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Archive for the ‘poetry’ Category

EDGE – part two

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , on June 3, 2023| 6 Comments »

[with poems from PINESONG 2023, NC Poetry Society Anthology]

 

Ghazal: Ghost Apples (Kent County, Michigan)

 

Ice-encrusted boughs from which transparent versions
of apples hang – each fragile as hand-blown glass.
+++
Their history: fruit on the cusp of rot, winter storm trundling
down a hillside, sleet coating each apple in sudden glass.
+++
Viscous fruit leaked from apertures until only icy shells
remained – December trees bearing quicksilver bulbs of glass.
+++
Imagine them a vivid red or green, like cascades of apples
even humble grocery stores offer on the far side of plate glass.
+++
If we shattered these globes, would they taste like hard cider
or the cloying sweetness of pulp, like edible versions of glass?
++++++
Soon these crystalline shells will melt to nothingness, the way
we all disappear. Beloved, step lightly upon grief’s bitter glass.
+++
Lavonne Adams
Joanna Catherine Scott Award First Place, Pinesong 2023
+++
❦ ❦ ❦
+++
Diversity often blooms at the edge. This little trail heading out from Isaac’s Trail Head on the MST is limn upon limn . . . boundary . . . transition. The wide riparian border along Grassy Creek attracts neotropical migrants for a rest stop each spring; Louisiana Waterthrush, White-Eyed Vireo, and Common Yellowthroat stay behind to breed here. The footpath parallels a pasture fenceline, and while cows with their calves stand flank-deep in meadow grass and blackberry bramble, all manner of wildflowers hug the margin of No Grazing: Blue Toadflax, Venus’s Looking Glass, Carolina Crane’s-Bill. Leaving creekside, the trail is hemmed by a moist rising woodland: Rattlesnake Fern, Sensitive Fern, Southern Lady Fern. And by the end of summer, if the farmer hasn’t sprayed, the trail edges will fill with Blue-Curl, Cardinal Flower, Goldenrod, Wingstem.
+++
Smaller fields and many interruptions make for many edges; diversity begets diversity. At one point along the trail a wide acreage of corn abuts a small hay field of mixed grasses. The corn field is solemn in its solitude; above the hay the air is filled with swallows, Bluebirds and Phoebes perch along the wire, and as we hike past we’re apt to flush an Indigo Bunting foraging.
+++
But then there are Cowbirds. For centuries they followed prairie bison herds and no doubt also the woodland bison of the Carolina piedmont. Now they follow every human disturbance, common in cow pasture but just as common on suburban lawns. Cowbirds are exclusively brood parasites, known to lay their eggs in the nests of over 220 other species. To their detriment. Kirtland’s Warbler has been pushed beyond the edge of “endangered” by Cowbird predation, and most birds do not have the ability to recognize the foreign eggs which will hatch and out-compete the rightful occupants. How to resist? Escape the edges. Reverse the fragmentation. Cowbirds will not follow into deep woods – warblers nesting deep in the forest are safe.
+++
It isn’t the Cowbird that threatens wood warblers, whip-poor-wills, vireos. It is shrinking habitat. Many species thrive at the edge. Some, though, require wide wild expanses. How much wild can we leave?
+++
❦
+++
Upon which side of the boundary does poetry perch, thrive or decline? And what would it look like, that restored, invigorated poetry habitat, a definite nudge toward thriving? More fifth graders setting pen to page and seeing their lines is print, as they have in this year’s annual Pinesong anthology by the North Carolina Poetry Society? More opportunities and promptings to write – whatever one’s background, training, preferred theme, chosen form? And more readers?
+++
That’s where we come in. This morning I broke a nice sweat hiking miles along meadow and creek, through upland forest to lakeshore and back. This afternoon with feet up I’ve covered another rewarding meander through the pages of Pinesong. Student poets, grades 4 through undergrad; dozens more of adult poets, many names entirely new to me. I’ve traveled new places, I’ve encountered the unexpected and enlightening, I’ve paused long to reflect, and I’ve even laughed out loud. As Robert Frost wrote in The Pasture: “You come, too.”
+++
❦ ❦ ❦
+++
Eleven Lines In Search of the Perfect Rhyme
+++
Is it accidental that bereft almost rhymes with death?
+++
Watching geese rise in a chevron formation The New River
at Grassy Creek, flying south to warmer waters, I think of how
+++
sons and daughters grow up, how the nest – that like death
almost rhymes with bereft, – empties with their flight.
+++
How these words fly out of my mouth like startled birds.
+++
How we dream of loved ones who are dead. How we forget
what happened in the dream, what we did, what we said.
+++
How there are hundreds of ways to leave, not only the 50 ways
in Paul Simon’s song, and thousands of ways to grieve, bereft.
+++
How you can both the lover leaving and the lover left.
+++
Beth Copeland
Carol Bessent Hayman Poetry of Love Award Honorable Mention, Pinesong 2023
+++
❦ ❦ ❦
+++
Pinesong is the annual publication of contest winning poems by the North Carolina Poetry Society, founded in 1932. Pinesong 2023 is Number 59, edited by Sherry Pedersen-Thrasher with assistance from Joan Barasovska. This year’s volume is dedicated to David Radavich, former NCPS President and steadfast supporter of poetry and the arts.
+++
You can learn more about North Carolina Poetry Society and its contests, plus read previous years’ editions of Pinesong . . . here.
+++
If you would like to purchase Pinesong ($12, postage included) please contact NCPS Vice President of Membership Joan Barasovska: msjoan9[at]gmail[dot]com
+++
A free issue of Pinesong is available to all NCPS members in good standing who request ($2 mailing expense). Please contact Joan, as above.
+++
❦ ❦ ❦
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2020-09-08b Doughton Park Tree

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Remember

Posted in family, Imagery, Photography, poetry on May 19, 2023| 4 Comments »

[featuring three poems by Valerie Neiman]
What you see, that is what survives.
What you remember is all there is.

Don’t you want to save the world?
+++++++++++ from Catechism by Valerie Neiman

❦

Yesterday I walked and tried to remember. Here beside my foot, what is the name of this so familiar leaf? Distinctive, like no other leaf, for that reason alone I should remember it. Surely I have seen it before and known it. Surely the other things I’ve seen and learned for the first time today have not pushed from my memory an equal number of things I learned yesterday, cargo jettisoned?

Later I found a photo of the leaf and immediately knew it and where and when I’d first learned it, Jumpseed or Virginia Knotweed, Isaac’s Trail (MST), August 2022. It was in bloom then and I recall a definite small joy in learning it – the leaf, after all, is distinctive. Old friend, it is good to see you in your Spring garb.

Lately I’ve been chiding myself for always walking the same trails every week, sometimes every day. Branch out, see something new! But these woods are never quite the same today as they were yesterday. I notice the same things in different light or at a new stage of growth; I see and hear things I’ve never noticed at all in years of passing this way. I suppose I’ll keep walking these trails until I’ve noticed everything. Or perhaps even longer, until memory no longer retains a thing and each day is indeed entirely new.

Except that’s not quite how it ends. There are all the people who’ve walked beside me on these trails, who’ve shared with me and with whom I’ve shared, if only the shapes of leaves. It’s not quite true that what you remember is all there is. What you share is all there is.

❦ ❦ ❦

Out of the Ordinary
## 
My friend mourns the missing thrushes,
ee-o-lay that used to rise
like fireflies at the verge of oak woods.
## 
Her memory saves a space for their song;
others, later, won’t notice the lack,
satisfied by the insistent mockingbird
## 
(his repertoire a hundred songs or more,
including cell phone and cricket chirp),
reweaving a looser web of dawn chorus:
## 
So one bird replaces a canopy of absent
warblers, as a synthesizer sets ghosts
in the chairs of an emptied orchestra.

+++++++++ ❧

Like scissored silhouette
of a child’s shadow, this becomes the is
of that isn’t. What is no longer,

like those ballads that bridged generations.
We no longer lift our quotidian voices
to pace work or ease the idle hours,

now that professionals provide
tunes at the ready, electronically
clipped and smoothed,

like purebred stock at the fair,
not one hair out of place,
not one note quavered.

Valerie Nieman
from Hotel Worthy, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC, © 2015
❦ ❦ ❦

Last week I was helping my wee mother take a little walk – tie her shoes, re-button the pink sweater, find her cane – and as I held her elbow to steady her across the threshold, she looked up and said, “You’re a good boy.” If you are also an oldest child, perhaps you, too, have spent a good chunk of your life doing whatever it took to hear those words (and no, I haven’t had to wait 70 years to hear them for the first time). But doesn’t every child, primogenitor or not, long to gain their parents’ favor? More than to be loved – to be worthy?

Valerie Nieman writes there on the left is the Hotel Worthy and I realize I’ve been trying to check in for years. Many of the poems in Hotel Worthy struggle with conflict – how to be worthy? Or how to be true to yourself? Is there some hallowed doorway that leads to both? Or is it true that The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is / to know every name of every part of the sailboat from gudgeon to headstay and . . .

The purpose of life is a shadow ducking behind a tree in a dark wood. Pursue, pursue! After spending several hours reading Val’s book straight through, I find myself returning to poems that especially entice me on, this one, that one, re-reading and discovering new connections, doorways opening into new places. The archaeologist’s surface stratum is scratched away to reveal a metaphor for human relationships and generations. So many metaphors, each one more true than the last. Valerie’s collection creates a lifeline and a world of knowing that emerges not as a tree, spreading from root to bole to branch, but as a web, nodes across time and place. I scribble a collection of her lines I want to hold on to and learn from. I smile when an awareness dawning in the poet dawns in me as well. I’m glad I accepted the invitation to check into this Hotel – you come, too!

❦

Valerie Nieman is a graduate of West Virginia University and Queens University of Charlotte, and teaches writing at North Carolina A&T State University and at other venues including John C. Campbell Folk School. Hotel Worthy is the second of her three poetry collections which Press 53 in Winston-Salem NC has published; the first is Wake Wake Wake and the third The Leopard Lady. Her Press 53 novel, Blood Clay, received the Eric Hoffer Award, and her fourth novel, To the Bones, was published in 2019 by West Virginia University Press.

❦ ❦ ❦

Stratigraphy
++ In archaeological sites, natural and human-generated material occur together
++ in layers. These layers, called strata, form a record of past events . . .

++++++++++++ – Research Laboratories of Archaeology, UNC

Prehistory
is what has been cut apart
and swallowed,
bite by terrible bite,
and laid down in the body’s lattice.
Small sharp things:
that glance across the table,
those unfinished gestures.
## 
History waits in the antechamber
for the arrival of words:
no documents, no history.
But what’s down inside
the long galleries of the bones
all the while, without any light,
painting aurochs on the walls?
## 
Now if you only want to pry
artifacts out of the generations
of mud, what can be salvaged
for love or for money,
hurry, then, with pick and shovel –
difficult to tell what it all
amounted to, once,
except that sometimes
in the upended clay the light
finds a carved head, a bit of gold,
or flaked edge of obsidian
that might (or not) have been employed
in a clenched fist.
## 
The careful investigator,
with dental pick and bone brush,
would find the same shattered femurs,
the same engraved figures
(vulva and tectiform shelter),
but frame them
in time and meaning:
how high the icy water rose
that spring,
how the deer fled,
how we starved.
## 
Valerie Nieman

from Hotel Worthy, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC, © 2015

❦ ❦ ❦

Dark Matter

 

Seaweed, scoured from the deep, scatters
its beads upon the beach. Everything broken.
I gather twists and bits, small lives blasted
##
and holed, shoved aside by the waves, a slattern’s
house(un)keeping, fires heaped with trash,
any salutary offerings to one goddess or another
##
scrabbled up by dirty hands, a smidge and a smatter
to feed a momentary appetite. So I kick along the tide
line and analogize, my disappearing domestic
##
bliss no match for weighty issues of war-shatter
everywhere east to west, eruptions staggering the world;
but still, but still, I accumulate little bomblets
##
of disaster and embrace them, the spatter
of heartsblood ready to fly when the least jounce
lets it all come apart, and so the personal
##
etc. holds little hands with the larger all the way up, dark matter
flinging this fine universe outward from one hot bang,
farther, colder, the space-between we imagine.
## 

Valerie Nieman

from Hotel Worthy, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC, © 2015

❦ ❦ ❦

2020-06-11a Doughton Park Tree

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Wind & Fire

Posted in family, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , on May 12, 2023| 9 Comments »

[featuring two poems by Regina Garcia]

This Fire Tastes Like . . .

This fire won’t taste like the last ones did
Singed souls torn up, crying, wandering,
wondering how to get love back
How to fix life
How to repair
The last fires tasted like . . .
Tasted like loss
Tasted like shame
Tasted like despair
Tasted like mourning
Tasted like no way out
Tasted like no way back
tasted like Tulsa
Tasted like Elaine
Tasted like Watts
Tasted like Wilmington
Tasted like old Eppes High . . .
Tasted like all that it had consumed

This fire tastes different
This fire tastes fed up
This fire has eyes set
Beyond loss
Beyond prison
Beyond death
Beyond the graves
This fire has new eyes
Fixed on that “New New”
Jerusalem
New fire gonna propel these children into
promised land
They won’t need the water fo the oppressor
Because they are children of living waters
And Raging Fires
And earth tht has promised fertility
Yet pushed out weeds to choke and distract

This fire tasted different
It tastes like energy

Tastes like righteous fury
Its fuel is dark kindling root
It will combust from a place to deep
So misunderstood
So, underestimated
That it will not be contained
This fire tastes different
It tastes like resolve

It will reject any attempts to thwart combustion
The internal combustion
It will incinerate attempts at trickery for
It has seen the video and believes
It waw murderous hubris
It saw The Dead that were tried for dying
It saw the solid stance of patronizing defiance of other fires
It saw the lies stifling acrid air
This fire tastes different
It tastes alive
It will not stop until there is nothing left that can stop it
It will then scoop the ashes and build
Jerusalem
Yeah
This fire tastes different
This fire tastes like revelation
This fire tastes like change
This fire tastes like
Hope

Regina YC Garcia
from The Firetalker’s Daughter, Finishing Line Press, © 2023

 

 

❦ ❦ ❦

Rainstorm, windstorm, limbs thrashing the house in panic, rain attacking the windows through the screens: we can feel Amelia’s mounting fear each time the sky grows dark and she asks, “Is this a tornado?” No, Honey, just a big storm. We don’t get tornados around here.

Until this afternoon. Severe Thunderstorm pings on the phone while we’re watching a movie with Amelia in the living room. Within minutes the sky is slate and the TV goes black. When hail peppers the porch we lurch for the basement. Amelia makes it into a game, the divine gift of the seven-year old, and while we play with flashlights we hear the drumming of rain but assume those contrabasso reverberations are thunder.

It’s all over in fifteen minutes. We climb the stairs and open the front door – our neighbor’s venerable willow oak, trunk at least two meters in diameter, is angled across the road into our driveway. Not crushing our living room. One sugar maple at the end of our house has had its spine snapped and hurled, but not into our bedroom. As our neighbors emerge, we tally and discover no one is injured (although not true of several roofs).

Everyone’s yard is full of twisted trunks and limbs or huge redclay balls of the uprooted. We notice most of the trees aligned prostrate in the same direction and we mutter, “Downburst.” “Straight-line wind.” Two days later, though, the National Weather Service makes its proclamation: an E0 tornado. We wonder if Amelia will ever want to finish that movie we had started. And if we ever get our power back on, we’re ordering some more flashlights.

❦

 

❦

Regina Garcia’s new poetry collection, The Firetalker’s Daughter, is elemental – wind, earth, water, fire. She describes her mother and her son as Firetalkers – they can speak to pain and talk it into submission. And isn’t that what these poems do, speak to the pain? If words could remove the pain of the world, the inescapable pain of living, perhaps a new day would dawn when the earth would have no more need of words. We will never see that day.

But strong words, words of compassion and truth, can raise us out of the pain. We can stand on the shoulders of the poetry, the hymns, the stories of the Firetalker and see a way beyond the pain. We can see a road before us where pain can’t wield its power over us. We can live in this world of pain and still proclaim joy, the rise of indomitable spirits from the embers. Oh, Regina Garcia, may your poetry lead us there. You are the Firetalker.

❦ ❦ ❦

The Fire That Consumes: The Burnings of Black Histories

Have you ever seen fire, the kind that consumes . . . ?
a house, a block, a street?
a community?
a town?
a nation?

Have you ever stretched fingers towards fire just because you wanted to feel
the last gusts of breath before the flames melted . . . ?
Mortar from brick?
Wood from steel?
Skin from meat from sinew from bone?
Have you ever jumped at the crack and splinter before the crash?
Hid your face to escape the blowing soot?
Covered your nose to block the smell of escaping gases the incineration of
flesh? Squeezed eyes shut to restrain the release of tears?

Fire destroys completely
Everything
Except memory
Those who have lived through fire never forget that all that was lost cannot
be returned, cannot be restored
Pre-fire life flickering in memory

Have you ever known the indignity of stolen memory?
Of erasure of thought?
A disallowing of necessary history passed on from ind to mind
No collective storage
Trashed as disposable waste
Scores of nations and families of people relegated to one layer of life lived
while other layers burned away
Withdrawn from the light of day
Layers that could have lit
the illumination of minds
the awareness of conditions

the recognition of irreverence and unrighteousness
the tackling of generational traumas
the overcoming of fear
the pride of resilience

Layers of heated memory
Deemed villainous
Tossed into the ashes
By thieves, those who dread
The power that it brings
And the rise of indomitable spirits from the embers

Regina YC Garcia
from The Firetalker’s Daughter, Finishing Line Press, © 2023

❦ ❦ ❦

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