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Like Grass – J. R. Solonche

July 31, 2026 by GriffinPoetry

E&A flora hawkweed bee
 . 
[ 4 poems by J. R. Solonche ]
 . 
Hay Wains
 . 
They sit, a long-married couple,
side by side, in the unkempt, dusty
grass of the field, which they have
forgotten. The field has not forgotten
them. Neither has a crow, a dark,
folded thing, like a thought, perched
on the red one’s shoulder. They have
the quiet of things that have been
put away for good, the resignation
of the neglected but dignified old.
A chain, rusted into a circle, sleeps
in the weeds like a loyal dog. And
the air around them, full of the slow
humming life of roots and insects
and small burrowing animals, moves
in and through the empty spaces
where their souls used to be.
 . 
J. R. Solonche
from Like Grass, Like Atoms, Like Years, Serving House Books, Raleigh NC; © 2026
 . 
❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
Better Glue
 . 
His son wanted to fly. His father
knew how to make wings. He said,
We won’t use wax this time. He used
glue. Strong glue. Industrial glue.
The kind they use for airplanes.
The son said, What about the sun?
The father said, The glue will hold.
The son said, What about the sky?
The father said, The glue will hold.
So the son put on the wings.
The father said, Don’t fly too low.
Don’t fly too high. The son said,
Don’t worry old man. The glue
will hold. And it did. The son flew.
And the father watched. And he
flew. And he flew. And the father
watched and watched. The son flew
away. He got smaller and smaller.
And the father watched until he
could no longer see the son in the far
distance. He is probably still flying
now, the son. The father sighed.
He almost wept. Perhaps he did weep.
No one knows for sure. The glue held.
The wings held. The son didn’t. He
wasn’t supposed to. It was good glue.
 . 
J. R. Solonche
from Like Grass, Like Atoms, Like Years, Serving House Books, Raleigh NC; © 2026
 . 
 . 
❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
The Difference
 . 
The breeze is what we invite.
It comes in the window with
the scent of newly cut grass
or yesterday’s rain. We smile
at the breeze because we have
asked it in. We want it to stay
a while. The wind is different.
It’s a bad relation. It has a record.
It comes with a warning. It rattles
the glass. It has something to say
that we would rather not hear.
The wind is not invited. We do not
smile at the wind. We can’t. It
would wipe it right off our faces.
 . 
J. R. Solonche
from Like Grass, Like Atoms, Like Years, Serving House Books, Raleigh NC; © 2026
 . 
❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
USE
 . 
The woman at the hardware store
said, “Can I help you?” as I wandered
down an aisle of paint brushes. “No,
thank you,” I said. What I really needed
was a different kind of brush, one that
could cover the cracks in my memory.
She moved on to another customer,
someone who actually knew what they
came for. But the question stuck with
me, a fleck of paint on a thumb. “Can I
help you?”Help with what? The years
piled up, drying paint cans on the shelves
of my brain, and none had the right color.
Some were labeled, The Summer of ‘82.
Others, My Daughter’s Laugh. Most were
just a vague, unhelpful shade, like “off-
white” or “beige.” I picked up a brush,
a cheap one and held it up to the light.
It felt useless. I felt useless. I bought it
anyway just for the sake of having done
something. “I see you found what you
were looking for,” she said as I paid.
“Yes,” I said. Her smile was useful.
It was exactly what I was looking for.
 . 
J. R. Solonche
from Like Grass, Like Atoms, Like Years, Serving House Books, Raleigh NC; © 2026
 . 
 . 
❀    ❀    ❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
Truth is a tiny bee visiting a flower. If there is something sweet, she takes a sip, then flies off with the pollen of truth sticking to her. Does she notice that burden? Maybe only later when she feeds the grains to a companion bee (or to her larva, cute). Such are the truths of J.R. Solonche’s poems – airy and peripatetic as that bee, sweet sometimes and sometimes sticky. Able to sting, yes, but so beautiful when you lean in close. It would be a crime against poesy to weigh these poems down with any grave pronouncement about them.
 . 
So can you see me smiling as I arrive at the last line of each poem? Can you see me alight at its edge for a moment before I fly to the next? Like Grass, Like Atoms, Like Years is giving me permission to take a deep breath and be still for a minute. It is revealing the biggest things in the smallest things. It is leading me in close. The facts of that closeness confess their troubles, but they also spin my soul out into the cosmos.
 . 
And there is some joy out there. I’m on my way. As J.R. says, . . . I wanted to / know the universe like the back of my / hand. I did not become an astronomer. / I wasn’t good enough at math. I became / a poet, and I came to know the universe / of the back of my hand.
 . 
❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
J.R. Solonche is a long practiced and prolific poet. I tried to count his poetry books listed in this latest collection, Like Grass, Like Atoms, Like Years, but I ran out of fingers and toes. He has received many awards, nominated for the National Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and three times for the Pulitzer Prize. He is still writing. Perhaps he is taking his own advice:
 . 
. . . You may not know
what you are doing for a very
long time. Don’t worry. The 
words do not know either.
They’ll figure it out together.
Like old friends with nothing
new to say to each other until
they realize they do. . . .
from More Advice to a Young Poet
 . 
Discover more about J. R. Solonche HERE,
and so that you can immediately love it like I do, please purchase Like Grass, Like Atoms, Like Years HERE
 . 
And – read one more poem by J.R. Solonche at Verse and Image here
 . 
E&A flora hydrangea bee
 . 
❀    ❀    ❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
Thank you for visiting Verse and Image:
. . . . . every Friday I present a few poems I’ve read this week that particularly speak to me;
. . . . . some Saturdays I present one or two poems submitted by YOU, my readers.
 . 
If you would like to offer a poem for consideration, either by a favorite author or your own work, please view these GUIDELINES for Saturday Readers Share:
 . 
 . 
If you would like to receive an email each time a post appears, please SUBSCRIBE to Verse and Image using the button on the Home Page.
 . 
If you have a hard time finding the SUBSCRIBE button on this WordPress site, you can send me your email address and I will add you to the subscriber list. Send your request to
 . 
COMMENTS@GRIFFINPOETRY.COM
 . 
Thanks again for joining the conversation.
 . 
– Bill
 . 
 . 

Posted in Imagery | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments »

Candescent – Linda Parsons

July 24, 2026 by GriffinPoetry

Meadowbeauty, Rhexia virginica

 . 
[ 3 poems by Linda Parsons ]
 . 
The Vale
 . 
I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall
be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture.
— John 10:9
 . 
To brave the vale, to spread its curtain,
like my father on the hillock of his final pass,
our common purgatory. My father, who fingers
 . 
my knuckles with one hand, counts the abacus
of my backbone with the other. We’re in a waiting
period, he says is if to apparitions come
 . 
for the main event, time is winding down.
Nothing in my own life matters, not that I share
his descent on shards of marriage vows,
 . 
that I roam the sheepfold in search of oasis.
Only that the weather is good or overcast,
lunch is coming or done. We sit skin to skin,
 . 
as never before, his hands the picture of his mother’s.
Maybe she’s the one in white organdy, her hair
still strawberry blond, tapping her ladies’ Bulova:
 . 
Lordy, how the time goes. Maybe she’s the shepherd
disguised, the one who lies down at the mouth
of thievery, both door and gatekeeper for the huddled
 . 
bleating. Let us enter the door without pleading
or birthright and be known by the one, the voice
leading us in and out to find pasture,
 . 
fingers woven at our breast so weary from being
and trying, so strayed we can only be gathered.
 . 
Linda Parsons
from Candescent, Iris Press, Oak Ridge TN; © 2019
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❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
Phantom
 . 
Strange the great presence in absence—
book I remembered on the second shelf
of the red bookcase, next to Flannery
 . 
and Ole Fred, rounding the corner to bare
wall, or brushing my left hand, indentation
on the ring finger from years of gold.
 . 
The mind plays tricks, clasps the gilt frame
if imagined life even after the moving truck
with his furniture barrels off, even after
 . 
I sit shiva with my grief, days unraveled
partly by my own device, and I have, thread
by knotty thread, woven a new silken skin.
 . 
Ghost pain, phantom pain, a limb lopped
clean, the dead bee’s sting. We are good
amputees, efficient little starfish and lizards,
 . 
regenerating feet and tails in the shadows
where no one watches us spin and weep,
where no one sees me turn a corner
 . 
in the dark before bed, giving wide berth,
my body’s radar still beeping and flashing
to sidestep a bookcase no longer there.
 . 
Linda Parsons
from Candescent, Iris Press, Oak Ridge TN; © 2019
 . 

Ironweed and crab spider

 . 
❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
Inner Work
 . 
for Paula Capps Kyser
 . 
The inner work must be done in the well
of drawer among pebbled buttons kept
 . 
for whenever, lavender sachets spilling
their guts, Grandmama’s cat’s-eye glasses,
 . 
my pride pierced on her pincushion.
Only there can I sift what hangs loose
 . 
on my shoulders, the stained, the torn,
crocheted illusories never seeing
 . 
light of day. Keys to nowhere, Irish
pence, the pocket Psalms and Proverbs
 . 
have no providence, no commerce
in my wilderness, though I rub each
 . 
faux pearl as talisman, the Long Nights Moon
heartsick at my window. Strayed, undone
 . 
in the layers, I dig to the bottom, wooden
thud that nips my heel, turns me to the field
 . 
of what never emptied in the first place,
not bargain or plea but steppingstones,
 . 
uneaten breadcrumbs, one then another.
Buckeye and amethyst still harbor luck.
 . 
Old stockings will do for garden stakes,
for spring coming sure.
 . 
Linda Parsons
from Candescent, Iris Press, Oak Ridge TN; © 2019
 . 
❀    ❀    ❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
what never emptied in the first place . . . spring coming sure.
 . 
What we truly lose – is it possible that is something different from what we think we’ve lost? The love of so many years now parted, disdaining; the beloved parent now departed, buried. Who wouldn’t be shattered to pieces? Who wouldn’t doubt in any power to restore?
 . 
Linda Parson’s poems do not skip lightly across the landscape of grief. She stabs her fingers into the cold clay and wrestles with the spiky roots. Stiffened and wearied along with her, we ourselves wonder if there is any hope that warmth may return. Loss is not defeated but confirmed, in all its guises of loneliness and disruption. But we also accompany the poet into her intentional silence. She will release the past from strangling her present, from projecting her future. Perhaps what she thinks she has lost does threaten her with the loss of hope, the loss of joy. With the loss of the inner knowledge that spring comes sure. But then she turns to the field of what never emptied in the first place, and there she finds a way back. A path. Steppingstones. She is not truly lost.
 . 
Candescent is a glowing meadow with all its messy diversity of creatures and themes. Vines and briers may twine and choke, but full fecund life grows strong through the past into the present. Life will not be overcome. This collection of poems, colorful and fragrant, affirms the resilience of the human spirit. Struggle and pain are part of us but do not make us. I take encouragement from the poet’s words: Let dead be dead . . . return, to cress beneath your feet, return to real and true.
 . 

Boneset and Swallowtail

 . 
❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
Linda Parsons is a member of the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame and has served as the Poet Laureate of Knoxville. She will be poetry instructor at the 2026 Tremont Writers Conference in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Her bio at The Poetry Foundation is available HERE; her fifth poetry collection, Candescent, is available from IRIS PRESS.
 . 
❀    ❀    ❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
Thank you for visiting Verse and Image:
. . . . . every Friday I present one or two poems I’ve read this week that particularly speak to me;
. . . . . some Saturdays I present one or two poems submitted by YOU, my readers.
 . 
If you would like to offer a poem for consideration, either by a favorite author or your own work, please view these GUIDELINES for Saturday Readers Share:
 . 
 . 
If you would like to receive an email each time a post appears, please SUBSCRIBE to Verse and Image using the button on the Home Page.
 . 
If you have a hard time finding the SUBSCRIBE button on this WordPress site, you can send me your email address and I will add you to the subscriber list. Send your request to
 . 
COMMENTS@GRIFFINPOETRY.COM
 . 
Thanks again for joining the conversation.
 . 
– Bill
 . 
Doughton Park Tree, 2022-05-17B
 . 

Posted in Imagery | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments »

Direction – Ron Rash

July 17, 2026 by GriffinPoetry

Hepatica americana, Round-lobed Hepatica

. .
[ 3 poems from New and Selected ]
. .
White Wings
. .
Tucked in each pew’s back pocket,
hymnals simmered in mote-light
until Sundays when the soiled
rough hands of farmers lifted
those songbibles, pages spread
like white wings being set free,
but what rose was one voice
woven from many, and heard
by Jason Storey who stood
in a field half an acre
of gravestones away, mute as
a fence post while neighbors sang
inside the church doors he swore
never to pass through after
wife and son died in childbirth,
that long-ago Christmas when
three days of snow made the road
to Blowing Rock disappear,
the doctor brought on horseback
arriving too late. Decades
Jason Storey would remain
true to his word, yet was there
in that field come rain or cold,
but came no closer, between
church and field two marble stones,
angel-winged, impassible
. .
Ron Rash
from Poems, New and Selected, HarperCollins, New York NY; © 2016
. .
❀    ❀    ❀
. .
Wet Moon
. .
Come look, my grandmother said,
the moon’s shed its skin, see how
bit and bright, and when I asked
where the old skin was she laughed
Later than night when I waked,
looked out the window, I found
moonglow draped on the barn roof
like clothes on a line, and wished
for a tall ladder to lean
against the wood slats and raise
a finger, brush the cool skin
that had once been cloaked with stars
. .
Ron Rash
from Poems, New and Selected, HarperCollins, New York NY; © 2016
. .

Tiarella cordifolia, Foamflower

. .
❀    ❀    ❀
. .
Direction
. .
Stay on the four-lane until
mountains sigh, make a valley
where off-ramps wait, only then
find that other way home, one
easy to miss (there’s no sign).
Houses you pass are like beads
strung between trees and pasture,
most dark except some bare bulbs
blooming back porches yellow,
but what opens the heart’s need
wide as this night are the rooms
lit as if someone waits up
to give direction should you
lose your way on this bypass
back to your knowable life.
. .
Ron Rash
from Poems, New and Selected, HarperCollins, New York NY; © 2016
. .
❀    ❀    ❀    ❀    ❀
. .
Although I wouldn’t mind if the world got the impression that I pretty much have things figured out, I have to admit there are plenty of times I question whether I’m headed in the right direction. Not just how to get there, but even where to try to end up. Ron Rash’s poetry calms me down. Oh, there are no glaring road signs, just like there aren’t for most of the friends and family that inhabit his stories, but that’s exactly the point. We are all of us on this journey and none of us have all the answers. Where is my home, and how do I find it? How do I bring all these people I love along with me? Reading Ron Rash, I feel better about having all these questions.
. .
❀
. .
Ron Rash grew up in the mountains of North Carolina. He teaches at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, NC, and will be the keynote speaker and instructor at the fourth annual Tremont Writers Conference (Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont, October 2026). His bestselling novels, short stories, and poetry have won many awards, including twice the O. Henry Prize.
. .
Read three earlier poems by Ron Rash in the first part of this Verse and Image selection from his New and Selected here:
. .

Botrychium virginianum, Rattlesnake Fern

. .
❀    ❀    ❀    ❀    ❀
. .
Thank you for visiting Verse and Image:
. . . . . every Friday I present one or two poems I’ve read this week that particularly speak to me, sometime more;
. . . . . some Saturdays I present one or two poems submitted by YOU, my readers.
. .
If you would like to offer a poem for consideration, either by a favorite author or your own work, please view these GUIDELINES for Saturday Readers Share:
. .
. .
If you would like to receive an email each time a post appears, please SUBSCRIBE to Verse and Image using the button on the Home Page.
. .
If you have a hard time finding the SUBSCRIBE button on this WordPress site, you can send me your email address and I will add you to the subscriber list. Send your request to
. .
COMMENTS@GRIFFINPOETRY.COM
. .
Thanks again for joining the conversation.
. .
– Bill
. .
. .

Posted in Imagery | 2 Comments »

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