July | 2024 | V E R S E and I M A G E

Archive for July, 2024

Planting Orchids

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, tagged A Coming of Storms, Bill Griffin, Ecopoetry, imagery, Les Brown, Main Street Rag Publishing, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing on July 26, 2024| 6 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Les Brown]

Pause

I placed my hand on the moon

++++ to keep it from its course,

to stop time in the comfort of night

++++ when sleep subdues sounds

of machines and urgent voices.

++++ Starlight and still moon

are enough to guide my stroll.

++++ I cross the meadow

among sparse trees,

++++ where snowy crickets cry fast

with time kept by heat

++++ of past day’s searing sun.

I lie down and listen

++++ for the whippoorwill

whose call is rare now,

++++ watch fireflies wink love calls.

I will hold the moon until

++++ the world stirs and wonders

why the night endures,

++++ with dreams of Earth

where fires do not rage,

++++ floods do not drown,

spiraling winds cease,

++++ oceans retreat from shores

and the cricket cries slow

++++ once again.

Les M. Brown

❦ ❦ ❦

Light rain in the woods, droplets coalesce and cascade through the upper canopy, tuliptree, oak, & hickory, until they freefall onto our heads and shoulders. A fat drop flicks a browned leaf or blinks in the duff. We imagine small creatures leaping up from the earth and then they do! Angel-winged insects are bobbing up and down to touch the fresh damp with the tips of their abdomens, animated by moisture. Linda watches one female Cranefly, notices nearby a delicate floral spike with angel-winged florets, and says, “Look, it’s planting orchids!”

Cranefly Orchid and Cranefly, so like each other, elongated nectar tube of the flower resembling the long abdomen of the insect ending in its ovipositor, but so unlike! Except in our visual imagination they’re not related at all . . . or are they? Both favor moist woodlands with a nice layer of decomposing vegetation. Both reproduce in midsummer, by bloom and seed or egg and larvae. Both look a little creepy if you’re not fond of long spindly legs.

Altogether unrelated, entirely different Kingdoms – Animalia and Plantae – and yet these two are related ecologically, if simply by the places in which they thrive and by the company they keep. They live in community. But mightn’t the relationship go deeper? All living creatures on this planet are genetically related; we share many of the same genes for basic functions like metabolism, DNA replication, and protein synthesis, share them with every bacteria, archaea, fungus, protist, and plant. Compare the genome of any plant – Cranefly Orchid – and any animal – Cranefly – and you’ll discover hundreds of identical genes. It’s one big family tree, this Kingdom Earth, with some pretty twisted and winding branches, and yet all connected to the same trunk.

❦

Alas, the Cranefly is not planting orchids. She’s laying eggs in the moist duff; they’ll hatch into larvae called leatherjackets. She doesn’t care a whit for her namesake orchid, which is pollinated by Owlet Moths (Noctuidae). The Cranefly Orchid’s tiny flowers twist either left or right as they progress up the stalk (raceme), so that as the moth’s long proboscis probes the nectar tube she gets a dusting of pollen on one or the other of her large compound eyes. And carries it with her to the next flower.

❦ ❦ ❦

Mayfly Swarm

Night on the Pearl River, steaming warm –

our small boat pierces the tunnel of blackness.

Beams of head-bound lights play

across the dark slow current.

We tease out an occasional moccasin,

quiescent in boughs of bald cypress.

Lock on bright-lit eyes of river frogs,

the hungry raccoon eating a mussel.

The motor pusher our johnboat upstream –

Suddenly, a blinding blizzard

of white-winged snow rises.

Shimmering mayflies fill the blackness.

They are in our eyes, nostrils, mouths, ears,

and hair, an erupting silent lace-winged storm.

Millions rise in singular ecstasy, then die.

Their gossamer bodies blanket the river.

Fertile eggs drift into black depths.

Frog, fish, and bird devour the dead,

a one-night feast, a gift, a magic cycle

of lovers, death, and satiated flesh.

Les M. Brown

❦ ❦ ❦

Les Brown’s new book, A Coming of Storms, has plenty of vivid and hair-raising (literally) descriptions of black cumulonimbus monsters plowing down the mountainside to batter us with hail and impale us with jagged barbs of lightning. The storm he’s really warning us of, however, is metaphorical and of our own making: the devastation of Planet Earth by that most destructive invasive species, Us. Among these poems are Lamentations for the now diminished towns and farms where our lives were once so rich, Jeremiads proclaiming the dire future we’re creating for ourselves, and the Psalmist’s tender recollection of family homestead, tender sojourns in nature, and all the smells and tastes and feel of our fertile world at its best.

Les has all the necessary credentials of a prophet. He grew up in the rural mountainscape of North Carolina; his poetry is most poignant when populated by his grandparents, uncles, neighbors. He earned a Ph.D. in Biology and taught ecology to college students all his working life. He himself feels most personally and pointedly our loss of unspoiled fields and forests, our disconnection from the earth that sustains us. I wish he were here beside me this afternoon so we could both get our knees dirty investigating Cranefly Orchids and Rattlesnake Plantain. I’ll be looking forward to his next observation, and holding my breath for a cooling breeze of hope.

❦

A Coming of Storms is available from Main Street Rag Publishing.

❦ ❦ ❦

Think seeds, not bullets

++++ melons instead of bombs.

Drink wine, rest a while

++++ instead of scorching earth.

Rip off epaulets

++++ and but on bedroom shoes.

Call mothers. Tell them

++++ their children are safe

Revere the earth,

++++ cool it.

Grow chanterelles,

++++ not mushroom clouds.

Bend barrels

++++ and weld triggers

into metallic art.

++++ Read a different Good Book.

Let only birds tweet.

++++ Read only magazines

instead of loading them.

++++ What is beneath the skin

of an apple?

++++ It is a simple question.

Les M. Brown

❦ ❦ ❦

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Life Sucks

Posted in family, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Daybreak, family, imagery, Mark Smith-Soto, nature photography, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing, Unicorn Press on July 19, 2024| 24 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Mark Smith-Soto]

Sunroom Twilight

Another thunk against the window glass,

another broken wing or neck, as like as not,

another muted spill of feathers on the grass –

I love this space, but it’s been dearly bought.

Of course, the same might well be said

of the lamb we grilled last night, honoring

its sacrifice with salad and good bread.

The whole-grain loaf, the baby kale, everything

sundered from daylight for my sake,

floods the mind in unforgiving surge,

sweeps me into the sobering give / take

that underpins life / death. In the sun’s wake,

birdsong dapples the gold air with its dirge.

Or rather, hymn of wonder; my mistake.

Mark Smith-Soto

❦ ❦ ❦

Passenger side floorboard there’s a Mason jar of flowers, black-eyed susan and zinnia, marigold and mint. I cut them from our garden this morning for Mom’s bedside table. On I-77 South just past Jonesville there’s a field of sunflowers blooming, another field near the coverleaf with 421, all looking southeast right now because it is still morning. I’m driving to Winston to visit Mom and Dad in Kate B. Reynold’s Hospice Home. Life surely does suck. Life surely is exalted.

This is a respite care admission, scheduled so we can upgrade their bathroom and bedroom. Make their home more liveable while dying. Their dates of death are not clearly visible to us over the horizon, certainly not etched in stone, but how distant can they be? Is this what people mean when they say live one day at a time? Mom can still laugh when we joke around, although each day a bit more of her releases into airy nothingness. Dad’s crash has been more sudden, broken neck, delirium, bedfast, but he still seems to add a few more good minutes to each ensuing day. All three of their children will be under the same roof today, now that’s red-letter. We’ll be helping them with lunch, sitting with Mom in the flower garden for a half hour, logrolling Dad in bed to rub ointment on his back. And while the two nap, we three will have a long conversation in another room about next week, and the weeks after.

Yesterday afternoon my son called after he returned from a few hours visit with his grandparents. Josh took Granddaddy grits and collards and says he spent most of their visit eating. Yeah! Josh has been afraid to see the changes in the two up close and had put been putting this day off for months. I told him I know he still hurts from Jonathan, his best friend all through school, right after graduation the cancer. But then at the end of talking, Josh says to me, “So how are you doing, Dad?”

Don’t get that question a lot and even less often do I say anything more than, “Fine.” I hear the sincerity when Josh asks. All the drive down today and all the drive back what I’m really thinking about is how to continue the conversation. I’ll stop at his house before I get home to drop off a cooler he left at Granddaddy’s house. I’ll begin by taking him outside and telling him how much I appreciate what he said. I’ll ask how he’s doing. And then I’ll ask another – rehearsed in my head for days, weeks, months: “And how are you doing on your path to quit drinking?” Life can surely do its best to convince you it sucks. But I have a feeling the two of us standing in the driveway for a half hour talking is going to show life it doesn’t have to.

❦ ❦ ❦

Segue

Now that you mention it: death,

the cherry outside the kitchen

in full bloom, the novel I left

open on my bed, the stitch in

my side riding a rib, the small

hole at the center of my retina

where nothing registers at all,

the rip in the screen letting in a

gnat adrift on the whiff of daphne

blooming along the broken driveway,

the sudden abandon of your laugh, me

forgetting what I was going to say,

closing my eyes, holding my breath,

and now that you mention it, death.

Mark Smith-Soto

❦ ❦ ❦

The poet notices a little something, a little nothing, really: breakfast, a chess board, chalk dust; light across a woman’s profile, flowers that shouldn’t be there, a word that carries on its back two meanings. Common things, every day things. The poet notices and his smile as he points out what he has noticed is almost sly; the pointing is all about what he’s not quite saying. Then all at once you notice, too. And you smile.

In Mark Smith-Soto’s world you might discover wonder in commonplace, joy in commonalities, mystery in what we share and have always shared without noticing that we do. You might join him in memories that make you cry, realizations that lift from within you a deep sigh, possibilities that sober you right down before they exalt you. In Mark’s ultimate collection, Daybreak, every single one of the 56 sonnets has touched me, gently but insistently, until I admit I’m relieved: I am / a human being. I’m pretty sure of that. [Biology Lesson]. After reading these poems, I begin to notice the flowers in the cracks of my walkway with new eyes; they implore me that death [is] a lifetime of hours away [Aria da Capo].

During the years of this twenty-first century, my orbit and Mark’s intersected only a handful of times, for only a handful of hours. But what gravity and what luminosity! In life I knew Mark only a little; I am glad to know him much more in poetry.

❦

Mark Smith-Soto (1948-2023) was born in Washington, DC, and lived in Costa Rica until the age of 10, when his bilingual family returned to Washington, his father’s native city. Mark’s awards include a fellowship in creative writing from the National Endowment for the Arts and the NC Writers Network’s Persephone Competition for his chapbook Green Mango Collage, among many others. Daybreak is his seventh poetry collection and is available from Unicorn Press in Greensboro, NC.

Thank you, Michael Gaspeny, for sending me Mark’s book as a gift. A treasure.

❦ ❦ ❦

There You Are

I do feel somehow exiled here, outside

the frame – just what is it about a woman

at an open window, seen from the side,

an opalescent half light on her hands

holding the curtains apart, head tilted,

questioning? Maybe her gaze has stranded

on the naked lady half-hidden by the shed,

a blossom she knows she never planted,

her wondering, These small, random gifts,

why do they touch one so? But of course,

I can’t begin to guess her mind, it’s

me trespassing here, I should go before

she sees me, leave her to her thoughts –

“Oh, there you are, amor. Come look at this.”

Mark Smith-Soto

❦ ❦ ❦

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Be Filled – Shibori Blue

Posted in family, Imagery, poetry, tagged Beth Copeland, Bill Griffin, imagery, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Redhawk Publications, Shibori Blue, Southern writing on July 12, 2024| 12 Comments »

Poems and photography from Shibori Blue

by Beth Copeland

Winter passes and one remembers one’s perseverance. – Yoko Ono

Frost on the mountain.

Creeks freeze under skins of ice.

A broken window.

My neighbor’s chimes are silent.

Even the wind is frozen.

❦

Spring passes and one remembers one’s innocence. – Yoko Ono

Does the mountain mourn

its lost children, bones buried

beneath sediment

and stone? Who gathered near its

peak? What family, what tribe?

❦

Summer passes and one remembers one’s exuberance. – Yoko Ono

Bridal veil mountain

in May, the month of weddings.

Fog, Mist, and white clouds.

Wild daisy fleabane bouquet

fresh in a blue Mason jar.

❦

Autumn passes and one remembers one’s reverence. – Yoko Ono

Tiger-striped sunset

above the ridge in the west.

Trees with leaves and trees

without. What are we losing,

my love, and what will we keep?

❦

Poetry and photography by Beth Copeland

❦ ❦ ❦

Beth Copeland lives in Ashe County, North Carolina, smack in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Each morning from her porch she sees The Peak, the highest mountain in Ashe County. It is solid and eternal – it is always shifting. Beth has recorded the mountain’s moods and contemplations with daily photographs, now pairing them in her new book with thirty-six poems that capture ephemera through the course of a year, moments of change through the changing seasons.

Thirty-six. A figure of truth and power. Product of two perfect squares. Multiplied by 2 to create the 72-season calendar established in 1685 by Japanese astronomer Shibukawa Shunkai. And again 36 the number of woodblock prints of Mount Fuji published by Katsushika Hokusai from 1830 to 1832. It is no coincidence that Beth chose thirty-six views of The Peak to inform her poems. She was born in Japan, the child of American missionaries, and has long revered the iconic mountain of her birth country, Fuji-san, whose profile The Peak of Ashe County so resembles.

This book invites me to slow my breathing, pause in the busy race, contemplate each page: five simple lines of verse, the silent mountain drawing my gaze. Redhawk is gathering a family of uniquely creative poets, writers, and artists to stretch our imaginations and open us to new experiences of words and images. I will leave this sentence here at rest and return to another page of Shibori Blue. And another.

❦

More information about Shibori Blue: Thirty-Six Views of The Peak and the opportunity to purchase HERE

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Perseverance – Deep in winter do they dream of the music they will make, cicada song? Crescendo arpeggio decrescendo, easy combers across the long sea of summer. And does the creature measure the span of its days, egg to nymph, seasons in darkness, climb into light to mate and to die? Nothing can last, not even our song, yet we do not withhold our voices.

Innocence – She is most beautiful when she does not know I am watching. She gives her animals life, little fox blanket, cupcake kitten, and they take from her all the fear and heartache that could have been trapped within to fester. Then she begins to sing.

Exuberance – Utterly alien at once perfectly identifiable, the house wren fills its small kingdom with melody, rocketing in turn to each waypoint to pause, raise its minute cornet, FANFARE!, then swift to the next. I do not understand the words but I recognize the tune.

Reverence – What we have heard teaches us, reminds, suggests, niggles, promises, invites. What we have yet to hear offers to pull us into its presence. Listen. Be filled.

❦