Jenny Bates | V E R S E and I M A G E

Posts Tagged ‘Jenny Bates’

Saturday Share – Barbee and Bates

Posted in Imagery, tagged Jenny Bates, NC Poets, poetry, Sam Barbee, Saturday readers share, Southern writing on December 6, 2025| Leave a Comment »

. Saturday morning readers share:

Sam Barbee and Jenny Bates

Tomato

I pass my time well,

but if a man is worth his salt,

he will learn his season.

I hope to die some indigo night—

un-diagnosed—preferably,

in my tomato garden.

I wait content in this fertile space.

I water each vine.

Spray rattles the dry leaves

and collects on stem bristles.

Tonight I know, plucking

ripe fruit is kind: by autumn,

so much rots, ignored.

Sam Barbee

Tomato was also a Poetry in Plain Sight poster poem. I grew up in Wilmington, and am still an autumn-season beach-bum. I’ve lost my enthusiasm for fishing, but the solitude continues to delight me.

Additional poetry by Sam Barbee at Verse and Image:

2025-07

2022-04

2021-07

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Trimmed in Black

The bears came back yesterday then

last night you spun a black ribbon in

my hair did I mention?

the bears were black too if I could

only remember the words the turned

tune of words as you wove that ribbon

in and out and through my braid

the bears were in color as was the dream

I tried to stitch all the hues mostly the black

into the wind like trimming a tree with

memory or wishing I had umber bat wings

webbing I could spread and catch your vow

or the sound of any how hung high

in a tree so the breeze will always touch them.

Jenny Bates

I’m going through a wringer of a time in life right now, but … in reality I hope to disappear, but I would also go for becoming a Pine Marten! and really? I am my environment on the mountain and the fellow creatures I live with so the photo is the inspiration for the poem…

Additional poetry by Jenny Bates at Verse and Image:

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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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Thanks again for joining the conversation.

– Bill

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Earth Day Prelude – Three

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, tagged Bill Griffin, David Dixon, Earth Day 2024, Earth Day Every Day, ecology, Ecopoetry, Hannah Fries, Jenny Bates, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, William Blake on April 19, 2024| 5 Comments »

April 19, 2024

…the path to heaven

doesn’t lie down in flat miles.

It’s in the imagination

with which you perceive

this world

and the gestures

with which you honor it.

++++++ Mary Oliver

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Insects with Long Childhoods

June bug, stag beetle, cicada –

three, seven, thirteen years as larvae

feasting underground in the gentle

rot of roots and castoffs, gone generations,

only a few weeks in the light

sharp as the blades of consciousness, incessant

buzz, cosmic background of loss

threaded through late summer’s throbbing

days, lush nights, a brevity so full

it must feel like th eternity they came from.

I have a child who asks a question

of the air’s every hum. He has not learned grief.

Sky, he says, and shovels soil into his mouth,

let’s it drip out mud.

Hannah Fries

from ECOTHEO Review, 3/2024

Shared by Lynda Rush Myers, Durham NC, who writes:

The poet, Hannah Fries, reminds me of Pattiann Rogers: scientific, technical, yet capturing the dense brevity of her subjects’ lives. The turn of the poem came as a touching surprise. Every parent can relate. A child’s word and actions capture his reality. The mother enjoys the unforgettable moment, knowing her son will learn grief all too soon.

++++++ Lynda

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There is only one subject: what it feels like to be alive. Nothing is irrelevant. Nothing is typical.

++++++ Richard Rodriquez, in American Scholar, Spring 2002

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.

++++++ Rachel Carson (1907-1964)

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The Fly

Little fly,

Thy summer’s play

My thoughtless hand

Has brush’d away.

Am not I

A fly like thee?

Or art not thou

A man like me?

For I dance,

And drink, & sing

Till some blind hand

Shall brush my wing.

If thought is life

And strength and breath,

And the want

Of thought is death,

Then am I

A happy fly,

If I live

Or if I die.

William Blake (1757 – 1827)

from Songs of Experience; in the public domain.

Shared by Paul Karnowski, Asheville NC, who writes:

I like the connection Blake makes between the narrator and the “trivial” fly. Humans too easily dismiss the rest of the natural world because we have the ability to “think.” But it’s the countless thoughtless acts of blind hands – from other humans – that bring about our demise. Life and death connects us all – from the greatest thinker to the lowliest fly.

++++++ Paul

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Am I leading the life that my soul, / Mortal or not, wants me to lead is a question / That seems at least as meaningful as the question / Am I leading the life I want to live.

++++++ Carl Dennis, A Chance for the Soul from Practical Gods

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If I Fell

Crow knows me.

Can see the difference

between me and another.

Gave me a feather

I keep

in case I need to fly.

I know Crow

from Blackbird

and Raven

yet wonder

what Crow

would want

to keep

from me.

Perhaps a token

of my essence

in case Crow needs

to dream of flying.

David Dixon

Poetry In Plain Sight 2024, NC Poetry Society

Shared by Jenny Bates, Germanton, NC, who writes:

Life is a process of waking up from a long and ancient sleep of the soul. David Dixon embodies this whether he means to or not in his poetry. This poem I chose to send, If I Fell, has also been chosen for 2024 Poetry in Plain Sight through the NC Poetry Society.

As far as my own poem, it is a plea, a prayer that each of us has to fill up the emptiness inside us in different ways…even the Earth. My poem, Conceived and Born is from my Pushcart nominated book, ESSENTIAL.

++++++ Jenny

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Conceived and Born

There’s no suckling here

as though we were

going to get some anyway

The sanctity of Earth is a fast.

The holy presence of prayer a fast.

We are born of a mother that is not

dependent on us.

She is a planet — and a small, fragile

one at that.

Jenny Bates, Germanton NC

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And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. I would not change it.

++++++ William Shakespeare, As You Like It

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To celebrate EARTH DAY 2024 we are featuring seven posts of poems submitted by readers – poems by William Blake to Walt Whitman, Robinson Jeffers to A.R.Ammons to Linda Pastan, and by a number of contemporary poets. Check in every day or two – connect to the earth and to each other!

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Old Sam Peabody

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Essential, imagery, Jenny Bates, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing on February 9, 2024| 14 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Jenny Bates]

Essential

Trees are a gathering of circles.

If I touch this tree

say your name,

Light from the moon, the stars

will burn inside it.

Frost kindles its leaves to flame,

Spills them on to yellowing grass.

Unchanged.

From prehistoric times the ages

are inconsolable, so they turn.

Mantle shadows by truly seeing them.

I tell you this as I touch the tree,

circle this tree, say your name.

The tree and its golden mean listen

without an ear to hear.

As you wear yourself out

with a single essential thought.

Give.

Jenny Bates

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Ah, February – enter the season of Romance! Naturalists will mark its approach with sightings of large red heart-shaped boxes lining the entrance to Food Lion. Outdoors we notice that, yes indeed, that gray squirrel robbing the feeder looks nicely plump: she will deliver her puplets in a high leafy nest on Saint V’s Day. Wood frogs and peepers, surprise!, have already begun to sing their amorous invitations to amplexus. Owls have a jump on the festivities, already nesting, while there is a general restiveness and revving among the yard birds.

For Linda and me, the end of winter and first blood flow of Spring are marked by a plaintive two note whistle issuing from the rhododendron. There it is again! A rising minor third, clear and bright, the introduction to a joyful motet, the Oh My! of Oh my Canada, Canada, Canada. The White-Throated Sparrow is tuning up.

Why do birds sing? All winter the white-throat has minded his own business, hopping in the litter beneath the feeders or posing quite sage in the azalea. Now he sings his first couple of notes, but within a few weeks he will have flown far from here to breed in Maine or Michigan or the infinite boreal forests of Canada. Why sing now? Obviously his whistling can’t be to establish a territory in our back yard. And it defies imagination to think he’d hope to attract a mate here in North Carolina and keep her by his side all the way to Quebec. Today’s song, to judge from the snippets and fragments he’s practicing, sounds like he’s just warming up tor the big date.

Here’s how I see him – my little White-Throated Sparrow is Jeremy Brett in My Fair Lady, walking down the street where she lives. He’s passed this way before, but today the pavement simply refuses to stay beneath his feet. Days lengthen and love fills his breast until it is impossible any longer to resist – it must overflow in song. And so although the street where she really lives is 1,000 miles from here, White Throat graces Linda and me here in the NC foothills with his opening aria of Romance. Ah, February!

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* The song of the White-Throated Sparrow (Zonotrichia albicollia) comprises a couplet of long clear ascending whistles followed by three more rapid triplets, and can also be recalled by the mnemonic, Old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody.

** On the Street Where You Live, 1956, Lerner & Lowe, from the musical My Fair Lady starring Audrey Hepburn & Rex Harrison, with Jeremy Brett as Freddy singing: “I have often walked down this street before / but the pavement always stayed beneath my feet before. / All at once am I several stories high, / knowing I’m on the street where you live . . . .”

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Red and Green

where the surface of one thing meets the surface of another . . .

— William Bridges

You were twisting and turning

leaping and swerving a flame

on each foot, on a field so green

so green – so gorgeously

green, the earth’s addiction.

And you, warrior Fox as you fought

you fought off the mysterious foe, rattled like

a shaman losing part of his soul.

You danced between spirit and spirit and matter

danced all parts of your body a spontaneous me!

When you finally stopped puffing

from chaos, from chaos and glee you flowed

a rhythm of stillness – so still

you stood as if in meditation

and mantra on what you created.

Jenny Bates

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I have never met Jenny Bates but I imagine a visit to her home in the woods. Afternoon sun through west-facing panes is captured by glass in the colors of earth, sky, pasture, summer asters. We don’t remain indoors but take our mugs of oswego tea with local honey out beneath the pines. Dusk creeps in and we allow it to fill us with its silence. Creatures creep closer as well, wild but curious. If we were to threaten them, they would flee or turn and slash, but we and they simply remark each other’s presence and respect our distance. They go about their crepuscular business and grant us leave to be part of their universe. Being part of. Communion. Creating wholeness. The highest call and at once the most confounding task of the rational being.

This is also a visit to Jenny’s poetry in the woods. The universe Jenny Bates creates through words is one of deep acceptance and communion. Essential, from Redhawk Publications, continues her series of books which create a sort of natural theology. The You whom Jenny addresses in so many of her poems – is it God? A spirit familiar? A ghostly memory? Or is it the fox who stares cautiously from the edge of night? You might be a source of answers but more often is simply one with whom to share the questions. In this universe, there is no supernatural, only the fundamental reality that we are all one. One, that is, if we are able to open ourselves that much.

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Visit Redhawk Publications and purchase Essentials HERE

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Be Bold

I said to the Woodpecker

as I lifted it off the ground

cradled it for a half an hour, this

second Woodpecker to break its neck.

I’m no angel I said to him, though I’ve

been called it many times

a few drops of Be Bold I tell myself

when there is a need, but sometimes

those drops don’t soak in and I’m left

buckling to my knees.

The body will be gone by morning

and sure enough it was, yet still I

struggle How can one keep up with

death stare it in the face? Or program our

unconscious to react in certain ways?

Sweet smelling or dour unpleasant odors

are all we instinctively know, and here,

I’m not too Bold.

I placed the bird on one big leaf, hearing

another drum away

laid his head on dry curled grass

a pine bough for a wreath

both of us changed and changing

the pattern of our resonance.

Jenny Bates

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But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? This morning I discover Romeo Sparrow perched in the Silverbell. He turns to gaze fondly at Juliet, perched one branch higher. Perhaps they have booked adjoining seats for the flight to their Canada!!