Native Southern Wildflower – Geranium maculatum
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[ poems by Fred Chappell, Patricia Crittenden, Patricia Hooper, Richard Widerkehr,
Ann Deagon, Peter Makuck, David Manning ]
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Forever Mountain
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J.T.Chappell, 1912-1978
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Now a lofty smoke has cleansed my vision.
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I see my father has gone to climb
Lightly the Pisgah slope, taking the time
He’s got a world of, making spry headway
In the fresh green mornings, stretching out
Noontimes in the groves of beech and maple.
He has cut a walking stick of second-growth hickory
And through the amber afternoon he measures
Its shadow and his own shadow on a sunny rock.
Not marking the hour, but observing
The quality of light come over him.
He is alone, except what voices out of time
Swarm to his head like bees to the bee-tree crown,
The voices of former life as indistinct as heat.
By the clear trout pool he builds his fire at twilight,
And in the night a granary of stars
Rises in the water and spreads from edge to edge.
He sleeps, to dream the tossing dream
Of the horses of pine trees, their shoulders
Twisting like silk ribbon in the breeze.
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He rises glad and early and goes his way,
Taking by plateaus the mountain that possesses him.
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My vision blurs blue with distance,
I see no more.
Forever Mountain has become a cloud
That light turns gold, that wind dislimns.
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This is continually a prayer.
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Fred Chappell (1936-2024)
from Source, LSU Press (1985), and collected in The Fred Chappell Reader, St. Martin’s Press (1987)
selected by Bill Griffin
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This was the first contemporary poem I read as I returned to poetry in my forties. I have read it again and again since then, as well as most everything else Fred has written. This, along with the poem Hymn by A R Ammons, was also the inspiration for me to imagine I might take up the pen and write as well. Even more today than all those decades ago, I am captured by this vision of heaven, the afterlife, as a campfire at night with a granary of stars, rising trout, and a new mountain to climb each morning. May it be so.
— Bill
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❀ ✿ ✾ ❁
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We Set Out Together
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My daughter and me,
up an old mountain road through the late autumn trees.
We’d agreed she’d climb to the peak on her own and, on her way back,
find me where I’d wait among bright colored leaves.
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But the leaves are gone, fallen back to the earth.
We’ve come too late.
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We pause near the last of the asters; that lets me keep up.
But soon I begin to tire.
As we pass the first bench, I’m still with her.
Then, before the second, I say, “You go on ahead,”
as we had agreed.
She walks up the mountain, as I rest on the downside,
glad not to be chasing life’s peaks anymore.
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This is how it goes, isn’t it?
You carry your children until they can toddle.
But, when you finally could walk together, they’re too busy.
Now, as you grow old, they walk ahead
and you see them receding as they round the bend.
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I reach the second bench alone and walk on
to an opening in the woods with a long view across a deep stream-cut hollow.
I stand and look.
The ravine is too deep to cross; can three decades be bridged?
Will she pass or has she gone so far ahead that I won’t see her?
Her footsteps die out, replaced by a faint breeze whispering among the dry leaves,
then the buzz of a bee on a few faded flowers,
then nothing.
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I wait.
I wait some more.
I wait as long as hope can hold on and then a bit longer,
then I turn back to the second bench.
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It’s all agreed; she will come back
and I will be here – for a while.
Life’s path is universal, but uniquely trod
rising briefly from earth, then disappearing whence it came.
Is it better to live and die, as the forest does, without foresight?
She thinks the future is long and she knows she will return.
But I know time is short and fickle – like the first hard frost.
Will she come back in time?
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Patricia Crittenden
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Thank you, Patty, for sharing this lovely poem. It weaves between observation and musing, between presence and anticipation, even between joy and grief, just like a mountain path weaves up the ridge and down again. We may say we are glad that we no longer have to chase life’s peaks, but then regret swells as we watch life’s treasure recede. There are so many endings here, and so many hopes that what we hold dear may not end altogether. May each of us discover that it is never too late.
— Bill
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Autumn Sasssafras
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❀ ✿ ✾ ❁
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Sightings
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The world leafs out again, the willow first
and then the river birches near the road
we’re driving down, you in your car seat watching,
for hawks or smaller birds returning home.
Two years have passed since you could walk or stand
alone. The winter-damaged fields are sown,
and there, along the ridge, unraveling,
spirals of song birds, drifts of dogwood trees,
restored to blossom, beauty that breaks the heart.
And you whose spinal cord could not be healed:
you’re lowering the window, looking up
at miles of wings, your face alive with joy.
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Patricia Hooper
from her fifth book, A Necessary Persistence
selected by Richard Widerkehr
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Hooper makes us feel connected to this “annual miracle” of April, as E. Dickinson called it. Clear images, strong feeling—a grandson’s wonder, the speaker’s joy and gratitude—this poem is a gift to the reader. (I wrote a review of A Necessary Persistence for Aquifer a few years ago.)
— Richard
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✾
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In The Forest, There Are Stars
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Thick green-black branches can’t hide them,
whistling through cedar and fir trees. You’ve seen
one star drop as if torn from the forest.
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Here stars jostle each other, falling toward you—
you forget what you were and how you came here.
Maybe, by day on the road to islands,
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can you remember the white edges
of rooftops, how the forest rose to meet you?
Here sword ferns jut from the hillsides.
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High fern-like branches fan themselves downward,
and stars soak you with their cold radiance.
The stars that were small and cold
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in the sky are still small and cold. The branches
lift about them, hissing lightly.
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Richard Widerkehr
from Missing The Owl (Shanti Arts Publications), first published in Sweet Tree Review and then reprinted in Adventures Northwest
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❀ ✿ ✾ ❁
. .
Augury
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Tonight my father cupped his hands and blew
into their hollow sphere and brought to life
the long wild resonant cry
of country boyhood, owl-haunted evenings
and the dark modulations of distant hounds,
fluttered his fingers throbbing into memory
those sobbing whistles hunting down the rails
my childhood dreaming in the restless city.
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And as my children wondered cupping their hands
to capture that primeval mimicry
of all that haunts and heightens our precarious sense
of living rooted in immemorial time,
I saw my father new, and shared his knowing
the secret of our give and take of breath:
live long enough to know that we are dying,
hand on with tenderness and dignity
our resonant art
the long learned call
of trumpeter man.
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Ann Deagon (1930-2024)
collected in Word and Witness: 100 years of North Carolina Poetry, Carolina Academic Press, Durham NC (1999)
selected by Bill Griffin
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“The secret of our give and take of breath:” the mimicry of primeval haunts whispers that secret into our soul, that we share these short lives with every creature that snuffles, caws, and swims, with every waving tree and scented flower. What call, what whistle will we hear that can draw us back together into one circle?
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In her bio, Ann Deagon once remarked that she didn’t begin writing until she was forty, “when that three-headed dog love death and poetry took me in its teeth and shook me.” She taught Classics at Guilford College and was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literary Fellowship, among many other honors during her life.
— Bill
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❀ ✿ ✾ ❁
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My Son Draws an Apple Tree
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I watch it grow
at the end of his dimpled hand
rooted in white paper.
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The strokes are fast
and careless, as if the hand
has little time.
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Quick black trunk,
a green crown and in the white
air all by itself
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a red splotch,
an apple face with a frown
that is his
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he gravely says
looking up at me — the stiffening
branch he falls from.
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Peter Makuck (1940-1923)
from Long Lens, New & Selected Poems, © 2010 by Peter Makuck, Boa Editions, Ltd.; American Poets Continuum Series, No. 121
selected by Bill Griffin
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Some poems we return to only to discover that at each visit they bestow upon us a different benediction. Which simply makes sense, since we are a different person each time we read the lines. I am the tree bent and stiffening. I pray only this, that for those I love and for all the earth as well that not all innocence and purity may be lost. Thank you, Peter, for continuing to inspire.
— Bill
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❀ ✿ ✾ ❁
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The Dance
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I say yes to the tulip tree
dropping its cups of flowers,
golden and green
and to the derelict ailanthus
breaker of concrete sidewalks
and to the sumac with its cones of fire.
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Yes to the white-tails that float
their magic, then vanish
far into the woods’ deep green
and to the mallard pair, duck and drake
that waddle up from Crabtree Creek
and to the earthworms
they clear from our driveway.
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Yes to the turtle, the red slider
that spring calls from the creek
to wandering, the one I rescued
from a storm-drain and gave my blessing to.
And yes to that damn beaver
that cut down the giant beech
near the stream, my favorite tree
in the wetland, and to the trees
he left behind.
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Yes to the night’s extravagance of stars,
to Vega’s frozen light, the lyre of the stars
and to the southern cross
and multitudes of strange lights
I cannot see, much less name, so far below
the horizon over Patagonia
all the way down to the pole.
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And yes to the blessing of day and night,
mates following each other
and to the contentment each brings
in its own way, bright, then silent dark.
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Because none of these I can keep.
They are not mine, and I cannot stop
the music in the middle of the dance.
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So yes to this morning rain carrying
yesterday away.
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David Treadway Manning (1928-2021)
from Sailing the Bright Stream: New & Selected Poems, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC (2020)
selected by Bill Griffin
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Thank you, Dave for years of friendship. For minds that open and expand, always. For a thousand true laughs, the bright and knowing ones and the wicked ones. For this poem, its music in which you and I will continue to live.
— Bill
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❀ ✿ ✾ ❁
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Life is not so much a matter of discovering something new as it is a matter of rediscovering what has always been present.
— W. Ralph Ward, Jr.
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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it.
— Minnie Aumonier
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Thank you for celebrating the month of April with International Earth Day (April 22) and National Poetry Month, and for continuing the celebration. And thank you, Readers, who have selected poems to share that connect us to our planet and each other. EVERY DAY is EARTH DAY!
And thanks always to camping buddy Mike Barnett, who keeps me supplied with the unending delights of quotations from the spirit of Nature.
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❁
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— Bill
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❀ ✿ ✾ ❁
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2016-10-17 Doughton Park Tree
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