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Posts Tagged ‘Debra Kaufman’

Poetry and Earth – Clay

Posted in Ecopoetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on April 24, 2026| 4 Comments »

 . 
[ poems by Robert Hass, Debra Kaufman, Hilda Downer, 
Richard Wilbur, Paul Karnowski ]
 . 
The Image
 . 
The child brought blue clay from the creek
and the woman made two figures: a lady and a deer.
At that season deer came down from the mountain
and fed quietly in the redwood canyons.
The woman and the child regarded the figure of the lady,
the crude roundnesses, the grace, the coloring like shadow.
They were not sure where she came from,
except the child’s fetching and the woman’s hands
and the lead-blue clay of the creek
where the deer sometimes showed themselves at sundown.
 . 
Robert Hass
selected by Debra Kaufman
 . 
I love how this poem speaks to the creative spirit and how the basic elements of the earth inspire and sustain us. There is here a delicate, a reverent, interdependence. Had the creek and earth not made the clay, had the child not brought the clay to the woman, had the deer not visited the creek, had the poet not observed the wonder of it all, the spark that inspired the poet would not exist, and we would not have this poem. I admire the brevity and apparent simplicity of the poem, knowing that the poem, like the clay, had been worked over so that every line (as every curve of the figure) is a work of art. A gift. A wonder.
— Debra
 . 
❀
 . 
Off-White
 . 
This Sunday the sky is an eerie
off-white, as if dawn began rising,
then stood still, reluctant to let
the day begin. And no wonder.
I read of collapsing buildings,
 .      . 
people scurrying for shelter,
burning oil fields, smoke and ash
roiling toward heaven. But heaven
refuses our cruelty:
The clouds do not budge.
 . 
I believe, we used to recite,
in the Holy Spirit, and although I could
only picture it as a tattered cloud,
I did believe, as easily as I believed
in God, in America, hand over heart.
 . 
To believe made my small heart soar.
I’d skip home singing This Little Light of Mine.
I had a crush on Jesus, with his
soft brown eyes, who said, Be ye kind
and Suffer the children to come unto me.
 . 
The clouds begin to shred. Any prayer
I might offer dissolves on my tongue.
My body says time to move.
Today, the second day of spring,
will be uncommonly hot.
 . 
Debra Kaufman
 . 
 . 
❀ ✿ ✾ ❁
 . 
— Drill, Baby, Drill
 . 
Drill because the rich get richer
and the rest get drilled.
 . 
Drill us in your own image
a colander that can’t hold water,
farms caving in drained sink holes beneath.
Drill until amalgams turn our teeth grey,
our bones fracked and fractured.
 . 
Drill it in
that billionaires are a superior race
because we still don’t get it.
Drill our skulls into frontal lobotomies,
milling our brains with the inane premise
that veterans don’t deserve healthcare
and the elderly don’t deserve
funds they worked for.
 . 
We know there are more than the two genders
of white male and Stepford wife.
 . 
Drill it into normalcy—
the military unleashed on its own people,
the masked orange taco gestapo
as they go from field to field,
door to door.
 . 
Then, drill some more.
Put us on mute—
multimedia censorship.
Undermine libraries and public schools.
We already knew history repeats itself—
on two sides of the penny bitcoin.
The indigenous, forbidden to speak their language,
kept their power alive behind closed doors.
The enslaved, not allowed to read or write,
followed the signs sewn into quilt patterns.
Monarchs and oligarchs,
books burning, bullets drilling
in revolution, civil war, world war—
we will find another way, a better way.
Erase history if you can.
Erase the mentally ill, the homeless,
the poor, the disabled, the elderly,
those on a spectrum,
those bona fide with a genius IQ,
the artists, the writers, musicians
except for an American band
to play for your disgusting dance
like that of a tick before
jumping on its prey.
Oh, what a day
for supporters who hate melatonin
more than felons and pedophiles!
 . 
DOGE data drilling might locate
and make us disappear,
but memory only fosters our courage.
We will remember.
We will not be remembered for our fear.
What more will you be remembered for?
 . 
Drill until you hit rock bottom,
blaming Canada for Fentanyl.
Drill until you come out in China.
Drill until you try to buy
a Nobel Peace Prize
by trading Alaska to Russia
for an interim cease fire
during your term.
Drill and chisel
a moonscape across Earth
to better view your golf courses
and Gaza Resort
safely from your starship
in outer space,
while we get grilled.
 . 
Your fake resuscitation
with a syringe of adrenaline
drilled into the heart of Appalachia.
X marks the rot
where oil and coal
are still dead.
 . 
Drill until the bowels of Appalachia erode
creeks and rivers with toxic sludge.
Deforest the temperate rain forest
by way of tropical hurricane from climate change.
 . 
We already learned from coal mine strikes
and strategic planning at Highlander
how to organize—
protest songs on standby,
“Which side are you on?”
When you start deporting our people,
“We shall not be moved.”
 . 
Spill out Bibles that spell out
the commandments you break,
that the meek shall inherit the Earth.
Go ahead. Drill, Baby, drill.
We see clearly still—
through each hole
drilled long ago into these lands
and through Christ’s hands.
 . 
Those first four years
were just a drill.
 . 
This is not a Drill.
I repeat. This is not a Drill:
 . 
children under school desks,
hands covering heads.
Hands off what’s in and out of their heads!
From redwood forests to blue ridge mountains,
children too hungry to learn,
hands off Head Start,
14-year-old girls,
and countless young women.
You can no longer drill.
 . 
Hilda Downer, High Country Poet Laureate
 . 
Joseph Bathanti passed your call onto me as he knows I am Appalachian through and through. I live about 50 miles from where I grew up beside the oldest mica mines in the world. Mitchell County is mineral laden, and now threatened by AI’s demand. When I wrote this poem, I was only thinking about the greed behind the use of fossil fuels, decimating the environment, and denying global warming. Now, the demon is sniffing at the windows of my home. Thank you for considering this highly political poem I read at the first Hands Off Rally in my town of Boone, NC. However, I am sure you might be expecting something more like the second poem I am sending you, Mother Tree.
— Hilda
 . 
✾
 . 
Mother Tree
The way the Mother Tree cares for the forest
makes me ashamed of selfish humans.
The tall Mother Tree can harvest more sun
though holes leak light from her leaf-knit shawl
to showcase a pink lady’s-slipper here
or pat a moss draped root there.
Through phototropism and photosynthesis,
she toils harder than the rest
to produce excess carbon and sugar
for sharing not only with her saplings
but also with other species,
both deciduous and conifer.
She can recognize her own kin
but serves the whole community.
Her roots spread far, symbiotic with fungi
that network with other trees.
If one is sick, she sends healing nutrients.
If one is in danger, she warns them all.
Loggers that cut the big trees
allow frail ones to grow,
leaving the forest to pine
without diversity.
Think of the old growth forest
where the Mother Tree lay dying.
Think of the roads cut through.
Just one house is built,
and gone is the sharp, dark smell of black walnut.
Gone is the wizened Carolina hemlock, twisted at its base.
Think of the trees felled,
replaced by utility poles
for communication far inferior
to the Mother Tree’s instinctive telepathy.
I think of my own mother, gone now,
her mind gone long before.
What traditions still bind us?
After my grandmother passed,
aunts, uncles, and cousins no longer met in Bandana
for a fried chicken dinner after church
or made an apple stack cake for the Buchanan reunion
after the Decoration at Silver Chapel Church.
We all grew up playing house under the umbrella shade of laurel,
disclosing angry crawfish under creek rocks,
and plummeting from grapevine swings.
How do we recognize our kinship
or ourselves
if not in the chapel of the woods?
The entrance hugs us
with the wide-open arms of orange azalea.
Our traditions rest upon a log pew
cushioned with the clean scent of moss and musky mushrooms,
centered by autumn’s kaleidoscope;
flanked by crepuscular rays
filtered by the Mother Tree.
 . 
Hilda Downer, High Country Poet Laureate
 . 
 . 
❀ ✿ ✾ ❁
 . 
A Wood
 . 
Some would distinguish nothing here but oaks,
Proud heads conversant with the power and glory
Of heaven’s rays or heaven’s thunderstrokes,
And adumbrators to the understory,
Where, in their shade, small trees of modest leanings
Contend for light and are content with gleanings.
 . 
And yet here’s dogwood: overshadowed, small,
But not inclined to droop and count its losses,
It cranes its way to sunlight after all,
And signs the air of May with Maltese crosses.
And here’s witch hazel, that from underneath
Great vacant boughs will bloom in winter’s teeth.
 . 
Given a source of light so far away
That nothing, short or tall, comes very near it,
Would it not take a proper fool to say
That any tree has not the proper spirit?
Air, water, earth and fire are to be blended,
But no one style, I think, is recommended.
 . 
Richard Wilbur
selected by Paul Karnowski
 . 
The trees in Wilbur’s woods remind us that we all live together, and each of us, big or small, has an important role to play.
— Paul
 . 
✾
 . 
Gaze
 . 
How to spend my days,
and where to fix my gaze?
 . 
Out a wistful window,
to soar with swirling swallows,
brushing wings against
the summer sky.
 . 
Or at the misty mirror,
looking at a lump of flesh
tethered to the ground,
no feathers to be found.
 . 
Paul Karnowski
first published in Grey Sparrow Journal, January, 2026
 . 
❀ ✿ ✾ ❁
 . 
Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity.   
— Aldo Leopold
 . 
A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.     
— Aldo Leopold
 . 
Thank you for celebrating the month of April with International Earth Day (April 22) and National Poetry Month. And thank you, Readers, who have selected poems to share that connect us to our planet and each other. We will continue posting EARTH POETRY throughout the month of April – and beyond April as well, of course, since EVERY DAY is EARTH DAY!
 . 
❁
 . 
Thank you for visiting Verse and Image: 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
 . 
❀ ✿ ✾ ❁
 . 
Doughton Park Tree 2020-11-22
 . 

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Wisp

Posted in family, Imagery, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , on January 26, 2024| 12 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Debra Kaufman]
 . 
Walking Westerly, My Shadow Precedes Me
 . 
She does not hear a warning
in the wren’s song,
+++++++++ as I do,
or see the ghost moon as an omen.
 . 
She appears to have a jauntier step,
wilder hair, longer, slimmer limbs.
 . 
Perhaps she is the me
I once was –
waitress, dancer, diary keeper.
 . 
Nothing bad
has happened yet.
+++++++++ Soon
 . 
she will trail a dangerous
fragrance, be sniffed out,
tracked, pinned down.
 . 
Wind trembles the beech leaves.
The wren calls again.
 . 
I step toward the past,
she into the future
 . 
Debra Kaufman
from Outwalking the Shadow, Redhawk Press, Hickory, NC; © 2023.
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
If you believe that everything is connected;
if you believe that matter and energy are conserved (not to mention angular momentum);
if you believe that the breath you’ve just taken into your body, its oxygen reddening your corpuscles, worked its way up the hill from the great red oak not tumbled in last spring’s tornado, and that when you release it a second from now it will begin to wisp its way back down to wait for the asters you’ve sowed on wind-scoured earth;
if you believe that your body is stardust, its phosphorus and calcium and that fleck of selenium, every element which is heavier than air;
if you believe that no distance is too far and no time too long a thread to tie everything together and extend the connection,
++++++++++ then believe this:
 . 
when that wisp of a woman sitting on the couch beside your father and his baby sister, white-haired tiny flit of a woman no more substance than moonbeam, when she smiles it will light up the string of a million smiles stretching back so far that every smile since must take its cue, all the way back to the very first smile twenty-five years (less thirteen days) before you were born.
 . 
Recall those smiles you can and hold onto them — you dancing while she plays Mozart on the piano and laughs; she holding the cake while you take a deep breath to blow; beaches and playgrounds, jokes and canasta, weddings and first smiles of your own babies shared with her. Most smiles have flown to continue their cycle, petal of a flower she will notice, bug she’ll try to pick up from the carpet, a noise or a vision in some other creature’s thread of existence . . .
 . 
. . . but some precious few smiles are preserved in silver. Layers of atoms on glossy paper. Here’s one that her niece, your cousin, has just handed you, holding its connection to the others over seven decades in the bottom of a carton waiting for your gathering today. You hold it close for her to see and she smiles again.
 . 
Look! Today’s smile! When you see it, recognize its provenance, its taxonomy, its lineage and inheritance from all that have preceded it. Accept its assurance. So much lost, so much consigned to this or that flimsy drawer in the cupboard of memory (yours) and so many keys to so many drawers misplaced (hers), but still firmly by that long and winding thread as tenuous as breath connected. Every wisp connected.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The last time my mother
 . 
spoke words I heard
I saw her see me in a flash:
You’re my daughter!
We walked the hall,
a circumference
around the single rooms.
Round and round.
Each time we passed
the common room
she’d point to the Christmas lights.
 . 
On her bed lay a book
of her wedding photos.
I named the names, some small comfort.
I sang “Jacob’s Ladder”
and she smiled in that puzzled way.
 . 
I meant to rub lotion on her legs –
her skin dry, tissue-paper thin –
but they were calling her
for supper. I kissed her cheek.
She kissed my hand,
did not want to let it go.
 . 
I hoped we’d see a few sparrows
out her window, but
dark coming early, I saw only
our ghostly selves reflected there.
 . 
Debra Kaufman
from Outwalking the Shadow, Redhawk Press, Hickory, NC; © 2023.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Yet if we do not stare despair in its face
(I hear you say) how will we recognize
 . 
the silver sliver of moon
when it hangs suspended like a dream?
 . 
++++++++++ from Bearing / Witness
 . 
Moonrise this past Monday was 2:37 PM in Elkin, North Carolina, USA. Waxing gibbous, we spot her on the one clear afternoon without rain. We won’t have to worry about finding our way through the darkened house at bedtime. Light will precede us, follow us, attend us. We can’t summon the moon or assign her course; we can only watch and trust she will return. We can only recognize and be grateful.
 . 
I didn’t want to get out of bed that Monday morning. All the motivations and machinations of the preceding week – phone calls, site visits, family conferences – had cooled and dissipated. Who says energy is conserved? I sat at my desk, the to-do list accruing and scrolling in my head, not knowing how to begin. And then there was Debra Kaufman’s new book waiting patiently at the top of the pile. I opened to the first poem. The clamp on my innards released and breath returned.
 .  . 
Moon, and of course shadow, are recurring images in Outwalking the Shadow. It is no coincidence that metaphor and metamorph are nearly homologues. Images may shift their shapes and meanings, may stand in for any number of times and spaces, but moon and shadow link arms, weave a net, cast it out and draw us in. Debra does more than create contrasts. Her poems are not satisfied to simply cast light into the dark umbra of grief. Enter her lines and welcome the shadow, relive it, discover how and who it has made you. Recognize that light blinds when it glares but enlightens when it glimmers, slivers, almost ephemeral as dream.
 . 
Recognize that each of us lives with our shadow, and that even moonlight may cast one. Debra’s book is dedicated to her mother, Kathleen, and many of the poems explore her life, their life together, her final days, thereafter. Debra’s poems encompass much, much more than grieving, however. In many of her lines, I hear her speaking the very phrases I have needed to speak to my own heart. Perhaps you, too, have had mornings when you found it a burden to take even one step, when you felt empty and powerless and alone. These poems admit that. We are human and we carry our shadows. But these poems surprise themselves with sudden flashes and connections – a summoning of crows, a lesson learned, a visitation by spirits. Every time I turn another page, I discover more of what I need. Come, let us walk out together. There may still be joy if we open ourselves.
 . 
❦
 . 
More about Debra Kaufman, Outwalking the Shadow from Redhawk Press, and how to purchase HERE
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Let my heart swing open
 . 
like French doors to a garden of blowsy flowers,
saloon doors where Kitty serves shots of rye,
a screen door with a farm wife waving you in,
 . 
or let my heart be a picture window
through which I see everyone I have ever loved,
my breath steaming the glass, come in,
 . 
we’ll turn up the party lights,
show all the passersby we’re dancing,
or better yet, let’s all spill out into the street,
 . 
my heart a village music festival –
welcome teachers, firefighters, cashiers, nurses,
shysters and spinsters, salsa dancers a skateboarders,
 . 
cat lovers, detasselers, twirlers and high-steppers,
come in you scuffed shoes, rhinestones, flannels,
I’ll be a mirror reflecting all y’all’s kindness,
 . 
your clumsy moves and broken bits,
your sad patience and patient wildness,
your generosity, crankiness, haunted dreams –
 . 
I’ll be the hostess sprinkling blessings like petals,
saying, The universe is here and so are we – 
champagne for everyone!
 . 
Debra Kaufman
from Outwalking the Shadow, Redhawk Press, Hickory, NC; © 2023.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
2016-10-17a Doughton Park Tree

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Communities – Beech Gap and Debra Kaufman

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 9, 2020| 2 Comments »

[with two poems by Debra Kaufman]

Deep shade, red spruce, heavy moss – the trail switches up, cuts back, winds steadily higher. We can smell the transition, conifer tang, slow decomposition. We can feel it on our faces, in our pores, sweat cooling, wraith of mist blown up the ridge to envelope us. And we feel it somewhere deeper.

Something changes, so gradual we sense it before we know it. Daylight creeps through, one tree with toothed sun-colored leaves, then two; smell of spring and sweet flowering even at the end of autumn; witch hobble and pale mountain asters give way to dwarf goldenrod. Look, here are beech drops, flowers faded, seeds set, never green, their skinny bodies and appendages like effigies set among the trees they parasitize. We stop and breathe. Again, deeper. This is beech gap.

Leave a patch of ground alone long enough and it will grow into what it is meant to be. Its personality is in its community. Why does this beech gap persist? Its elders, Fagus grandifolia, stunted and twisted in communion with mountain maple, wood ferns, sedges – why not fir and spruce intruding? Elevation, precipitation, mountain aspect, soil pH? Centuries-old seed repository in the duff? Visitation by warblers, jays, and small mast-seeking mammals? Protection by allelopathic residues? Protection by mountain spirits?

All of these may define but don’t explain. It is the community that becomes itself: shallow spreading roots and pervasive mycelia, leaf and frond, sporangium and ovule, every one essential to the personality of place.

And you and I? We may choose how tall we stand. We choose which way we face, whether we learn from our elders, teach our children. We rest here for a few minutes and commune with this other. The silence of a ridge-crest glade: fragile or resilient? Retreat or restoration? Will we descend from the mountain and bring this peace, this purpose, into our own communities?

Beech drops, Epifagus virginiana, Orobanchaceae (Broomrape family)

 

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These two poems by Debra Kaufman speak to me of reverence and restlessness, of longing for community and the fear of isolation. Are we welcome on this earth and will we welcome others? Will we create more than we destroy?

As described on the cover of her book, God Shattered, Kaufman discovers how personal disillusionment can be a guide to finding the godly within ourselves. These poems lead us to contemplate and understand our place in this fragile world.

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Great White
An angel is nothing but a shark well-governed.
– Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Everyone carries a shadow.
The less it is embodied in the conscious self,
the blacker and denser it is.

Does a savage self always lurk
just below the surface,
on the hunt, no matter

our good intentions? Is our higher
nature ready to do battle against the dark,
harpoon at the ready?

If, as the Buddha says, there is no I,
does awareness reside
between empty spaces?

I understand so little.
But I can see Aleppo is rubble,
its people scattered;

anyone who listens can hear the cries
of girls being shuttled into brothels,
can imagine comforting someone suffering

here or half the world away.
How do we stop what is sacred
from being ravaged,

witness life out of balance yet not despair?
There must be ways
toward doing what is right.

Why else, as Job asked, would
light be given to a man
whose way is hidden?

The great white shark
is nearly extinct. It can sense
a beating heart over a mile a way.

.     .     .     .     .     .     .

Welcome

You, one of seven billion born
helpless, nearly hairless,

one more chimp-cousin
in our midst:

Will you be swaddled,
neglected, anointed,

will you breathe air
that smells like rain?

Which foods will sustain you,
upon what ground

will you walk? What storm,
fires, floods will sweep

over you, what languages
will you learn, what

dances, what prayers?
Here is my hope for you,

little stranger: may you feel
beholden to this wondrous planet,

may you take your hungry,
humble place in it,

may you dedicate your life
to making it a world worth

revering, holding, passing on.

poems by Debra Kaufman from God Shattered, Jacar Press, © 2019

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Debra Kaufman grew up in the Midwest but has lived in North Carolina for thirty years. She has published three poetry chapbooks and four full length poetry collections: God Shattered, Delicate Thefts, The Next Moment, and A Certain Light.

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The Beech Gap is a rare subtype of Northern Hardwood Forest, found scattered in small patches surrounded by Fraser Fir and Red Spruce in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and elsewhere at the highest elevations of the Southern Appalachians. The Beech, mixed with small numbers of Buckeye, Birch, and Maple species, are stunted by the cold climate and high winds, with an open understory but relatively rich herb layer. Some patches in the Smokies are fenced to prevent destruction by invasive non-native wild pigs. Why this seemingly stable climax plant community remains stable and is not overtaken by Spruce-Fir remains a mystery.

 

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All photos by Bill Griffin from Southern Appalachian Naturalist Certification Program on Southern Appalachian Ecology, September 2020, Great Smokies Institute at Tremont; instructors Jeremy Lloyd and Elizabeth Davis.

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IMG_7952

 

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