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Posts Tagged ‘nature photography’

Choice / No Choice

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Denton Loving, Ecopoetry, Feller, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, poetry, Southern writing on November 14, 2025| 5 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Denton Loving]

Lake Sagatagan Summer

After evensong at the abbey, we walk circles

in the woods, weaving through deerflies

in kamikaze flights. The cerulean warbler

mates among these trees, we’re told,

so we keep vigil for blue flickers in the leaves.

So far, nothing. On half-submerged logs

turtles perch like hard-shelled gods –

We canoe to the deepest part of the lake

before we can talk about who we were

before the other existed as witness.

Night descends, and we have to compete

with the liturgy of loons,

but here, surrounded by water, by darkness,

is the only safe place to tell the truth.

Denton Loving

❦ ❦ ❦

Last month I took a walk in the woods with my brother Bob, visiting from Montana. Here in North Carolina it was 78 and sunny, leaves still on the trees, plenty of shade. Bob wore a long-sleeve shirt rated SPF 50, sun blocking mitts, a neck gaiter pulled up over his ears, and a broad-brimmed hat. Yesterday I spent four hours with Dad at the plastic surgeon’s office. Besides freezing several superficial cancers on Dad’s scalp, she gave him the option of not treating the half-inch basal cell cancer on his nose. After all, he’s 99. What if he should choose to just ignore that cancer?

My brother seems to be choosing to live another thirty years skin cancer free. My father seems to have chosen never to wear a hat. Bob lives in the future. Dad lives with his past. The sun shines on us all. But this is not a microessay about UV protection or dermatologic wellness.

God sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. If you are trying to farm in an arid plain like Judea, rain is not a downer but a blessing. The threatening proposition would seem to be, The sun shines on us all. But here’s a phrase even more ominous – He lives with his past. As Linda and I drive through the neighborhood this morning, she asks me if I’m OK after I let out a deep involuntary sigh. Am I OK? Where did that come from? I tick back – we had just passed the house of a man who used to be my patient. I made a bad choice in his care, he got mad, and he went and found another doctor. Fifteen years ago. You can’t live in a small town for decades without daily reminders of your choices. You can’t live on the earth, it sometimes seems, without your past constantly poking you and calling you out.

The other night at chorus we men sat and listened while the women rehearsed their own piece, SSAA. There is Linda, intent on the director and facing away from me, but the clear flute of her soprano reaches my heart. For one bright moment I am swept up in perfect love and peace. Tomorrow we’ll again flash our prickles, maybe argue about whether I’m paying attention or choosing to ignore her, but right now every choice I’ve ever made tastes sweet.

So here’s what Dad didn’t choose: to be alive on the 99th anniversary of his birth. Plenty of years for that ultraviolet to penetrate and warp his squamous cells and basal cells. And even though basal cell carcinoma never kills you, it will keep on growing until it bleeds and hurts. Especially if you are someone who vows on every birthday, as if you actually have a choice in the matter, to live five more. I tell the surgeon, “We choose the knife.” I tell myself, “Choose the music.”

❦

This is a bit more of that passage from the fifth chapter of Matthew, Jesus speaking to a crowd of seekers who had followed up a mountainside: You have heard it said, You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you; that you may be the children of your Father who is in heaven: for he makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. [Matthew 5:43-45 ]

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The Octopus School of Poetry

Yes, that they have three hearts is remarkable.

So too, the way they navigate man-made mazes.

That their eight arms simultaneously perform

separate tasks. That they can unscrew jar lids

even when they’re trapped inside the glass.

But of all the strange facts, I can’t get past

their ability to squirt jets of black ink,

theatrical for sure, but an effective tactic

to distract a hungry eel or seal or albatross –

not unlike the poem, shooting fireworks

to ward off what haunts us. Such a nifty trick.

Almost worth the burden of those extra hearts.

Denton Loving

❦ ❦ ❦

Almost worth the burden of those extra hearts.

I try to divert my eyes from the cover endorsements when I pick up a new book of poems. You don’t read the last page of a novel first, do you? One joy of reading poetry is the sudden encounter with a line that leaps into revelation – opening a window into the writer’s heart – or into epiphany – opening the reader’s heart.

Anyhow, I figure I know Denton Loving’s poetry from his books Crimes Against Birds and Tarp. I rub my hands together in anticipation of mountains and hollers, of creatures and musk. And this new book does not disappoint. Denton displays the naturalist’s eye and ear and sensibility; every poem is rich with place and presence. But Feller is even deeper and richer than nature. The natural landscape is simply gesso for the canvas – these poems are about the burden of heart. These are love poems, and loss poems. While the naturalist observes, questions, connects, we are permitted to observe and connect with his deepest feelings and honest vulnerability. These pages are a safe place to tell the truth.

❦

Denton Loving publishes interviews and reviews at https://dentonloving.com/ and has just announced a call for poems by Appalachian writers with and about disability, an upcoming anthology edited by Kendra Winchester. Denton is co-founder and editor at EastOver Press and its literary journal Cutleaf. For over a decade, he co-directed the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival at Lincoln Memorial University. He lives on a farm near the Cumberland Gap, where Tennessee, Virginia, and Kentucky meet.

Feller is available from Mercer University Press.

You may sample Denton Loving’s prior books here in previous posts at VERSE & IMAGE:

Crimes Against Birds

Tamp

❦ ❦ ❦

The Eagle and the Drone

My soul leapt, you said when you witnessed

the eagle attack the drone in mid-flight –

the drone’s camera capturing its own finish,

the eagle cementing her reign of the sky.

When you read this, I think you’ll know

the triumphant eagle is not a symbol

of America, and neither is the lost drone.

This is no polemic or war-time parable;

as far as I can tell, there’s no clear wisdom

gained when we pit nature against technology.

I only know medicine men say eagles bring new vision –

like light through a lens passing obliquely

from air into a prism’s flat panel of glass,

refracting and separating the sun’s beams –

to help us understand our complicated past

and present, to guide us through the mysteries

of the future. That reminds me of the last trip

I made to visit you in Florida, when an eagle rose

from one of Highway 417’s narrow strips

of median as you drove me to the airport in Orlando.

The eagle winged directly toward our windshield,

and we agreed it was a very good omen:

how she caught our eyes, how pure white her bald

head appeared before she flew into the morning sun.

Denton Loving

❦ ❦ ❦

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Requiem for Trees

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, tagged Barbara Conrad, Bill Griffin, Ecopoetry, Had I a Dove, Hilda Downer, hurricane Helene, imagery, Molly Bolton, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Southern Appalachians, Southern writing, Suzette Clark Bradshaw on November 7, 2025| 2 Comments »

[with 3 poems from Had I a Dove]

Grief for These Trees

Nearly half, we’re told, downed by wind,

wrenched from river-flooded ground.

+++ Clogging streets, parks, schoolyards,

blocking our hiking trails. Our town is dank

as a worn graveyard, branches and brambles

+++ strewn among marble stones.

+++ So what to do with the haunt

of these crippled trees? My muse would say

go to the woods, hike the trail anyway.

And I will. But before lacing my boots,

let me honor what we’ve learned of nature,

+++ how in mystery

trees speak to one another – give support

+++ and shade, share water and sun.

And like old friends, mourn when one dies.

Let me rub my fingers into the wound

+++ of this tulip poplars’s bark,

nod to the beetles and lichen who thrive.

Smell the sweet air of pine sap.

+++ Scrunch my body

over broken bones of oaks and willows,

cling to the dead the way I’d cling

as a kid to our sugar maple

+++ next to Daddy’s tomato patch.

Limbs holding me safe,

+++ a flutter of breeze through leaves

always whispering my name.

Let me linger here in the trees I”ve known,

the ones now gone, the ones

+++ still upright and grieving.

Barbara Conrad

❦ ❦ ❦

It was cold enough to frost last night but I hear music outside my bedroom window and raise the sash. A sparrow is calling, perched on a branch just a few feet from the house. He swivels his head west-south-east and at each turn chirps a metallic almost musical tink. He means business. He is not just any little brown bird – he’s a White-Throated Sparrow, migrated here from Canada to spend the winter. And his perch is not just any tree – it’s a native dogwood. It holds onto color, its coppery leaves, while the tuliptree and maple are already browning in the road. This tree holds onto life when so many of its kinfolk have been taken down by blight.

Tink, tink, tink. I am here. Brassy foliage and scarlet berries. I am here. We are here for each other.

Poets who survived hurricane Helene mourn their trees. The poems in Had I a Dove bear witness – trees uprooted, splintered, tumbled down mountainsides, tangled in rivers. Trees crushing houses and blocking roads, trees wiped from entire ridgelines, and with every fresh breeze our own reborn fear of trees falling. We being a species which can grasp large numbers, we try to calculate. How many trees destroyed by wind and flood? Millions? Dozens of millions? It becomes unimaginable. At the loss of even one tree, the heart suffers. That big hickory that shaded the garden. The righteous oak that lifted and held the kids’ tire swing. The dogwood where sparrows perched.

Hurricane Hugo roared through Charleston in 1989 and felled thousand-year old cypresses in the blackwater swamps, then stomped on up the Appalachian chain to leave behind downed trees all the way to Ohio. Near our home a hundred year old oak blocked Flat Rock Ridge trail where it winds from Basin Cove up to the Blue Ridge Parkway. An anonymous Park Service volunteer with a huge chain saw cleared the trail, and into the face of that massive stump he carved “Hugo 9-21-89.” I have paid homage every time I hike past, until a couple of years ago I had to stop and cast about to find the stump. Rot and lichen and a thick beard of moss had cloaked the inscription. Overhead, the canopy had closed as fellow trees shouldered their way in. In the midst of grief and loss, we hold onto life.

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I could not hear the trees fall

the morning that yowling she-wolf,

Helene stormed up from Florida,

sank blood-stained fangs into Appalachia,

her torrential mad-drool rain,

drowning wide river valleys,

and all those skinny little hollers.

From a kitchen window I watched

her lay into a neighboring ridge, her super-charged

breath knocking down magnificent oaks,

colossal hickories, and hundreds of tall pines

which dominoed one by one by one.

She left nothing standing in the upper hillside grove.

The next day, after that noisy bitch moved on,

I heard an immense tree fall somewhere

close by. There was a crack,

a ghostly groan, a swoosh of leaves,

then, as it met the ground, a tremendous bellow.

And I whispered a prayer for the passing.

Suzette Clark Bradshaw

❦ ❦ ❦

Barbara Conrad has lived in North Carolina all her life and in Asheville since COVID. She edits Waiting for Soup, an anthology created by her writing group with houseless folks.

Suzette Clark Bradshaw lives in western North Carolina, writes and sculpts, and is employed by her county to manage Helene recovery projects and FEMA grants.

Molly Bolton lives in Foscoe, North Carolina, and upholds the spiritual practice of collective liberation with weekly posts at enfleshed.com.

Had I a Dove: Appalachian Poets on the Helene Flood, an anthology collected and edited by Hilda Downer, includes a preface by Joseph Bathanti. More than 80 poets, voices as various and deep as those wild mountain ridges and hollers, share the night that hurricane Helene’s “thousand year” flooding and gales devastated the mountain counties of North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee. They share the days and weeks and now months that have come after, the scars and healing. Available from Redhawk Publications at Catawba Valley Community College Press in Hickory, NC.

❦ ❦ ❦

somehow bloodroot

For Western North Carolina & Gaza

still blooms, the same

spot as last year

at the crumbling edge

of the driveway

in the seam

of march and April

under the body

of a fallen elder oak

each flower coming up

wrapped around

its stem like a windless

white flag.

they say

among the rubble

there will be dancing –

beautiful people

in ancient lands

tending fires

while they are hunted

ghosts unsurprised

by the power of greed

to route bombs towards

children, a hurricane

to the mountains. my sister

had to come get me

through maze of

washed-out roads &

Here

I am, still alive

same spot as last year

bumming a cigarette outside

the todd community square dance

just to watch smoke rise

from the creaky porch

past the blown-open riverbank

to the cold white stars.

Molly Bolton

❦ ❦ ❦

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Who?

Posted in family, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, family, Halloween, imagery, Lateral Drift, nature photography, NC Poets, poetry, Robin Greene, Southern writing on October 31, 2025| 5 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Robin Greene]

Everyone is Someone Else

Everyone is someone else tonight.

Sitting on hallway stairs, bowl of packaged candies

on my lap, I rise to greet four princesses – facemasks

hard and identical, two Energizer bunnies,

an army soldier in fatigues, and three wise men –

brothers they tell me. Later, as my son peels off

his Ninja costume to sleep in the chaos of his take,

two new moons, discovered around Uranus,

appear on CNN. And strangely, Uranus

is one of his spelling words this week.

The world seems driven by repetitions:

the ant’s legs scrambling across the kitchen tile,

sheet rain blowing against window glass,

the perennial grass relentless beneath

our feet. Robert Creeley once removed

his glass eye in a poetry workshop and described life

as a dress rehearsal, but never said for what . . . .

And once there was a man I loved and married.

We made three babies, but one died inside me,

and I bled for a month. Sometimes I pretend

that shit like this just happens, and whatever

meaning I search for is like searching for the faces

of strangers on this Halloween: behind masks

are masks, behind motion is motion.

Robin Greene

❦ ❦ ❦

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but (even) then face to face.

I Corinthians 13:12 (KJV – adapted)

Is everyone someone else, or just me? Am I who I seem to be, and would I let you know if I weren’t? I was that kid in English class who read every story in the book even though only four were assigned. I was the guy mixing and measuring in the back of the lab while the chemistry teacher was up front confounding the class. In college they had to drag me out of the science building every night when it closed. I chose medicine as my profession from some hazy expectation that it would let me keep learning new stuff all my life.

Now in my closing decades I want to say, “Stop! I’ve learned enough!” I don’t need to know any more than I do right now about all the hard stuff. Parent, caregiver, worrier, fuckup – enough! There is only one way, however, that life will finally drag you out of the classroom. To paraphrase a caution about Nature: Life gives you the test first, then teaches you the lesson.

A mirror, like a person, ages. Over a century shiny metal applied to glass tarnishes and darkens. It reveals its pits and blemishes. Attrition, wearing down, is not far from contrition, wearing ashes. Paul writing his first letter to the Corinthians expects us to outgrow our foolishness and confusion, set aside childish ways and think like grownups. He dangles the promise that we may experience eternity with God face to face. I hope that’s true, that my self is more durable than my molecules, but I wonder about all this learning and knowing in the meantime. Life – has it been worth it? Even the person who passes with an “A” still answered 5% wrong. That adds up to a lot of foolishness and confusion I am carrying.

Even gazing into a dark mirror, I still see myself face to face. Who is that looking back? All the knowing I’ve tried so hard to accumulate and hold onto, all the elements I’ve combined into myself, in that mirror they become shadows fading away at the periphery. The person in that mirror – who is he really? Perhaps on my final day, when the blazing light of the universe is revealed and ultimate mysteries are mysterious no longer, I will also see, clear and defined, face to face, me.

❦ ❦ ❦

The Necklace

Under cool running water, my mother clutches

a knife, debones chicken breasts the color

of a winter moon; I’ll never be a woman,

I think and rise from my half-lotus

on the countertop – eight years-old –

my flat, tight body still an ally.

My mother and I never speak of this

apprenticeship, field archeologist

I’ve become, unearthing the glyphs

and ruins of my gender

until my father and brother arrive,

noisy as blind men,

bumping their way across the linoleum tiles –

breaking our silence

as though it were neither real

nor holy.

Later, the smells of cologne, hairspray

filter through the house.

Steam from the iron sizzles

on its aluminum pad

as mother presses

my father’s slacks and shirt,

and sets up snacks for the babysitter –

fashioning each small part of our lives

as though they were hand-made beads

for a necklace some Inca woman

might make and pass down

to her only daughter.

Robin Greene

❦ ❦ ❦

Just as an earthquake or long drought may expose new strata to the paleontologist’s questing eye, so a pile of books tumbling off a desk. Robin Greene wrote these poems in Lateral Drift twenty-five years ago. When I open the book today for the first time, how powerfully the lines still reach out to me and into me. How truthfully they speak; how in the present they are; how they open themselves, and me. Who is the voice in these unsheathed knives of stories? Who was she then, and is she still? But why even ask such a thing? The poems are who they are made to be; they carry the light and the darkness they were created for.

Better to ask instead, Who am I as I read these poems? I am a man opening myself to receive the truth of a woman’s struggles and the marrow of her knowing. I am a person old enough to have grandchildren yet I become a child and a young parent and Lord knows what in the tangle and turbulence of these stories. I am someone who knows little, perhaps nothing at all, until I am willing to sit down for a moment in this silence filled with words.

After I’ve read the book, read it through a second time, spoken some poems, typed out a few favorites in order to learn them through my fingers as well as through my eyes and breath, then I turn back to the title page and test memory and find this: 11/17/01 To Bill, Best wishes, Robin Greene. Time is not metallic, unspooling keen enough to slice you if you try to hold it still or alter its shape; time is froth and broth and no telling what may next boil to the surface. There you discover the one advantage of having lived seventy years – you have plenty to add to the stew.

❦

Robin Greene has bubbled and boiled plenty since she signed my copy of Lateral Drift. She is cofounder of Longleaf Press and also cofounder of Sandhills Dharma Group. She retired as Professor of English and Writing, and Director of the Writing Center at Methodist University in Fayetteville, NC. She continues to write and publish poetry, fiction, and non-fiction from her home in Hendersonville, NC.

Robin Greene – Artist’s Statement

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What the Leaves Said

As I walked in the woods today,

early October, the leaves fell –

individually – through stark, shining air,

until one of them unfolded its

blood-red palm in my outstretched

hand and whispered a word

before joining its kin on the forest floor.

I had stopped for a moment, noticing

sunlight opening up shadows,

shifting its radiance in light wind

across the new landscape as leaves

shook from beech and oak,

and I listened: one word becoming

many, becoming one.

Robin Greene

❦ ❦ ❦

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Posts Tagged ‘nature photography’

Choice / No Choice

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Requiem for Trees

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Who?

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