Clear Crystals

These 31 short poems carry the weight of waiting. Written from the home front, they capture the particular ache of loving someone far away in a time of war: the pride and fear tangled together, the small rituals of hope, the silence between letters. The title hints at what these verses hold: clear as tears, clear as the crystal drops of longing, clear as the sudden clarity that comes when everything precious is at stake. Each poem is a small vessel, concise and direct, offering not grand speeches but the quiet truths of someone who wakes each day with a soldier's safety as their first thought. This is home front poetry at its most personal, not the rhetoric of nations but the beating heart of individuals caught in history's sweep. For anyone who has ever waited, and waited, and hoped.