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Alone – J. R. Solonche

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , on August 7, 2026| 2 Comments »

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[ 4 poems by J. R. Solonche ]
 . 
Only
 . 
“Why do you not sleep?” the goddess asked.
“They are only years.
Only years.”
 . 
“I do not sleep because they’re only fears,” he answered.
“Only fears.”
 . 
“Why do you weep and weep?” the goddess asked.
“They are only fears.
Only fears.”
 . 
“I weep and weep because they’re only years,” he answered.
“Only years.”
 . 
“Why do you keep and keep?” the goddess asked.
“It only disappears.
Only disappears.”
 . 
“I keep and keep because it only appears,” he answered.
“It only appears.”
 . 
J. R. Solonche
from Alone, David Robert Books, Cincinnati OH; © 2023
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❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
October
 . 
It’s a beautiful day.
It’s just about perfect.
Why just about? Why not?
Why the hell not perfect?
The temperature’s in
the sixties with an easy
breeze. Clouds, not too
many, in the blue sky.
I walk my property,
talking to myself. “These
are my trees,” I say.
“They belong to me. Every
branch, every twig,
every tree, small or big,
is mine. Every bird
that nests in my trees are
mine. Every worm that
crawls in my warm soil
is mine. Every blade of
grass that grows in my lawn
is mine. Every breeze
that blows through my trees
is mine.” Ah I would
give, I would give, I would
give all that is mine,
all this that is mine for
the girl I saw on the train
when I was seventeen.
 . 
J. R. Solonche
from Alone, David Robert Books, Cincinnati OH; © 2023
 . 
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❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
Thought
 . 
I thought I had a thought.
I was wrong.
It was not a thought.
It was something else entirely.
I know a thought when I think one.
I have had many thousands of thoughts.
What I had was not a thought.
It was a feeling.
It was an inkling.
It felt like ink running down the back of my neck.
It was an itch of ink.
I scratched it until my fingers turned blue.
Then I wrote this with it.
This is not a thought.
This is a poem.
I think.
 . 
J. R. Solonche
from Alone, David Robert Books, Cincinnati OH; © 2023
 . 
❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
Today We Fly Over You
 . 
Today we fly over you,
said the geese with wings as wide as vowels
as I looked up to see them fly over me.
 . 
Remember us or not,
said the last of the geese in line
as it disappeared from sight.
 . 
Everyday I fly over you,
and everyday you do not notice me,
said the empty sky
 . 
as I looked up at the empty sky
filled with ghosts of geese,
their wings like soaring smiles.
 . 
J. R. Solonche
from Alone, David Robert Books, Cincinnati OH; © 2023
 . 
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 . 
In this collection Alone, by J. R. Solonche, the poems in Part I and Part III are indeed alone, one single poem lingering within each section, and these two lonely poems are each titled Alone. What then might I, as reader, expect from the eighty-five poems that jostle together to fill Part II, that wide open expanse of poems in between the opening poem and its brother poem at the book’s far shore? None of those eighty-five at first reading seem to tackle head on the question that opens the first line of the first poem in the first section of the book: How does a man get used / to living without a woman? Not head on, not at all, but perhaps tangentially and discretely? And when they seem to wander, is it really without aim or purpose? What in the world is their purpose?
 . 
What is the purpose of any poem, after all? If it is written to a purpose isn’t it really an essay or a polemic, even if disguised with linebreaks? Maybe the poem finds its purpose in simply being alone. There it reclines on the page, its shape or shapelessness an undecipherable incantation by the writer of it. There the poem stutters its grammar into being, a Rosetta stone to be picked up and picked at by the reader. Namely me. I, who have chosen to sit alone with the poem for the passage of moments it takes to read it line by line. Then probably read it again because a single passage through those curls of letters like lines of foam on incoming waves is not enough to really feel the tug of undertow.
 . 
And then at the end, after crossing the sea of the entire one+eighty-five+one poems, I arrive at the far side. Time has coalesced, an infinite sequence of points becoming finite. The words have gathered themselves and bestowed whatever my momentary mentality has been able to glean. The poems have become my past, my present, and even my future (this is getting tense). I don’t know the explicative answer to the poet’s question, How does a . . . , but I know I myself have spent alone time with these poems. We have been alone together. I have a feeling. I will write it down, my own question. Maybe sometime later when you and I are alone together, I will share it with you.
 . 
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 . 
Perhaps the answer to How . . .? is Keep writing. The sensations, observations, recollections converge to become the unifying moment. Or diverge into companionship with the cosmos. My inklings and I, we are never alone.
 . 
Read additional poems by J. R. Solonche at Verse and Image:
 . 
Moon
 . 
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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
 . 
 . 

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Waking Up Alone – Michael Hettich

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , on July 3, 2026| Leave a Comment »

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[ poetry by Michael Hettich ]

Waking Up Alone

—Colleen Ahern-Hettich, 1955-2025

[from section 11]

Though it can’t be true, I imagine I’ve been in love
since before I was born; and because it can’t be true,
I imagine the same is true of her, my true love.

As a child, before I knew her, I was moving toward the day we’d meet.
As a young man, confused, I ws moving toward that day,

even as I met other women and seemed
to find myself with them, or nearly, I was really
moving toward her, my true love.

Now I don’t know anything about anything at all.
Not even where I am. Every morning

I move another stone from the creek bed to the path
I’m building through the broken woods, toward her. I don’t know
who I am otherwise, and the stones are heavy.

I stumble a little as I lift and put them down.

•

Once I was a girl, she shays now. I didn’t know you.
Once, before that, I was earth, I was air.

Once, before I knew you, someone took a breath of me,
someone drew a path up the mountain, above the trees
and slept there for years, like nothing really can

and survive. I survived in the gleaming.

Once I was a shadow, the shape of a sleeping
body in the grass, in the morning. Next morning
the grass stood straight again. There was no trace of me.

•

I’m tring to write only of what seems essential now,
though I don’t know what that is. I’m trying to find it

like a man in the dark of a motel room somewhere
trying to locate his keys.

[from section 12]

Sometimes I can only write about Colleen
without writing about her, just as I can only
say what needs to be said by telling
a story: Yesterday, I sat on a hillside
and waited for something. It was sunny. I was not
hoping for an animal or a change in the weather.
No, instead something like a letting-go of language,
forgetting the person I’ve made of myself.

I could crawl inside your body, my love, and disappear
like most memories. You were here; then you were gone
and never gone. The wind through the young trees
moving as though it remembered the old ones,

their massive trunks, their canopies and vast root systems,
their voices. Then it falls silent.

Michael Hettich
from Waking Up Alone, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory, NC. © 2026. Winner of the 2025 Lena Shull Book Award of the North Carolina Poetry Society.

❀    ❀    ❀

Insomnia

If I could remember to breathe the way
you breathed beside me, sleeping, I might
slip into the absence you left me

and sleep, myself, inside the rhythms
your dreaming embodied—not the dreams
themselves but the deep in-and-out of your sleeping
beside me.

 . . . . . .   So I lie here, in the bedroom we loved in,
under the roof of the house we loved,
under the stars and moon, the clouds
and migrating birds, the winds and all

I’ve forgotten, and I try to match the rhythms
of my breath to yours, my love, absent
but still here beside me in the darkness.

Michael Hettich
from Waking Up Alone, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory, NC. © 2026. Winner of the 2025 Lena Shull Book Award of the North Carolina Poetry Society.

 

❀    ❀    ❀    ❀    ❀

Although it is quiet this morning here on the porch, somewhere rain lashes at sharp angles and a thrashing tree threatens to fall on a house. Although here the morning birds have settled themselves in the rising heat and only one cicada is singing, I can hear in the distance the low hum of an engine. Men and women are working, children are getting bored with summer, everyone is wading through life in this silence. Maybe for a moment, as they look through their windshields or at their screens, as they look at their mother making a sandwich or their co-worker so intent, maybe for a moment they also look inside. What do they discover there?

Michael Hettich’s Waking Up Alone is stillness and storm. It is confusion and stumbling insight. It is looking back and looking inside, but mostly it is silence. Awakening to days when dreams do not relinquish their hold as the sheets fall aside. Nor nightmares. But also waking into the continuous tangle of story and dream and memory that gradually resolves itself into recognition. Waking up One but not really Alone.

Few books of poetry have so gathered me up and taken me into the mind of the poet. So into the poet’s heart. These poems, and especially the extended titular poem that is the center of their universe, urge me out of my distractedness. They open a space for me to encounter my own silence. The smoke and ashes of my own dreams rise to swirl and struggle into life around me. Perhaps a mark of the most insightful poetry is how it prompts the reader into contemplation and insight of their own. Writer and reader join together on the journey of awakening.

❀

Purchase Waking Up Alone from Redhawk Publications HERE

More about the NC Poetry Society Lena Shull Award HERE

Other poetry by Michael Hettich at Verse and Image

https://griffinpoetry.com/2026/04/20/poetry-and-earth-night/
https://griffinpoetry.com/2025/12/26/a-sharper-silence-michael-hettich/
https://griffinpoetry.com/2025/09/26/poetry-at-cary-arts-center/
https://griffinpoetry.com/2024/09/27/anticipate/
https://griffinpoetry.com/2023/07/14/magic/
https://griffinpoetry.com/2023/07/07/catch-fire/
https://griffinpoetry.com/2023/03/17/archetype/

 

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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:

https://griffinpoetry.com/about/

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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Cloud and Moon – Brillig

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , , on June 26, 2026| 4 Comments »

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[ 4 poems from Brillig ]
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Mooned
 . 
Moon at my window wants to come in.
She has a beautiful black gown,
silky dark tresses gemmed with stars.
Moon-faced and pale with longing
she whispers with the tide
that slides up silent estuaries
 . 
I’m lonely up here all by myself.
Your astros came but wouldn’t play.
Frightened of my beauty they flew away.
 . 
What will I tell her, that my falling
silver hairs are mooncoins,
that my gray unkept robe is wolfskin
 . 
just right for me to howl her praises?
But, oh, she’s wise to me, too many
faded lovers already to take another on.
 . 
She slides a fan of cloud over her eyes
but just before, she winks at me.
Hey, poet, stay open for me another night.
 . 
Bradley R. Strahan
from Brillig, Winter/Spring 2026. Created by Deborah Doolittle.
 . 
❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
An Elegance of Swans
 . 
The predawn green-grown lawn filled with swans,
snow-soft swells or so they seemed. Subtle
as first fall of frost, wings wind-weathered,
the flock massed on the grass. Moon-tethered,
they began to glow. Feathers supple,
at home here as if they’d never flown.
 . 
On this bright cold night,
one goose across the full moon.
Are we both alone?
 . 
Paul Jones
from Brillig, Winter/Spring 2026. Created by Deborah Doolittle.
 . 
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❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
Interior Gear
 . 
Travel before light.
Keep maps
of trails to overlooks
palm-sized, folded,
creases smoke-blackened.
 . 
By firelight,
get around to writing
those letters to people
who like you,
but you refused to believe.
 . 
Tell them absolute darkness
does not exist.
Everything moves.
Our bodies give off
infinitesimal radiation.
 . 
Rob Merritt
from Brillig, Winter/Spring 2026. Created by Deborah Doolittle.
 . 
❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
cloudbound
 . 
an imagined collaboration of Lafcadio Hearn and Matt Snyder
 . 
the place
 . 
business trip
the departures board lists
my hometown
 . 
of the issuing clouds . . .
 . 
alma mater
I chat up the beggar
about his t-shirt
 . 
graves on a mountain
 . 
stones
in the fog
in the potter’s field
 . 
Matt Snyder
from Brillig, Winter/Spring 2026. Created by Deborah Doolittle.
 . 
IMG_9468
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❀    ❀    ❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
Brillig is created twice a year by Deborah Doolittle. Not only does she gather the poets and poems into a small universe where the lines can speak each other from dream into reality, but Deborah also prints and cuts and folds and glues to fabricate each small booklet that will become that season’s offering of Brillig. Each edition is a different theme, each episode is a different style of small hand-crafted booklet. Each creation of wordly imagery also joins with artistic imagery – woodcut, line drawing, collage – to unfold into the final amazing artifact within your hands. Marvelous!
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❁
 . 
Hold a limited edition copy of Brillig in you own hands by using this order form. And consider submitting your own poetry for consideration: 3-5 previously unpublished poems, any subject, any style, 20 lines or fewer. Submit as a single .DOC attachment to brillig.mlm@gmail.com, or mail to BRILLIG: a micro lit mag / 103 Jean Circle / Jacksonville, NC 28540. Include a 3-4 sentence bio and postal address. And visit this earlier post featuring Brillig.
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❁
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Additional poetry at Verse and Image by:
 . 
Matt Snyder
 . 
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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
 . 
2020-11-03a Doughton Park Tree
 . 

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