Dear Dirty America

I learned the other day through John Bennett’s email list that writer Doug Draime had passed away. He was 72 years old. His wife Carol wrote:

Dear John,

I am writing to you because I know you and Doug were in communication with each other
quite often.  I am familiar with your writing, through Doug, and have enjoyed your daily shards.

Doug passed away on Tuesday surrounded by his family.  He fought hard to heal this dreaded
disease and believed to the very end that he would be healed.  I honored his privacy and took
care of him by myself until the last 24 hours when we needed hospice and lots of drugs.

I am, understandably, devastated.  If you want to share his obit with writer friends, go ahead.
I don’t know who they might all be.

Doug first contacted me in 2013 asking if I would accept one of his poems for consideration in Dear Dirty America. I ended up publishing three over the next few months (here’s the first). He was so grateful, even to have me post his poems on as small a site as this one.

His last piece on DDA was from an ebook called Speed of Light. Doug told me those poems were way different from what people expected from him — the harder hitting stuff — but that they were nothing uncommon from what he often produced. There is a grandiosity in purpose and image in Speed of Light that is detectable in much of his work, but it seemed to appear in a simpler, lighter form in that book.

I’m sad he’s gone. May there be peace and blessings on him, wherever he is.

Here’s a poem from Doug that he submitted to me, but I never posted. I think it gives a good flavor of the staunch truth-seeker kind of poet Draime was.

[sunset image from Joonas Lyytinen]