Poems and photography from Shibori Blue
by Beth Copeland
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Winter passes and one remembers one’s perseverance. – Yoko Ono
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Frost on the mountain.
Creeks freeze under skins of ice.
A broken window.
My neighbor’s chimes are silent.
Even the wind is frozen.
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Spring passes and one remembers one’s innocence. – Yoko Ono
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Does the mountain mourn
its lost children, bones buried
beneath sediment
and stone? Who gathered near its
peak? What family, what tribe?
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Summer passes and one remembers one’s exuberance. – Yoko Ono
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Bridal veil mountain
in May, the month of weddings.
Fog, Mist, and white clouds.
Wild daisy fleabane bouquet
fresh in a blue Mason jar.
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Autumn passes and one remembers one’s reverence. – Yoko Ono
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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?
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Poetry and photography by Beth Copeland
from Shibori Blue: Thirty-Six Views of The Peak, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory NC; © 2024
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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V E R S E and I M A G E 
I love this idea/practice of writing about the same view in different seasons.
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Yes, I agree. It helps to have such a view out your window! It occurs to me to spend some time contemplating all the photos I close each blog with, the lone tree on the highest point at Bluff Ridge in Doughton Park on the Blue Ridge Parkway. I take a shot from the same stone trail marker every time we visit. Thanks! —B
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I love this book!
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Oh yes. Lines and images that remind me anything is possible. —B
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Such a wonderful, lyrical book. “The mountains are always with us,” a friend reminded me recently. Beth has captured the tension and beauty between what is both constant and always changing.
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From the mountaintop perhaps we see how huge the world is and we, though small, are part of it. But sitting on a log on a mountainside, our walls and floor and sky all green and brown, perhaps we feel ourselves large enough for the world to recognize us. And embrace us. —B
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A few words can be as lovely a whole volume of verse
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Essence . . . —B
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Exquisite! So often we look and do not see…
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“The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.” (RLS) —B
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Lovely!
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[…] Blue: Thirty-Six Views of the Peak HERE. . Sample poems from Shibori Blue at Verse & Image HERE. . More information about the North Carolina Museum of Nature Sciences HERE. Dive into the K […]
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