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Passage – Earl Huband

Posted in family, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 20, 2026| 4 Comments »

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[ with 3 poems by Earl Huband ]
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Cocoon-spinner, straining / to engineer the risk out of life.
from Rites of Passage
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❀    ❀    ❀
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A Sister’s Presents
 . 
Across the table
two goggle-eyed owls,
my pepper and salt,
hoot at me. Wise to
a bric-a-brac heart,
my sister Mary
surprised me with them
many meals ago.
 . 
And here she is still,
cheering me through these
efforts to add spice
to this saucepan life.
 . 
Earl Carlton Huband III
from The Dix Hill Blues, Main Street Rag Enterprises, Edinboro PA; © 2026
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❀    ❀    ❀
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The Pavilion of the Old Chinese Poets
— for Priscilla
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Leaves resist the ground.
The ground calls to the trees.
The trees slowly nod their heads
and leaves fall to the ground.
 . 
The canoe is propelled
through the parting waves.
Island water whispers;
the canoe rocks.
 . 
Here the winds caress
the flanks of the island.
Here the lover caresses
the arms of the beloved.
 . 
The moon hides its face
behind fingers of cloud.
Lover, close your eyes
at the touch of love.
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Earl Carlton Huband III
from The Dix Hill Blues, Main Street Rag Enterprises, Edinboro PA; © 2026
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❀    ❀    ❀
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Lost
 . 
Do not condemn this granite.
Become one with the stone
and weep as water trickles
down the cracks in its face
 . 
Look for your reflection
in the pool of moving water
at the bottom od the stone.
 . 
Earl Carlton Huband III
from The Dix Hill Blues, Main Street Rag Enterprises, Edinboro PA; © 2026
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❀    ❀    ❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
Years ago, during one of my longer visits, my mother had me sit for a portrait. I watched the back of the canvas, smelled the linseed oil, while she worked ochre into the surface for an hour. Her technique was to create the subject’s shape and dimensions in monochrome, then remove pigment to add detail. Later she would dip into her entire palette to finish the portrait. Only on another visit when the oils had dried did I realize that for this painting she had folded the canvas and painted me on the right half. She opened the hidden side to reveal beside mine another man’s face with Mephistophelean goatee and declared, “I’m calling it ‘Saint and Sinner.’”
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How to respond to the idea that my mother considered me a saint? Oldest child, studious, diligent, following the straight and narrow passage through life? I will smile a little that Mom evidently drew some comfort from that image. Only to myself do I confess every thoughtlessness, unkindness, misstep, outright mistake and fuckup I’ve every committed, all those demons that throng three AM when I can’t fall back to sleep. Sins of omission and commission. That is the real passage, straights and turbulence beneath but only untroubled waters showing. On canvas, my mother could create reality from her artist’s imaginings. I ask myself today, is this the life I imagined for myself? My imagination was clearly not sufficient. Short on wisdom, insight, compassion.
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Earl Huband’s imagination does the heavy lifting of recreating the reality of his life’s passage in Dix Hill Blues. There are no softened edges in these stories, no cheerful hues to the palette. The first two sections of the book capture the struggles and failures of his family through the generations and paints them into a montage which narrates Earl’s own passage through life. One might at certain points use the term sin, or one might simply call this truth. Earl as poet, however, touches each person and each event with benediction. Yes, we are all human, fallible, broken; yes, love can still enter here. These poems need to be read as a whole to grasp the hopefulness that survives even darkest nights.
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The third and fourth sections of the collection are a deep and cleansing breath. A bit of humor from a wry observation, the other side of a dreadful story, a moment of joy: Earl’s imagination is not short on wisdom, insight, compassion. He unwraps his own failings and I am comforted that we are brothers. The poet can be healed by the telling. Perhaps none of the saints that surround me have such a straight and unerring passage as would seem apparent. Perhaps tomorrow will be the day I glean a little wisdom. Perhaps I will pick this book back up and read again from the beginning.
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❀
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Earl Huband lives with his wife Priscilla Webster-Williams, also an accomplished poet, in Durham NC. I have met him many times at various poetry events and never seen him without a warm and welcoming smile. Dix Hill Blues is his third collection and is available HERE
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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;
. . . . . every Saturday 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
 . 
Doughton Park Tree 2020-11-22
 . 

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Saturday Share – Barnett

Posted in family, poetry, tagged , , , , on December 20, 2025| 2 Comments »

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Saturday morning readers share:
Nancy Barnett
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Death Tree
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The aging oak tree on our block, which we had watched together,
Noting the frailty of its branches even in Spring,
Now, stripped and gaunt after an autumnal hurricane
Stands in death tall, powerful, alone.
 . 
I walk beneath, longing to tell you,
“Our tree is gone” – but you are not here.
You went out in another tempest, bruised and broken
Before one leaf had turned to gold.
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Like the tree you stand before me,
Shattered of branches, defaced of bole and leaf,
Torn away without gentleness,
Naked, wrapped in the invisible sheet of pain,
Noble in the completeness of death.
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I walk in sharp winds that cut life between us;
In clearness of winter light,
Along icy edges of despair,
I keep watch by your dark death tree;
Knowing in storms that will come
No lightning bold, in terror or anguish,
Can shatter the roots that bind me to you,
Plunged deep in primal earth clay,
In the passion and endurance of love.
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Katherine Garrison Chapin (1890-1977)
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This poem by Katherine Garrison Chapin is one I’ve had for 40  or 50  years.  I believe I cut it out from the New Yorker. It’s a little on the somber side; not for the holidays!
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It caught my eye because of my memory of the elm tree we had in our back yard in our home in Springfield, Missouri. I lost one of my brothers when I was 11 in 1962 to a car accident. When I was 15 years old I came home from school one day and the tree was gone! It was during the elm tree  blight and the city was removing the elm trees. This was about 1966.
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The tree was special because we had bought an old house and my mother, noticing my reaction  at 7 years old, told me we’d put up a tree swing. (It hadn’t been lived in for awhile and looked haunted…. We’d owned a nice brick home in Independence.)  My brothers put up the swing and I had much enjoyment swinging in the tree for a few years. When we came home from my brother’s funeral I headed straight for the tree swing.
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The last two lines I find especially poignant. There was no bereavement counseling in those days and over the years and to this day I’ve found comfort in poetry.
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– Nancy 
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Additional poetry shared by Nancy Barnett at Verse and Image:
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❀    ❀    ❀    ❀    ❀
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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;
. . . . . every Saturday 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:
 . 
 . 
Also note: after January 1, 2026 I will no longer be sending separate weekly email reminders.
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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Release the Distances – Betty Adcock

Posted in family, tagged , , , , , , , , , on December 5, 2025| 6 Comments »

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[two poems from Intervale]
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Poem from November
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The leaves have fallen, releasing the distances.
This year of my turning moves
in an arc like a preying bird’s,
purposeful.
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My loves have dried. I find
I can remember only the least things:
mouse-gray of my grandmother’s hair
dead in the silverbacked brush,
the smell of hardpacked dirt
under black grease in the smokehouse.
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Here is the old sky, the one we always had.
Everything in it is small,
punctuation for a vanished story.
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I have forgotten the trick
an old man taught me: how the voice
can be made to nest in the cupped hands,
calling. Was it the dove
or the owl I brought close then?
There was a calling.
Something came.
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❀    ❀    ❀
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Penumbra
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The child in the cracked photograph sits still
in the rope swing hung from a live oak.
Her velvet dress brims with a lace frill.
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Her pet Bantam is quiet in her lap.
It is the autumn day of a funeral
and someone has thought to take a snap-
 . 
shot of the child who won’t be allowed
to go to the burying – the coffin in the house
for days, strange people going in and out.
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She’s dressed as if she’d go, in the blue church-
dress from last Christmas, almost too short.
The rooster loves her, she guards his perch
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on her lap, his colors feathering the mild air.
She concentrates on this, now that her father
is unknowable, crying in his rocking chair.
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Her mouth knife-thin, her small hands knotted hard
on the ropes she grips as if to be rescued.
She’s growing a will that won’t be shed
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and something as cold as winter’s breath
tightens in her, as later the asthma’s vise
will tighten – hands on the throat, the truth.
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Black and white, she is hiding
in every one of my bright beginnings.
Gold and deep blue and dark-shining
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red the cockerel’s feathers, gold the sun
in the skyblue southern fall, blue
over the four o’clocks and the drone
 . 
of weeping that drains like a shadow from the house
where someone is gone, is gone, is gone –
where the child will stay to darken like a bruise.
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I am six years old, buried
in the colorless album.
My mother is dead.
I forgive no one.
 . 
Betty Adcock
from Intervale: New and Selected Poems, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge LA; © 2001
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This is the season of perfect-family photos arriving by text after reunions for feasting or bursting from the envelopes of early Christmas cards. These cousins with their complimentary sweaters on the front steps, their lovely smiling children and companions. I spent the first day with my father after our dual week-long Covid quarantine helping him watch a home movie from 1936, his little sister on a tricycle, he barefoot astride his cousin’s pony. His aunts and grandmother crossed in the greytone background like hovering angels or benevolent wardens. And then the next reel, in color, my father in white t-shirt is twenty-six and I am a flame-haired infant in my grandfather’s arms.
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These two poems and others in this collection by Betty Adcock take me deeper than I’ve ever labored into my own past. She sees everything. What no one but she had yet noticed, the voices, the smells, all are now alive in her sharp, unsentimental, raven-eyed truth telling. What memories are waiting half-asleep for each of us? What memories call us to create them fresh from fragments and tales and slowly disintegrating histories? A few words from Betty Adcock and forgotten ghosts materialize. There was a calling. Something came.
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❀
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Betty Adcock (b. 1938) was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2014. She has taught and served as writer-in-residence in the state for many decades. Among her numerous awards and publications, this comment by Mary Oliver stands out: Adcock “writes poems that are as upright as houses, and as flighty as clouds. She never postures. The poems … are beautiful, meaningful, and very real.” (for The Difficult Wheel, 1995)
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Intervale and Betty Adcock’s other books are available from LSU PRESS.
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Another poem by Betty Adcock at Verse and Image:
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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;
. . . . . every Saturday 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/
 . 
Also note: after January 1, 2026 I will no longer be sending separate weekly email reminders.
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
 . 
2020-09-08b Doughton Park Tree

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