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[ with 3 poems from Transformed and Singing ]
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The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough of is love.
— Henry Miller
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Night Ship
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The compass of our bodies leads us
through another moonless night,
cresting waves of sleep, steered
by phosphorescent dreams that
knit our cells whole again,
or as whole as they can be
after years on this sea.
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The dark has no power over us
as we roll on our ship of tossed
and wrinkled sheets, the shushing
of syrupy crickets a white noise
leaking beneath the cracked window.
As dawn approaches once again,
the dogs stir and lick our hands.
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Sherry Siddall
from Transformed and Singing, Main Street Rag Enterprises, Edinboro PA; © 2026
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The Beautiful Dead
2020
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are half a million human souls
lost the way spring is lost
in deepest winter.
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I go about the day
as if everything is fine,
as if safety can be found
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in the folding of laundry,
the arranging of
store-bought flowers.
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Outside where life is shuttered,
still, there is some comfort
in the wildness of branches
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twined on winter trees,
or a scatter of bird seed
on frozen ground.
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I turn to the simplicity
of sunlight on a well-worn chair,
how it warms me if I sit there.
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From the window I watch
a male bluebird who studies
the birdhouse on a maple tree.
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Its round entry is exactly the size
for birds of his kind, and also snakes,
because no home is absolutely safe.
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The bluebird will make up his mind
to nest or not, and when spring
erupts in its ruthless way,
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with green possibilities
and warmth suffusing all
that was brown and bare,
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I’ll half-expect the dead to return
cross some impossible border,
overwhelm me with joy.
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Sherry Siddall
from Transformed and Singing, Main Street Rag Enterprises, Edinboro PA; © 2026
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Daily reality sometimes washes over us like a wave, slams us down, sucks us into the darkness. How are we to stand? What if, as Sherry Siddall suggests in her poem Time Chop, we can know love as a ripple in the fabric of spacetime? Perhaps the deep nature of reality is not particles and energy, not wave functions and uncertainty, but the moment by moment expanding web of experiences and relationships. And every bubble of experience is under the influence of the nudge of love.
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When I was half-way through Sherry’s book, Transformed and Singing, I became aware of the thread of love that weaves these poems together. I stopped and went back to each to discover love’s signature: sometimes explicit as love for strangers . . . nothing to be done but love, and always implied, as this clockwork beauty of the cosmos and one of may favorite images, I see you / waving to me from far away, and I wave back. Sometimes we find meaning as we reflect on our past – the stab of loss countered by the fullness of companionship – and sometimes meaning finds us in a moment of simple presence. Feelings swirl within us as restless as the sea, at times threatening but just as often beautiful as sunlight on water. A struggle, a jewel. Reality. As Sherry discovers in Conch – same joy, same something too difficult to name.
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Transformed and Singing is available from Main Street Rag. Sherry Siddall lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA. She is also the author of a poetry chapbook, Sweet Land (Finishing Line Press, 2021). Thank you as well, Sherry, for the Henry Miller quotation which I have lifted from you book.
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Conch
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After his death we flew south,
like storm-tossed birds, mother
and I, to get away.
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I walked the beach, fourteen,
sunburned, heron-thin,
a shadow me of years ago.
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The surf was pounding
like today’s, the sun jolly,
its own relentless self.
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One wave shoved forth
a perfect conch, pearly pink as
flesh inside, rough whorls
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hard and soothing. I picked it up.
Here was joy, and something else
too difficult to name.
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Today, on a different beach, a sturdy wave
delivered another whelk as I walked,
this one battered, pocked, unique.
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Its only beauty might be in a garden,
green tendrils winding through the holes.
My scarred body greets this new shell
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as kindred after fifty years.
Same joy, same something else
too difficult to name.
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Sherry Siddall
from Transformed and Singing, Main Street Rag Enterprises, Edinboro PA; © 2026
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Today’s photos were taken this spring along the Elkin & Allegheny Nature Trail in Elkin, North Carolina, USA. As you read this, Foamflower is just about to bloom. Perhaps you would like to join me and other curious seekers on one of this spring’s naturalist walks, a program of Elkin Valley Trails Association. Upcoming dates are April 11 and April 25. Details and registration (free!) 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;
. . . . . some Saturdays I also present one or two poems submitted by YOU, my readers.
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Thanks again for joining the conversation.
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– Bill
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V E R S E and I M A G E 
Thanks Les. Witness to the pain and the joy. ---B