Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Imagery’ Category

Tenacity

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , , on January 10, 2025| 7 Comments »

January 1, 2025 — Henbit

 . 
[with 3 poems from Main Street Rag]
 . 
The Morning of the Unfinished Coffee
 . 
Lightning, thunder, righteous
downpour clatters on the roof.
I fetch in the newspaper,
heavy as a sack of dough.
Good Morning BLues on the radio.
I brew the coffee and go to settle
on the sofa when my wife,
she of the new hip replacement,
thumps in on her walker,
trailing unslept pain.
The fridge we just had repaired,
on the fritz again, 60̊.
Dry ice kept the cooler
cool but froze her half and half.
“Pop, the sugar bowl is empty.”
No amends can suffice.
8:15. She stirs her coffee,
I get on the horn to the repair guy.
She slide-bumps her walker
past the unmade bed,
the blinking leg-pump machine,
the warm ice packs.
I stare out the kitchen window.
Will the repair guy never call?
Her PT is due at 9:00,
so I don’t walk to the corner store
for dry news of Gaza’s wounds.
I imagine the waterlogged blood.
The paper won’t tell this truth,
that her second cup
chills on the counter, or that
I cry as I empty it in the sink.
 . 
Ricks Carson, Atlanta GA
from The Main Street Rag, Vol 29 Nr 4, Fall 2024, Edinboro PA; © 2024 The Main Street Rag Publishing Company
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
New Year’s Day – I park at the Rec Center to take a walk on the Elkin Nature Trail. Sun’s out but the air temp is just a few degrees above freezing and last night it dipped into the teens. These are the days when one feels the North in North Carolina. Bare trees, frosted fields, uninterrupted carpet of brown beside the woodland trail, this is all the nature you are permitted on a winter nature walk.
 . 
But what’s this? In an unkempt bed surrounded by concrete curb, in backfill from last summer’s paving project and scarcely qualifying as “earth,” here is a low dust-hugging froth of green waving in the biting breeze. And not only green but specks of pink and purple. I squat. Blossoms smaller than a peanut, little mouths of dotted mauve, they sing some perverse love song to the slant sunlight. Flowers in January.
 . 
My God, Henbit, is there a month when you don’t bloom? Colonizer from Europe since colonial days, non-native naturalized citizen, lure for early pollinators and considered tasty by chickens, even I have made a salad of you though you’re not my favorite. So here’s your chlorophyll chugging away, frost warning be damned. Here are pink pinhead buds lining up to yawn wide for the hardiest bee-ling. My nose is dripping and my fingertips are blue but you just look way, way too happy.
 . 
O Henbit, Lamia amplexicaule, Mint Family, I can see I need a warmer coat and a couple ounces of your tenacity.
 . 

January 1, 2025 — Spiny Sow Thistle

 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Frank Dribble a Tennis Ball
 . 
I’ve never seen the old man playing,
only complaining about the neighbors,
 . 
immigrants, taxes, traffic, and the dogs
that piss on his pink peonies.
 . 
The tennis ball gets away from him,
bounces downhill toward his basement door.
 . 
He chases it five yards and stops,
as if he suddenly remembers his age.
 . 
I wave. Frank doesn’t remember me,
but he waves back at strangers now.
 . 
I see him often without his toupee,
wearing the same red flannel pajamas,
 . 
checking his mailbox ten times a day
like a twelve-year-old looking for a gift.
 . 
His wife opens the front door, shouts to Frank,
Stay near the house where I can see you.
 . 
Frank waves. I not to his ghostly universe:
Forgotten ball, empty mailbox, strangers.
 . 
Terry Huff, Brentwood TN
from The Main Street Rag, Vol 29 Nr 4, Fall 2024, Edinboro PA; © 2024 The Main Street Rag Publishing Company
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Before I write this I head to the basement where I know I’ve stashed a big plastic bin. Ah, here it is, Vol 4 Nr 4 1999, the first issue of Main Street Rag Poetry Journal I ever bought. Five bucks, 72 pages, saddle stapled. I lay it beside my latest copy, Vol 29 Nr 4, 126 pages, perfect bound and hefty. Nine dollars, discounted to subscribers. If I took a book-finding expedition throughout the house, all these groaning shelves and random piles, if I look behind and under, I imagine I could find every issue spanning that twenty-five years. Oh yeah, and I read them all, too.
 . 
Tenacity, from the proto-Indo-European root ten-, which produces the Latin verbs tenere “to hold, grasp,” and tendere “to stretch:” sometimes you just have to do both. I open my dictionary to tenacity and find a photo of M. Scott Douglass. The average lifespan of a small press poetry journal is probably somewhere between Mayfly and Pet Hamster. How does founder, editor, designer, and chief mailroom clerk Scott Douglass do it? I flip the Wayback to 1999 and flip the little book to page 63, Ralph Earle’s Beirut Holiday Inn, 67 AD, and Taste Our Simple Pleasures, and damn, they’re just as good as when I circled their titles in the table of contents 25 years ago.
 . 
Poetry for the regulars on Main Street. What you’ll discover in these pages every three months is mostly everything that makes us human: family and crisis; love and sex; society and politics; satire, some snark, and a few decent chuckles; clear mornings and long sleepless nights. What you won’t find is Hallmark, and you definitely won’t find incomprehensible wordsplats that don’t have the sense they were born with.
 . 
I’ve been trying to learn to write poetry for twenty-five years, and still learning. The only thing I’m sure about after all that travail is that to write it you’ve got to read it. So now see here, M. Scott, I’ve got just one more thing to say to you – thanks.
 . 
❦
 . 
Scott and Jill have pulled up stakes in Charlotte NC and moved back to Pennsylvania to be closer to family. End of an era. Who is going to hold all of our feet to the fire? The Main Street Rag will live on, however, reincorporated and with a business address of Edinboro, PA. Last week I was scanning weather maps to see how Linda’s family in Pittsburgh and Cleveland were going to fare during the big winter storm. The graphic of inches of expected snow showed 4 here, 6 there, and smack dab over Edinboro a big fat 8. Someone who’s grown up in western Pennsylvania will scoff and say, Eight inches, pshaw, let me tell you about the time . . . Nevertheless, Scott, please get the teenagers to shovel the drive.
 . 
And you can read back issues and subscribe right HERE:
 . 

January 1, 2025 — Common Groundsel

 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Beirut Holiday Inn, 67 AD
 . 
You find yourself in the lounge
drinking a Brandy Alexander
trying to stay calm. At your elbow
a kid with red hair stares at this fingers,
a Swiss flag sewed to his
army jacket back.
 . 
He is into prophecies, like you,
reads a lot of Jesus, likes Habakkuk
and Jonah, too. When he says something sharp
about the end of Jack the Baptist, you relax
and with a few fast facts show
that Jeremiah foresaw
the current catastrophe
and though old Nero
is sharp as a Philistine’s eye tooth
it was noble Augustus
really had the moves.
 . 
The kid’s attention drifts
to the TV hanging in darkness:
bread and circuses
live
from the Coliseum.
 . 
Ralph Earle, Durham NC
from Main Street Rag Poetry Journal, Vol 4 Nr 4, Winter 1999, Charlotte NC; © 1999 Main Street Rag Poetry Journal
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Doughton Park Tree 2020-11-22
 . 
[AFTERWORD: This morning (Wed. Jan. 8) I finished editing Tenacity, added the photos and captions, and put it to bed until Friday Jan. 10 for posting. This afternoon I reached for the next book in my stack and opened Ralph Earle’s new collection, Everything You Love is New. There on page 15 is Beirut Holiday Inn, 67 AD. Total serendipity and cosmic congruence. The only change is that old Nero is now Caligula. Thanks, Ralph! Now to start choosing poems for Jan. 17! — Bill G]
 . 

Read Full Post »

Things Taken, Things Remain

Posted in family, Imagery, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , on January 3, 2025| 3 Comments »

 . 
He, the oldest, was / the last to leave and / took our childhood with him.
 . 
[with 3 poems by Irene Blair Honeycutt]
 . 
When the Last Page Turns
 . 
When the last page turns
 . 
will I step into a star
 . 
on a moonless night
 . 
 . 
or drift deep into the dark
 . 
maybe alight on your door screen
 . 
a firefly – a single green lantern?
 . 
 . 
Wherever I was when last
 . 
you read me
 . 
let the empty space
 . 
remember
 . 
Irene Blair Honeycutt
from Mountains of the Moon, Charlotte Lit Press, Charlotte NC; © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
My mother has died. I am no longer a child.
 . 
What has she taken with her? I remember her fingers like butterflies across the keys, the baby grand in the tiny house on Marion Road. She played Mozart’s Rondo alla Turca at warp speed while Bob and I, three and five, whirled and flailed and leaped until we collapsed in convulsions of laughter. She gave us music, yes, and art and games and stories, but what I remember is the laughing.
 . 
Such a childhood she gave us. An old wig, staring eyes painted on her cheekbones, she became a wooly booger to take me trick-or-treating next door. The neighbors startled, then laughed, dubious, not entirely certain it was really her. She was sixty-five, I was forty, such children.
 . 
All the quiet moments before and between, quieter and quieter as her days slowed and faded – thank God I slowed enough with her to share a few. She had been the wizard of noticing, of pattern recognition, spotting a prothonotary warbler, racing the last few pieces into another puzzle at the beach or in her townhouse living room. These past years I named for her the house finch on the feeder, pushed pieces on the table to be closer to where they would fit. Helped with the morning crossword she used to whipsaw in ink. Held a napkin to catch drips from her popsicle on the front porch.
 . 
Who foresees becoming a parent to their parent? Who wants that job? My mother has passed into that kingdom where all she has left to bestow are memories. Her last power, her final gift. Has she taken everything else with her? Innocence? Joy? My childhood?
 . 
No. Not at all. In the nursing home, I lean my bald head to thunk against my equally bald father’s. We laugh. Such children.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Joy
++++++++++ after Mary Szybist
 . 
I had the happy idea I could be eating breakfast at my
++ friend’s table in California and become bees pollinating
++ her roses.
 . 
Over oatmeal and blueberries, I saw the Lafayette hills mixed
++ with shadow and light reflected in the patio window.
 . 
I had the happy idea I could enter the reflection and begin
++ hiking the path to the eucalyptus trees.
 . 
Sitting in the gravity chair on the deck, I imagined myself
++ a passenger on a jet, flying East of Eden on a Long Day’s
++ Journey into Night.
 . 
I had the happy idea I could be both the seashell sunning in
++ a Peruvian basket and hot-pink geraniums soaking up
++ water in terra-cotta pots.
 . 
I had the happy idea I could become Jarrell’s bat-poet, hitch
++ a ride on a red-shouldered hawk, write a poem while
++ hovering above the witch’s house after Gretel pushes her
++ into the oven.
 . 
I had the happy idea apples and walnuts and pomegranates
++ could mingle. A host of flavors and fragrances never
++ before tasted or smelled would be born.
 . 
My happiest wish was that the ocean would wash over my
++ skin and purify the life within my body. The marrow
++ of my bones, the tissue beneath my skull, would all be
++ renewed.
 . 
And if I truly imagined myself as happy, the pines with
++ candle-like candelabras would light up each night. No
++ one would even try to explain the mystery.
 . 
Irene Blair Honeycutt
from Mountains of the Moon, Charlotte Lit Press, Charlotte NC; © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
In A Song for the Hours, Irene Blair Honeycutt eulogizes the commonplace and the exalted: railroad spikes and a dead possum, John Donne and Typhoid Mary, a fragment of memory and a burst of birdsong. The message of the poem and the power of every poem in the collection resides in Song’s closing line: I am here. Irene fully inhabits the hours, the moments, and breathes them into poetry.
 . 
To notice: superpower of poets, gift of the muse, or hard-won skill requiring grueling apprenticeship? Read Mountains of the Moon and you may discover clues. Irene gathers places she has known deeply, music and art that have touched her, friendships and griefs, and awakens them – she gives them new life. Perhaps the “noticing” is equal parts paying attention to what is happening around you as well as to the warp and weft within that weave the fabric of your soul. Because Irene’s poems are taken from her true experience and inner truth, then freely, openly given to us, we readers may also be drawn into the noticing.
 . 
A confession: I often tell myself I have nothing left to write. Then I spend an hour with a book like Mountains of the Moon and discover threads within myself that have been calling to untangle themselves into words. Reading poetry has power to jiggle the notice! synapses. And, as usual, the most profound thing one notices is that we humans share in common a wealth of pain and joy. A gift indeed.
 . 
❦
 . 
The opening line of today’s selection is from Irene Blair Honeycutt’s Why, among my brothers.
 . 
Mountains of the Moon, by Irene Blair Honeycutt, is available from Charlotte Lit Press.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Milkweed, Jonas Ridge, NC
 . 
That spring she planted milkweed across the road from
Cozie Cottage on Bald Mountain. It was 2008. Thought
she was doing it for the butterflies.
 . 
By 2010 the milkweed had spread across the field, reaching
the apple trees. During the Great Migration, waves of
Monarchs followed invisible scents
 . 
to her place. Spent several splendid nights. Imagine ecstasy.
Plentiful drumming, feeding, laying of eggs.
 . 
Before they left, Susan drove her mother through
the wonder of it all –
 . 
Grandfather Mountain watching in the distance.
In 2014 her mother, at 96, took flight.
 . 
Though the milkweed has thinned and moved down
the slope, it remains a plant of hope. 2024.
 . 
For the Monarch. The earth.
And for the memories it sows.
 . 
Irene Blair Honeycutt
from Mountains of the Moon, Charlotte Lit Press, Charlotte NC; © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
 . 

Read Full Post »

Prost Neujahr!

Posted in Imagery, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , on December 27, 2024| 9 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems from Kakalak 2024]
 . 
How to Hold Small Things
 . 
You were this big,
Mom used to say,
cupping her hands
as if to keep a bowl
of holy water
from spilling.
 . 
Is that why I love
to hold small things?
Ladybugs. Twig tips.
Clover petals. Auger shells.
 . 
It’s in the way
we hold small things
that makes them precious,
how we tender moments,
keep them warm
and safe in our clutch –
the newborn kitten,
the wounded bird,
the crab shell that might blow away
if we’re not careful –
as if holding our breath
as we carry them
might keep something
inside of us
from breaking.
 . 
Tonight,
I hold you, baby girl,
cradle you against my chest,
your quick breaths
like scissored whispers,
your tiny fingers
thimble pinches,
and those blue eyes
dreaming with the fury
of newborn stars.
 . 
Michael Beadle – Raleigh, NC
from Kakalak 2024, Moonshine Press Review, Harrisburg NC; © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
God Bless You! Whether I’m at Food Lion, the post office, Dad’s nursing home, even at church, whenever I sneeze some friend or perfect stranger invokes God on my behalf in that benediction. And I sneeze a lot (I even sneeze when I chew peppermint gum). God Bless You! comes a small voice from around the corner in the condiments aisle. Why?
 . 
A medieval superstition is one explanation. When you sneeze your soul is expelled from your body and a quick invocation prevents the devil from snatching it. Even earlier is a tale from the bubonic plague of 590 CE in Rome – a sneeze or cough might be the first manifestation of that fatal affliction, and since Pope Gregory had implored the populus to pray without ceasing for delivery, benedicat Deus was no doubt a universal refrain. When I sneeze, those three words are raised as a warding or talisman to protect me magically from death.
 . 
What about Gesundheit? It simply means health auf Deutsch. Raise a glass of lager in Frankfurt or Bonn and your companion will likely toast, Sei gesund! (Be healthy!, as in To your health!). When I was a student in Berlin, however, the standard invitation was Prost! I never actually knew what Prost meant and just assumed it had origins in some dark Prussian drinking tradition, but surprise!, it’s Latin – a contraction of prosit, may it be beneficial. Another kind of blessing.
 . 
But here’s my problem – I don’t want you commanding God to bless me. It’s not just because I enjoy sneezing. It’s not because when you say those words it feels superstitious and almost pagan – a little pagan is fine with me. I disagree with God Bless You at a fundamental level. God is not a jurist who bestows or withholds blessings depending on whim or quota or petition. God who is universal and who is the universe has already blessed me in the simple fact of my existence. The greatest additional blessing I might seek would be to recognize the goodness of this earth and of every creature, every person, around me.
 . 
I am already blessed. What if the phrase on everyone’s lips were God has blessed us! Or even better, God is blessing us! Could this become an antidote to consumerism, tribalism, the culture of resentment and entitlement? Could I be healed of my feverish striving for more and more blessings and my coveting of yours? Contrary to my nature, I feel pretty pessimistic about the state and the fate of humanity as 2024 approaches oblivion. Is there any good that will survive our human perversity? Instead of wishing a Happy New Year, I might rather wish for you and me both to discover one good thing and hold on tight. The beneficial, the good, is around here somewhere. It always is. As my Prussian friends would proclaim, Prost Neujahr!
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Upon Hearing U2’s “The Sweetest Thing” at the Harris Teeter in Friendly Center
 . 
I’m rushing through the grocery store on a Friday evening
after a long week, filled with deadlines, with news of another
sick friend. All I want to do is pick up a bottle of chardonnay,
a rotisserie chicken, and disappear into the weekend. I consider
buying some cookies too, and then among the masses pushing
their grocery carts, I hear the first chords of “The Sweetest Thing,”
on of my favorite songs, and stop, lean against the Oreos
and Chips Ahoy, and listen, at first only humming, then Bono’s
voice has me swaying in the aisle, and I start to sing louder
as people step farther away from me. But I don’t care. I need
this song, on this day, in this grocery store, and when I look up,
there’s a woman, about my age, staring at me, lip-syncing
the words. She steps forward and somehow we’re dancing
in the snack food aisle. I can’t tell you what she looks like
because we’re in motion, and The Edge is strumming his guitar,
and the whole damn week washes away as we hear a man
in a striped shirt, whom I assume is the manager, say Okay,
that’s enough now. She grabs my hand, and we run along
the back of the store, where the seafood counter guys smile
at us, and this one guy, who reminds me of my long-gone father
because of his graying beard, starts to clap, and my God,
his clapping, her hands in mine, this trip to Harris Teeter
feels like the sweetest thing in the whole wide world.
 . 
Steve Cushman – Greensboro, NC
from Kakalak 2024, Moonshine Press Review, Harrisburg NC; © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
One good thing that arrives as the New Year approaches is the annual Kakalak anthology. It grows each year and has become a gathering of almost two hundred artists and writers; this year there are dozens of names new to me. I especially appreciate the skill with which the editors curate micro-collections within the greater work, often placing several poems in sequence that share a theme or image, complimented by the art. Thank you to Julie Ann Cook, Angelo Geter, and David E. Poston for Kakalak 2024, and to benevolent deity Anne M. Kaylor who makes it happen and gives it life.
 . 
Purchase Kakalak 2024 HERE:
 . 
❦
 . 
Michael Beadle teaches kids to love poetry, to write poetry, to speak poetry.
Steve Cushman works in IT, which does not inhibit him from finding poetry in everything.
Jessi Waugh is well on the way to having everyone on Bogue Banks engaged in poetry.
 . 
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Canopy Disengagement
 . 
The year is closing and won’t come again
 === this day, the way the sun slants shadows
through the space between leaves that will fall
 . 
and never grow again, the ones next year
 === will be different on a changed tree, you can’t
step into the same river twice
 . 
We look for patterns with our primitive minds
 === searching the space between leaves for meaning
and when there is none, we relax and drift
 . 
let the chaos of a system with a thousand variables
 === wash over us and defy explanation, why try?
O sweet surprise, oh symphony of endless instruments
 . 
My child grows taller by the day and further away
 === The tree watches each lost leaf with a sigh
We’ve done our jobs, these rules aren’t yours or mine
 . 
Only the space between leaves and the moment
 === the sun shines through us and the blaze of blood
orange fire as the wind plays with your hair
 . 
I lose the pattern and accept the asymmetry
 === heart lightened by knowing there’s nothing more
I could do, nothing more would make you stay
 . 
We step into the everchanging river your palm in mine
 === and a red sweetgum hand lands like a swirling gem
Your fingers disengage to catch it, the wind blows
 . 
And the space between leaves shifts slightly above us
 . 
Jessi Waugh – Pine Knoll Shores, NC
from Kakalak 2024, Moonshine Press Review, Harrisburg NC; © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
 . 

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »