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Geography of One – Richard Allen Taylor

Posted in family, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , on September 25, 2026| 11 Comments »

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[ 3 poems by Richard Allen Taylor ]
 . 
Continental Divide
 . 
When I drop the word cry on the spine
of a mountain ridge, weep flows down
one side, shout down the other, one word
split into different-meaning halves,
 . 
then face will follow, turning toward
the Eastern slope while becoming the front side
on the West, and
 . 
check will hesitate at first, not sure whether
to inspect for defects or stop a moving object,
 . 
but before I drop the word orange,
I have to decide whether to eat it or wear it,
 . 
and I discover the word colonizing, when released
from high altitude, might burst into colon and zing
like a couple divorced for irreconcilable differences,
 . 
and knowing that rivers seldom head straight for
the sea, but wander sometimes in great bends
and curves before they reach home, one must
be careful when dropping a grenade like love.
 . 
Richard Allen Taylor
from The Geography of One, Main Street Rag Enterprises, Edinboro, PA; © 2026
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❀    ❀    ❀
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Blessed Are
 .  .     after “Ode on Inheritance” by Kate Partridge
 . 
Perhaps there is no inheritance worth having
that does not include a narrative of water—
a river, a lake, an ocean
 . 
pounding on the beach below the open windows.
My father bought a farm
with a white house on a hill, a pond
 . 
at the bottom. My mother inherited. She later sold.
All of it was, shall we say, liquidated.
Gone, the tiny lake
 . 
fed by a stream tumbling over my father’s modest
ambitions. Just as well. My brothers and I sought
neither the view nor the serenity.
 . 
We were reaching elsewhere, for something
less pastoral, more hopeful,
something more highway
 . 
than country road. But even a cave can elicit hope.
The torch goes out, we thrust our hands
forward, grope walls,
 . 
feet following our blindness. As if a hole could lean
against its sides. All it takes is the will
to swap adjectives.
 . 
Trade wet for slick. Choose briny over soaked.
Here we go again with that
narrative of water. Snow, hail,
 . 
ice melting in your palm. Later, when drought
squeezes the pond dry, a spark catches,
and fire climbs the hill—
 . 
everything promised burns. The difference between
bold and meek becomes a matter of timing.
Bold when we rush forward
 . 
to extinguish the blaze. Meek when the flames
force us back to a place
where faces do not melt.
 . 
When rain finally comes, we inherit the memory
of blackened hills, even if no lawyers or signatures
attend. When grief follows, we console ourselves.
 . 
We say the trees bury their seeds under layers of ash.
We say the trees dream of resurrection..
 . 
Richard Allen Taylor
from The Geography of One, Main Street Rag Enterprises, Edinboro, PA; © 2026
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❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
Song for a Wind with No One Left to Talk To
 . 
Now that you’re alone, wind,
where will you go?
north, sough, high, low
 . 
Now that you sleep, wind,
what will you know?
peace, love, war, snow
 . 
Now that you’re empty, wind,
how will you fill?
zephyr, gust, sail, chill
 . 
Not that you’re free, wind,
what else will you be?
home, afar, aloft, alee
 . 
Now that you die, wind,
how will you rise?
cloud, star, spirit, sky
 . 
Richard Allen Taylor
from The Geography of One, Main Street Rag Enterprises, Edinboro, PA; © 2026
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❀    ❀    ❀    ❀    ❀
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About a month shy of 60 years ago, DuPont transferred my Dad (again) and we moved from Michigan to Aurora, Ohio. The first of November was my first day of eighth grade in my new school, and my first class was German with Fräulein Appenzeller. I shuffled my feet while she introduced me, then declared that they already had a Wilhelm in the class and therefore christened me Fritz. For the next five years most of the kids in Aurora thought my real name was Fritz.
 . 
I sat down and looked around the classroom. I don’t remember much from that morning, but I do recall that there was one girl with long dark hair and very red cheeks. I mean really red, like silver dollar sized lipstick circles. Was this an arcane German class ritual? Turns out it was lipstick, from Halloween the night before. Turns out she had tried really hard but hadn’t been able to wash it off. Turns out her name was Linda. Turns out eight years later, in 1974, we would get married.
 . 
Turns out we still are. During those almost 60 years now the proportion of time we have driven each other completely nuts has been far less than the proportion of time we have made each other laugh. Or at least smile. Smiling — I love that.
 . 
Smiling is what these little paragraphs are about. Richard Allen Taylor’s poetry always, always makes me smile. His new book of poetry is crammed to bursting with smiles. Not just the poems that are funny – slyly, wickedly, innocently, unexpectedly funny. Also and even more so I am smiling with Richard and with his poems about these last few years he has lived alone, and about the three decades he and Julie were married before her death from leukemia. Smiling because love remembered and relived in such a pure, tender, and honest way lights up the world. Smiling because it is a gift to discover a poet willing to give so much of himself or herself.
 . 
Turns out, Richard, that you are the world’s biggest mensch, and I love you. Keep smiling.
 . 
❀
 . 
Order Geography of One from Main Street Rag Enterprises.
 . 
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❀    ❀    ❀    ❀    ❀
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Thank you for visiting Verse and Image:
. . . . . every Friday I present one or more poems I’ve read this week that particularly speak to me;
. . . . . some Saturdays 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:
 . 
 . 
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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Girl Filling the Sky – Melissa McEver Huckabay

Posted in family, Imagery, tagged , , , , , on September 11, 2026| Leave a Comment »

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[ 2 poems from the winner of the 
2024 Cider Press Review Book Award ]
 . 
Partial Eclipse
 . 
Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember. – Louise Gluck
 . 
The morning light is dew:
soon the sun will crescent away.
 . 
The windows of our house let
pieces of light in. Pines and oaks
 . 
undulate in the wind. Our ground
turns yellow green in shadow.
 . 
I remember my passage here:
from one house to another, neighbors
 . 
who speak and those who are silent.
Black-eyed Susans fading away,
 . 
fields turning brown in summer.
Highways leading us toward home.
 . 
My mother is here, her suffering
a slow movement across the sun.
 . 
I want to make a well of myself.
Find the water, cup my hands,
 . 
ask her to drink. Turn the soil
into something soft. tell her:
 . 
Mama, you are so clear to me—
let’s push away this swollen moon.
 . 
Melissa McEver Huckabay
from Girl Filling the Sky, Cider Press Review, San Diego CA; © 2026
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❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
Summer
 . 
For Lynn
 . 
Wasn’t our skin sticky
in the air conditioning,
wasn’t your dark hair
 . 
smooth, your lipstick
leaving a red ring
on your wine glass? Weren’t we
 . 
all laughing while I chopped
serrano peppers into tiny
green slits, while we poured
 . 
more merlot? Didn’t we drink
so much that we started singing,
and didn’t you cover your mouth
 . 
while you giggled, like you always
do? Wasn’t this just the other day,
just the other August, before the sunset
 . 
turned bronze on South Padre,
before we all moved away,
before you walked down the aisle
 . 
in your beaded dress, your face
gleaming and pink—
 . 
before the hospital,
before the cancer,
before the call?
 . 
Melissa McEver Huckabay
from Girl Filling the Sky, Cider Press Review, San Diego CA; © 2026
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❀    ❀    ❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
What good is anything? No, this one right here. She stops beside the nature trail and points, the juicy stem tinged pink, the flowers as little like flowers as can be. What good? Will it taste like ripe berries? Cure cancer? Stop my heart beating before I finish chewing? Who knows?
 . 
And why even care enough to answer? Although I will try. Maybe sidestep, throw in some muse about plant communities, or defer to Cherokee ethnobotany, or mumble a longish word like pollinators. What good is any of that?
 . 
All I know is that on this morning a brief breeze rises and a dozen fairies fly. They pirouette and then they’re gone. I could tell you that just below the hill the burnweed has gone to seed. Nothing special, never any grand inflorescence, only stalky climb into light then bent brown by autumn. I could consider only that and let it go.
 . 
But for a few seconds against the backdrop of the maple’s first red-limned transfiguration, poised on the slow transit of noon to afternoon, those airy wisps, those ephemera, those dancers winglit by sunflash — my God.
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❀
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Girl Filling the Sky is the winner of the 21st annual Cider Press Review Book Award, 2024. Melissa McEver Huckabay teaches high school English in Cypress, Texas. Her poems weave through the generations: a grandmother widowed by war, a mother scarred by deceit, a little girl abandoned by her father and forever imagining his return. And yet the warp of loss is patched and filled by the weft of love, sometimes smoldering, sometimes radiant. In the title poem, the writer is four years old and imagines she can fly from her second story balcony. Isn’t our life meant to fill the sky?
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❀    ❀    ❀    ❀    ❀
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Thank you for visiting Verse and Image:
. . . . . every Friday I present one or more poems I’ve read this week that particularly speak to me;
. . . . . some Saturdays 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:
 . 
 . 
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 2025-07-10

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As His Name – Ron Rash

Posted in family, Imagery, poetry, tagged , , , , , , on July 10, 2026| 3 Comments »

Violet Wood Sorrel, Oxalis violacea

 . . 
[ 3 poems from New and Selected ]
 . . 
Barbed Wire
 . . 
New strung, it sparks a live wire
when sun hits right, and can be
thumbed like guitar string, its tune
pure country twang, but given
enough time rain rusts metal,
fence posts wobble like loose teeth,
barbed wire burrows in laurel
and goldenrod before found
by fishermen or hunters.
As I found out once, deep in
the Smokies when something latched
to my calf—coil of old strands
not quite elemented back
into ground ore, and though I searched
no chimney-spill or hearthstone,
no sign but rusty fence-thorns
of one whose hammer tapped out
a claim on this land traveling
through bright lines from post to post,
traveling time to a moment
one man’s tenuous hold on
the earth snagged like memory
surfaced long after, time-dulled,
but still able to draw blood.
 . . 
Ron Rash
from POEMS, New and Selected, HarperCollins, New York NY; © 2016
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❀    ❀    ❀
 . . 
Plowing on Moonlight
I rose with the moon, left the drowsy sheets,
my nine months wife singing in her sleep,
left boots on the floor, overalls and hat
scarecrowing a bedpost so I could plant
my seeds with just a plow between
the earth and me, my pale feet deep
in the ridged wake where I labored,
gripped the handles like a divining rod,
my eyes closed to the few stars out.
All night I plowed, beard budded by frost,
chest nippled, my breath blooming white,
and felt in me the sway of the sea,
rain’s fall and soak, the taproot’s thrust,
the cicada’s winged resurrection.
I opened my eyes to dawnlight,
left my field and lay with my wife,
warming as I pressed against her body,
my hand listening to her waxing belly.
 . . 
Ron Rash
from POEMS, New and Selected, HarperCollins, New York NY; © 2016
 . . 
Doughton flora milkweed

Common Milkweed, Asclepias syriaca

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❀    ❀    ❀
 . . 
The Exchange
 . . 
Between Wytheville, Virginia,
and the North Carolina line,
he meets a wagon headed
where he’s been, seated beside
her parents a dark-eyed girl
who grips the reins in her fist,
no more than sixteen, he’d guess
as the come closer and she
doesn’t look away or blush
but allows his eyes to hold
hers that moment their lives pass.
He rides into Boone at dusk,
stops at an inn where he buys
his supper, a sleepless night
thinking of fallow fields still
miles away, the girl he might
not find the like of again.
When dawn breaks he mounts his roan,
then backtracks, searches three days
hamlets and farms, any smoke
rising above the tree line
before he heads south, toward home,
the French Broad’s valley where spring
unclinches the dogwood buds
as he plants the bottomland,
come night by candlelight builds
a butter churn and cradle,
cherry headboard for the bed,
forges a double-eagle
into a wedding ring and then
back to Virginia and spends
five weeks riding and asking
from Elk Creek to Damascus
before he finds the wagon
tethered to the hitching post
of a crossroads stone, inside
the girl who smiles as if she’d
known all along his gray eyes
would search until they found her.
She asks one question, his name,
as her eyes study the gold
smoldering there between them,
the offered palm she lightens,
slips the ring on herself so
he knows right then the woman
she will be, bold enough match
for a man rash as his name.
 . . 
Ron Rash
from POEMS, New and Selected, HarperCollins, New York NY; © 2016
 . . 
❀    ❀    ❀    ❀    ❀
 . . 
Ron Rash will take you there. He will take you deep into to the forest where the unvoiced past may suddenly reach up from the earth and bite your leg. Into the night where moonlight unveils dreams and deep desires. Up a lonesome mountain holler where one of his own kinsmen once scratched to farm a living. Even deeper, farther, he will carry you into generations long grown cold but where a story of his early ancestor can still wring a warm and sudden smile.
 . . 
This collection, Ron Rash’s New and Selected, covers decades of his writing but hundreds of years of settlement and stories, of life and death in the southern Appalachians. Each poem is the flare of a match that lights a lantern to limn a face, a moment, another turning point in another life. A history book might teach you about the Tennessee Valley Authority and farmers displaced by lakes filling behind its hydroelectric dams, but these poems will teach your heart how it felt to live on that land and watch it go under. The poems will teach you that poverty in possessions is not poverty of the soul. They might teach you that following your God can still involve some wrestling matches. Most of all, these poems connect – they tell one expansive enlarging straggling and struggling story of people and families each one of us is a part of. We are a part of these stories if we call ourselves Americans, and especially Southerners. Or if we just call ourselves human beings.
 . . 
❀
 . . 
Ron Rash – POEMS, New and Selected is available at Bookshop.org.
 . . 
Also by Ron Rash at Verse and Image:
 . . 
❀
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NOTE: you can share three additional poems by Ron Rash at the sequel to today’s post, from July 17, 2026;
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Common Buckeye, Junonia coenia

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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;
. . . . . some Saturdays 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:
 . . 
 . . 
If you would like to receive an email each time a post appears, please SUBSCRIBE to Verse and Image using the button on the Home Page.
 . . 
If you have a hard time finding the SUBSCRIBE button on this WordPress site, you can send me your email address and I will add you to the subscriber list. Send your request to
 . . 
COMMENTS@GRIFFINPOETRY.COM
 . . 
Thanks again for joining the conversation.
 . . 
– Bill
 . . 
IMG_0880, tree
 . . 

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