant Colonel and also served as an Acting Assistant Secretary of Labor, as Executive Director of the Florida Department of Veterans Affairs, and as an Undersecretary in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. His eldest son served his country for 20 years in the Central Intelligence Agency. His youngest daughter is an award-winning dog groomer and his youngest son, a photographer and a top Sales Associate for Harley-Davidson. While enjoying retirement, including the six grandchildren he has jointly with his wife, Rhoda, Dr. Ross has performed frequently in his condo community’s Theater of the Performing Arts, with starring roles in various shows including HMS Pinafore, The Mikado, Music Man, Show Boat, Fiddler on the Roof, The Pirates of Penzance, and My Fair Lady. Since 1982 he has written and published 10 books.)

The Best Poem Of NORMAN ROSS

Sestina For Winter

The city's trees are shriveled, bleak, and bare.
The matted clouds are gray with threatened snow.
The people scurry home in bristling cold
with finger-tips and toes like beaded ice.
One last ribbed leaf goes tumbling in the wind
which fiercely rattles every window glass,

as eager children, huddled to the glass,
peer into the streets now almost bare.
At last, in flurries, it has begun to snow,
and stragglers bundle up against the cold,
(which turns the first few early flakes to ice) ,
their bodies bent to spear the startling wind.

Frost-fettered branches snapping in the wind
rattle to the street and crack like glass;
And now the frost-packed earth is quick to bare
the swift but silent cataracts of snow
and piercing sleet—and still, so pinching cold,
the river stands amazed and turns to ice.

Thin saplings in the park are cased in ice
and quiver numbly in the aching wind,
much like slim sticks of polished glass
or giant icicles. Stark and lean, they bare
their crystal branches to the glacial snow
and stand imprisoned in the chill, hibernal cold,

naked and lonely. While the parching cold
transforms the wandering rills to paths of ice,
a squirrel trembles in the chattering wind,
treading nimbly on the brooks of glass;
His autumn hollow echoes, being bare
of acorns, or else is blanketed with snow.

How beautifully the earth is banked with snow
and soft white drifts. The world is marble cold
and static—sculptured crystalline in ice—
willing subject for the keen-bladed wind
that burrs and burnishes the lakes, like glass
or iridescent prisms glazed and bare.

Look now! How bare the sky is all of snow,
Though still it's cold; and skaters on the ice
Ignore the wind and skim along the glass.

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