All Men are Sisters

Virtue's its own punishment;
vice is its own reward.
Sometimes crime pays
while persistence comes to naught.

Still water stagnates;
who hesitates is late.
Silence can be wooden--
but the early worm gets caught.

Richard Newcomb is Associate Director of Academic Counseling at the University of Washington, where he has been a student and/or employee for the last thirty-five years. His poems have appeared in the Atlantic, Poetry, Seattle Review, Bellowing Ark, and elsewhere. His manuscript for a first book was a national finalist for the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets.