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Saturday Share – Barbee and Bates

Posted in Imagery, tagged Jenny Bates, NC Poets, poetry, Sam Barbee, Saturday readers share, Southern writing on December 6, 2025| Leave a Comment »

. Saturday morning readers share:

Sam Barbee and Jenny Bates

Tomato

I pass my time well,

but if a man is worth his salt,

he will learn his season.

I hope to die some indigo night—

un-diagnosed—preferably,

in my tomato garden.

I wait content in this fertile space.

I water each vine.

Spray rattles the dry leaves

and collects on stem bristles.

Tonight I know, plucking

ripe fruit is kind: by autumn,

so much rots, ignored.

Sam Barbee

Tomato was also a Poetry in Plain Sight poster poem. I grew up in Wilmington, and am still an autumn-season beach-bum. I’ve lost my enthusiasm for fishing, but the solitude continues to delight me.

Additional poetry by Sam Barbee at Verse and Image:

2025-07

2022-04

2021-07

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Trimmed in Black

The bears came back yesterday then

last night you spun a black ribbon in

my hair did I mention?

the bears were black too if I could

only remember the words the turned

tune of words as you wove that ribbon

in and out and through my braid

the bears were in color as was the dream

I tried to stitch all the hues mostly the black

into the wind like trimming a tree with

memory or wishing I had umber bat wings

webbing I could spread and catch your vow

or the sound of any how hung high

in a tree so the breeze will always touch them.

Jenny Bates

I’m going through a wringer of a time in life right now, but … in reality I hope to disappear, but I would also go for becoming a Pine Marten! and really? I am my environment on the mountain and the fellow creatures I live with so the photo is the inspiration for the poem…

Additional poetry by Jenny Bates 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:

https://griffinpoetry.com/about/

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

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Thanks again for joining the conversation.

– Bill

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Saturday Share – Rouphail and Barasovska

Posted in Imagery, tagged Joan Barasovska, Maria Rouphail, NC Poets, poetry, Saturday readers share, Southern writing on November 29, 2025| 2 Comments »

Saturday morning readers share:

Maria Rouphail and Joan Barasovska

This small house, this big sky .

. . Shapes of things: so much the same

. . . . they feel like eternal forms

. . . . . (Adrienne Rich, “Sources”)

This small house

my heart’s center

where the world entered and sat down

and I greeted it

as a mysterious guest

my first words swelling into

sentences and song

north to the barred owl in the backyard oak

and the clothesline strung with bedsheets post to post

south to the sawmill

and the draft horses pulling flatbeds of logs

east where a gravel road snaked toward the bay

and long clouds steamed from the loud freight train

west and a highway curving into the pines

and the pond where we swam

where a laughing boy in my class

did not drown one afternoon

but caught polio instead

he never walked again

his mother cried

my mother kept me close

and the sky stared at us in silence

every day in those days

I wondered why

that boy

and not me

Maria Rouphail

This is the title poem of my 2025 book, This small house, this big sky (Redhawk Press). I deliberately avoided punctuation, hoping to effect a kind of seamless stream of consciousness.

Papa and me, circa 1952

Here’s something weird: since childhood I’ve had the ability to “mirror write,” and spontaneously and without pause. Could be because I’m left-handed. Long ago, I was told that DaVinci had the same ability, but I’m certainly no DaVinci!

Additional poetry by Maria Rouphail at Verse and Image:

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Scarcity

Love, ever a torment,

a yearning—the knot

I’ve got for what I need.

Love, not blind, but stupefied

like grief, like bleeding.

The trouble with me

is agony, the piercing note

of longing, its persistence.

It’s plainly the shame

of scarcity, the freeze

of what I sprang from.

I guess I cried.

Joan Barasovska

Scarcity is forthcoming in the winter edition of Persimmon Tree.

I am sitting at my small desk, above which I have placed many, many things: a photo of the sign that hangs outside of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the cracking cover of an old Penguin paperback of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan with Joan in armor on her steed looking skyward; a clipping of a newspaper headline: “The Courage to Be Alone”; my dad’s business card; a Bazooka Joe comic in Hebrew; the poem “Crossing” by Jericho Brown; lines from Eudora Welty, Borges, Eliot, Mark Strand, Raymond Carver; Bertolt Brecht; a note from Bill Griffin: “You are the beating heart of NCPS, not to mention spleen and gizzard”; a framed arrangement of dried flowers and ginkgo leaves. More. But there’s a yellowed, brittle piece of newsprint, probably from The American Poetry Review, with these lines: “There the wind blows / There the rain falls / There god roams / on his palms, on his all four palms” Can anyone identify this? Is it familiar? I would love to know.

Also on my desk, this photo with my daughter Clare in my living room

Additional poetry by Joan Barasovska at Verse and Image:

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Saturday Morning Submissions – Once a week on Saturday I feature one or two poems shared with me by readers. If you would like to consider having a favorite poem appear, either by you or by a poet you admire, please see the GUIDELINES here:

https://griffinpoetry.com/about/

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Witness – Appalachia to Hatteras

Posted in Imagery, tagged Bill Griffin, GCDPS, Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet Series, Jude McDonald, Lauren Mills, nature photography, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing on November 28, 2025| 1 Comment »

Two poems by Gilbert-Chappell students

Fantasy

I said can you feel that sun and she said no and I beckoned her out of the shadows and tilted my face skyward and my skin lit up gold crown to sole and I said can you feel that sun and she said no and I took her hand and pulled her close and pressed my nose to her temple and breathed in her warmth and I said can you feel that sun and she said no but her voice held the nostalgia of a thousand dusks and I cracked one eye open in suspicion and she was radiant and grinning

Jude McDonald

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Affirmations for My Twenty-First Year

I am tensile and easily missed. I am choral, and archaic, and autumnal in fashion.

When the temperature drops, I wear a sensible pair of stockings that attract

a sensible amount of attention. I am wild-footed. I am uneven in an interesting

way. When there is singing, I listen. I believe in jackalopes and the miracle of modern

medicine. I am trustworthy. I am the end of a bloodline. When there is not

singing, I will ask for there to be singing.

+++++ A lover (lover! Lover, lover) once siad I was a flashlight cutting through

the dark pier of “something, like, life, maybe?” She was not a good poet. This year,

I am no one’s flashlight. I will tell lovers (lovers!) forget your wavering, cut the shit,

you should not need me to know where to step. And anyway, you know how to swim

+++++ don’t you?

I am tall. I am tawny and approachable. Where there is love to be found, I am

a good hunter. When the moon rises, I offer traditional greetings. I am funny.

I am funny, funny, funny. I am not a flashlight, I am something hotter. Fire,

why not! I burn your eyes. I burn your tongue. I burn your mother’s hands

when she takes me out of the oven. I am a blackberry cobbler baked fresh.

+++++ I am an East Coast native. I am kind. I am the hand of gnarled oak clawing

at a telephone wire. I am kind. I climb bare-bodied birches in winter and watch

my breath. I am light and breezy. When lovers say I am anything, I will say, “No,

I am not.” I am kind. I am a friend to cats and children. I have a certain allure. I leap

off cliffs and build houses where I land. I am kind. I will be kinder.

Lauren Mills

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When there is not / singing, I will ask for there to be singing. Both of these poems are full-throated affirmations, songs of self uplifted, revealed, celebrated. Every time I read Fantasy my smile grows broader and broader line by line. To become radiant and grinning, oh how I wish it to be so. Why shouldn’t every day be an opportunity to discover joy? Exactly the same with Affirmations. Enter the universe of miracles and music and hot blackberry cobbler. My hope in our world is restored when even one person chooses to be kind. And kinder. Let’s all join in.

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Witness: Appalachia to Hatteras (2025) is the annual anthology of the Gilbert-Chappel Distinguished Poet Series of the North Carolina Poetry Society. Poet Mentors in the eastern, central, and western regions of the state spend six months guiding student poets, culminating in public readings and this published collection. The 2025 Distinguished Poet Mentors are Gideon Young, Maria Rouphail, and Mildred Kiconco Barya.

Jude McDonald (Raleigh, NC) is a Black, queer poet, multimedia artist, and writer. He focuses on complex themes like love, identity, and reflection, and asks his listeners/viewers to stop in close and embrace vulnerability. Lauren Mills (Sherrills Ford, NC) currently attends Dartmouth College as an English and Creative Writing major. She is interested in Shakespearean theatre, the weather, getting funnier, and dogs that have the size and temperament of cats.

Note this new format for 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, please view these GUIDELINES:

https://griffinpoetry.com/about/

Also note: after January 1, 2026 I will no longer be sending weekly email reminders.

If you would like to receive an email each time a post appears, please SUBSCRIBE to VERSE & 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 subscribe for you. Send your request to

COMMENTS@GRIFFINPOETRY.COM