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Archive for the ‘Imagery’ Category

A Sharper Silence – Michael Hettich

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , on December 26, 2025| 3 Comments »

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[ 2 poems from A Sharper Silence ]
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The Angels
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As day turned to dusk, we sensed we could feel
the people we’d loved and lost calling
like a breeze that suggests itself but never
actually awakens the trees. She told me
again about the moment she decided to let
our first child go so she could go on
living herself, and I remembered
how once, as a young man, I’d walked by myself
for a day, until I was lost and came
to a boulder and a creek. She remembered yearning
to comfort our baby after we’d scattered
her ashes, and I remembered that the sun
had been warm; the sound of the creek had filled me
with something as different from thought or song
as a dream. She said she still dreamed of Audrey,
our lost child. And then I told her again
that when dusk fell, a clutch of black birds landed.
Even when I stood up and gestured, there
in that unfamiliar landscape, they refused to fly away.
I think they were hungry. But I had nowhere else to go,
so I lay down under stars so sharp
in that darkness they hurt my eyes, even
when my eyes were closed. All night those black birds
stood watching, waiting for something. Like angels,
she said and then laughed, though I don’t think she was joking.
 . 
Michael Hettich
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❀    ❀    ❀
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Gratitude
 . 
Night emerges from the morning woods
+++++ to move across the tall grass toward us, sighing
+++++ +++++ faintly in the fresh light, as though it were confused.
 . 
+++++ We call to it gently, like we might call a stray dog,
+++++ +++++ or someone’s lost pet, holding ourselves
+++++ ready to pull back if it threatens to hurt us.
 . 
But this darkness is neither starving nor dangerous,
+++++ so we let it come close enough to pet, until
somehow it enters our bodies, like language
 . 
+++++ enters a child, to make that child real
+++++ +++++ to itself. It’s a language we’ve spent most of our lives
+++++ learning to speak, though we’re still not able
 . 
to say what we mean exactly: I love you
+++++ in words that capture the rivers and streams,
+++++ +++++ the huge flocks of birds, the silences,
 . 
+++++ +++++ +++++ +++++ and the stunning losses that resonate still
+++++ at the core of our deepest contentment, all
+++++ +++++ the nights we’ve hugged in sleep, dreaming
 . 
+++++ worlds we’ll forget as we wake, again
into a blessedly ordinary day,
+++++ one of many hundreds, hardly noticed as it passes.
 . 
Michael Hettich
from A Sharper Silence, Terrapin Books, West Caldwell NJ; © 2025
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❀    ❀    ❀    ❀    ❀
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Michael Hettich does not shrink from allowing darkness to enter his body as freely as breath, or as dreams. Within the silence there is music, singing. The smell of sweat is perfume. We have no words yet somehow we share language. Fall we all must, through and into nothing, only to discover that the darkness is filled with light. That is what I discover here, alone yet not alone with the exquisite sorrow – the most ordinary day, hardly noticed as it passes, is blessed.
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❀    ❀    ❀
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Michael Hettich’s The Halo of Bees: New and Selected Poems 1990-2022 won the 2024 Brockman-Campbell Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society. He has published more than a dozen books through the years and received many honors, including several Individual Artist Fellowships from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs. Michael holds a Ph.D. in literature, taught for many years at Miami Dade College, and now lives in Black Mountain, NC.
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More about A Sharper Silence and Terrapin Books HERE; more about Michael HERE.
Additional poetry by Michael Hettich at Verse and Image:
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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;
. . . . . every Saturday 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:
 . 
 . 
Also note: after January 1, 2026 I will no longer be sending separate weekly email reminders.
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
 . 
2017-03-06a Doughton Park Tree

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Galaxies and Honeysuckle – Richard Chess

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , on December 19, 2025| 4 Comments »

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[two poems by Richard Chess from JUDITH MAGAZINE 11/27/2025]
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Galaxies
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Since the night his father
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died alone in a spacious
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room, the hours
 . 
 . 
have left his bedside clock.
 . 
Psalms, too, every night
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fly from the page, letter
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 . 
by letter, each letter
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taking its place, a star
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in winter sky.
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All he can do
 . 
for comfort now
 . 
is to face what remains
 . 
 . 
of his nights and days, empty
 . 
pages of prayer, and praise
 . 
receding galaxies.
 . 
❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
Honeysuckle
 . 
Today, he gives his right hand to the living will.
He gives his pronoun to the census bureau.
He gives his birthday to the family Bible.
He gives his face to the mirror.
What would you find if you looked for him there?
 . 
Tomorrow, he’ll take god back
from the names in which god’s held captive.
But who can say if he’ll survive until tomorrow?
 . 
For now, he gives his charm to one of you,
his disdain to another. And he won’t stop giving,
not when there’s an eye to give to beauty,
a short sentence to give to the book of oblivion,
not when inside him there’s still honeysuckle,
the fragrance of his loneliness, to breathe
into the air where it might make you swoon,
that scent of nectar tinged with vanilla.
 . 
Richard Chess
these poems first appeared online at Judith Magazine, A Journal Of Jewish Letters, Arts & Empowerment, on November 27, 2025
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Moon
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I was introduced to Richard Chess and his poetry by my friend and medical mentor, Jessica Schorr Saxe, MD. I read these poems and others by Richard featured at Judith Magazine on the morning after a night of questioning and despair. Their lines take my frayed and tangled life and allow it to remain frayed and tangled, but now with a few bright threads revealed. Humility, seeking, and shared humanity – these are what Richard Chess brings forth to me through his writing.
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Additional poems by Richard Chess at Verse and Image:
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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;
. . . . . every Saturday 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:
 . 
 . 
Also note: after January 1, 2026 I will no longer be sending separate weekly email reminders.
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
 . 
2020-03-07 Doughton Park Tree
 . 

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Two Words – Betty Adcock

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on December 12, 2025| 3 Comments »

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[ two poems by Betty Adcock]
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Two Words
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++++ for Gerald Barrax
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Far west of this late afternoon,
mountains I’ve never seen search California’s
sky for snowdrifts. I can only guess
at shapes of trees and flowers
born of such high thrift.
On the flats below, nothing greens.
Rainshadow.
++++++++++++It is a word for thirst.
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In my country, small birds are surging
into October. They gather at dusk,
their pillar of smoke swirling
over the dead chimney,
a dream getting ready to dive,
the fire going backward.
Swifts.
++++++++It is a word for visible wind.
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Imagine the lives of such words.
Subtle as the interiors of antique jars,
they shape their enclosed dark
because we hold them to be;
and name after name, they give us the many.
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If we should break the clay,
as we can, able to do anything,
believing as we do in no vessel,
believing in fragments, in nothing –
night would step out, the old
wild messenger
bearing the same steep shade,
the same configurations of black wings.
 .  . 
Whatever we hoped to say,
it was there all the time.
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Betty Adcock
from Intervale: New and Selected Poems, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge LA; © 2001. First published in Nettles (1983).
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❀    ❀    ❀
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Revenant
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Horizontal in my green coat,
resting my head on a log, I must have seemed
some part of autumn that refused to turn,
under the flicker’s scissoring and squirrel’s
scribble against an iron sky.
 . 
And this is a simple story. Let loose
it will run by itself to the place
where blanched sun laced through near-bare branches
and the day seemed to pour from the hawk’s gyre.
 . 
To doze in the woods is to rest on the hard edge
of fear, so you’re awake
to what you can neither see nor dream
nor come at with a name.
And yet I thought at first of hikers
in that crash of leaves, a sound that dimmed
at the edges then came back all wrong
because there was no order in it,
no human rhythm.
 . 
I did not quite cry out but froze the moment
I saw him see me, saw the heavy-antlered head
alter its slant.
He moved in the slow way animals will seem
to move in children’s picture books,
on each page larger, clearer –
until he was so close I saw the shine
on raised black nostrils,
and I though stupidly of creeks,
how they go black with mystery
underneath the winter’s lens of ice.
 . 
Browsing the leaf-quilted floor, huffing,
the deer edged closer, stopped, his eyes on mine;
and the moment went sly as a dream, the world
unhinged a little, light with reckoning and change.
But there was no revelation. None.
No help for the poet’s old protean
longing to become, to be undone.
 . 
Whole minutes – two? three? A look, a tangle
of otherness tight as bramble, odd
as a long fall. Noting
had ever happened or ever would
while I could hear that stranger-breath and see
each separate shoulder-hair shift color as he blew
a snort like a horse’s. How exact the hoof’s design
on fallen leaves, lifting and setting down
with such small sound I might be still alone.
 . 
And someone now is saying this is one of those
dense and symbol-laden moments poets make
to force and tease, the whole thing false
with sexual curvature and hidden weight.
This could be the father coming back
in the form he killed. Or the father’s
nemesis. Or it could be a sweet communion,
that old lie.
 . 
Finally huge and motionless as a tree
and nearer than my senses wished to know,
he took on, like a cloak, the simple dusk.
And if that looks like poetry, like loss,
the shadow of loss, or memory like black water
on his sides, the let it be
these words as good as any.
++++++++++++++++++++He leapt straight up
as if to lose that covering thought.
He turned and caught
the barest gilding of last light
and stirred the leaves to sharp explosion
and was gone. A distant brushy rustle.
 . 
It took me longer to begin to leave.
Some tears shook from me without regret or reason,
a kind of backward praise. For what,
I neither know nor quite forget.
 . 
Betty Adcock
from Intervale: New and Selected Poems, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge LA; © 2001. First published in The Difficult Wheel (1995).
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Betty Adcock was six years old when her mother died. Could losing your entire world at such an age cause you to hold more fiercely and deeply to your new world through all the days that follow? Her poetry pierces me with the painful acuity of its remembering, its seeking, its discovering. There is always another question, another quest. She never arrives at a comfortable shore.
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Betty often uses tangible artifacts as anchors for her narrative – an old photo of her on the day of her mother’s funeral, her father’s wood carvings that she must clear from his old roll-top desk after his death. The artifact, however, is servant to her imagery, which wrenches and lofts and growls in the throes of imagination. Today I helped my father set up a little Christmas tree in his nursing home room. When I cleaned out his attic last year, I selected from within his and Mom’s many boxes of Christmas decorations a shoebox full – less breakable, more memorable. As we pulled them out and placed them on the tree today, I imagined where they may have come from, why this or that one in particular might have been chosen or crafted or purchased.
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Dad barely commented to see most of the ornaments; their stories are beyond him now. Loss and diminishment is the story I was prepared to bring home with me. But in the bottom of the box I found two angel silhouettes cut from cardboard, hand decorated with glitter. Dad chuckled when I turned them over to show their clothes pin hangers and names in pencil, “Bobby G.” on one and the other “Billy.” As I was leaving, Dad gazing rapt at the handsome tree, he turned and said, “Thank you for bringing this to me.” Loss, diminishment, preservation, memory. Joy?
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❀
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Betty Adcock (b. 1938) was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2014. She has taught and served as writer-in-residence in the state for many decades. Among her numerous awards and publications, this comment by Mary Oliver stands out: Adcock “writes poems that are as upright as houses, and as flighty as clouds. She never postures. The poems … are beautiful, meaningful, and very real.” (for The Difficult Wheel, 1995)
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Intervale and Betty Adcock’s other books are available from LSU PRESS.
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Additional poetry by Betty Adcock at Verse and Image — 
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❀    ❀    ❀    ❀    ❀
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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;
. . . . . every Saturday 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:
 . 
 . 
Also note: after January 1, 2026 I will no longer be sending separate weekly email reminders.
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
 . 
IMG_1827
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