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Direction – Ron Rash

July 17, 2026 by GriffinPoetry

Hepatica americana, Round-lobed Hepatica

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[ 3 poems from New and Selected ]
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White Wings
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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
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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
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Tiarella cordifolia, Foamflower

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Direction
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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
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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.
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❀
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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.
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Read three earlier poems by Ron Rash in the first part of this Verse and Image selection from his New and Selected here:
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Botrychium virginianum, Rattlesnake Fern

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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
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. .

Posted in Imagery | 2 Comments »

As His Name – Ron Rash

July 10, 2026 by GriffinPoetry

Violet Wood Sorrel, Oxalis violacea

 . . 
[ 3 poems from New and Selected ]
 . . 
Barbed Wire
 . . 
New strung, it sparks a live wire
when sun hits right, and can be
thumbed like guitar string, its tune
pure country twang, but given
enough time rain rusts metal,
fence posts wobble like loose teeth,
barbed wire burrows in laurel
and goldenrod before found
by fishermen or hunters.
As I found out once, deep in
the Smokies when something latched
to my calf—coil of old strands
not quite elemented back
into ground ore, and though I searched
no chimney-spill or hearthstone,
no sign but rusty fence-thorns
of one whose hammer tapped out
a claim on this land traveling
through bright lines from post to post,
traveling time to a moment
one man’s tenuous hold on
the earth snagged like memory
surfaced long after, time-dulled,
but still able to draw blood.
 . . 
Ron Rash
from POEMS, New and Selected, HarperCollins, New York NY; © 2016
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 . . 
Plowing on Moonlight
I rose with the moon, left the drowsy sheets,
my nine months wife singing in her sleep,
left boots on the floor, overalls and hat
scarecrowing a bedpost so I could plant
my seeds with just a plow between
the earth and me, my pale feet deep
in the ridged wake where I labored,
gripped the handles like a divining rod,
my eyes closed to the few stars out.
All night I plowed, beard budded by frost,
chest nippled, my breath blooming white,
and felt in me the sway of the sea,
rain’s fall and soak, the taproot’s thrust,
the cicada’s winged resurrection.
I opened my eyes to dawnlight,
left my field and lay with my wife,
warming as I pressed against her body,
my hand listening to her waxing belly.
 . . 
Ron Rash
from POEMS, New and Selected, HarperCollins, New York NY; © 2016
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Doughton flora milkweed

Common Milkweed, Asclepias syriaca

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The Exchange
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Between Wytheville, Virginia,
and the North Carolina line,
he meets a wagon headed
where he’s been, seated beside
her parents a dark-eyed girl
who grips the reins in her fist,
no more than sixteen, he’d guess
as the come closer and she
doesn’t look away or blush
but allows his eyes to hold
hers that moment their lives pass.
He rides into Boone at dusk,
stops at an inn where he buys
his supper, a sleepless night
thinking of fallow fields still
miles away, the girl he might
not find the like of again.
When dawn breaks he mounts his roan,
then backtracks, searches three days
hamlets and farms, any smoke
rising above the tree line
before he heads south, toward home,
the French Broad’s valley where spring
unclinches the dogwood buds
as he plants the bottomland,
come night by candlelight builds
a butter churn and cradle,
cherry headboard for the bed,
forges a double-eagle
into a wedding ring and then
back to Virginia and spends
five weeks riding and asking
from Elk Creek to Damascus
before he finds the wagon
tethered to the hitching post
of a crossroads stone, inside
the girl who smiles as if she’d
known all along his gray eyes
would search until they found her.
She asks one question, his name,
as her eyes study the gold
smoldering there between them,
the offered palm she lightens,
slips the ring on herself so
he knows right then the woman
she will be, bold enough match
for a man rash as his name.
 . . 
Ron Rash
from POEMS, New and Selected, HarperCollins, New York NY; © 2016
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Ron Rash will take you there. He will take you deep into to the forest where the unvoiced past may suddenly reach up from the earth and bite your leg. Into the night where moonlight unveils dreams and deep desires. Up a lonesome mountain holler where one of his own kinsmen once scratched to farm a living. Even deeper, farther, he will carry you into generations long grown cold but where a story of his early ancestor can still wring a warm and sudden smile.
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This collection, Ron Rash’s New and Selected, covers decades of his writing but hundreds of years of settlement and stories, of life and death in the southern Appalachians. Each poem is the flare of a match that lights a lantern to limn a face, a moment, another turning point in another life. A history book might teach you about the Tennessee Valley Authority and farmers displaced by lakes filling behind its hydroelectric dams, but these poems will teach your heart how it felt to live on that land and watch it go under. The poems will teach you that poverty in possessions is not poverty of the soul. They might teach you that following your God can still involve some wrestling matches. Most of all, these poems connect – they tell one expansive enlarging straggling and struggling story of people and families each one of us is a part of. We are a part of these stories if we call ourselves Americans, and especially Southerners. Or if we just call ourselves human beings.
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Ron Rash – POEMS, New and Selected is available at Bookshop.org.
 . . 
Also by Ron Rash at Verse and Image:
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NOTE: you can share three additional poems by Ron Rash at the sequel to today’s post, from July 17, 2026;
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Common Buckeye, Junonia coenia

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 . . 
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
 . . 
IMG_0880, tree
 . . 

Posted in family, Imagery, poetry | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Waking Up Alone – Michael Hettich

July 3, 2026 by GriffinPoetry

  .  

[ poetry by Michael Hettich ]

Waking Up Alone

—Colleen Ahern-Hettich, 1955-2025

[from section 11]

Though it can’t be true, I imagine I’ve been in love
since before I was born; and because it can’t be true,
I imagine the same is true of her, my true love.

As a child, before I knew her, I was moving toward the day we’d meet.
As a young man, confused, I ws moving toward that day,

even as I met other women and seemed
to find myself with them, or nearly, I was really
moving toward her, my true love.

Now I don’t know anything about anything at all.
Not even where I am. Every morning

I move another stone from the creek bed to the path
I’m building through the broken woods, toward her. I don’t know
who I am otherwise, and the stones are heavy.

I stumble a little as I lift and put them down.

•

Once I was a girl, she shays now. I didn’t know you.
Once, before that, I was earth, I was air.

Once, before I knew you, someone took a breath of me,
someone drew a path up the mountain, above the trees
and slept there for years, like nothing really can

and survive. I survived in the gleaming.

Once I was a shadow, the shape of a sleeping
body in the grass, in the morning. Next morning
the grass stood straight again. There was no trace of me.

•

I’m tring to write only of what seems essential now,
though I don’t know what that is. I’m trying to find it

like a man in the dark of a motel room somewhere
trying to locate his keys.

[from section 12]

Sometimes I can only write about Colleen
without writing about her, just as I can only
say what needs to be said by telling
a story: Yesterday, I sat on a hillside
and waited for something. It was sunny. I was not
hoping for an animal or a change in the weather.
No, instead something like a letting-go of language,
forgetting the person I’ve made of myself.

I could crawl inside your body, my love, and disappear
like most memories. You were here; then you were gone
and never gone. The wind through the young trees
moving as though it remembered the old ones,

their massive trunks, their canopies and vast root systems,
their voices. Then it falls silent.

Michael Hettich
from Waking Up Alone, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory, NC. © 2026. Winner of the 2025 Lena Shull Book Award of the North Carolina Poetry Society.

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Insomnia

If I could remember to breathe the way
you breathed beside me, sleeping, I might
slip into the absence you left me

and sleep, myself, inside the rhythms
your dreaming embodied—not the dreams
themselves but the deep in-and-out of your sleeping
beside me.

 . . . . . .   So I lie here, in the bedroom we loved in,
under the roof of the house we loved,
under the stars and moon, the clouds
and migrating birds, the winds and all

I’ve forgotten, and I try to match the rhythms
of my breath to yours, my love, absent
but still here beside me in the darkness.

Michael Hettich
from Waking Up Alone, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory, NC. © 2026. Winner of the 2025 Lena Shull Book Award of the North Carolina Poetry Society.

 

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Although it is quiet this morning here on the porch, somewhere rain lashes at sharp angles and a thrashing tree threatens to fall on a house. Although here the morning birds have settled themselves in the rising heat and only one cicada is singing, I can hear in the distance the low hum of an engine. Men and women are working, children are getting bored with summer, everyone is wading through life in this silence. Maybe for a moment, as they look through their windshields or at their screens, as they look at their mother making a sandwich or their co-worker so intent, maybe for a moment they also look inside. What do they discover there?

Michael Hettich’s Waking Up Alone is stillness and storm. It is confusion and stumbling insight. It is looking back and looking inside, but mostly it is silence. Awakening to days when dreams do not relinquish their hold as the sheets fall aside. Nor nightmares. But also waking into the continuous tangle of story and dream and memory that gradually resolves itself into recognition. Waking up One but not really Alone.

Few books of poetry have so gathered me up and taken me into the mind of the poet. So into the poet’s heart. These poems, and especially the extended titular poem that is the center of their universe, urge me out of my distractedness. They open a space for me to encounter my own silence. The smoke and ashes of my own dreams rise to swirl and struggle into life around me. Perhaps a mark of the most insightful poetry is how it prompts the reader into contemplation and insight of their own. Writer and reader join together on the journey of awakening.

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Purchase Waking Up Alone from Redhawk Publications HERE

More about the NC Poetry Society Lena Shull Award HERE

Other poetry by Michael Hettich at Verse and Image

https://griffinpoetry.com/2026/04/20/poetry-and-earth-night/
https://griffinpoetry.com/2025/12/26/a-sharper-silence-michael-hettich/
https://griffinpoetry.com/2025/09/26/poetry-at-cary-arts-center/
https://griffinpoetry.com/2024/09/27/anticipate/
https://griffinpoetry.com/2023/07/14/magic/
https://griffinpoetry.com/2023/07/07/catch-fire/
https://griffinpoetry.com/2023/03/17/archetype/

 

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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:

https://griffinpoetry.com/about/

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

 

IMG_0880, tree

 

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