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Archive for the ‘family’ Category

Saturday Share – Bradley Strahan

Posted in family, tagged , , , , , , on May 23, 2026| 4 Comments »

The journey is . . .

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Saturday morning readers share:
Bradley Strahan
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To My Father, as He Should Be in Paradise
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Surely there’s a baseball diamond there
where you could be the pitcher you were meant to be.
 . 
And Marilyn, not Mom, must be on your arm,
sexy as the picture you kept on your shop wall.
 . 
There would be beaches with ice cream stands
and real hot dogs with gobs of mustard leaking out.
 . 
No bills you can’t pay, no demands you can’t meet . . . .
You’d have your ’55 two-tone Chevy back, bright as new.
 . 
Oh, and that odd sense of humor would have those angels
rolling in heavenly aisles at your mangled puns.
 . 
There’d be tons of swinging there, and not just chariots:
Benny’s boys and Glen and Tommy too, all playing just for you.
 . 
Funny, I never saw you dance but I know you could.
Cut a rug Dad! And those pennies from heaven are all yours too.
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B.R. Strahan
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Bradley R. Strahan is best known to North Carolina writers and readers as the long time editor and publisher of the poetry journal Visions International. His creative influence, however, spans continents, with a worldwide following for his work since 1976. His publications include several books of poetry and over 500 poems in journals in North America, the UK, Ireland, Belgium, and Korea. He has been anthologized in numerous collections and translated into French, Spanish, Dutch, Serbian, Macedonian, Korean, etc.. He has lectured and read his work in America, Europe and Asia; is a former Fulbright Professor of Poetry & American Culture; taught poetry at Georgetown University; for over 20 years sponsored a series of international poetry readings at Rock Creek Gallery in DC and other venues; and in 2001 replaced John Ashbery as the American poet at the “Literaire Podia Amsterdam” in Holland.
NOTE: Brad has a few copies left of his book “A Parting Glass.” See the link below from 2022 for sample poems. If you would like a copy contact him at brs.poetry@gmail.com; $5 to cover postage and a bit of the printing.
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Additional poetry by Brad Strahan at Verse and Image:
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VISIONS INTERNATIONAL featured at Verse and Image:
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Cookie & Wilson

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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;
. . . . . Saturdays 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 -- 5/1/2021
 . 

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Dead Reckoning

Posted in family, tagged , , , , , on May 15, 2026| 6 Comments »

1949 Yearbook Staff, Women’s College of the University of North Carolina

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[ poetry by Hyejung Kook and Donna Masini from Poem-a-Day ]
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Dead Reckoning
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to estimate one’s position
without instruments
or celestial observations
 . 
calculating direction and distance
traveled from the last known fix
while accounting for tides, currents, grief
 . 
drift       numbness
sudden storms of pain
unexpected joy
 . 
to reckon is to believe
something true
to reckon with the dead
 . 
is to believe I can know them
an airy thinness
gleaming
 . 
despite
the distance
traveled
 . 
I’d like to know how far
I’ve gone
how much farther there is
 . 
to go       how absence
unfathomable
becomes
 . 
something I can carry
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Hyejung Kook
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Copyright © 2024 by Hyejung Kook. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 16, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. Hyejung Kook is a Korean American poet from Seoul. She received her BA from Harvard University and holds an MFA from New York University. A Fulbright and Kundiman Fellow, Kook lives in Prairie Village, Kansas.
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Mother’s Day was this past Sunday, May 10. I unboxed my old digital picture frame, the thumb drive from September, 2024 still in place: Mom’s memorial service, two months after her death at age 96. I set it up on the bedside tray in Dad’s room at Chatham Nursing Center and he and I watched it through twice. Infant Mom on Grandma McBride’s lap. Tween Mom on her bike with favorite dog. Graduate Mom in mortarboard at Women’s College in Greensboro. Mother Mom holding my hand as I take my first steps.
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And happy, nutty, smiling Mom in all her favorite places with all her favorite people doing all her favorite things. Some of those things we engineered during her last year of life. I measured and helped her stir the batter but she rolled out the nutty fingers to bake. Mary Ellen scheduled the entire family for an afternoon of painting pictures of dogs, Mom’s favorite subject, and she the only true artist among us. And for her last Birthday that hat – knit Duke Blue Devil with protruding horns and eyes – she couldn’t quit laughing while she wore it.
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Absence unfathomable. I am carrying it.
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My Father Teaches Me to Play Solitaire
 . 
by the window of his hospital room. So late in the day
and he won’t let us cheat. Cards slipping on his rickety tray,
 . 
the orderly rows collapsing into one another,
his hand diminishing, he turns over the one card
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that won’t fit anywhere. We couldn’t finish.
Wait, I said, we’re almost done. He shook his head.
 . 
Luck, chance. No skill involved. No will. No bluff. No time
to start a new game. I left my father waving in his window.
 . 
Days later I bought a deck, shuffled the stiff cards, set them up
the way he’d shown me, and—beginner’s luck?—I won.
 . 
Can you win a game you’ve played alone? No need to display
a poker face to yourself. No kidding, he said, I just won too.
 . 
My father’s a joker. Bruno, our neighbor used to say,
you’re a card. So no surprise what he taught me:
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when you’re done you have nothing in your hand.
 . 
Donna Masini
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Copyright © 2025 by Donna Masini. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 26, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets. Donna Masini is the author of four poetry collections, and is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a New York Foundation for the Arts grant. She is a professor of English and creative writing at Hunter College and lives in New York City. . 
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Dad didn’t need me to teach him how to play Rummikub, but at ninety-nine he is requiring a few more nudges and prompts. And he can still beat me. Sometimes.
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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 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
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I See You Waving – Sherry Siddall

Posted in family, tagged , , , , , , on April 3, 2026| 3 Comments »

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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.
 . 
Outside where life is shuttered,
still, there is some comfort
in the wildness of branches
 . 
twined on winter trees,
or a scatter of bird seed
on frozen ground.
 . 
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,
 . 
with green possibilities
and warmth suffusing all
that was brown and bare,
 . 
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.
 . 
I walked the beach, fourteen,
sunburned, heron-thin,
a shadow me of years ago.
 . 
The surf was pounding
like today’s, the sun jolly,
its own relentless self.
 . 
One wave shoved forth
a perfect conch, pearly pink as
flesh inside, rough whorls
 . 
hard and soothing. I picked it up.
Here was joy, and something else
too difficult to name.
 . 
Today, on a different beach, a sturdy wave
delivered another whelk as I walked,
this one battered, pocked, unique.
 . 
Its only beauty might be in a garden,
green tendrils winding through the holes.
My scarred body greets this new shell
 . 
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.
 . 
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 2025-07-10
 . 

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