My dear friend John Madden died last week after a long battle against cancer. As you can see from the dates given above, I am not sure how old John was, but I think he was several years younger than I am, and I was born in 1940. Until he became ill, John was with the Evergreen Funds in Boston, and like so many of my good friends, I first met him as an institutional client. He was a big, wonderful man, with a great sense of humor and a tremendous storehouse of knowledge and wisdom on a wide array of topics.

During the last year that Steve and I were at Prudential Securities, we began a weekly newsletter entitled "Politics, Etc." One of the things we did was to ask for client participation. John was the only who responded. He wrote under the pseudonym "The Old Curmudgeon." The two poems that appear here were among his many offerings.

John was a poetry buff. Christina Rossetti's Amor Mundi, the fifth poem to be included in these pages, was a favorite of his. The War Song of the Saracens by James Elroy Flecker appeared later in response to a conversation we had had about Flecker's work. The following is an excerpt from an e-mail he sent me just about a year ago.

I wonder what it says about me that I now open the weekly poem before I turn to the politics. I don't like to think it is old age, and I can't credit any late-blooming intellectual or cultural maturity. I think it's mostly a matter of pleasure: the poems bring genuine pleasure, and the politics seems more and more to just incite me to very un-Christian thoughts about many of the characters involved.

The last e-mail I received from John was in response to the poem Mr. Flood's Party by Edwin Arlington Robinson. It read as follows.

I was not familiar with Mr. Flood's Party, but guess who was? My younger son, Nick--honors English, junior year in high school ten years ago. Let's hear it for public school education, or at least the good ones!! What will I miss by never getting to be as old as Eben [Flood]? Some of it I might not mind missing, I would think, starting with the loneliness that my father endures stoically, even as he is in total denial about my illness. Your trips to Florida [to see your father] are a good thing to do.

The first poem that follows was written by John in response to news that Newt Gingrich had a girlfriend. The second relates to a ruling by a Judge in Ohio named Solomon Oliver regarding a school voucher program. I hope you enjoy them. God bless you John. I'll miss you, old friend.