V E R S E and I M A G E

Poetry and Earth – Love, and

April 10, 2026 by GriffinPoetry

[ poems by Connie Green, Kari Gunter-Seymour,

Jenny Bates, Annie Woodford, Paul Jones]

Song at Daybreak

Behind the mountains this morning

a soft curtain of pink, dawn dipping

into her palette, my soul the recipient

of her artistry, this small moment

that would not have occurred

had I not wakened early, wandered

sleep-deprived into the kitchen

and turned my face toward the ridges-

those ridges that daily wait for me

to look up, to accept, if only

for a minute, the gift they offer

and have offered since the forces

of nature, the work of time pushed

them from plain to towering majesty,

our common stardust knitting mountain,

kitchen, aging woman into song notes that lift

and drift, the finite urging toward the infinite.

Connie Jordan Green

selected by Kari Gunter-Seymour. First appeared in Women Speak, Volume Eleven (Sheila Na Gig Editions 2025)

This gorgeous Song at Daybreak by Connie Green reminds me that there is so much splendor and joy to be had if we let ourselves be still long enough to truly embrace all that the earth (and sky) has to offer, and that aging too is a gift, because it means we have been given so many more opportunities to stand in awe and wonder of it all. — Kari Gunter-Seymour

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Ten Miles North of Lore City, Guernsey County, Ohio

Oh, Salt Fork, I’ve come to hide

inside your autumn, walk

beneath the cathedral of your branches

become a meditative painting,

a Cézanne—your impressions

revealed in planes of pigment,

the slow study of light,

pin oak and American beech awash

in swaths of topaz and carnelian,

the lake a reverie of reflections.

The universe is out of whack, tremulous

in the pathos of floods, wildfires and drought.

Here, red squirrels wax comedic,

all bark, tuck and tumble, a white-tailed

snorting at their antics.

Tangy pockets of mugwort

and mountain mint intoxicate my airways

weak-knee me into giggles.

Chickadees hip-hop branch to thicket,

their black caps adorably gangsta.

Above, an osprey chirps its tea-kettle whistle,

ascends, thrusts, disappears,

returns, as if parleying ancestral maps

stored inside the lace of its bones.

Cricket songs stitch the afternoon.

I don’t know how long your trails can hold

such abundance, your fervor of tints and textures

winding their way to my insides, transcendent

as a psalm, the rhythm of your balms and breezes

rumoring their promise of peace.

Kari Gunter-Seymour

First appeared in The Nature of Our Times (Paloma Press 2025)

Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to submit a poem I love by poet Connie Green and one of my own as well, in honor of Earth Day. KG-S

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Connie Jordan Green lives on a farm in East Tennessee where she writes and gardens. She has published award-winning novels for young people, newspaper columns, poetry chapbooks and collections, most recently Nameless as the Minnows, Madville Publishing. Her poetry has been nominated for Pushcart Awards. She frequently teaches writing workshops.

Kari Gunter-Seymour is the immediate past Poet Laureate of Ohio and author of three award-winning poetry collections, including Dirt Songs (EastOver Press, 2024) winner of the 2025 IPPY Bronze, NYC Big Book and Feathered Quill Awards. Her newest collection, What Teethes Within is forthcoming from University Press of Kentucky, August 2026. Her work has been featured in a variety of publications including the American Book Review, Poem-a-Day, World Literature Today and The New York Times.

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Virga

Every raindrop panics me now

long before it arrives

I feel like an old Dog who hides

in the bathroom sniffing grey skies

I go out walking anyway make

myself brave but I don’t really don’t want

it to rain

I want fear to evaporate like a virga

line I want to become a cloud dropped

full of reflection and affection

when I listen to rain I hear echoes

of your voice not in my ears anymore

asking under any circumstance

will you want to make love again?

Jenny Bates

selected by Paul Jones

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Love Poem for the Appalachian Rainforest

The trees as rib cage, as sea-

bare branches tapping each other,

signing furiously the word

for wind. Temperate rainforest

filled with broken trees,

bracken tinder. I pray

for damp weather, fog, snow-

a proper frozen sojourn

among High Country clouds

plumping moss & lichen.

To keep fire at bay.

Needle and loam, trees breathing

wet breath against each other,

heavy enough to float, to form

their own ecology of hope.

Annie Woodford

selected by Paul Jones

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In the Cards

Outside of Beaverdam, an old lady told the cards.

As close to a crone as the mountain side could grasp,

could hold there, cling-rooted and knotty as laurel.

She was sour on life by now, hers, which had been hard,

and the mountain itself. “It must change,” she rasped.

Fingering the whirling figure, she hissed, “This is the World.”

“It’s in the past. Better that the dancer held a sword.”

The next up, the seemingly indifferent Four of Cups.

“Ignoring the gifts and threats of the sky and earth. Peril.

That’s where we are now. In danger, but not acting. Bored

with it all. Not doing what we need to do.” She gasped,

“No not this! I would rather be telling the Devil,”

as if she already had seen, but dare not disregard,

the next card, the future told by the Tower. The last.

“The end that comes to us all both good and evil.”

Soon the storms came as they had never come before.

She and her house were washed away. Among the lost.

She saw but was not saved. Not found. Except her skull.

Paul Jones

Thanks for combining Poetry Month and Earth Day (all month long). These three poems are from the award winning anthology, Had I a Dove: Appalachian Poets on the Helene Flood, edited by Hilda Downer (Redhawk Publications 2025). Each of these poem connects human awareness and in some cases human agency in the face of the experience of the flood and what followed. The whole of the anthology is rich with the appreciation of nature during and due to climate based disaster. Besides the three poems attached, Virga by Jenny Bates, Love Poem for the Appalachian Rainforest by Annie Woodford, and In the Cards by me, the anthology holds many treasures. — Paul Jones

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We do not live in a Nuclear Age or an Information Age. We do not live in a Post-Industrial Age, a Post-Cold War Age, or a Post-Modern Age. We do not live in an Age of Anxiety or even a New Age. We live in an Age of Flowering Plants and an Age of Beetles.

– Sue Hubbell, from Broadsides from the Other Orders

Thank you for celebrating the month of April with International Earth Day (April 22) and National Poetry Month. Readers have selected poems that connect us to our planet and each other. If you have a poem that has rooted you to the earth and spread your branches into bright sky, please share! It can be a poem by your favorite writer, living or dead, a poem of your own, or both.

Send a your poem(s) in the body of the email or as .DOC or .RTF to:

ecopoetry@griffinpoetry.com

Please include your comments or reaction to the poem. And publication acknowledgments if previously published.

We will share one or two posts each week, multiple posts during the week of Earth Day, and we will keep sharing into May and beyond if you continue to respond!

Feel free to invite others to send their favorite Earth Day poems. Perhaps some day we will be able to say we live in the Age of Connection.

❁

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Thanks again for joining the conversation.

— Bill

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Posted in Ecopoetry | Tagged Annie Woodford, Connie Green, Earth Day 2026, Ecopoetry, Jenny Bates, Kari Gunter-Seymour, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, Paul Jones, Southern writing | Leave a Comment »

I See You Waving – Sherry Siddall

April 3, 2026 by GriffinPoetry

[ with 3 poems from Transformed and Singing ]

The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough of is love.

— Henry Miller

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Night Ship

The compass of our bodies leads us

through another moonless night,

cresting waves of sleep, steered

by phosphorescent dreams that

knit our cells whole again,

or as whole as they can be

after years on this sea.

The dark has no power over us

as we roll on our ship of tossed

and wrinkled sheets, the shushing

of syrupy crickets a white noise

leaking beneath the cracked window.

As dawn approaches once again,

the dogs stir and lick our hands.

Sherry Siddall

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The Beautiful Dead

2020

are half a million human souls

lost the way spring is lost

in deepest winter.

I go about the day

as if everything is fine,

as if safety can be found

in the folding of laundry,

the arranging of

store-bought flowers.

Outside where life is shuttered,

still, there is some comfort

in the wildness of branches

twined on winter trees,

or a scatter of bird seed

on frozen ground.

I turn to the simplicity

of sunlight on a well-worn chair,

how it warms me if I sit there.

From the window I watch

a male bluebird who studies

the birdhouse on a maple tree.

Its round entry is exactly the size

for birds of his kind, and also snakes,

because no home is absolutely safe.

The bluebird will make up his mind

to nest or not, and when spring

erupts in its ruthless way,

with green possibilities

and warmth suffusing all

that was brown and bare,

I’ll half-expect the dead to return

cross some impossible border,

overwhelm me with joy.

Sherry Siddall

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Daily reality sometimes washes over us like a wave, slams us down, sucks us into the darkness. How are we to stand? What if, as Sherry Siddall suggests in her poem Time Chop, we can know love as a ripple in the fabric of spacetime? Perhaps the deep nature of reality is not particles and energy, not wave functions and uncertainty, but the moment by moment expanding web of experiences and relationships. And every bubble of experience is under the influence of the nudge of love.

When I was half-way through Sherry’s book, Transformed and Singing, I became aware of the thread of love that weaves these poems together. I stopped and went back to each to discover love’s signature: sometimes explicit as love for strangers . . . nothing to be done but love, and always implied, as this clockwork beauty of the cosmos and one of may favorite images, I see you / waving to me from far away, and I wave back. Sometimes we find meaning as we reflect on our past – the stab of loss countered by the fullness of companionship – and sometimes meaning finds us in a moment of simple presence. Feelings swirl within us as restless as the sea, at times threatening but just as often beautiful as sunlight on water. A struggle, a jewel. Reality. As Sherry discovers in Conch – same joy, same something too difficult to name.

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Transformed and Singing is available from Main Street Rag. Sherry Siddall lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA. She is also the author of a poetry chapbook, Sweet Land (Finishing Line Press, 2021). Thank you as well, Sherry, for the Henry Miller quotation which I have lifted from you book.

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Conch

After his death we flew south,

like storm-tossed birds, mother

and I, to get away.

I walked the beach, fourteen,

sunburned, heron-thin,

a shadow me of years ago.

The surf was pounding

like today’s, the sun jolly,

its own relentless self.

One wave shoved forth

a perfect conch, pearly pink as

flesh inside, rough whorls

hard and soothing. I picked it up.

Here was joy, and something else

too difficult to name.

Today, on a different beach, a sturdy wave

delivered another whelk as I walked,

this one battered, pocked, unique.

Its only beauty might be in a garden,

green tendrils winding through the holes.

My scarred body greets this new shell

as kindred after fifty years.

Same joy, same something else

too difficult to name.

Sherry Siddall

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Today’s photos were taken this spring along the Elkin & Allegheny Nature Trail in Elkin, North Carolina, USA. As you read this, Foamflower is just about to bloom. Perhaps you would like to join me and other curious seekers on one of this spring’s naturalist walks, a program of Elkin Valley Trails Association. Upcoming dates are April 11 and April 25. Details and registration (free!) here:

https://www.meetup.com/mstsegment6/events

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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 also 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

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Thanks again for joining the conversation.

– Bill

Posted in family | Tagged Main Street Rag Publishing, nature photography, NC Poets, poetry, Sherry Siddall, Southern writing, Transformed and Singing | 3 Comments »

CALL FOR POEMS FOR EARTH DAY

April 2, 2026 by GriffinPoetry

CALL FOR POEMS FOR EARTH DAY 2026

– Sue Hubbell, from Broadsides from the Other Orders

Yesterday Teresa Litschke interviewed me in preparation for the Great Trails State celebration in North Carolina this fall. One thing she asked me was, “Why do you think the activities of your local trails organization are important for your community?”

I’ve been thinking about that question ever since. Why take a walk? Why look at a flower or listen for a bird? Why spend a minute outdoors? I don’t know if my answer in the interview was profound or true, and I don’t know if I can even begin to answer the question for you, either. Perhaps the most important thing is that we each ask the question of ourselves. Do I feel connected? To other people in my community? To the fragrance of spring and the bite of winter? To the sun rising and the rain falling? To the flowering plants and the beetles that are the most abundant inhabitants of my planet?

Each time I lead a naturalist hike, I remind all the participants that they are the naturalists during the time we’re together. If you are paying attention to the earth, you are flexing your naturalist muscles. And of course paying attention is at the heart of creating a poem. Earth Day . . . Poetry Month . . . natural companions.

I would love to post dozens of poems for Earth Day this year throughout the month of April.

Please send me one!

And please include your comments or reactions to the poem! Does it enlarge your sense of connection to the earth and the universe?

Send a single poem in the body of the email or as .DOC or .RTF to:

ecopoetry@griffinpoetry.com

BONUS: if you send me one poem by an author other than yourself, I invite you to send me a second poem by you. Please let me know where the poems have been published.

And feel free to invite others to send their favorite Earth Day poems.

Perhaps some day we will be able to say we live in the Age of Connection.

— Bill