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Archive for the ‘family’ Category

Release the Distances – Betty Adcock

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

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[two poems from Intervale]
 . 
Poem from November
 . 
The leaves have fallen, releasing the distances.
This year of my turning moves
in an arc like a preying bird’s,
purposeful.
 . 
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.
 . 
Here is the old sky, the one we always had.
Everything in it is small,
punctuation for a vanished story.
 . 
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.
 . 
❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
Penumbra
 . 
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.
 . 
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.
 . 
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
 . 
on her lap, his colors feathering the mild air.
She concentrates on this, now that her father
is unknowable, crying in his rocking chair.
 . 
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
 . 
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.
 . 
Black and white, she is hiding
in every one of my bright beginnings.
Gold and deep blue and dark-shining
 . 
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.
 . 
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.
 . 
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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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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❀    ❀    ❀    ❀    ❀
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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/
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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.
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 . 
Thanks again for joining the conversation.
 . – Bill
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2020-09-08b Doughton Park Tree

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Your Shallow Place in All of This — Lucinda Trew

Posted in family, Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , , on November 21, 2025| 2 Comments »

[2 poems by Lucinda Trew]
if you wish to grow a garden, first seed
your soul with sadness
 . 
for it helps to have an ache, a molecule
of sorrow that will swell, release and drench
the patch of earth you claim
 . 
like a weather plane sowing stingy clouds
with silver beads of iodide, lush promise of rain
something withheld – a slip of rue, s spore
of woe to bury – a slender sprig of remembering
your shallow place in all of this
 . 
a cloister of green where secrets are safe
where worm and peat, centipede and muddy
trowel will carry melancholy to the seedling
graves you dig
 . 
for a garden is forgiving – a copse confessional
a place for penance – pulling weeds, snapping
roots, kneeling in dirt
 . 
and tending, gently tending, to fragile shoot
breaching bud, those in need of holding up
and the healing grace of fresh tilled ground.
 . 
♦
 . 
when trees fall
 . 
from natural cause – nor’easter, drought
decrepitude – they lean in, one upon another
++++ a prayer of knotty hands
 . 
we pray, too, in other ways, holding one another
close in crook and crutch of branch, and nests
++++ for those in need of cradling
 . 
we unfist fingers, unwind clocks, hold one another
in a basketweave of leaf and twig and comforting
++++ like trees, we slant
 . 
against wind and time, hearts and boughs that break
from storm and thorn and toppled crowns
++++ we ease one another
 . 
to ground, to the resting place of forest floor
to beds of moss and tender mercies yielding to ash
++++ as we all fall down
 . 
Lucinda Trew
from What Falls to Ground, Charlotte Lit Press, Charlotte, NC; © 2025
++++
IMG_9468
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♦   ♦   ♦   ♦   ♦
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I love these poems for their compassion in the deep sense of that word, “suffering together.” In reading these lines I am able to pause and slant against the wind of my own doubt and daily struggles. Lucinda writes, “a poem is a bone / in the graveyard of remembering.” In memory I visit the bones of loss and pain but also the roots and seeds of what may again grow into joy. In the music of Lucinda’s words and phrases, the myth and earthy origins her poems suggest, the impermanence of all things resting the midst of rising sun and growing plant – in these I rediscover hope. Yes, we all fall to ground. Yes, we may ease each other as we fall.
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♦
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Lucinda Trew lives and writes in the red clay piedmont of North Carolina, USA. What Falls to Ground is her debut collection and is available from Charlotte Center for the Literary Arts.
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Additional poetry by Lucinda Trew at VERSE and IMAGE:
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IMG_1948
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Saturday’s Submission – Once a week on Saturday I feature one or two poems sent to me by readers. If you would like to consider having your poem appear, please see the GUIDELINES here:

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Who?

Posted in family, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , on October 31, 2025| 5 Comments »

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[with 3 poems by Robin Greene]
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Everyone is Someone Else
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Everyone is someone else tonight.
Sitting on hallway stairs, bowl of packaged candies
on my lap, I rise to greet four princesses – facemasks
hard and identical, two Energizer bunnies,
an army soldier in fatigues, and three wise men –
brothers they tell me. Later, as my son peels off
his Ninja costume to sleep in the chaos of his take,
two new moons, discovered around Uranus,
appear on CNN. And strangely, Uranus
is one of his spelling words this week.
The world seems driven by repetitions:
the ant’s legs scrambling across the kitchen tile,
sheet rain blowing against window glass,
the perennial grass relentless beneath
our feet. Robert Creeley once removed
his glass eye in a poetry workshop and described life
as a dress rehearsal, but never said for what . . . .
And once there was a man I loved and married.
We made three babies, but one died inside me,
and I bled for a month. Sometimes I pretend
that shit like this just happens, and whatever
meaning I search for is like searching for the faces
of strangers on this Halloween: behind masks
are masks, behind motion is motion.
 . 
Robin Greene
from Lateral Drift, Windows on History Press, Durham NC; © 2002
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but (even) then face to face.
I Corinthians 13:12 (KJV – adapted)
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Is everyone someone else, or just me? Am I who I seem to be, and would I let you know if I weren’t? I was that kid in English class who read every story in the book even though only four were assigned. I was the guy mixing and measuring in the back of the lab while the chemistry teacher was up front confounding the class. In college they had to drag me out of the science building every night when it closed. I chose medicine as my profession from some hazy expectation that it would let me keep learning new stuff all my life.
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Now in my closing decades I want to say, “Stop! I’ve learned enough!” I don’t need to know any more than I do right now about all the hard stuff. Parent, caregiver, worrier, fuckup – enough! There is only one way, however, that life will finally drag you out of the classroom. To paraphrase a caution about Nature: Life gives you the test first, then teaches you the lesson.
 . 
A mirror, like a person, ages. Over a century shiny metal applied to glass tarnishes and darkens. It reveals its pits and blemishes. Attrition, wearing down, is not far from contrition, wearing ashes. Paul writing his first letter to the Corinthians expects us to outgrow our foolishness and confusion, set aside childish ways and think like grownups. He dangles the promise that we may experience eternity with God face to face. I hope that’s true, that my self is more durable than my molecules, but I wonder about all this learning and knowing in the meantime. Life – has it been worth it? Even the person who passes with an “A” still answered 5% wrong. That adds up to a lot of foolishness and confusion I am carrying.
 . 
Even gazing into a dark mirror, I still see myself face to face. Who is that looking back? All the knowing I’ve tried so hard to accumulate and hold onto, all the elements I’ve combined into myself, in that mirror they become shadows fading away at the periphery. The person in that mirror – who is he really? Perhaps on my final day, when the blazing light of the universe is revealed and ultimate mysteries are mysterious no longer, I will also see, clear and defined, face to face, me.
 . 
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Necklace
 . 
Under cool running water, my mother clutches
a knife, debones chicken breasts the color
 . 
of a winter moon; I’ll never be a woman,
I think and rise from my half-lotus
 . 
on the countertop – eight years-old –
my flat, tight body still an ally.
 . 
My mother and I never speak of this
apprenticeship, field archeologist
 . 
I’ve become, unearthing the glyphs
and ruins of my gender
 . 
until my father and brother arrive,
noisy as blind men,
 . 
bumping their way across the linoleum tiles –
breaking our silence
 . 
as though it were neither real
nor holy.
 . 
Later, the smells of cologne, hairspray
filter through the house.
 . 
Steam from the iron sizzles
on its aluminum pad
 . 
as mother presses
my father’s slacks and shirt,
 . 
and sets up snacks for the babysitter –
fashioning each small part of our lives
 . 
as though they were hand-made beads
for a necklace some Inca woman
 . 
might make and pass down
to her only daughter.
 . 
Robin Greene
from Lateral Drift, Windows on History Press, Durham NC; © 2002
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Just as an earthquake or long drought may expose new strata to the paleontologist’s questing eye, so a pile of books tumbling off a desk. Robin Greene wrote these poems in Lateral Drift twenty-five years ago. When I open the book today for the first time, how powerfully the lines still reach out to me and into me. How truthfully they speak; how in the present they are; how they open themselves, and me. Who is the voice in these unsheathed knives of stories? Who was she then, and is she still? But why even ask such a thing? The poems are who they are made to be; they carry the light and the darkness they were created for.
 . 
Better to ask instead, Who am I as I read these poems? I am a man opening myself to receive the truth of a woman’s struggles and the marrow of her knowing. I am a person old enough to have grandchildren yet I become a child and a young parent and Lord knows what in the tangle and turbulence of these stories. I am someone who knows little, perhaps nothing at all, until I am willing to sit down for a moment in this silence filled with words.
 . 
After I’ve read the book, read it through a second time, spoken some poems, typed out a few favorites in order to learn them through my fingers as well as through my eyes and breath, then I turn back to the title page and test memory and find this: 11/17/01 To Bill, Best wishes, Robin Greene. Time is not metallic, unspooling keen enough to slice you if you try to hold it still or alter its shape; time is froth and broth and no telling what may next boil to the surface. There you discover the one advantage of having lived seventy years  – you have plenty to add to the stew.
 . 
❦
 . 
Robin Greene has bubbled and boiled plenty since she signed my copy of Lateral Drift. She is cofounder of Longleaf Press and also cofounder of Sandhills Dharma Group. She retired as Professor of English and Writing, and Director of the Writing Center at Methodist University in Fayetteville, NC. She continues to write and publish poetry, fiction, and non-fiction from her home in Hendersonville, NC.
 . 
Robin Greene – Artist’s Statement
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 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
What the Leaves Said
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As I walked in the woods today,
early October, the leaves fell –
 . 
individually – through stark, shining air,
until one of them unfolded its
 . 
blood-red palm in my outstretched
hand and whispered a word
 . 
before joining its kin on the forest floor.
I had stopped for a moment, noticing
 . 
sunlight opening up shadows,
shifting its radiance in light wind
 . 
across the new landscape as leaves
shook from beech and oak,
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and I listened: one word becoming
many, becoming one.
 . 
Robin Greene
from Lateral Drift, Windows on History Press, Durham NC; © 2002
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❦ ❦ ❦
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IMG_1783
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