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Wapiti

February 17, 2023 by GriffinPoetry

[with 4 poems by Stephen Cushman]

What did Daddy Buffalo say to his little boy when he dropped him off at school?

“Bi Son.”

Bert (5) and I watch the little herd of elk graze along the gentle Uwharrie slope. They are all females except one chesty bull with a rack of antlers twice as tall as Bert. Every few minutes he raises his head and eyes us. He ignores six bison when they approach from the east, although drawing near they snort and the white-rumped cow elk back away. Grazing resumes.

Bert is the animal man. He will correct you immediately if you refer to bison as “buffalo,” whether in his home menagerie of plastic creatures or here at the North Carolina Zoological Park near Asheboro. Bison and elk once roamed the Carolina piedmont prairie; their grazing plus fires from lightning and intentional burns by indigenous tribes maintained the open expanses encountered by European settlers. Today we learn that the last native eastern bison was killed by hunters in 1799. And from Zoo interpretive displays we also learn that what we see here are Woodland Bison from Canada, a different subspecies from the slightly smaller Plains Bison we’ve watched at Yellowstone.

We’ve also learned something else this morning: these are not elk!

Cervus canadensis is one of the largest species of the deer family, Cervidae. When English settlers arrived in North America, they named creatures they met to match vaguely similar species back home, taxonomy be damned. (European Robins are not even in the same Family as American Robins.) In English the word Elk refers to the European moose, Alces alces, also Family Cervidae, but by the 17th century moose had been extirpated from the British Isles. Having never seen one, for most Englishmen the concept of Elk had grown a little fuzzy. They may have just used the word to mean Big Deer, and these were definitely some big deer.

So if we don’t want to be a big disappointment to Bert by calling bison “buffalo,” what shall we call elk? Wapiti, derived from a Shawnee and Cree word for “white rump,” is the term for Cervus canadensis preferred by Zoo educators and taxonomists. It is the same species reintroduced to Yellowstone in Montana and to North Carolina in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and native across Canada and Alaska (with subspecies in China and Siberia). Wapiti and Bison, preserving the Atlantic piedmont prairie ecosystem for thousands of years, we bow to you.

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Not all English settlers called the big deer Elk. The native British Red Deer, Cervus elaphus, is a dead ringer for Cervus canadensis. Until the advent of molecular phylogenetics, in fact, the two were considered to be the same species. Sir William Talbot’s 1672 English translation of John Lederer’s Latin Discoveries called the North American species Red Deer, but noted in parentheses that they were for their unusual largeness improperly termed Elks by ignorant people. *

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The Rain in Maine

fell also on the Etchemins, their name for us
humans, us builders of fish weirs,

us real people, as opposed to monsters,
animals, or the ghosts of others

back for a visit to glacial moraine
above the beach where clamming thrived

and the canoe route south could make good use
of easy portage across a bar

exposed at low tide, for which they also
must have had words, maybe one meaning

the waters inhale or the earth whale breaches,
as they would have had words for various arrowheads,

the kind meant for deer rather than seals
or for making war on trespassing tribes,

who bad as they were weren’t so pathetic
as to need such abstractions

as religion, as nature, as beauty removed
from whatever gray weather the eagle glides through.

Stephen Cushman
from Keep the Feast, Louisiana State University Press, © 2022

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Stephen Cushman’s book is a feast – of imagining, of unexpected encounters and epiphany, of wordplay, of luscious sensuality and sheer rejoicing – but after reading and re-reading I am still asking myself if there is one specific feast he’s admonishing us to keep. The miraculous feast at Cana, stale water becoming wine that exceeds even the host’s best vintage? The poet’s groaning board of allusion and figurative language? A banquet of awe and praise in the presence of the numinous? Biophilic diversity shared with all creatures and creation?

Keep all these feasts. Attend and partake. Pry open mind and soul and feel the inrush of delight. Keep the Feast relishes the twists and turns, the movement, the sink of stomach as the bottom drops out and the soar of heart when the object of adoration appears. The middle section, a long poem of 26 verses with the same title as the book, is loosely configured like Psalm 119, but it is as if the Psalmist, Jalāl al-Dīn Rumi, and Steve Martin spent all night together on Mt. Ararat – the mystical language of prophesy and ecstasy with a 21st century voice. Look out, Reader! You may remain hungry for more.

Stephen Cushman is general editor of the fourth edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012) and Robert C. Taylor Professor of English at the University of Virginia. Keep the Feast is his seventh collection of poetry.

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from Keep the Feast
section 23

Whither can thy servant turn
+++++ and not find thee there before him?
Whither can his eye revolve
+++++ and not see dust thou art raising?
How can his ear, even if deaf,
+++++ shut out the buzz of constant current
charging the wind with thy high voltage
+++++ and effervescing through his blood stream?
Behold, how doggedly days do their job
+++++ and how the hours persevere!
Soon they will demolish thy servant
+++++ and dismantle his worshipful voice.
If he should cover his head with ashes,
+++++ pay him not the slightest mind.
Do not let him get away
+++++ with some glib quip or facile finale.

Stephen Cushman
from Keep the Feast, Louisiana State University Press, © 2022

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Green Zebra
++++ Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink,
++++ taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of each.
+++++++ – HDT

Help, Theophrastus,
or you, lewd Linnaeus,
with classes for plants and Sexual System

That borders on porn, “nine men in the chamber
of only one bride” sounds pretty wild
and might keep her happy, that passel of stamens
for only one pistil,
+++++ +++++ +++++ but where is the wild
found anymore,
what’s the vicinity
that hasn’t been tilled by husbandry wholly
to nothing but cult, -ivated, -ivar;
+++++ +++++ +++++ +++++ take Adoration,
cocktail hybrid, or flat-globe Celebrity
or even Enchantment, all engineered
one way or another,
+++++ +++++ +++++ while here we were thinking,
when madly monandrous

+++++ +++++ +++++ +++and mounted like wolves
howling full moon beyond the tame pale,
we had evaded human improvement,
+++++ +++++ +++++ +++++ only to find
in ancient love manuals
+++++ +++++ +++++ we might as well be
a Cherokee Purple, another Big Rainbow,

or this zingy beauty with flavorful flesh
striped green and yellow.

Stephen Cushman
from Keep the Feast, Louisiana State University Press, © 2022

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Woe to Us Hypocrites

Hemingway’s fantasy
of days when we’re free
to shoot whom we please
hasn’t got a chance
luckily for us
who trust we’re the marksmen
and never the targets
so when you come home
from drudging through Monday
to news an old enemy,
nasty-cuss nemesis,
had open-heart surgery,
don’t whoop and cheer,
just send him a card,
maybe some mums,
that dish of green beans
you’ve nearly perfected,
garlic, hot chili oil,
and bow to hypocrisy
for keeping the peace
with smiling mimesis
in spite of the anger
for which we’re still liable
to judgement and fire;
there must be a reason
it’s a translator’s freebie,
a piece of the Greek
that’s English to us.

Stephen Cushman
from Keep the Feast, Louisiana State University Press, © 2022

Wingspan

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* Elk history and taxonomy on Wikipedia

 

2020-09-08b Doughton Park Tree

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A Book of Poems

February 10, 2023 by GriffinPoetry

[with selections from Ordering the Storm]

Reading a good book of poems is like traveling unknown terrain at night, glimpsing in each lightning bolt a swatch of vastness. – Philip Brady

A good book of poetry is a book of poems. This statement is not a tautology. A good book of poetry comprises a book of poems that are selected, ordered, arranged, and presented in a way that illuminates the vastness.

This statement is also not an equation exhibiting the commutative property: a book of poetry that is a book of good poems is not necessarily a good book, or not as good is it could be if the poems are not selected and ordered in a such way as to make them greater than their whole. The mystery, then, is how to order the storm.

It is a mystery that will not be dispelled but may be entered and engaged. An overstuffed folder accumulating pages of script for years, a hundred computer files with their changeable names and endless revisions, how to gather and sort and create a collection? How to turn them all into a book that not only a friend or an editor but also the unknown lover of poetry would want to read? Would enjoy? Would come away from having glimpsed a swatch or two of vastness? Those are the questions posed by a book residing on my desk for the past year, Ordering the Storm: How to Put Together a Book of Poems, edited by Susan Grimm.

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Once or twice I have become so addled while trying to pull together a manuscript of poems that I’ve spread all my poems around me in a circle. The first step is in finding a poem beautiful enough to make a beginning. Then the next poem seems to flow naturally from the choice of that poem. Together, a group of poems begins to tell a story. . . . The poem that belongs no place often has no place in the book. Once in a while I’ll try to cram something in, but it’s awkward, and seldom works out well. Sooner or later that tooth will have to come out. You sacrifice individual poems for the sake of the book as a whole . . . . All of this can turn the making of a book into an unpleasant process, painful, like therapy. – Liz Rosenberg

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As an African-American, published by Black Sparrow Press for over thirty years, I was outside the teensy Black literary mainstream. I was effectively alone in the Southwestern United States. To the good, this made man an instant authority on “thangs Black.” But there was no Maxwell Perkins in my future. I could “do” whatever I wanted. To the bad, I was undereducated and tended to dismiss even sound advice if vaguely perceived as racist, and did not always know what I wanted, at first. Worse, I was not clear on what my options were when arranging poems or stories into a dynamic order that would complement, enhance or further illuminate them.

Developing poetically required that I get a grasp on my initial sense of an ordered universe, which then seemed multi-leveled a the source: from within (I needed things highly organized in play and work environments); from fairly strict, vigilant and punitive parents; and, from an intense love of reading, calculated to escape the emotional and intellectual damage of the school system in which I was trapped. . . .

. . . What kind of response to I want the reader to have when they’ve finished my book, given all possible demographics? Ideally, I hope my reader will be revitalized by the end of the process, gratified, or profoundly moved. I want my reader to perhaps feel the need to linger and savor, or to simply sit with me for a thoughtful length of silence. I want to have touched them, across space and time. I want them to taste my youth and enjoy my sassiness. I want them to be excited by my concerns and ideas. I want them to bemoan my losses and, my trials. I want them to sample all life as it has defined me. I want them to have moved through my flesh. – Wanda Coleman

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I wonder whether a whole book of poems might not have affinities with a ceremony, a kind of service which would have many of the qualities of a public event to which people come in hopes of some kind of nourishment for their minds and spirits. The explicit language might be “secular” or “sacred” – I’m in favor of keeping the overt God-talk to a minimum and throwing the clichès out completely, though I’ve not always kept either principle – but I like the notion. I also like the idea of ending with some intimation of hope, some glimpse of shelter and safety in this dangerous world. My most recent book Deerflies (WordTech Editions, 2004) ended with such a poem:

Small Night Song from Oneonta

It’s good that the world has more beauty
than it needs. It’s good to walk into
the smooth Catskill night and discover

that the night has no edges, no sympathy,
no grievance against me, that any place I step
will hold me firm, not like a lover,

not like a child. It’s good to be a child,
and then for years to be something else,
and then something else. It’s a hard world

but the rain is persistent, the deer
are quiet and discreet, and for ages now
the trees have known how to dream their way up.

A man with a pack on his shoulder
saunters down the path below me, knowing
the lights he sees ahead are burning for him.

– Jeff Gundy

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Ordering the Storm includes an introduction by Susan Grimm and eleven essays by poets such as the writers sampled above as well as Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Carolyne Wright, and Maggie Anderson. Each explores their own experiences and insights in creating order from the chaos of individual poems. The book is published by Cleveland State University Poetry Center (© 2006, Cleveland OH) with the support of the Ohio Arts Council.

I read and re-read this book while collating my own short collection of 30+ poems, How We All Fly, which will appear sometime in 2023 from The Orchard Street Press (Gates Mills, OH, editor Jack Kristofco). I can’t say Ordering the Storm provided me with an algebraic equation along the lines of a + b + c . . . for sequencing my poems, but it did fill my head with images and insistent questions. Perhaps a reader of the collection will one day let me know whether they glimpse any swatches of vastness.

IMG_0768, tree

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Artifact

February 3, 2023 by GriffinPoetry

[with 3 poems by Rebecca Baggett]

How many grooves are there in a 12-inch 33 ⅓ rpm long-play record? The seven-year old doesn’t think us a bit odd when we fish out the big black discs and set them spinning: Burl Ives, Disney Princess theme songs, John Denver and the Muppets. She sings along with Miss Piggy, “Five Go-old Rings!” Would she have hopped off the couch last night and boogied with us to The James Gang cranked to the max on Funk 48?

We still have a landline at our house and until recently a rotary dial phone in the basement. I just read that only this year is Chuckie Cheese phasing out software updates shipped on 3.5 inch disks – which the article called “floppies” (remember? 5 ¼ inch, 360 kb, don’t toss them into a drawer with any magnets). Physical artifacts may be relegated to the landfill, but words remain our tools even if we’ve never knapped a flint. Dial it for me. The car won’t crank. Meet me at half-past (fractional arc of an analog circle?).

Last week I checked in at radiology for an x-ray. The young woman entered all my identifiers and when she got to my email address, she remarked, “Gee, AOL, I haven’t heard that one in a while.” Darlin’, that just means I’ve been jacked into the internet since before you were born. Juggling floppies. Writing DOS batch files before breakfast. And I’ll bet you don’t even know how many grooves.

Just one. That’s all it takes to be real groovy.

❦ ❦ ❦

Before the Stories Begin

Before the stories begin, the mothers die,
setting their daughters adrift, little coracles
bobbing rudderless, at the mercy of river currents
and ocean tides. Abandoned in forests so thick
no light touches their ferny floors, imprisoned
in crumbling towers guarded by rampant brambles,
banished to the dank depths of castle kitchens.

But here is the alternate reading:
Before the stories can begin, the mothers must die,
setting their daughters free – released from cautioning
fingers and pursed lips, from disapproving quirks
of a brow, from warnings weighted with echoes of warnings,
the line of foremothers frowning down the generations.

The daughters find themselves oddly light,
abruptly free to renounce titles and abandon kingdoms
for life on the high seas, to fall in love with a man-beast
deep in the forest, a stable boy, a fairy godmother.
To seclude themselves in towers full of groaning
bookshelves, to spend their days squinting
at the twisting calligraphy of ancient manuscripts,
to aim telescopes toward the night skies,
to rename all the stars.

Rebecca Baggett
from The Woman Who Lives Without Money, Regal House Publishing, Raleigh, NC, © 2022

❦ ❦ ❦

Words are artifacts by which we might glimpse the world. Words are not the world; words do not contain the world nor create the world; words are simply pebbles someone has painted, incised, knapped and dropped along the path. But Oh, how words may guide us along that path!

Rebecca Baggett is an inherent and inveterate sesquipedalian, as she confesses in the poem by that title in her book, The Woman Who Lives Without Money: a lover of complicated ‘foot-and-a-half long’ words. And yet the words she uses to craft these mysterious, marvelous, poignant, sad, hilarious poems are seemingly simple words. Everyone knows these words, these comfortable and familiar words. How Rebecca has painted, incised, and knapped these words, though! How she has lined them up and breathed into them meaning they had only dreamed of. How wonderful is the world she reveals in this ethereal and at once solid collection of words, such telling artifacts, these powerful words.

The Woman Who Lives Without Money (Regal House Publishing, 2022) is the winner of the 2020 Terry J. Cox Poetry Award. Rebecca has also published four chapbooks, including God Puts on the Body of a Deer, winner of the 2010 Main Street Rag Chapbook Contest. She was born in coastal North Carolina and his lived her adult life in Athens, Georgia.

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Weeping Willow

The willow missed
the children, their chatter –
like squirrels, but more various
and musical – missed
the sparrow-light bodies pressed
against her, the secrets
they whispered, how thy clung
to her branches with their small
hands, the way their legs twined
around her.

++++++++++ Nothing inhabited her
like that, nothing loved
so fiercely or so foolishly.
They believed they would be
hers forever,
++++++++++ did not understand,
at all, necessity, compulsion,

letting go

Rebecca Baggett
from The Woman Who Lives Without Money, Regal House Publishing, Raleigh, NC, © 2022

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Chestnut

I touched a chestnut sapling
in the Georgia mountains.

My friend writes of the great trees
and their vanishing,

but I have seen a young chestnut,
tender and green, rising from its ashes.

I, too, write of loss and grief,
the hollow they carve

in the chest,
but that hollow may shelter

some new thing,
a life I could not

have imagined or wished,
a life I would never

have chosen. I have seen
the chestnut rising,

luminous,
from its own bones,

from the ash of its first life.

Rebecca Baggett
from The Woman Who Lives Without Money, Regal House Publishing, Raleigh, NC, © 2022

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Doughton Park Tree 4/30/2022

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Love is Work

January 27, 2023 by GriffinPoetry

[with 3 poems by Maria Rouphail]

A stroll down the beach at dusk – I was sixteen and she was almost. Would you call it our first date? I think we held hands. I know we didn’t kiss. Fifty-four years later the beach is still there, although not the pier we walked beneath, things the earth makes, less so human desires. This afternoon she is upstairs writing a letter and I have just cleaned up after lunch. Where have we been and where are we going? Well, in an hour we’ll take a walk beside the river.

Oh Wise One, long-married, specialist in domestic bliss and expert in the cultivation of love, impart your secrets! Are you kidding me? I’ve spent all morning making a list and it is exactly two items long: (ONE) Never Imagine You Know; and, (TWO) Never Quit Working to Find Out. Number One becomes apparent every time I assume or jump to a conclusion or utter as comfort some empty platitude (or, cardinal sin, just wasn’t paying attention). Number Two is the quick corollary as Number One’s immediate aftermath and the sooner engaged the better – not Working to Find Out usually invites conflagration.

Which is probably why love is such a necessary obsession of poetry. Infatuation is the hot minute of attraction; love is the cool hour of reflection. Poetry may germinate unseen underground as the temperature rises, but its sprout becomes visible when the creature is leaned back in chair, pen hovering listless over paper, the image of affection growing into clarity within the cool, reflective mind. And as I reflect further, I perceive that the seeds of most of my own love poems involve messing up with Number One and Two, above, only to be rescued and reconciled by the big sighs and small gods of forbearance and forgiveness.

Even now I imagine her at her desk, pen and paper, that elegant typographer’s script, those meticulous phrases – oh yes, I want to love her and I do.

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Annunciation
++++ (after Lynn Emmanuel)
+++++++ for Robert

He wants to be born.
So first he enters the dream of the woman
a doctor has told will never conceive.

He lets himself in through the gate
of her sleeping brain
during a hard snow
in late November.

He give himself eyes and hair like hers,
wraps himself in thick fleece, his fingers curving
over the hem, like a paws of a burrowing mammal.

She wakes with the dream of him still clinging,
I’ve birthed a back-eyed baby boy, I’ve carried him
up the aisle of the church to the baptismal font.

She goes to the window where slantwise
snow erases the houses across the street.
Only a curbside lamp on its iron stalk breaks through,
++++ a yellow clot in the boreal blur.

After she has laid aside the dream or forgotten it,
he enters her body sometime in January.
His arrival ignites engines and fires up turbines

with power unknown to her, making her whole
being a construction zone for the laying of foundations,
the framing of the many rooms of his evolving body.

In April, cornerstone and beam well set and level,
he shows her his brain and spine, a string of perfect lights
blinking the in the midnight sky of the sonogram.

The doctor is speechless. But the woman
rehearses the names of her beloved living and dead.
She will pick one of them.

She watches the tiny heart strobe in its cage.
Beacon of what is coming in October.
A swaddling blanket. A christening.

Maria Rouphail
from All the Way to China, Finishing Line Press, © 2022

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One line echoes in each poem I read in Maria Rouphail’s collection: Even then, / I could not say you did not love me. All the Way to China is a conversation between daughter and mother that spans decades, even generations. Many different speakers inhabit the poems, in many places and circumstances, but the voice of daughter/mother is audible in each, even if only as a whisper. Through harsh treatments, neglect, destructive choices, and pain that whisper of love still works to keep itself alive.

Love is work. In one of Fred Chappell’s novels, a youngster asks his old grandfather how is it possible that he and grandmother have managed to stay married for so many years. The old guy’s answer? “You don’t leave, and you don’t die.” In Maria’s poems, leaving is a frequent threat and dying too soon is a reality, but the magical work of poetry allows the dialogue to continue in spite of, maybe even because of, mortality. Telling a story allows it to discover its meaning. Telling a hard and painful story allows it to discover new meaning that just may open a door to healing.

The final two poems in the book bring meaning and healing forward and invited me to turn back to the first page and read the cycle again: Laudate Omnes (in praise of everything), and Mother and Daughter, Two Voices – III, Daughter. Yes, this collection is the work of love.

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Laudates Omnes
++++++(for Asher, young grandson)

Let’s talk
to the bees.

++++++Let’s say

Ladies, thank you
each and all

for coming this day
to the hyssop and bergamot.

Thank you
for diving

into the boggy throats
of pale blue sage.

Thank you
for letting sticky

pollen crawl
up your hairy legs.

Thank you
for the sweet spit of the hive.

Now to the trees turn and say,
Brothers,

I don’t know all your name
or what families you belong to,

but you over there,
tall and handsome with your spiky green:

if you and I were lone survivors
of a meteorological catastrophe,

I’d live with you.
I’d hole up under your branches.

Leaves and rain
would be our food and drink each day.

Now let’s say thanks and thanks and thanks
for the hive’s honeyed paradise,

for meadows of thick-maned mares
drowsing with their foals,

for bees, horses, and trees,
ocean, plains, and the sky.

Let’s say thanks
for the darkness between stars

which is not an emptiness,
but a rookery

where God dreams us.
And if we found ourselves

on a comet flying
beyond Pluto’s orbit,

even there we would
be not separate and alone,

but we would be
as now we are

in the heart of things,
the very heart.

Maria Rouphail
from All the Way to China, Finishing Line Press, © 2022

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Margie’s Daughter Talks Back

Wood. Shell. Bone. Buttons
in every size and color your mother saved for mending.

You, too, saved them,
in the round cookie tin on a high shelf.
Rainy days, and you’d take it down
and we’d remember
buttons from faded summer dresses,
buttons from coats returned from war,
buttons with bits of garments still clinging,
flesh and tendon of them. Red grosgrain,
shock of silver wedding silk,
fingers of fragrance still clinging.
Attar of rose and vetiver still clinging.
Heft and pour, the cascading clack and clatter
of buttons, like coins or pretend jewels.

You, too, loved them.
You and I together breathed the old secrets hanging
like the kitchen smells in that Bronx apartment.
Buttons from a man’s flannel before zippers were.
Your father’s, you said. And the blue bruise
your mother tried to hide with a lock of hair when
you, looking, and in your small voice, asked,
What happened to your eye, Mama?
as she reattached the right arm of your school sweater.
In the next room the bleats of a baby boy,
and a darkness you hoisted onto your twelve-year-old hip
and hauled through the rest of your life.
Hauled it into my life, too.

Would you believe me if I told you?
I have survived the winter.
Here is the faith I’ve entered with myself,
rule, rite, and rigor of it:
I will not belong to whatever happens to me.
It’s OK to say these things.

Maria Rouphail
from All the Way to China, Finishing Line Press, © 2022

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2019-02-09 Doughton Park Tree

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Poetry Submission Calendar – January, 2023

January 23, 2023 by GriffinPoetry

Poetry Submissions Calendar – UPDATE JANUARY, 2023

Placing yourself at the mercy of the editors, are you?! In 2015 I originally posted a table I use to keep track of when and where to submit poems for publication. Not to say one thrives on rejection, but the possibility of the occassional favorable comment from an editor, not to mention an acceptance, do nourish one’s motivation.

Here is the most recent update:

……….. Poetry Submissions Calendar – PDF file ……….

Since my last posted update in August, 2022, I’ve added another 20+ entries and corrected dozens, including sites no longer accepting submissions. There are currently 278 journals and contests listed.

.     .     .     .     .     .     .

Here’s how I use the calendar:

It’s arrayed by month – look down the column to see what journals and sources are open for submissions right now!

Subscription Calendar Screen Shot: January, 2023 —-CLICK TO ENLARGE

Each row includes the web address – be sure to check before you submit, because requirements may have changed since I last updated!

The row also includes other information such as:

Is this an online only publication ?
Do they accept simultaneous submissions?
Should your submission be a single document?
What format files do they accept?

There are more instructions on the table itself. Feel free to print it out. And I would really appreciate it if you notify me of any errors or suggested changes!

In particular, if you have journals to which you’ve enjoyed submitting I can add them to the table! Please send me the details, especially the web address!

I will try to post an updated table two or three times a year and whenever I have made significant additions and corrections to the table. And . . . scroll all the way to the end of the document for extra tidbits, awards for most rapid response, and a new list of sites accepting art and photo submissions.

Here’s the original post from 2015 with a little musing about rejection:

https://griffinpoetry.com/2015/08/31/editors-mercy-part-2/

.     .     .     .     .     .     .

Enjoy!

And if
++++++you find this useful . . .
++++++you discover errors . . .
++++++you would prefer to have me email you a .PDF . . .

. . . please contact me at comments@griffinpoetry.com

THANKS!  — BILL GRIFFIN

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Never Come Down

January 20, 2023 by GriffinPoetry

[with 3 poems by Terry Blackhawk]

Monty and I are trying some new knots, big husky knots, and we’re pretty sure we have it right this time. The stalwart little paratrooper I got for Christmas, his broad red and white plastic parachute and the web of thin strings that fix to his shoulders – they just won’t hold together. Each time we fold the chute just so, roll the trooper carefully so nothing tangles, throw it as hard and as high as we can, but the lines come loose as soon as the plastic banner deploys. Our man has plummeted to his death over and over.

It’s 1965. I’ve only been living in Wilmington, Delaware for a few months; the heritage of where I moved from to get here is firmly affixed in the nickname all the other sixth graders have given me – “Memphis.” My new school might as well be Mars Colony A, so distant it seems from Colonial Elementary. I have four different teachers, most of them are men, and they seem determined to require a boy to think. On this final afternoon of winter break, Monty and I are determined to have our last hour of fun.

The breeze has picked up. Most of the snow has melted but our hands are red and chapped – you can’t tie knots with gloves on. We pull the last string tight, tighter, fold and roll, and we’re ready. I hold the soldier like a grenade, lean back, and lob him straight up with a grunt. At the peak of its arc the little package unrolls; red and white unfurls and fills with evening’s breath. The knots hold.

And the wind takes our paratrooper higher and higher into the east.

Monty and I give chase through backyards and down long sidewalks in our housing development. The parachute dims and shrinks in the distance. We run until our sides ache and the brave soldier is out of sight. Gone. We stop, gasping, and stare into the lowering dusk as lights blink on in windows around us.

I imagine my little man has crossed the Delaware River, surprising people who happen to look up from the railroad yards, the factories and warehouses. He holds his lines tight; he swings and sways. Catching the last light from that high vantage, now he can see the Atlantic. I imagine him never coming down.

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The Woodcock

Weary of the daily terror I turn
to the mystic body of the bird. A woodcock
I found crackling the twigs and ivy,
barely escaped from a cat’s clumsy claws.
I feared for the odd angle of its wing,
the surprised flopping it made there,
but I did not fear the extreme length
of its beak or the eyes popping diametrically
on either side of its head. I loved the feathers’
deckled edges and the light weight it made
as I scooped it up and put it, limpsy and weak,
into an old canvas book bag, and when I
released it from that soft safe space
some time later, out on Belle Isle, I missed it
at once, as one would miss a friend.
It whirred straight up, explosively,
toward freedom on the other side of the river,
its pulse now gone from my hands.

Terry Blackhawk
from One Less River, Mayapple Press, Woodstock NY, © 2019 Terry Blackhawk

note: “samples Song of Myself, 10, in which the speaker imagines succoring a runaway slave”

❦ ❦ ❦

Sometimes a knot is so twisted and curlicued you can’t make out whether it’s one string or a handful, much less how it all connects. Let’s see, Catherine Carter told me about Katherine Wakefield’s book, which led me to Patricia Hooper, who inspired me to read Terry Blackhawk. Or maybe the lines snake in and out along different paths; maybe I’m leaving out a thread here and there, most likely it goes back way farther even than that. I know, however, that I can count on this – the connections stretch and extend and I’ve not yet reached the end.

Such a warp and weft Terry threads through her book, One Less River. The Detroit River, subtropical shorelines, paths through dunes and forest, paths through myth and memory – the poems take us someplace new with each turning page. But despite shadows and storms these poems don’t cast us alone into dark landscapes. There is light. Light rises from the companionship of solid friends like Whitman and Dickinson, from companionable invitations to partake and be filled of rich intent and novel images. It is possible to wander through this book and be surprised and also reassured. The path will definitely challenge, because living is a challenge and preserving our world is a challenge. At the end we may discover that we are all tied together a little more closely. Our knots are not fetters but the shared bonds of humanness.

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The Extinct Fresh Water Mussels of the Detroit River
+++++++++++++++ for Kathryne Lindberg (1951-2010)

These are gone: the deer-toe maple leaf, the fat
mucket, the snuffbox, the rainbow shell. Here, still,

the rusted manhole cover and the chipping paint,
the lights and arches of the elegant bridge,

all coated no doubt then in ice. Here the breeze,
here the freighters but not the car. Quiet as it’s kept,

it’s no secret the keys were left in the ignition.

Absence makes the fond heart wander, the mind
meander, the river to swallow its flow –

the self-same river, the self-same self, even the one
that knew better, the self that knew better

than to pick up a phony ten-dollar bill folded
to disguise some evangelical come-hither.

Com hither, said the bridge.

Little earwig mussel, pimpleback, northern riffle shell,
something lacy yet along the rim.

In the print gallery a dry-point fox in outline
(“Running Fox,” R. Sintemi, Germany, 1944) floats
as if on the surface of a river, water swelling upward
on the verge of breaking up its lines –

Did you float, dear bat-out-of-hell, dear gnashing teeth –
the pointed ears, the flowing tail outlined on water not water,

on paper not paper, on the not-water before there only was
water, where we are floating now, as over a great uncertainty,
a mirroring surface that hides as much as it reveals.

No more rayed bean, purple warty back, O fragile paper shell –
Where was the artist in 1944? What did he do in 1939?

You would have wanted to know.

Terry Blackhawk
from One Less River, Mayapple Press, Woodstock NY, © 2019 Terry Blackhawk

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Again, the Moon

And now the moon, its vitreous pour
so quickly come again
moonstruck moon melon moon

I drive the unfamiliar
town, going where Siri tells me
through unlit streets

I cannot dial back to another
moon, although there have been many –
moons of loss, lists, listing oh the self-
consciousness of the moon

Look at the moon in the sky,
not the one in the lake, says Rumi
The pleasures of heaven are with me
and the pains of hell are with me, says Whitman

So which is the lake and which
the sky? With a moon this bright
I cannot find the stars.

Terry Blackhawk
from One Less River, Mayapple Press, Woodstock NY, © 2019 Terry Blackhawk

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Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

New

January 13, 2023 by GriffinPoetry

[with 3 poems by Katherine Soniat]

This morning is the thirteenth day of the first month in the Gregorian calendar. Outside my window the sunlight is thin and pale and all the birds wear their winter flannels. New Year, you say? Seems pretty frayed and achy this morning. Like me.

Not every culture celebrates the new year in the depths of Winter. Chinese New Year, based on a lunisolar calender, arrives with the new moon between January 21 and February 20. In much of Asia this timing includes the first glimmers of Spring, so New Year is a celebration of new growth and new arrivals. In 2023 that date is January 22.

The Islamic calendar is strictly lunar; the new year commemorates the Hijrah, the migration of Mohammed from Mecca to Medina (year 622 in the Gregorian). This can fall in any season of the year; for 2023 it’s Summer, July 19.

Rosh Hashanah (“head of the year”) is the Jewish New Year. By tradition this is the anniversary of the creation of Adam and Eve. It is celebrated 163 days after first day of Passover at the new moon closest to the Autumn equinox, between Sept 5 and Oct 5. For 2023 that’s September 15.

In every season, a new year. God’s course is one eternal round. Gray, dormant, stuporous, on hold, nothing happening you say? Linda and I enjoy celebrating the New Year with the arrival of our NC Wildlife Federation Journal. On the back page of every issue is a seasonal almanac, “Jeff Beane’s Guide to Natural North Carolina.” Just a sampling –

Dec 25 – Christmas fern, running-cedar, mistletoe — plenty of GREEN
Dec 28 – Winter holly and yaupon berries are RIPE AND READY
Jan 2 – hardy butterflies out & about on warm afternoons:
+++++++++ buckeye, fritillary, red admiral
Jan 7 – Bald Eagles are laying eggs
Jan 12 – Great Horned Owls nesting and hooting up a storm

And my favorite, on my birth date:

Feb 11 – Gray squirrels are having babies

Life goes on. Time is not standing still. The year is no straight line but a circle always new.

❦ ❦ ❦

For Sweet Dreams

Crimson with rash, I’m in bed in a hotel, my box of blue
capsules for sleep labeled: por sueños, dulce y tranquilos

beside me. Swallowing three with red wine, I doze off
to wander from door to door calling – I’m here for sweet dreams –

until a figure ushers me into the room where you’re dying. Winter here,
embers smolder in the grate. The scarlet rug with a bear woven at its center
covers you, almost up to the eyes – as if I need a reminder in this room with your
white metal bed on wheels.

Again, I insist that I’ve come only for dreams, knowing that when you’re gone,
part of our darkness will be complete.

From down the hall comes the smell of stew, that domestic porridge,
and I want you, the father of my children, not to die. I promise to stay on the path
with our basket of food as slowly you rise from bed

to hold me from behind. With your hands on my stomach, you say
we’re headed home, and this time it feels right to be going, sundown
in a gold winter day.
++++ ++++ ++++ Then, as if doused,

++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ that dream goes black,

++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ blank –

++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ my basket stone-heavy
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ and empty.

Katherine Soniat
from Polishing the Glass Storm, Louisiana State University Press, © 2023 Katherine Soniat

 

❦ ❦ ❦

I’ve been stretched on the couch for an hour reading Polishing the Glass Storm. I close my eyes. Pale lights, words with subtle breath, stalking figures fourstep slowly. They don’t make sense – they are sense. But now I’ve opened my eyes and they release my hands and the dance moves elsewhere. On and back.

Katherine Soniat’s poem sequence is the birthing place of memory, dreams, archetype. Time is fluid; memory shifts, now deceitful, now suddenly tangible. The speaker is child and mother, daughter to the dying, confessor, lover. The poems are conversations with the speechless, conversations of the soul with those living and those past living. Katherine recommends reading each section and its poems in sequence so that context can dissolve and reassemble. The images weave and drift; from an expressionistic landscape emerges the story of a life.

This is a challenging collection but worth the sojourn, the journey. From one comment on the cover: Soniat has the audacity to create a mythic language for the soul’s adventure that is utterly unguaranteed, adamantly open to the unknown . . . . More than a sequence, this is a cycle, a turning into and around. No straight line but a circle always new.

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In Bed at Night

In my mother’s house there was no heart.
In my mother’s heart she was always looking
for a home.
++++ ++++ I threaded stories of her, ones neither
of us had heard. Soft ones with feathers
at the bottom.

When my son had a daughter, she came into this blueness
knowing details with a past.

In bed at night playing puppets with the covers, she had
the smallest one whisper, You know, there’s so much sadness in this world.
She was three, and I almost didn’t hear that.

It was dark in the room, and inside her head. ++++ She thought in stride
with nothing — humped-up sheet, her cave in a city on earth
that must might go away.

Katherine Soniat
from Polishing the Glass Storm, Louisiana State University Press, © 2023 Katherine Soniat

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Place Where the Wind is Born

My promise is to stay by the bed, one finger tracing
his forehead into a fountain – up and out of the hospice,
over the garden wall.

He stays and I stay, the loping past, tail to mouth,
circles the room. Feeding. Time twisted about, only hours
left to count forward.
++++ ++++ ++++ Sound disappears. His vocal cords
sigh a bit – the syllabics of this life, done.

Silence enters every muscle. Visceral stillness. His lungs keep
breathing. Little motion but mine that afternoon in the shade-slated
room, the Dalai Lama’s chant playing by another sickbed. The fan
moves back and forth, as I blow breath on him.

He receives me like a sail.
Old Fudo, I tell him, purrs at this feet, the ocean vast and clear –
the tiller in his hand. In a strange, fierce tongue I speak
of what is no more.

Not much to let go – diminished relic of a man, something Franciscan
and medieval about him. ++++ ++++ By the window Buddha sits

with a load on his jade back.

Katherine Soniat
from Polishing the Glass Storm, Louisiana State University Press, © 2023 Katherine Soniat

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2020-03-07 Doughton Park Tree

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments »

Walking Through

January 6, 2023 by GriffinPoetry

[with 3 poems by Scott Owens]

. . . walls that don’t line up, some bricks
uneven, some not quite the right size,
and that’s what the mortar’s for,
the gray areas of tolerance,
forgiveness, understanding,
empathetic appreciation of things
being left imperfect, only as good
as we can stand to make them be.
+++++++ from Reclamation

E&A Nature Trail, Elkin rec center, Mountains-to-Sea, Forest Bathing – none of these trails today. Instead Mom and Dad and I walk their customary course behind the townhouse, traversing maybe 200 meters of blacktop. They tap their canes on the far curb to mark the first turnaround; it’s a little uphill and a lot slower approaching the second turn but then all downhill back to their doorway. Some days we keep going a little farther. This afternoon we feel like it’s been enough.

And why do we spend 45 minutes on our little trek, 3 or 4 careful steps per meter? Just needing the exercise? A breath of fresh air? Halfway through our circuit, Maggie’s owner appears and drops her leash, little fluffdog who gallops to Dad because she knows he always carries biscuits in his pockets. Norris stops to share the latest (oldest) joke. Here’s Peggy to check on how Mom and Dad made it through family travels over New Year’s (and to say Hi to this particular family person still staying with them tonight). Wave at Julia who’s expecting company for supper, wave at the FEDEX guy. Comment on all the little gardens behind each townhouse – Nice wreath! Is that a new bench?

This slow-gaited noticeably-hunched deliberate meander is the mortar of Mom and Dad’s days. These few folks they greet, and never overlook the dogs, are their neighborhood. “I’m going to get better, I’m going to walk farther,” says Dad, but even this afternoon it no doubt strengthens him just as much to hear, “I just can’t believe you’re 96.” Acceptance, understanding, empathy for the relentlessness of aging and decline – these hold the chipped, uneven bricks together. Let’s take another walk tomorrow, no matter how meager, no matter how slow.

And you can keep an eye out with me – I have yet to catch Dad slipping those dog biscuits into his pocket.

❦ ❦ ❦

Common Ground

My brother has never kept a single lake,
a single lost grave to himself.
Always he calls, then waits until I
can come, lets me lead the way,
find it like the first time,
proclaiming the names I know, the shapes
of bird and stone, cloud and tree.

Once in the same day I saw
a kestrel, a mantis, an arrowhead
and took it as a sign, though since
I have seen each in their own days
and miles away from each other.

I do not believe God will bend
to kiss this mouth. I do not believe
the wine will turn to blood. But something
knows the moment of sunflower,
the time of crow’s open wing,
the span of moss growing on rock,
and water washing it away.

In the pictures I remember, there is you
letting me stand on the fallen tree
as if it were mine. There is you
letting my arm rest on top of yours
around our mother. There is you
lifting me up to the limb I couldn’t reach.

This is the faith I’ve wanted, to know
that even now we are capable of such
sacrifice, such willingness to love.

Scott Owens
from Prepositional, New and Selected Poems, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, © 2022 Scott Owens.

❦ ❦ ❦

Scott Owens travels through life in this solid, substantial collection of poems, Prepositional. He is coming from it, being of it, finding its deep inside and its dark under, discovering its thrall over and above. And as Scott sees through and into life, he invites us to accompany, to courageously push things forward.

As the newest in a long line of books from a prolific poet, this collection yet seems to be an inflection, an exhalation of breath long held. These poems walked a long way to take their seats here. Some are new but all have been selected to become new. Or maybe it’s their relationships to each other that have grown new, as Scott explains in 13 Ways of Prepositions: every way a squirrel can be / in relation to a tree. These are poems about poetry, its art, its craft, but more so the arising of something greater out of something lesser. These are poems about students and teaching and being a student; these are poems about family ties in every Venn you can imagine. All these poems have gathered here, though, for a common purpose: to water the seeds of relationship; to somehow connect with each other and with you and me, their readers.

When I finished the last poem and laid the book down, this is the reverberation I still heard ringing in my mind: “The world is a wonderful place. You are a wonderful person. I’d like the two of us to sit down and share something of these two wonderful facts.”

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Words and What They Say

Some say you can’t tell anything
from the language that people use,
that Eskimos in fact have no
more words for snow than we,
nor Anglo-Saxons more
for cut, stab, thrust,
and the fact that our words for animals
when we eat them, beef, pork,
poultry, all come from French
doesn’t prove they’re better
cooks or bigger carnivores,
any more than 23 acronyms
for laughter shows that texting
teens just want to have fun,
but when I hear my carful of 2nd graders
from Sandy Ford Montessori School
making up names for the sun,
and the moon, and the stars that only
come out when you’re camping and the fire
goes out, and you turn off your flashlights
while our mother holds you in her arms,
I can’t help but believe
that not only is there hope for us all
but that the hope we have
is strongest when we find a way
to put it into words.

Scott Owens
from Prepositional, New and Selected Poems, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, © 2022 Scott Owens.

 

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Of

Poetry is contrary to productivity.
Poetry encourages idleness.
Poetry stands at the window
because it is curious about the flowers,
this flower with its yellow fringed face
around its one brown eye.
Poetry stands at the window
because it is curious about the trees,
this tree with heart-shaped leaves,
some turning yellow in the first
days of fall, some fallen off and still
the limbs reaching up to the sky.
Poetry stands at the window
because it is curious about the sky,
how it got there, where it goes,
what it’s like where it ends.
Poetry wants the window down.
Poetry walks back and forth
through a field going nowhere.
Poetry thinks it’s okay to look
at the same sky day after day,
sometimes minutes at a time,
sometimes with no other purpose
but remembering blue.

Poetry refuses to follow the rules
of efficiency: get in line,
speak only when spoken to,
never say anything that would embarrass your mother.

The first poem ever written was a drum.
The first poem ever written was a foot
tapping on the side of the crib.
The first poem ever written was a rope
slapping the red clay playground
of William Blake Elementary School.

It is not necessary for poetry
to be beautiful
though sometimes it is.
It is not required of poetry
that it be profound
though it rarely closes its eyes.
It is not expected that the face
of poetry be etched with tears,
the hair dripping with sweat,
the mouth expressing awe.
Poetry owes nothing to anyone.

Still, poetry wakes up each morning,
walks to the edge of the world
and jumps, believing one time
it will fly, believing one time
the dive will not end, believing one time
an answer will rise from somewhere beyond.

Scott Owens
from Prepositional, New and Selected Poems, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, © 2022 Scott Owens.

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Redhawk Publications; The Catawba Valley Community College Press;
2550 US Hwy 709 SE; Hickory, NC 28602.
Prepositional, New and Selected Poems by Scott Owens.

❦ ❦ ❦

Posted in family, Imagery, Photography, poetry | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 13 Comments »

A Parting Glass

December 30, 2022 by GriffinPoetry

[with 3 poems by Brad Strahan]

Though faces fade as years fly past
I raise to you this parting glass.

What shall we keep when the house has shed its bustle and the clock makes known its ticking from the next room? Bright paper discarded, plates stacked, car doors slammed as farewells spiral out into the cold, biting, stark? What shall we keep when not presents but this present settles itself again into the chair beside us, all its remarks past uttering?

My hands in the suds, Linda passes me crockery and remarks, “I wonder what the next year will be like.” “Different from this one,” I say without thinking, but then I start the tally. What gloom do I hope will not be repeated and how shall I number the gathering portents that threaten? Whoa, there. Why does it slip in so easily, no effort at all, this brooding on past troubles and fretting about some foreboding future yet unseen?

Share in the closing refrain from the Irish folk song, “The Parting Glass”:

But since it has so ought to be
By a time to rise and a time to fall
Come fill to me the parting glass
Good night and joy be with you all!

I have no resolutions; so little of this past year seems resolved. I have responsibilities and unfulfilled tasks and hovering demons aplenty, but let us pause a moment in this rare quietude to let the little mice of joy creep in from the corners. A young girl’s laughter, a little boy’s raised eyebrows, an afternoon walk with a teenager grown suddenly voluble, a recollection shared with a beloved companion – there is time enough to fall, time enough to mourn, but time as well for a smile if we but make it so. What we keep and what we carry – may they rest light upon our shoulders tomorrow.

❦ ❦ ❦

What Shall We Keep?
(a moment in Ireland, where the world ends)

And the answer that comes back
is the wind off the Irish sea.
Not to be, not to see,
beyond understanding.

This damaged flesh we hold,
a fortress against nothing,
like the ruined Viking towers;
exclamations left
after the words are erased.

Should we care what wind blows
our dust into tomorrow?
Could we feel the rain
that washes clean the green face
of this unsceptred isle?

Would we matter when
even our names are washed
clean as the stones in those
abandoned churchyards?

Somehow, blessed between green
and gray; sometime, bound between
the blaze of Fall and white Winter
I have loved you and maybe
that is answer enough.

Bradley R. Strahan
from A Parting Glass, BrickHouse Books, Baltimore, MD; © 2014 Bradley R. Strahan

plant, trail

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“A remembrance of Ireland” is how Brad Strahan describes A Parting Glass, his collection inspired by a year in Mallow, County Cork. His wife Shirley had “filled the long-vacant post of organist” and in addition to the congregation of St. James, Church of Ireland, they were welcomed into the community of poets. These fourteen poems are themselves a spare congregation, the lines spare, reverent, musing, and infused with the philosophy of rain-washed green island and mossed stones in ancient churchyards.

Fitting and more than fitting are these poems for the final few days of another roiling storm-tossed year. These are the days when we plant our feet and hope to feel what anchors us to the turf before the next year launches forth, uncertain, yes, but bright and hopeful for what it may discover. This is the reckoning, the nod of acquiescence when my grandson calls out to me, “Old man!”, the acceptance that a new year is no newer than any day which begins with taking another breath.

Read these poems in the warm companionship of ghosts that welcome your presence. Read and find company with the distant traveler and the warm hearth. With days of green and gray passed, passing, yet to pass. Raise your glass, all of us raise our glasses to the joy that may find each one.

❦ ❦ ❦

Hymn

Winter, solid to the bone,
melts in the music.
Colored light pearls
the faces in the wooden pews.

The news, good or bad,
has no foothold here.
The cold rain and snow
vanish in a flame of song.

Here we robe our tarnish
in vestments of harmony:
snow crystal bells
and a storm of organ-sound.

Here we are, not what we are
but what we would be,
notes on a purer staff,
leaning hard from brass to gold.

Bradley R. Strahan
from A Parting Glass, BrickHouse Books, Baltimore, MD; © 2014 Bradley R. Strahan

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A Book of Common Prayer
(St. James Church, Mallow)

Let me not for the flowers
by the altar placed.

Let me not for the windows
that gleam with grace.

Let me not for the music,
simple voices raised.

Let me still recall
the goodness that amazed

though nothing follows
being in this state of grace:

no more smiles, no more roses
and none there to embrace.

Bradley R. Strahan
from A Parting Glass, BrickHouse Books, Baltimore, MD; © 2014 Bradley R. Strahan

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NOTE: if you would like to purchase a copy of A Parting Glass from Bradley Strahan, please comment on this post or email me at comments@griffinpoetry.com.
++++++++++++++++++++++ Thanks! — Bill

 

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2017-03-06a Doughton Park Tree

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry | Tagged , , , , , , | 8 Comments »

A Morning to Astonish

December 25, 2022 by GriffinPoetry

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

 

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Let the Stable Still Astonish

Let the stable still astonish:
Straw-dirt floor, dull eyes,
Dusty flanks of donkeys, oxen;
Crumbling, crooked walls;
No bed to carry that pain,
And then, the child,
Rag-wrapped, laid to cry
In a trough.

Who would have chosen this?
Who would have said: “Yes,
Let the God of all the heavens and earth
be born here, in this place.” ?

Who but the same God
Who stands in the darker, fouler rooms of our hearts
and says, “Yes, let the God
of Heaven and Earth
be born here —-

in this place.”

Leslie Leyland Fields

❧ ❧ ❧

from
The 2022 Elkin Community Chorus
60th Anniversary Christmas Concert
Tonya Smith Directing
Lillie Sawyers – Alto Solo
Amy Johnson – Piano
Sylvia Grace Smith – Cello

 

Let the Stable Still Astonish
composed by Dan Forrest, lyrics Leslie Leyland Fields

[Digitally recorded on December 4, 2022,
First Baptist Church of Elkin, North Carolina
by John Rees, GodsChild Records, Mt. Airy, NC
Digitally mastered and distributed by John Williams,
Engineer, Douglasville, GA]

 

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MERRY CHRISTMAS!

❧ ❧ ❧

 

 

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2016-10-17b Doughton Park Tree

Posted in Christian themes, family, Imagery, music, Photography | Tagged , , , , , | 12 Comments »

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