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Maura High – Field as Auditorium

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, Imagery, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , on January 30, 2026| 2 Comments »

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[ 2 poems by Maura High ]
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Excursions in Moss
+++++ — for Barbara
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They were here, all this time,
in this same world,
here for the seeing:
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green shag and starfield, clumps, pinheads,
frilled with lichen,
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and poking up through them the green
first leaves of violet, wood sorrel,
for example, among the ephemera —
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here, in the piedmont of North Carolina,
all the greens in creation:
a landscape within landscapes,
slow as,
quiet as,
 . 
as back along
the rims of lakes and drainages in the early Cambrian.
In this same old world:
the same creep and cling
and drill into the surface
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with their fragile rhizoids, into rock fissures,
now bark, now exposed root,
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into the Anthropocene and still
green between paving stone,
on verges, stuck fast
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to rocks along the banks of Bolin Creek,
down a grit-and-gravel driveway.
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A green gift
my friend gave me:
moss scrapings, from her yard
 . 
over in the next county;
in late summer
 . 
the waggly spore capsules
pop open, and a million spores float
off and up into whatever wind.
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❀    ❀    ❀
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Reprise
+++++ — for Frances
 . 
One leaf falls from the hickory
+++++ outside my window—
 . 
+++++ a slow loop right,
an about turn, and squiggle—
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so cursory a gesture, it looks
+++++ like something written
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+++++ in an alphabet of leaves:
a charm against insects
 . 
and woodpecker; a plea
+++++ for all the leaves that fall,
 . 
+++++ blacken, and rot, and leach
into the earth, and rise again
 . 
to new petiole, new leaf,
+++++ singing the green song of desire
 . 
+++++ and the brown of thrift;
the whispery, creaky name
 . 
the tree gives itself;
+++++ or the name we have given it,
 . 
+++++ full of ourselves and our own
histories, as a child
 . 
writes her given name and sees
+++++ herself there, her first self-portrait.
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Maura High
from Field as Auditorium, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Community College Press; Hickory NC; © 2025.
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Maura High speaks the language of wild. She writes in an alphabet of leaves. Her poems sometimes withdraw entirely from the touch or consideration of human presence and become encompassed entirely by field, by forest – crownbeard setting seed in the wilding meadow, Bolin Creek about its business of undercutting a bank of clay, moss creating soil from stone. Maura translates for us the deep language of life and of time. Where did this come from? Where are we going?
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As I read Maura High’s poetry, I consider the many lives I have overlooked, forgotten, ignored. I am reminded to listen for the soft peeps of sparrows and finches settling into the shrubbery at sunset. Listen closer – the seep of water in the dirt beneath my feet and the striving of rootlets and mycelia. Closer yet – the movement of seasons, long connections across time, encircling connections gathering life and nudging forward. From careful observation and contemplation of the unremarkable features of a creek, a tree, a flower, Maura creates an opportunity for us, her readers, to participate in the most remarkable story of all.
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❀
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Maura High was born in Wales but grew up on Planet Earth. She has established tender rhizoids in piedmont North Carolina but the wind is apt to blow her to distant climes at any moment. These two poems are from her newest book, Field as Auditorium, from Redhawk. She has also published The Garden of Persuasions, winner of the Jacar Press chapbook contest (2013), and Stone, Water, Time in collaboration with artist Lyric Kinard, Lyric Art Publishing (2019). Sample more of her poetry at MauraHigh.com.
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Thank you for visiting Verse and Image:
. . . . . every Friday I present one or two poems I’ve read this week that particularly speak to me;
. . . . . every Saturday I present one or two poems submitted by YOU, my readers.
 . 
If you would like to offer a poem for consideration, either by a favorite author or your own work, please view these GUIDELINES for Saturday Readers Share:
 . 
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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.
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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 2021-10-23
 . 

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from Pedestal – Johnson and Fisk

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , on January 9, 2026| Leave a Comment »

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[ 2 poems from Issue 97 of Pedestal ]
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To Rest Here
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in the museum of my children
smooth the comforter
curl up and be the child
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adhesive streaks on the ceiling
the last of the glow-in-the-
dark planets
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I rest between the old
globe and the stuffed closet
the hoard of their natural history
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tiny sweaters with buttons of bone
primitive sculptures
I hold onto these I still hold
 . 
their small weight
sweet sticky hands
in my hair
 . 
when I circled them and
absorbed their light
when I was their moon
 . 
Marilyn A. Johnson
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❀    ❀    ❀
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As if it weren’t enough to bear
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the world’s dark cloak, the inhumanity
of man which knows no limit,
30-foot high flash-flooded rivers, the charred
acres lit by wind and lightning or cigarette butts
cheerfully tossed out speeding car windows
at midnight, we can’t escape our own
shallow thinking: who has wretched taste
in evening wear, or too many tattoos,
who exudes the rank smell of weed through
his pores in the 9-item quick line. Jesus, it’s bad.
Worth masking up again even if you aren’t afraid
of Covid or SARS the way you should be.
Managing so many large and small disasters
while newly on a budget and nervous about keeping
your job, or Medicaid, or Social Security,
and the chemo has ruined the nerves in your feet
so you keep falling in strange places for no reason.
Fuck. And then Gaza, and Sudan, and ICE picking
off people who aren’t white enough to live
in this country or at all according to the spiteful
rich bastards in charge this week. I am so furious,
and sorry, and don’t think writing poetry
does much good unless you accidentally hit
the bulls-eye sweet spot of something obvious
but deep that has never been said, or not recently,
not in today’s language, somehow blending
hope and humor in a salve to smear over
this seeping wound we all have. A little respite.
Other than that it’s just line after line
of ordinary frustration. And now we’re all sitting
around on a Friday morning in July and I just turned
70, the coming of age of everyone who’s ever
been elderly. I mean, really, what the fuck?!
 . 
Molly Fisk 
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The wound we all have: seeping, obvious, choking the room with stink; or cloaked, penetrating, a stone or a shackle. When nothing makes sense what’s left but to rage and wail? When there is no recovering sense from the senselessness, what’s left but to smooth the comforter and curl up in the past, comfortless though it may prove to be?
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These two poems snagged me at one particular morning’s perigee and swung me in circles, up and around and back again. There’s already too much evil in life to add more to it with some compulsion to feel guilty when a smidge of joy seeps in. There’s too much of life – life gone by and life circling around right now and maybe just maybe more life tomorrow – to chuck joy out the window entirely. Impermanence . . . suffering . . . joy, damn it! No rationalization requested, no forgiveness sought as I reach the last line with a silly grin on my face and shout to life, “Really, what the fuck!”
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❀
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These two poem are among many other saviors of sanity in Issue 97 of Pedestal. After twenty-five years of continuous publication, this is the final issue. John Amen founded Pedestal and is its managing editor, assisted by poetry editors Arlene Ang, melissa christine goodrum, Stefan Lovasik, Michael Spring, Susan Terris and the hundreds and thousands of writers who have submitted poetry and book reviews over the years. Thank you, Gang. And thank you for alerting us that although Pedestal will not be publishing new editions you will be maintaining back issues online indefinitely.
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Marilyn A. Johnson (marilynjohnson.net) lives with her family in New York’s Hudson Valley. recent poetry can be read online in UCity Review, Plume, and the Provincetown Journal. Her three non-fiction books include The Dead Beat, about obituary writers; This Book Is Overdue, about librarians and archivists in the digital age; and Lives in Ruins, about contemporary archaeologists.
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Molly Fisk (mollyfisk.com) lives in California’s Sierra foothills. She edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology, with a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. Molly’s publications include The More Difficult Beauty, Listening to Winter, and five volumes of radio commentary. Her new collection, Walking Wheel, arrives in April from Red Hen Press. She
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Thank you for visiting Verse and Image:
. . . . . every Friday I present one or two poems I’ve read this week that particularly speak to me;
. . . . . every Saturday I present one or two poems submitted by YOU, my readers.
 . 
If you would like to offer a poem for consideration, either by a favorite author or your own work, please view these GUIDELINES for Saturday Readers Share:
 . 
 . 
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.
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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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IMG_0768, tree
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Saturday Share – Merry Christmas!

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , on December 27, 2025| 3 Comments »

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Saturday morning, after Christmas
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If the Fates Allow
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this could be the season we simply hang
together, forget parties, share a
cup of tea, perhaps those cookies with shining
sprinkles like you used to make, star
shaped, smell of baking better than feasting upon
any fancy cakes or puddings, the
presence enough, rooted and roosting – to fly highest
forgotten by two birds on a single bough.
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Bill Griffin, for Christmas 2025
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Thanks for this “Golden Shovel” poem goes to Sarah, Jeannine, Suzanne, Sophia, Kim, and Renee. We are the Tremont Cohort, the seven poets selected to attend the inaugural Tremont Writer’s Conference, 2023, in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. We’re from Tennessee, Massachusetts, Ohio, and North Carolina, but for over two years we’ve managed to Zoom once a month to critique each other’s work and write something new together. MERRY CHRISTMAS, my friends! Thanks for the prompt. And deepest thanks to our inspired and inspiring teacher at the Tremont Conference, Frank X Walker.
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First a poem made from a song. Now a poem made into a song. In early 2018 conductor and composer David McCollum invited me to write a poem that could become the lyrics for a new anthem he wanted to perform for Christmas with the Elkin Community Chorus. We collaborated all summer, tweaks and adjustments to find the proper rhythm and cadence to fit the message. The Chorus premiered Wilderness Advent on December 2, 2018. Thanks for listening!
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Wilderness Advent
(Pisgah Stranger)
Lyrics: Bill Griffin . . . . . . . . . . Music: David L. McCollum
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Elkin Community Chorus 58th Annual Concert
December 2nd, 2018 – First Baptist Church, Elkin, North Carolina

Wilderness Advent
(Pisgah Stranger)

A stranger here, I sleep beneath the slash of stars,
The Pisgah forest deep and friendless.
I close myself to love, my heart requires the dark;
Can night within this cove be endless?

Come, you’ve slept too long
And love grows dim.
Awaken to a song – Can it be Him?

Is it madness or a dream that seems to whisper here?
The murmur of a stream or singing?
It chants, a still small voice, I’ve nothing now to fear
For tidings of great joy it’s bringing.

Come, you’ve slept too long
And love grows dim.
Awaken to a song and welcome Him!

And now the music swells as every fir and spruce
Unloose their boughs to tell the story:
May all God’s creatures wake, hearts quickened by the truth,
Invited to partake of mercy.

Come, we’ve slept so long
That love grows dim.
Awaken that our song may worship Him.

Come sing it with the wind and all the Pisgah throng:
The Child reclines within the manger!
With owl and bear and deer my soul’s reborn in song
For none of us is here a stranger.

Come, you’ve slept too long;
If love grows dim
Awaken to a song for it is Him!

Waken . . . welcome . . . worship . . . it is Him!

IMG_9285

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Thank you for visiting Verse and Image:
. . . . . every Friday I present one or two poems I’ve read this week that particularly speak to me;
. . . . . every Saturday I present one or two poems submitted by YOU, my readers.
 . 
If you would like to offer a poem for consideration, either by a favorite author or your own work, please view these GUIDELINES for Saturday Readers Share:
 . 
 .  .  .  .  .   https://griffinpoetry.com/about/

 . 
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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