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Waking Up Alone – Michael Hettich

Posted in Imagery, tagged imagery, Michael Hettich, nature photography, NC Poets, poetry, Redhawk Publications, Southern writing, Waking Up Alone on July 3, 2026| Leave a Comment »

[ 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.

❀ ❀ ❀ ❀ ❀

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

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Thanks again for joining the conversation.

– Bill

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Poetry and Earth – Night

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, tagged Clint Bowman, Earth Day 2026, Ecopoetry, Jenny Bates, Mary Oliver, Michael Hettich, nature photography, nature poetry, poetry, Scott Owens, Southern writing on April 20, 2026| 1 Comment »

[ poems by Mary Oliver, Scott Owens, Clint Bowman,

Jenny Bates, Michael Hettich ]

from Little Alleluias

This is the poem of goodbye.

And this is the poem of don’t know.

…

My hands touch the lilies

then withdraw;

…

my hands touch the blue iris

then withdraw;

…

and I say, not easily but carefully-

the words round in the mouth, crisp on the tongue-

…

dirt, mud, stars, water-

I know you as if you were myself.

How could I be afraid?

Mary Oliver

selected by Scott Owens

Commenting on anything written by Mary Oliver seems presumptuous and superfluous. How could anything I could imagine saying make what she writes clearer? Here, and in poems like, “Wild Geese,” and “The Summer Day,” Oliver seems to reach beyond my consciousness and grab hold of what resides even deeper and then say it in a way that I could never say as clearly, precisely, exactly. “as if you were myself. / How could I be afraid?”

— Scott

❀

Night in the Forest

You hear every twig snap,

every leaf flutter, every

strange unknowable animal sound.

Looking, your eyes widen,

find bits of light to hold onto,

see shadows grow from shadows

separate in slightest breath of wind.

You smell animal musk,

taste it in the air,

feel the hair on your arms,

the back of your neck, rise

as you’re certain something

comes closer. Every sense

is filled to overflowing.

And yet, amidst the unease,

the urge to panic,

there is also in moments of stillness

a calm, a sense of peace,

of no obligation, no schedule to attend,

you only ever feel here

in the still, in the quiet, in the dark.

Scott Owens

I started this poem more than 20 years ago when I went camping a lot, usually alone. I was teaching middle school at the time, and when I left the house Friday mornings I would throw my backpack, camping pad, sleeping bag, lighter, flashlight, sawback knife, and a change of clothes into the back of my car. And when school let out, I headed to the mountains and hiked at least 3 miles into the woods before setting up “camp.” It could be scary out there alone, but it was also the closest thing to serenity I had ever felt. The duality of the experience is what kept me doing it again and again, so of course I tried to write about it. I was never satisfied with the end of the poem until 2 decades later when I used 3 consecutive prepositional phrases as the conclusion of a poem about burial, and intuitively this old, unfinished poem sprang back into my consciousness because I somehow knew that was how I wanted to conclude this one too. Fortunately, I’m very stubborn about throwing attempted poems away, and although it took me a while to find the last failed draft, I eventually did.

— Scott

✿

Unleashed

Lately, it’s like I can feel myself aging.

I arrive home and immediately

look for my slippers, slip on a sweater,

put my feet up, close my eyes.

I remember once in the last year

of his life I took my old dog Huck

for a walk in the park. After rain.

The soccer fields were flooded, glistening

with sunlight in shallow pools of water,

and the robins had gathered in huge flocks

to take advantage of rain worms coming up

everywhere. I let Huck off the leash

and for a moment memories of youth

flashed in his eyes once again and he ran

all over chasing the birds up first

in one spot and then in another.

He carried on for longer

than I had seen him run in years.

I hope somehow I know

when I am close to death

and I, too, can have

a last moment of memory like that.

Maybe climb a tree to the top,

round the bases at a ball field,

walk out with no destination

in mind, no concept of how far

I might go before turning back.

Scott Owens

Time in nature and time with poetry often achieve the same effects for me: renewal, catharsis, perspective, clarity. I tell my students the most important habit in writing, maybe in life, is paying attention. I teach them how to make it a habit: schedule it 7 days in a row; commit to it; follow through. If at the end of those 7 days you’re not consciously noticing more things. Do it another 7 days. Then I give them a few more pointed assignments to help broaden the habit. I tell them ask yourself every day, What am I doing right now? Write down your answer and everything else it makes you think of. I get a never-ending stream of poems beginning with interesting participial phrases. Lastly, I tell them pay attention to the stories you tell people, especially the ones you tell over and over again. If you want to tell the story, especially if you want to continue telling it, then clearly there is something interesting about it. Why haven’t you written it down yet? I usually try to listen to my own lessons, and one story I’ve told over and over is the story of Huck, at 15, chasing the robins. It always felt like such a poignant moment for me, but I only thought to write it down recently when a co-worker told me a story they had already told me before about how they feel “older,” and at the same time I was putting the finishing touches on a manuscript about aging.

— Scott

❀ ✿ ✾ ❁

Threads

Sometimes

I want to go back

to where the deer

don’t run in my presence,

and the frogs keep singing

as I stomp through the creek.

Back to where

closets are full

of shotguns-

locked and loaded,

and the old gas station

is run by a woman

who calls me baby

and takes the tax

off my bottles.

Where farmers

offer me cigarettes,

and even though

I don’t smoke,

I entertain the idea

over ramblings

about local roads

that stitch together

our kin —

threads so tightly knit,

all the heat stays in.

so those frogs

can’t stop singing,

and the deer have learned —

there’s nowhere to run.

Clint Bowman

from If Lost (Loblolly Press, Asheville, NC) 2024

selected by Jenny Bates

I have chosen to send the poem “Threads” by Black Mountain poet Clint Bowman not only because he is my friend but because he embodies in his words the simplest of truths as it can be towards the natural world. There is no teasing or fakery in his poetry and he is as honest as a walk in the woods with all its variance and subtle candor.

My own poem “Artifice Thoughts” is more whimsical but true!

— Jenny

✾

Artifice thoughts as I look out the window

see a Deer casually strolling by and I read

it my favorite childhood book

I think we envy animals of the wild

what do you say?

living by the dark of night the light

of day

pressing into the earth or winging above

they truly know how it works, my love

distilling every moment of time not by

clock or watch or phone line

but by the sky and trees and hollows

surrounding them, their home

they don’t seize up with rain or snow

an occasional sound is how they drop

in to dreams of warm days, cold nights

when swirling stars come out

you can hear them whispering as they

touch the ground

don’t close the gate, our entry point

only wait till the Moon is full.

Jenny Bates

Thank you for this opportunity Bill to help celebrate and educate on Earth Day 2026. – J

❀ ✿ ✾ ❁

Something Else

Suppose, one spring, the birds decided

not to fly north, and the animals

sleeping in the woods decided this year

they’d rather not wake, and turned over instead

for another dream.

Imagine one summer the butterflies decided

to stay in their cocoons, or the caterpillars forgot

to wrap themselves up inside themselves

and simply gorged themselves instead

until their season passed. One day the tide forgot to rise.

This is only one way of speaking for the world.

Suppose the spiders stopped weaving, mosquitoes

forgot how to suck our blood, bees

decided not to pollinate flowers.

Suppose the sea turtles never returned

to the beaches that bore them, to lay their moon-drawn eggs.

Or suppose for a moment the rivers held still

and the leaping salmon held still in mid-air.

Imagine fire stopped burning things to ash

although it still burned. It was no longer hot.

Of course that couldn’t happen. So think of something else.

Michael Hettich

from The Halo of Bees: New and Selected Poems, 1990-2022; Press 53, Winston-Salem NC (2023)

“Something Else” was first published in my 2010 book titled Like Happiness, and though sixteen years have passed since then, it seems to me, looking at the poem now, that the concerns that brought me to write the piece are, if anything, more urgent now than they were then. In asking us to imagine non-human animals and rhythms of nature deciding not to participate in the eternal rhythms of life—a kind of ultimate end-world scenario precipitated in response to human-wrought degradation—the poem (I hope) challenges our complacency. The two italicized lines attempt to articulate a perhaps extreme version of the kind of thinking we all do to deny our complicity. And I think the final line also intends a double reading: we can “think of something else” as a form of denial, or we can do so as a way of imagining a different sort of future.

— Michael

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Let us probe the silent places. Let us seek what luck betides us. There’s a whisper on the night-wind, there’s a star agleam too. And the Wild is calling, calling – let us go.

— Robert Service, Call of the Wild

We lose our souls if we lose the experience of the forest, the butterflies, the song of the birds, if we can’t see the stars at night.

— Thomas Berry

Thank you for celebrating the month of April with International Earth Day (April 22) and National Poetry Month. And thank you, Readers, who have shared poems 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

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Thanks again for joining the conversation.

And thank you again and forever, Mike Barnett, for filling the cool deep well of nature quotations which will never ever run dry.

— Bill

❀ ✿ ✾ ❁

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A Sharper Silence – Michael Hettich

Posted in Imagery, tagged A Sharper Silence, family, imagery, Michael Hettich, nature photography, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing on December 26, 2025| 4 Comments »

[ 2 poems from A Sharper Silence ]

The Angels

As day turned to dusk, we sensed we could feel

the people we’d loved and lost calling

like a breeze that suggests itself but never

actually awakens the trees. She told me

again about the moment she decided to let

our first child go so she could go on

living herself, and I remembered

how once, as a young man, I’d walked by myself

for a day, until I was lost and came

to a boulder and a creek. She remembered yearning

to comfort our baby after we’d scattered

her ashes, and I remembered that the sun

had been warm; the sound of the creek had filled me

with something as different from thought or song

as a dream. She said she still dreamed of Audrey,

our lost child. And then I told her again

that when dusk fell, a clutch of black birds landed.

Even when I stood up and gestured, there

in that unfamiliar landscape, they refused to fly away.

I think they were hungry. But I had nowhere else to go,

so I lay down under stars so sharp

in that darkness they hurt my eyes, even

when my eyes were closed. All night those black birds

stood watching, waiting for something. Like angels,

she said and then laughed, though I don’t think she was joking.

Michael Hettich

❀ ❀ ❀

Gratitude

Night emerges from the morning woods

+++++ to move across the tall grass toward us, sighing

+++++ +++++ faintly in the fresh light, as though it were confused.

+++++ We call to it gently, like we might call a stray dog,

+++++ +++++ or someone’s lost pet, holding ourselves

+++++ ready to pull back if it threatens to hurt us.

But this darkness is neither starving nor dangerous,

+++++ so we let it come close enough to pet, until

somehow it enters our bodies, like language

+++++ enters a child, to make that child real

+++++ +++++ to itself. It’s a language we’ve spent most of our lives

+++++ learning to speak, though we’re still not able

to say what we mean exactly: I love you

+++++ in words that capture the rivers and streams,

+++++ +++++ the huge flocks of birds, the silences,

+++++ +++++ +++++ +++++ and the stunning losses that resonate still

+++++ at the core of our deepest contentment, all

+++++ +++++ the nights we’ve hugged in sleep, dreaming

+++++ worlds we’ll forget as we wake, again

into a blessedly ordinary day,

+++++ one of many hundreds, hardly noticed as it passes.

Michael Hettich

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Michael Hettich does not shrink from allowing darkness to enter his body as freely as breath, or as dreams. Within the silence there is music, singing. The smell of sweat is perfume. We have no words yet somehow we share language. Fall we all must, through and into nothing, only to discover that the darkness is filled with light. That is what I discover here, alone yet not alone with the exquisite sorrow – the most ordinary day, hardly noticed as it passes, is blessed.

❀ ❀ ❀

Michael Hettich’s The Halo of Bees: New and Selected Poems 1990-2022 won the 2024 Brockman-Campbell Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society. He has published more than a dozen books through the years and received many honors, including several Individual Artist Fellowships from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs. Michael holds a Ph.D. in literature, taught for many years at Miami Dade College, and now lives in Black Mountain, NC.

More about A Sharper Silence and Terrapin Books HERE; more about Michael HERE.

Additional poetry by Michael Hettich 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:

https://griffinpoetry.com/about/

Also note: after January 1, 2026 I will no longer be sending separate weekly email reminders.

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