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Allegories

Posted in Imagery, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Concrete Jungle Allegories, Dasan Ahanu, NC Poets, poetry, Sable Books, Southern writing on June 6, 2025| 2 Comments »

[with poetry by Dasan Ahanu]

. . .

I see potential where others feel desolation

Show me a danger zone

I see an area under construction

An optimistic land developer

who’s been an indecisive bulldozer for too long

Never knowing whether to dig or bury

I’ve got a hard hat and a lunch box

because it’s a long day’s work

to rebuild a heart so beautifully broken

Fenced into construction sites

with lovers who have a lust for demolition

wearing orange vests

and steel-toe boots

Then wondering why all I have are stories

of things falling apart

. . .

from Suspense

Dasan Ahanu

❦ ❦ ❦

Love is a homeless wanderer. Might show up on your doorstep and make you decide whether to open /dig or slam / bury. Love is bread. You going to throw it out when it’s stale, then die of hunger? Love is not the punchline, it’s the plot; love is not the punctuation, it’s the enjambement; love is not the letters you learn to write or the words you learn to read, it’s the unlearned mother-tongue. Speak it.

Love isn’t easy. Are all its stories about things falling apart? In Concrete Jungle Allegories, Dasan Ahanu experiences hot love and cold love, empty love and full love, mother love and father love, and always on the edge of being sliced open by love. But always, always there are second chances. I guess this is what it means / when a poet has an epiphany.

The mystic discovers that love is the fabric of the universe, matter/energy/spirit within us and around us and every moment available for us if we will share in the discovery. The poet discovers love in every particular, a shout or a cry, a down-and-out or an up-and-over, and every moment discovers love is the only thing that can propel us forward. Years ago I argued with another poet that all poems are about Death. The immortal gods do not write poetry but only send us mortals such cutting awareness of our finitude that we are compelled to write the lines the gods hunger for. But the other poet challenged me that all poems are about Love. Love’s immanence or its distant faint glimmer are equal inspirations. Dasan Ahanu argues on the side of Love, and every poem must end with tears, or with AMEN. Hear it, and know.

❦

Dasan Ahanu is a community leader and cultural activist. He has taught courses on hip-hop and Black culture at UNC-Chapel Hill, coached the Bull City Slam Team, and served as Cultural Organizing Director for the NC Climate Justice Collective, as just a few of his influences for good. More about Dasan HERE; his newest poetry collection Concrete Jungle Allegories is available from SABLE BOOKS.

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Baggage Claim

To the homeless kid

who knew about horoscopes,

spoke about success in life,

and asked me what to do

about a girl

who feels for you

but is in a relationship.

I wish I had more to offer you.

I pray my hesitation

wasn’t seen as disrespect.

It’s just that the look

in your eyes was so familiar.

The one that lets people know

we both prefer to play with

broken things.

I sat there in that airport

listening to you conjure a roommate

and a job.

Watched you cast the illusion

of a roof over your head.

Became mesmerized

as you told me the story of

how you met her.

Conversations that left you hurt

and confused.

The man that doesn’t deserve her.

I don’t deserve to watch your magic.

To be front row

as you make the best of ghosts,

demons, and puppets.

. .

You say you know this girl

better than she knows herself.

Say that she pushes you away

because she’s fighting her heart.

I know that you are wrong.

You know an illusion that looks like her

better than you know her.

She pushes you away because

you call her the wrong tomorrow.

She only talks to you because she is curious

about this her you love so much.

I know how you got here.

Loving someone who doesn’t love

you back is a familiar model

established by your relationship

with your Gemini of a father.

It taught you to learn to see

apparition and temptation

as two sides of the same thing.

Isn’t it funny we met in the

baggage claim of the airport?

I was looking for an outlet.

I guess you were too.

Three in the morning.

I’m stuck there overnight.

Better than the cost of a hotel.

You are stuck with Cupid’s arrow in your heart,

talking to me.

Better than the cost of therapy.

You here telling me you want to claim

someone’s baggage got me all

teary-eyed at the selflessness.

I want you to have a home and a meal.

You want a conversation

and a happy ending

that says she will recognize

the wizard in your eyes.

In that moment

I am so torn, yet

so awestruck.

I force these working-class

pieces of advice out of my mouth.

They come in low and hushed.

This is an eloquent urban renewal.

Where I give you all the hope I have,

then rebuild my heart

high-maintenance.

Leave with an uppity faith I’m worth more.

It’s still just gentrification.

The kind I try to balance

with assistance for new residence

in your heart by vouching

for the value of optimism.

Justify it by saying it’s for your welfare.

That it is the only way that

I can be sure your dreams will survive.

When the police officers arrived

and asked you to leave,

they said they had seen you here

++++ before.

Said they had talked to you

++++ before.

I now they still couldn’t see,

couldn’t imagine

the power you possess.

Here I was in a city I didn’t live

talking to a sorcerer and

wishing I was one too.

Wished I could think quick enough

to cast a spell to keep you here.

But like you,

I’m so used to things ending.

used to people being led away.

I couldn’t even muster up a goodbye.

I had nothing to offer that would

stop your pain. For once in my life

I saw through my father’s eyes.

I could feel his mute silence.

The officers told me to be careful.

Told me that the living dead walk and

search for warmth here.

Advised me to go back upstairs.

I just wanted to sit there and cry.

Didn’t know how to wield such magic.

How to hold to a wish

when you have no world around you.

How to craft such a work of art

with scraps and trash.

To want to love.

To care less about a home

if you could know the glimmer in her eyes

was yours.

To be able to contextualize your

father’s mistakes as library,

lessons shelved until you need them.

Dammit, why couldn’t they have

left you be long enough for you

to teach me how to

want,

believe in,

and chase

a happy ending.

Dasan Ahanu

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Calculus

Posted in family, Imagery, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, family, Michael Dechane, nature photography, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing, The Long Invisible on May 30, 2025| 2 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Michael Dechane]

Something So Obvious

In the hardest days

with their outstretched nights,

whatever is beautiful

in the world recedes.

Light leaches from everything

we see, then. We can’t touch

ordinary goodnesses we might have

let buoy us. All of it fails. Sometimes,

we have to begin again

with something so obvious

and tired as the sunrise.

The wind in long grass.

The light holding back

our eyes from what is under

the surface of the water.

Then, the same light giving

a wrinkled glimpse of stones,

silt, and dark fronds waving

when we shift our stance

half a pace, or even turn

the angle of our face.

Some belief that goodness keeps,

that it might come back one day –

what could that mean today

when there is only the sun

returning in a flat peach wash,

the burning usher of another

Tuesday, coming in with the clanks

and grinding sounds of the city

shaking itself off, reanimating?

A waking we might observe

in colors we may discern

as all the life we lost burns out

of sight, beyond us now, as memory.

Michael Dechane

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If nothing else will happen

to witness so much alive

may be enough. . . .

from New Year’s Day

How much joy would it take to counterbalance the suffering of your normal lifespan? How would you quantify it, inchoate summation of glad moments over time divided by accrued heartache, grief, shame? What calculus might determine that life is worth living?

Last week in California a 26-year old man blew up a fertility clinic and himself. In an online manifest he described himself as “pro-mortalist.” Life is not worth living – bringing new life into the world is a crime. He is an extreme example of adherents of radical utilitarian philosophy. To achieve “the greatest good for the greatest number,” when society burns in chaos and personal joy is not to be found, when “good” is a rare and even unattainable commodity, the calculus of this logic dictates that numbers must be slashed. Decimated.

How much joy would it take? This morning I lean against the kitchen counter while my son stirs a pot on the stove. He is making his special stone-ground grits, with butter and cream, to take to Granddaddy in the nursing home. We talk about Granddaddy and my son’s reluctance to visit him, to open up to him. We talk about food and the kids and what remarkables we’ve each seen in the woods lately. For half an hour we are simply present for each other.

How much joy? My son is cooking in my kitchen because he now lives here with me. His marriage of twenty-three years has dissolved. Who can fathom the grief and shame he feels? My grief is bottomless. What can balance such an emptiness? Tonight my son’s daughter will visit to flip cartwheels in our front yard and help my son at the grill. She will pretend to be the maitre d’hotel while she sets the table on the porch and takes our orders. We will eat together. Soon he will drive her home and read Harry Potter before she falls asleep.

Why must there be any calculus at all? Throw it out. This moment is enough.

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Meditation on the Heart

And then, one day, you see

the copper teakettle on the stove

settled on its iron throne, precisely

in its place in the kitchen landscape.

Where, all these years, it has been

let’s not say faithfully. Not exactly.

But in its home, hallowed within

a scene so familiar it seems known.

The faint blue streaks of verdigris,

even the dullness of the handle,

become beautiful in this long-arriving

moment of recognition. Beneath

its dinge in the pockets of its dents glows

an undiminished gleam. Every morning

it has been lifted, filled, and carried.

Each day, it pours,. But you so rarely

touch it between its burning hours. Now

it is you that is filled as you long

for what you cannot see or say but sing.

Michael Dechane

❦ ❦ ❦

At first the poems of The Long Invisible overpower me with sadness. I have to stop after each page and inventory my own life. I grieve for the inhabitants of these lines. I recall a poem by David Manning – Where does the fire go / when it goes out? Do our mistakes extinguish all the good we’ve ever done? Or that we’ve experienced?

I am rubbish at meditation. As soon as I try to sit in the moment all my failures and painful moments of the past jostle in beside me. Better to read a book of poems like Michael’s. Every moment is true. Pain and epiphany commingle. Here comes a bear, and wild flora, pelicans, all the things we love together. And love itself proves it is no stranger. Here it flares, even when we thought it had gone out.

We may be rubbish at love, but love is good at us. It doesn’t weigh the balance or work the calculus to some final solution. We only have to give love such a small piece of ourselves. Like poets do. Like this poet does, whose book in what it reveals and what it shares gives us not just a bit of himself but a bit of each one of us as well. Which must certainly be the greatest gift of all.

❦

The Long Invisible by Michael Dechane is available from Wildhouse Poetry.

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What I’ve Come to Love

The texture of finely grated ginger.

Fernet’s herbal alchemy,

its tincture when I close the day.

All the surprising variegations in a cloud.

And seven black cows my neighbor keeps.

Some modest disappointments –

the kind that help me

know I’ve asked too much

and not enough.

Those parts of myself I kept

locked up on a kind of death row.

A list that needs

to interrupt me into attentiveness.

How this, a poem,

can move me beyond

what I knew, then further,

past what I can imagine.

I’ve come to love portals

into universes that do not exist

until we say they do.

Whoever you are, I love

your power. I hope it gives life

and sustains goodness for you, and everyone

connected to you: every one of us.

I know that I’ve come to love

may not love me back

yet. May I keep on loving

then. Keep practicing on stones,

long grass in the grips of a wind,

water, every way that it might be.

What a help that will be to me

as I turn, at last, to you.

The one I could not know

I was meant and made to love.

I am a stranger, a faceless other,

but you have invited me in.

You give me this time with you.

Forgive me for not believing sooner

in the gift of generosity,

in the hospitable spirit you have

harbored within, all these years, for us.

Michael Dechane

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Spring. Whatever.

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, Imagery, tagged Bill Griffin, Ecopoetry, haiku, imagery, Jacar Press, Kathryn Kirkpatrick, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing on May 9, 2025| 2 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Kathryn Kirkpatrick]

Turbulence

Of the stomach lifting. Of the weightless

where I was and am again variety.

Sway and crack, our craft. Slalom

the wind. So much carbon in the currents.

Of the climate kind. Of the jerk and twack.

Of the hurtling toward. Shake right out

of our human. As if we might not

settle back into these bodies,

but land instead in someone else.

Yet the hare far below isn’t empty

to receive us. Neither is the horse.

They have their own embodied plans.

We will have to settle beside ourselves

Blurred boundaries and all. Bump,

rattle, and creak. Our enlightened selves

grasp cokes, play solitaire, read, sleep,

going on as if what’s happening isn’t.

With more than prayers

holding us up, we are nonetheless

tossed in the vastness.

Kathryn Kirkpatrick

❦ ❦ ❦

ah spring spring

how great is spring!

and so on

Bashō (1644-1694)

Basho has perfectly snared my mood this morning. I am reading Spring haiku at SeasonWords.com: Ah, Winter vanquished!, Ah, new life!, blah, blah, blah. I am not feeling newly lively these days, especially not as the sun so gaily rises. By day I seem to be the rock between two storms, my father and my son, but by 4 AM I have eroded to sand and the bed is far too gritty for sleep. Now this haiku blog offers a prompt for the season and encourages sharing? Here are my Spring lines:

what to say

when everyone’s “spring, spring” –

toads trilling

In her book Haiku and Senryu: A Simple Guide for All, Charlotte Digregorio states, Wherever one lives, one experiences changing seasons. The haiku’s brief flash illuminates one specific moment. We read the terse lines and might recognize where we are, but certainly, and more critically, we do know precisely when we are. Perhaps we have never shared the haiku’s circumscribed space, but we do share the time of pollen, the humidity, crisp crackling leaves, the shivers. A moment’s experience broadens into a communal truth.

In that sense, haiku becomes less an instruction in encountering nature and more an invitation to shared humanity. Besides the experience of changing seasons, the thing we all share is the experience of suffering. A moment’s observation may stand in as a piercing metaphor: Spring’s anticipation, Summer’s lassitude, Autumn’s anxiety, Winter’s dread. And perhaps pricked by that dart of connection upon reading a haiku, we might also share one more thing – joy.

Just to be fair, I imagine my Spring haiku is not really an indictment of inane people chattering around me. On a dark night after rain, the lonesome trill of an American toad rising from down in the woods is a peace offering. My son and I stood on the deck last night and heard it together. Yes, it was very dark. This morning, light has returned. Again. Oh my. The season rolls on.

❦

In 1685, the Japanese astronomer Shibukawa Shunkai adapted the 24 Solar Terms of the Chinese calendar for Japan and created 72 seasons. As we learn at SeasonWords.com, these 72 seasons “offer a poetic journey through the Japanese year in which the land awakens and blooms with life and activity before returning to slumber.” Mark, the site’s curator and naturalist, shares lessons from nature corresponding to the seasons; haiku both ancient and modern that complement the lesson; and craft tips / kigo with a prompt and an invitation. Readers share their haiku and receive commentary.

Visit https://seasonwords.com/ and subscribe to receive periodic postings in your mailbox!

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The Ridge

One day I found the outline of a deer

in the snow. She’d slept on the old logging road

above our home, curled against the cold.

Her imprint on a trail I’d walked for

twenty years was intricate and vulnerable

as I now feel since strangers bought this land.

their cameras

nailed to the trunks of trees

Christ

At first I waved. New to the neighborhood,

the seemed shy. Hovering at the side

of the road with their harnessed dogs, they walked

harnessed too, shoulders hunched, eyes averted.

About their money I didn’t then know, or

Appalachian families letting go of land.

orange flags

festoon the property lines

orioles in snow

What we had of commons among

hill people here is gone, our hollow hollowed

out, our waves, our lifted heads, our calls across

casual borders fretted now by registered

mail. “Not authorized.” “Legal action.” They’ve

no bonds to sunder because they’ve no bonds made.

camera 1

my shetland sheepdog framed

first day of spring

Surveyed for surveillance, the ridge. But I

can love what I don’t own. I miss the oaks,

their wide-girthed stillness. I miss the mountain’s

spine. Across family lands and state lines,

through Cherokee and Appalachian time,

the mountains stay. The mountains stay. They stay.

a taloned sun sets

the red-tailed hawk

needs no human hand

Kathryn Kirkpatrick

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Creatures – so we are. We seek what all creatures seek, but especially we seek the closeness of other creatures. Kathryn Kirkpatrick is visited by crows and grieves for house wrens dying and for cows separated from their calves. She reveals her creature’s struggle and confusion as she loses her mother. She is not afraid to say that she hesitates to speak of death because every creature must face death but fears to do so. She reveals moments and connections and we readers look about us to discover her light is casting our own shadow. And in the closing section of Creature, Kathryn Kirkpatrick has written the finest collection of dog poems I’ve read in twenty years.

Creature by Kathryn Kirkpatrick at Jacar Press: HERE.

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On Finding Monarch Caterpillars in September

And whatever love a parent

feels stealing bread for a starving

child, I have it as I dig by

the flimsy light of my bargain

headlamp, having driven miles for the last

of the chain-store milkweed, which will

feed these ravenous young in their striped

skins, who are no metaphor, who stand for

themselves only, though in my ecological

worry, my long-range fright, I am surely

standing for something as I shovel in the dark.

Kathryn Kirkpatrick

In their multi-generational migration pattern, the endangered monarch butterfly bears its fourth generation in September and October. Rather than dying after two to six weeks as the earlier generations do, this generation migrates to warmer climates like California and Mexico, living six to eight months before starting the process again. – K.K.