Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘poetry’ Category

Lily of the Mountains

Posted in family, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , on August 4, 2023| 13 Comments »

 . 
[with poems by Frank X Walker]
 . 
Statues of Liberty
 . 
mamma scrubbed
rich white porcelain
and hard wood floors
on her hands and knees
hid her pretty face and body
in sack dresses
and aunt jemima scarves
from predators
who assumed
for a few extra dollars
before christmas
in dark kitchen pantries
they could unwrap her
present
 . 
aunt helen, her sister
took in miss emereen’s laundry
every Saturday morning
sent it back
had washed, air dried,
starched
ironed, folded
and cleaner
than any professional service
 . 
she waited patiently
for her good white woman
to die
and make good on her promise
to leave her
a little something
only to leave her first
 . 
aunt bertha, the eldest
exported her maternal skills
to suburbia
to provide surrogate attention
to children of money and privilege
and spent every other moment
preaching about
the richness of the afterlife
before the undertaker
took her
to see for herself
 . 
housekeepers
washer women
maids
a whole generation
of portable day care centers
traded their days for dimes
allowing other women
the freedom to shop
and sunbathe
the opportunity to school
or work
 . 
this curse-swallowing sorority
dodged dicks
and bosses
before postwar women
punched clocks
they birthed civil and human rights
gave the women’s movement
legs
sacrificed their then
to pave the way for a NOW
their hard-earned pennies
sent us off to college
and into the world
our success is their reward
we are their monuments
but they
are our statues of liberty
 . 
Frank X Walker
from Affrilachia, Old Cove Press, Lexington KY. © 2000
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
She and I squat beside the mudgreen puddle and discover a universe. I can’t quit watching the inch-long worms grubbing through the muck, their muscular tubular bodies, how they poke their siphon up to the break the surface tension. Is that the head-end or the butt-end? Lily points out the cadres of dusky tadpoles, some sprouting new legs, and she suspects they’re connected to the vibrato croaks we’ll soon hear from overhanging branches at dusk. Lily’s mom, Jodi, and I play Dueling Nature Apps to see who can broadcast Cope’s Grey Treefrog first.
 . 
In a couple of weeks, Lily will return to Kentucky for her senior year at Berea. I don’t know her major but her field of study is the earth and all that’s in it. When she was seven (and eight, and nine . . .) and came down from West Virginia to North Carolina to spend a summer week at Camp Auntie Lin & Uncle Bill, she was the little girl picking up every bug we encountered and calling out the name of every bird that sang. This afternoon she has showed me her newest drawings: wildflowers, amphibians, a howling wolf. Her big plush firefly is already packed with her other critters for college. If your home is a cabin in the woods and your mother is a Park Service Ranger, how could you become other than a lily of the mountains?
 . 
Now the shadows are stretching out across the Crownbeard and Yarrow and the last breeze of July has knocked off several degrees. Jodi’s birthday gathering with sisters draws to an end; Linda, Saul, and I have to head back south. Tomorrow at first light the roofers will arrive with slate-gray tin for Jodi and Lily’s new cabin, and the two women ask me for one last favor. I lug three stout logs from the woodpile and stand them on end to half ring the tadpole puddle. Jodi will flag it so the drivers don’t squash their trucks through the little persistent pool of new life. For the next two weeks, Lily will visit every day to mark the tree frogs’ and peepers’ metamorphosis. When she completes her classes in the spring and drives east again on Rte. 60, the Midland Trail, back to this little hilltop of trees and creatures, no doubt a new chorus will greet her.
 . 
❦
 . 
I am thankful for names that anchor their meaning into my sieve-like memory – Tetraptera; Erythrophthalmus; Frank X Walker. I noticed poems by Frank X popping up in my favorite anthologies, like Black Nature and The Ecopoetry Anthology. The universe kept inviting me to read more, to add this new species to my lexicon, and then I discovered that Frank X Walker will be the instructor at the inaugural Tremont Writer’s Workshop in the Smokies. The universe led me to his books.
 . 
Affrilachia is deep as the Ohio River Valley and broad as the Cumberland Mountains; it is angry and also healing, somber and laugh-out-loud. Most of all, Affrilachia is unique. Frank X Walker’s voice is true and sure from page to page to page but what a voice, rural and hip, local and universal, Southern and Black. I could not put this collection down. Then twenty years later, with many other books in between, comes Last Will, Last Testament. This is an extremely focused book, the first months of his son’s birth and the last month’s of his father’s death, but within these transecting interconnected events the man tells his entire life’s story. He concludes In Another Universe with these lines: Forgiveness is our new last name, / Loving is our first. But he is not describing some distant unattainable universe; these lines are the universe of Frank X Walker’s now. From isolation, loss, and pain come revelation and joy. I have been richly blessed by these poems.
 . 
Tetraptera means ‘four wings’ and is the species name of Carolina Silverbell. Erythrophthalmus means ‘red eye’ and is the species name for Eastern Towhee. Frank X Walker means ‘multidisciplinary artist’ and first African American poet laureate of Kentucky and he has been voted one of the most creative professors in the South. Frank X is founding editor of pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture and is Professor of English and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Harvest Time
 . 
Cancer came
on quiet possum feet
disguised as pneumonia,
until the steady hack and cough
just wouldn’t go away.
 . 
Everybody but him had forgotten
that he smoked
two packs a day for fifty years.
 . 
When he added up the cost,
realized he could buy that tiller
he wanted +++ in a month,
he took his last puff
and quit +++ without blinking.
 . 
If only he could use it
on the tension in this room
and plow up the nastiness,
mistrust, and division
rooted in the dirt
from a past he can no longer
turn under the ground.
 . 
Frank X Walker
from Last Will, Last Testament, Accents Publishing, Lexington KY. © 2019
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Afrofuturistic Messaging
 . 
When I hear him laughing
until he runs out of breath,
gulping more air and giggling again
at something unseen in the ether,
or catch him staring intently
over my shoulder
in the direction
of our Dogon masks
at something invisible
and possibly vibrating
in a spectrum of light only accessible
to the newly-arrived
or those about to depart,
I assume it is you +++ or mama
continuing one of the last and best
conversations you had on this side,
or exchanging coordinates.
 . 
He, barely a haiku, had just met you
and began jabbering and cooing
in couplets, like an old friend
from some other space and time.
 . 
You were even happier
to stare into familiar eyes,
to be comforted
about all that was ahead,
to catch up
with the old and the knew,
the breath between you
transforming into something
interdimensional,
the twinkle in your eye
starlight
from another galaxy.
 . 
Frank X Walker
from Last Will, Last Testament, Accents Publishing, Lexington KY. © 2019
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Affrilachia
(for gurney & anne)
 . 
thoroughbred racing
and hee haw
are burdensome images
for kentucky sons
venturing beyond the mason-dixon
 . 
anywhere in appalachia
is about as far
as you could get
from our house
in the projects
yet
a mutual appreciation
for fresh greens
and cornbread
an almost heroic notion
of family
and porches
makes us kinfolk
somehow
but having never ridden
bareback
or sidesaddle
and being inexperienced
at cutting
hanging
or chewing tobacco
yet still feeling
complete and proud to say
that some of the bluegrass
is black
enough to know
that being ‘colored’ and all
is generally lost
somewhere between
the dukes of hazzard
and the beverly hillbillies
but if you think
makin’ ‘shine from corn
is as hard as kentucky coal
imagine being
an Affrilachian
poet
 . 
Frank X Walker
from Affrilachia, Old Cove Press, Lexington KY. © 2000
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 .
 .  
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
2020-03-07 Doughton Park Tree

Read Full Post »

Chimney Swifts

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , on July 28, 2023| 4 Comments »

 . 
[with poems from Heron Clan X]
 . 
Chimney Swifts at the Historic Carolina Coach Garage
 . 
Two now more arrive and flit into the swirl,
swelling hive mind they shift and shape
the wind, counter then clockwise whirl
above old brickwork’s beckoning gape
 . 
left standing here erect as testament,
our conservational intent to leave
some landmark urban respite, benevolent
perhaps, perhaps self-serving; we’ve
 . 
taken advantage of their propulsive drive,
pushed our chairs back from the table
in the court to lean & steal their lives
and freedom open mouthed, rapt, able
 . 
for these few moments until darkness falls
to rise with them, untethered, bold
venture to where the elemental almost calls
but too soon bedtime, now our supper’s cold.
 . 
 . 
[For decades this warehouse and shop in Raleigh, North Carolina was a hub of activity servicing Carolina Coach Company buses, in the 1940s the nation’s largest regional bus company.]
 . 
Bill Griffin
from Poems from the Heron Clan Ten, Katherine James Books, Chapel Hill NC. © 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Mom can no longer hear their restless chitterings up the flue on summer evenings. When we sit on the front porch she doesn’t notice their atmospheric ellipsis, punctuating summer afternoons with their aerobatics. She can’t believe they’re calling constantly to each other and to us until I try to mimic that chatter and she laughs. What she most definitely can, though, is wish to see them diving into her chimney at dusk, especially when I tell her I’d seen one do just that last night.
 . 
Revered ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson described Chimney Swifts as little dark cigars with wings. Tapered on the head end and the tail end with sharply tapered wings jutting out mid-fuselage, fluttering so rapidly you’d swear those wingbeats were uncoordinated and asynchronous, well, yes they do look like airborne cigars. Although they often appear in field guide pages adjacent to those other famous aerial foragers, the Swallows, taxonomists place Swifts most closely related to Hummingbirds (based on wing structure). No hovering, though, for these Chimney Swifts – always forward, forward, forward with their loops and barrel rolls. Some species of Swift only alight to lay eggs, spending all the rest of their lives in the air.
 . 
Once you recognize a Chimney Swift’s fricative titter, you’ll realize they’ve accompanied you on hot afternoons and evenings all your life (assuming you live in the Eastern US). Although they winter in Peru, all summer long from the Great Plains to the Atlantic coast Chimney Swifts are widespread and common, probably more common today than they were pre-colonization, when they depended on hollow trees for breeding. These days they sometimes nest by the hundreds in abandoned chimneys, great clouds spiraling in at dusk, perhaps mistaken for bats. You can even buy chimney-like roosting boxes to attract them to your yard to eat the mosquitos.
 . 
After supper, I carry our chairs to the deck for a clean line of sight to the chimney. No smoke has risen from these three pots for decades. Mom and I watch. And watch. The birds circle and tantalize, gyre away, spiral out of earshot then back again so swiftly she misses their brief passage. Keep looking. Don’t blink. Two Swifts buzz the opening but then pull up in a high-G climb. Sky darkens. Dusk wants to coalesce around us, trundle us back indoors. Suddenly one little bird at full throttle blips straight down into the chimney. Then another. It’s become too dark to count the rest, but when we return to the couch beside the fireplace we hear the nestling together of a congenial company who’ll rest here with us until first light.
 . 
❦
 . 
Doug Stuber, Ed Lyons, and Richard Smyth Ph.D. hatched the idea for Poems from the Heron Clan in Rochester, New York in 1998. After Doug returned in 2015 from a seven-year professorship in South Korea, the anthology has been published every year. Not only does Volume Ten encompass a wide geography – poets from five continents, poets from Turkey, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Montenegro, and a dozen other countries – it also embraces a lavish geography of style and theme. The editors explicitly state: “We aim to represent well-established poets and emerging writers, young and mature poets, and poets of color.”
 . 
And North Carolina. NC poets populate these pages abundantly. JS Absher, Glenn Cassidy, Earl Huband, Shelby Stephenson, Steve Cushman, Anna Dallara, the three founders themselves – if you live in the South and read poetry, you’ll recognize these voices accompanying you all summer, all seasons. I’m drawn to all of the Carolina poetry in this volume and tempted to sample each one in this post. Alas, perhaps you’ll just have to purchase a copy. Meanwhile, here are Priscilla Webster-Williams, Preston Martin, and Bradley Strahan from Heron Clan X.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Morton Salt
 . 
Under a purple umbrella, a girl in a yellow raincoat
carries a box of salt, the cover art singing out
When It Rains It Pours. I studied the dark blue carton
that lived on the kitchen table, the Morton Salt Girl
smiling with each shake of the cylinder.
 . 
Morton, my father, toured with the big bands,
playing what he called Mickey Mouse Music,
tunes too tame for one who’d grown up crating
spicy Chicago jazz with Red Nichols and Jimmy Dorsey.
 . 
Morton met Jean, my mom-to-be, at the Nicollet,
where she was hostess of the grand dining room:
Grant Wood murals, double white linens,
real silver silverware, and a stage
for the musicians and the act.
 . 
Morton must have winked at Jean
from behind his golden trombone,
the vocalist crooning I’ll be seeing you
in all the old familiar places.
He must have whispered some kind of proposal
as they floated like movie stars across the dance floor.
 . 
When I was six, Mother shredded my Father’s photo,
set her stoic Midwestern jaw, and never spoke
of him again. She didn’t need to, his features etched
on my face like the grooves in one of his Bluebird records,
the same strawberry-blond hair appearing in my mirror.
 . 
Each day, I gazed at his name on that dark blue box
stamped with the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval,
and over time, Morton, my founding father,
became a pillar of salt.
 . 
Priscilla Webster-Williams
from Poems from the Heron Clan Ten, Katherine James Books, Chapel Hill NC. © 2023
originally published in The Narrative Possibilities of Coral, Main Street Rag Publishing, Charlotte NC. © 2017
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Elegy, Gloria Died in Eden
 . 
She took the well-traveled road
two nights ago.
No more tractoring up the back hills
or brush cutting lower fields,
or using her Daddy’s walking stick
++++ down beside the creek –
or oiling the mower or
penciling in the Reds box score,
or sipping an evening sweet wine
on the porch
++++ as nightly geese call down,
close overhead, descending to the reservoir.
 . 
She noted in her diary the day the flew on south.
And who will shoot the coyotes now?
 . 
Preston Martin
from Poems from the Heron Clan Ten, Katherine James Books, Chapel Hill NC. © 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Empty Places
 . 
In the end we are all archaeologists,
sifting through the ruins of existence
to find shards of pottery
inscribed in a strange tongue:
a letter from a friend left on a picnic table
a poem written on the back of a menu,
the sketch of a girl whose name you can‘t recall,
a yellowed photograph with stranger’s eyes.
 . 
We keep on struggling with left over pieces
from a childhood puzzle, trying to fill the gaps
left my smiling lips missing from a face,
tears frozen on eyeless cheeks,
fingers absent from an outstretched hand.
But somehow cannot fill the empty place
and the dark comes creeping in.
 . 
Bradley Strahan
from Poems from the Heron Clan Ten, Katherine James Books, Chapel Hill NC. © 2023
originally published in Gargoyle
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The editors of Poems from the Heron Clan invite you to buy a copy, explore their previous issues at their BLOG, and consider submitting three poems and a 50-word bio to:
katherinejamesbooks@gmail.com
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
 .

Read Full Post »

Impermanence

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , on July 21, 2023| 11 Comments »

 . 
[with poems by John Brehm (and A. R. Ammons)]
 . 
Songbird
 . 
Even thou I have not seen it,
I know how it could be,
how when the skylark flees
from a falcon’s quick pursuit
 . 
it will turn sometimes and begin
to sing, as if to say, “Being
eaten by a falcon is the last thing
in the world I’m worried about.
 . 
You cannot catch me, Tra, la, la.
I’ve got breath enough to waste
on a song like this, which you
may as well enjoy before I vanish
 . 
into air.” And the raptor know
it’s true, knows that anyone
foolish enough to sing in such
a circumstance is quite beyond
 . 
ever being caught, and that for all
his hunger he’ll be given just
a song, tumbling through the air,
as the body he desires disappears.
 . 
John Brehm
from Sea of Faith, winner of The Brittingham Prize in Poetry, University of Wisconsin Press, © 2004
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
For the past two months I am an ant whose dead moth has been lofted by an unseen hand. Go this way, go that way, it’s got to be around here somewhere. Tornado, no power for three days, driveway blocked, hundreds of trees down in our neighbors’ yards and a dozen in ours. Check the roof with the adjuster, walk the property with the arborist, wake up and go to bed with chainsaws and cherry pickers. We’ve lived in this house for forty years and the oak, hickory, maple, tuliptrees where already mature when we moved in. We’ve been used to one deep green engulfing embrace all summer, every summer. Now everything has changed.
 . 
I took a “break” this month, as I’d promised them last winter, to serve as primary caregiver for my nonagenarian parents while they spent a fond bit of time at their beach house. The first thing I noticed when Linda pulled back into our driveway the evening I returned was . . . WEEDS! Holy cow, fallow earth so used to deep shade must have been preserving this seed cache forever! Pokeberry, pilewort, hawkweed, fleabane, despised mimosa, uncounted escaped purple basil a friend gave me three decades ago – they’re everywhere and BIG! The invasion is overwhelming. As if life weren’t overwhelming me already.
 . 
After supper I walked out front to check the progress of a volunteer pumpkin that has grown up into the azaleas. Maybe I shouldn’t have instructed Linda to water it twice a week. The black-eyed susans have finally completed their conquest of our borders. Plants – they do enjoy sunlight. I stop in the middle of the roadway and turn to look back at our property. Is this the first time in two months I’ve looked up? Above and behind and around our house – sky. Empty sky. How long before the remaining trees fill it? How long until I lose this dread feeling that nothing will ever be the same?
 . 
❦
 . 
A number of years ago I read an anthology that I often return to: The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy, edited by John Brehm. When life is overwhelming and being in the moment is about to set my last few hairs on fire, I open to any page. There is no judgement here. No finger-wagging that I am not doing “enough.” There are no spiritual prescriptions or required agendas. I know as I read I’ll simply be sharing with a companion, another human being. It’s nice to be just one human among other humans, from Basho to Billy Collins and Saigyō to Shakespeare, friends all. I am an ant who feels no anxiety for his moth.
 . 
Then one day my issue of The Sun arrived I discovered these two by John Brehm himself:
 . 
Wanting Not Wanting
 . 
I wish I didn’t
want things
 . 
to be other
than they are
 . 
but wanting
to be some-
 . 
one who
doesn’t want
 . 
things to be
other than
 . 
they are is
just another
 . 
way of wanting
things to be
 . 
other than
they are —
 . 
and I don’t
want that.
 . 
 . 
On Turning Sixty-Four
 . 
The slowing down
is speeding up.
 . 
John Brehm
from The Sun. Chapel Hill NC, June, 2020
 . 
Oh my. Ohhhh my. I photocopied the page and kept it taped the wall beside my desk for months. Eventually I said to myself, “This John Brehm fellow has gotten into my head. I’d better get to know him better now that we’re friends.” I ordered Sea of Faith and was immediately floored (or exalted?) by the inscription: To the memory of A. R. Ammons ( 1926-2001). Oh my, here’s my other perennial poetry inspiration. So to come full circle I share with you another poem which I resemble intimately, this Ammons poem that appears in The Poetry of Impermanence.
 . 
Old Geezer
 . 
The quickest
way
to change
 . 
the
world is
to
 . 
like it
the
way it
 . 
is.
 . 
A. R. Ammons (1926-2001)
from The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy. Wisdom Publications, Somerville MA, © 2017
 . 
 . . 
 . 
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Blasted Tree
 . 
Of all of them along the path
that curved for twenty miles
through thickest forest, it was
the blasted tree I loved
best. Among thousands of firs
risen beyond the eye’s reach,
among colossal cedars
with their bark soft
as humid earth, among
groves of slender birches that
filtered winds cast across
these hills from Asia,
among even the hemlocks, gripped
in rocky ground and holding
two hundred years of darkness
in each leaf, among all these
it was the blasted oak
I loved best. Just as the path
turns and ascends, it stands
in a little clearing, like
a signpost to the walker
who would go on farther, as if
to say there is some price
to be paid, or only
the stricken may enter here.
Perhaps because it stood alone
the lightning bolt found its way
to it, the branch that would
have arched above and shaded
the meadow, torn off in a
brilliant flash of the sky’s
violence, ripped cleanly
from the trunk, though you can
still see the black scorched
teeth of the wood where
it broke and let
the limb fall to earth.
It must have been a ghastly
sound and a sight heart-
breaking to behold, the perfect
symmetry and elegance gone
in an instant. And now
a piece of sky no one would
ever have seen from here
come clearly into view,
empty and lue and cleaner
than before because of
the branch’s vivid absence.
I loved the damaged grandeur
of that tree, how it bore
its loss with such composure,
and kept on growing, lop-
sided, irreparable, beautiful,
the catastrophe of its history
written on its body.
And though I am not one
who’s been appointed to say
what trees may mean, it was
no mystery why it could hold
me so still, compel my eye
to such study, whenever
I passed that way.
 . 
John Brehm
from Sea of Faith, winner of The Brittingham Prize in Poetry, University of Wisconsin Press, © 2004
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Signs and Wonders
 . 
I’m not entirely in favor of summer,
what with its drop-dead heat,
its shallow unbothered
 . 
air of fullness beyond ending or
enduring. Sure I like to see
half the world disappear
 . 
behind this velvet green pulled from
the magician’s hat of the month
of May just like everybody
 . 
else. And I’m aware of the sun’s
unbearable importance because
why would we have ever
 . 
stood upright if not to get the sun
off our backs when we dropped
from the trees onto
 . 
the burning savannas five million
years ago? Now we can scan
the horizon, carry things
 . 
in our hands, give and take things to
and from one another. From
which all history
 . 
follows. Still, I wonder whether
swinging wordlessly from
branch to branch
 . 
might be better. I don‘t fell all
that thankful towards the
sun for bringing us
 . 
here or staging this big production,
this overwritten text in which
every meaning contains its
 . 
opposite – the furious tenacity
of life calling forth the sev-
ering response of death,
 . 
etc. Just last night I was walking
home thinking is my lover
going to leave me?
 . 
when a dead bird plummeted
from the sky, slammed onto
a car hood and rolled
 . 
onto the sidewalk beside me.
I’m as un-Homeric as the
next person, but Jesus,
 . 
I said, this cannot be a good
sign. Did it have a heart
attack mid-flight, Or
 . 
was it dropped from the talons
of a predator? Or knocked
out of the sky by an
 . 
airplane? Or thrown down by
the god assigned to watch
over and comment on
 . 
my various questions and pre-
dicaments? If we’d stayed
in the cool shade of
 . 
the forest no birds would ever
fall on us, or if they did we
wouldn’t kill ourselves
 . 
trying to decipher what they
might foretell. And this
morning coming up
 . 
the 34th Street subway I passed
a young Russian man hand-
ing out pamphlets, saying,
 . 
“Jesus is alive. Jesus loffs you.”
I don’t think so but I don’t
know anything, only
 . 
that it’s hot and we don’t belong
here and our hands betray us
and you’re gone.
 . 
John Brehm
from Sea of Faith, winner of The Brittingham Prize in Poetry, University of Wisconsin Press, © 2004
 . 
 .
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
You
 . IMG_1783
 . 

If you would like to buy a book mentioned in these pages:
– – – visit your local independent book store – or –
– – – click the publishers’ links I try to include each week – or –
– – – purchase online at Bookshop.org, where a portion of each sale is returned to independent booksellers. Thanks!

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »