Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘NC Poets’

Witness – Appalachia to Hatteras

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , on November 28, 2025| 1 Comment »

 . 
Two poems by Gilbert-Chappell students
 . 
Fantasy
 . 
I said can you feel that sun and she said no and I beckoned her out of the shadows and tilted my face skyward and my skin lit up gold crown to sole and I said can you feel that sun and she said no and I took her hand and pulled her close and pressed my nose to her temple and breathed in her warmth and I said can you feel that sun and she said no but her voice held the nostalgia of a thousand dusks and I cracked one eye open in suspicion and she was radiant and grinning
 . 
Jude McDonald
 . 

❀  ❀  ❀  ❀  ❀
 . 
Affirmations for My Twenty-First Year
 . 
I am tensile and easily missed. I am choral, and archaic, and autumnal in fashion.
When the temperature drops, I wear a sensible pair of stockings that attract
a sensible amount of attention. I am wild-footed. I am uneven in an interesting
way. When there is singing, I listen. I believe in jackalopes and the miracle of modern
medicine. I am trustworthy. I am the end of a bloodline. When there is not
singing, I will ask for there to be singing.
 . 
+++++ A lover (lover! Lover, lover) once siad I was a flashlight cutting through
the dark pier of “something, like, life, maybe?” She was not a good poet. This year,
I am no one’s flashlight. I will tell lovers (lovers!) forget your wavering, cut the shit,
you should not need me to know where to step. And anyway, you know how to swim
+++++ don’t you?
 . 
I am tall. I am tawny and approachable. Where there is love to be found, I am
a good hunter. When the moon rises, I offer traditional greetings. I am funny.
I am funny, funny, funny. I am not a flashlight, I am something hotter. Fire,
why not! I burn your eyes. I burn your tongue. I burn your mother’s hands
when she takes me out of the oven. I am a blackberry cobbler baked fresh.
 . 
+++++ I am an East Coast native. I am kind. I am the hand of gnarled oak clawing
at a telephone wire. I am kind. I climb bare-bodied birches in winter and watch
my breath. I am light and breezy. When lovers say I am anything, I will say, “No,
I am not.” I am kind. I am a friend to cats and children. I have a certain allure. I leap
off cliffs and build houses where I land. I am kind. I will be kinder.
 . 
Lauren Mills
 . 
 . 
❀  ❀  ❀  ❀  ❀
 . 
When there is not / singing, I will ask for there to be singing. Both of these poems are full-throated affirmations, songs of self uplifted, revealed, celebrated. Every time I read Fantasy my smile grows broader and broader line by line. To become radiant and grinning, oh how I wish it to be so. Why shouldn’t every day be an opportunity to discover joy? Exactly the same with Affirmations. Enter the universe of miracles and music and hot blackberry cobbler. My hope in our world is restored when even one person chooses to be kind. And kinder. Let’s all join in.
 . 
❀  ❀  ❀
 . 
Witness: Appalachia to Hatteras (2025) is the annual anthology of the Gilbert-Chappel Distinguished Poet Series of the North Carolina Poetry Society. Poet Mentors in the eastern, central, and western regions of the state spend six months guiding student poets, culminating in public readings and this published collection. The 2025 Distinguished Poet Mentors are Gideon Young, Maria Rouphail, and Mildred Kiconco Barya.
 . 
Jude McDonald (Raleigh, NC) is a Black, queer poet, multimedia artist, and writer. He focuses on complex themes like love, identity, and reflection, and asks his listeners/viewers to stop in close and embrace vulnerability. Lauren Mills (Sherrills Ford, NC) currently attends Dartmouth College as an English and Creative Writing major. She is interested in Shakespearean theatre, the weather, getting funnier, and dogs that have the size and temperament of cats.
 . 
2016-10-17a Doughton Park Tree
 . 
 . 
Note this new format for 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, please view these GUIDELINES:
 . 
                            https://griffinpoetry.com/about/
 . 
Also note: after January 1, 2026 I will no longer be sending weekly email reminders.
If you would like to receive an email each time a post appears, please SUBSCRIBE to VERSE & 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 subscribe for you. Send your request to
 . 
COMMENTS@GRIFFINPOETRY.COM

Read Full Post »

Saturday Share — Radavich and Taylor

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , on November 22, 2025| 4 Comments »

Saturday morning readers share:
David Radavich and Richard Allen Taylor
 . 
Birthday
 . 
Every year a leaf falls,
one at a time, hands,
days full of raking, scattering
 . 
and I come to see
the bare tree
of us
against the sunlight
strewn in branches, shimmering
naked against all
 . 
those colors you give me
tumbling free
within a small space,
 . 
a time together
walking in woods
 . 
David Radavich
 . 
For a possible Saturday poem I have selected Birthday, which strikes me as a quintessentially autumn poem. It was first published in my book, By the Way: Poems over the Years (Buttonwood, 1998).
 . 
 . 
The picture shows me ensconced in a park in Champaign, Illinois when my hair was not yet silver. As for a curious factoid about me, I enjoy reading German philosophy (in German), especially Schopenhauer and Cassirer. Also, casting horoscopes. Go figure.
 . 
Additional poetry by David Radavich at Verse and Image:
[April every year? David always contributes to our special EARTH DAY posts.]
 . 
❀ ❀ ❀ ❀ ❀
 . 
Blessed Are
+++++ After “Ode on Inheritance” by Kate Partridge
 . 
Perhaps there is no inheritance worth having
+++++that does not include a narrative of water—
++++++++++ a river, a lake, an ocean
 . 
pounding on the beach below the open windows.
+++++My father bought a farm
++++++++++with a white house on a hill, a pond
 . 
at the bottom. My mother inherited. She later sold.
+++++All of it was (shall we say) liquidated.
++++++++++Gone, the tiny lake
 . 
fed by a stream tumbling over my father’s modest
+++++ambitions. Just as well. My brothers and I sought
++++++++++ neither the view nor the serenity.
 . 
We were reaching elsewhere, for something
+++++less pastoral, more hopeful,
++++++++++something more highway
 . 
than country road. But even a cave can elicit hope.
+++++The torch goes out, we keep thrusting our hands
++++++++++ forward, groping the walls,
 . 
feet following our blindness. As if a hole could lean
+++++against its sides. All it takes is the will
++++++++++ to swap adjectives.
 . 
Trade wet for slick. Choose briny over soaked.
+++++ Here we go again with that
++++++++++narrative of water. Snow, hail,
 . 
ice melting in your palm. Later, when the drought
+++++squeezes the pond dry, the spark catches
++++++++++ and fire climbs the hill,
 . 
everything promised burns. The difference between
+++++bold and meek becomes a matter of timing.
++++++++++Bold when we rush forward
 . 
to extinguish the blaze. Meek when the flames
+++++ force us back to a place
++++++++++where faces do not melt.
 . 
When rain comes, finally, we inherit the memory
+++++of blackened hills, even if no lawyers or signatures
++++++++++ attend. When grief follows, we console ourselves.
 . 
We say the trees bury their seeds under layers of ash.
We say the trees dream of resurrection.
 . 
Richard Allen Taylor
 . 
This poem first appeared in Sheila-Na-Gig Online, and received a Pushcart Prize nomination. It is now part of a book-length manuscript, Geography of One, that will be published next year if all goes according to plan. 
 . 
 . 
This is my habitat but not necessarily the only habitat or even where I spend most of my time. But I don’t have a picture of me typing at my desk. That would be my real habitat and that would be boring. 
 . 
Interesting tidbit: After retiring from my job as Regional Human Resources Manager of Hendrick Automotive Group in 2013, I earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte in 2015. 
 . 
Additional poetry by Richard Allen Taylor at Verse and Image:
❀ ❀ ❀ ❀ ❀
 . 
 . 
Saturday Morning Submissions – Once a week on Saturday I feature one or two poems shared with me by readers. If you would like to consider having your poem appear, please see the GUIDELINES here.

Read Full Post »

Your Shallow Place in All of This — Lucinda Trew

Posted in family, Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , , on November 21, 2025| 2 Comments »

[2 poems by Lucinda Trew]
if you wish to grow a garden, first seed
your soul with sadness
 . 
for it helps to have an ache, a molecule
of sorrow that will swell, release and drench
the patch of earth you claim
 . 
like a weather plane sowing stingy clouds
with silver beads of iodide, lush promise of rain
something withheld – a slip of rue, s spore
of woe to bury – a slender sprig of remembering
your shallow place in all of this
 . 
a cloister of green where secrets are safe
where worm and peat, centipede and muddy
trowel will carry melancholy to the seedling
graves you dig
 . 
for a garden is forgiving – a copse confessional
a place for penance – pulling weeds, snapping
roots, kneeling in dirt
 . 
and tending, gently tending, to fragile shoot
breaching bud, those in need of holding up
and the healing grace of fresh tilled ground.
 . 
♦
 . 
when trees fall
 . 
from natural cause – nor’easter, drought
decrepitude – they lean in, one upon another
++++ a prayer of knotty hands
 . 
we pray, too, in other ways, holding one another
close in crook and crutch of branch, and nests
++++ for those in need of cradling
 . 
we unfist fingers, unwind clocks, hold one another
in a basketweave of leaf and twig and comforting
++++ like trees, we slant
 . 
against wind and time, hearts and boughs that break
from storm and thorn and toppled crowns
++++ we ease one another
 . 
to ground, to the resting place of forest floor
to beds of moss and tender mercies yielding to ash
++++ as we all fall down
 . 
Lucinda Trew
from What Falls to Ground, Charlotte Lit Press, Charlotte, NC; © 2025
++++
IMG_9468
 . 
♦   ♦   ♦   ♦   ♦
 . 
I love these poems for their compassion in the deep sense of that word, “suffering together.” In reading these lines I am able to pause and slant against the wind of my own doubt and daily struggles. Lucinda writes, “a poem is a bone / in the graveyard of remembering.” In memory I visit the bones of loss and pain but also the roots and seeds of what may again grow into joy. In the music of Lucinda’s words and phrases, the myth and earthy origins her poems suggest, the impermanence of all things resting the midst of rising sun and growing plant – in these I rediscover hope. Yes, we all fall to ground. Yes, we may ease each other as we fall.
 . 
♦
 . 
Lucinda Trew lives and writes in the red clay piedmont of North Carolina, USA. What Falls to Ground is her debut collection and is available from Charlotte Center for the Literary Arts.
 . 
Additional poetry by Lucinda Trew at VERSE and IMAGE:
 . 
 . 
IMG_1948
 . 
 . 

Saturday’s Submission – Once a week on Saturday I feature one or two poems sent to me by readers. If you would like to consider having your poem appear, please see the GUIDELINES here:

About

 

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »