Posts Tagged ‘NC Poets’
Saturday Share — Radavich and Taylor
Posted in Imagery, tagged Bill Griffin, David Radavich, NC Poets, poetry, Richard Allen Taylor, Saturday readers share, Southern writing on November 22, 2025| 4 Comments »
Saturday morning readers share:
David Radavich and Richard Allen Taylor
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Birthday
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Every year a leaf falls,
one at a time, hands,
days full of raking, scattering
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and I come to see
the bare tree
of us
against the sunlight
strewn in branches, shimmering
naked against all
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those colors you give me
tumbling free
within a small space,
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a time together
walking in woods
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David Radavich
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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).
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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.
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Additional poetry by David Radavich at Verse and Image:
[April every year? David always contributes to our special EARTH DAY posts.]
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❀ ❀ ❀ ❀ ❀
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Blessed Are
+++++ After “Ode on Inheritance” by Kate Partridge
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Perhaps there is no inheritance worth having
+++++that does not include a narrative of water—
++++++++++ a river, a lake, an ocean
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pounding on the beach below the open windows.
+++++My father bought a farm
++++++++++with a white house on a hill, a pond
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at the bottom. My mother inherited. She later sold.
+++++All of it was (shall we say) liquidated.
++++++++++Gone, the tiny lake
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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.
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We were reaching elsewhere, for something
+++++less pastoral, more hopeful,
++++++++++something more highway
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than country road. But even a cave can elicit hope.
+++++The torch goes out, we keep thrusting our hands
++++++++++ forward, groping the walls,
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feet following our blindness. As if a hole could lean
+++++against its sides. All it takes is the will
++++++++++ to swap adjectives.
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Trade wet for slick. Choose briny over soaked.
+++++ Here we go again with that
++++++++++narrative of water. Snow, hail,
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ice melting in your palm. Later, when the drought
+++++squeezes the pond dry, the spark catches
++++++++++ and fire climbs the hill,
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everything promised burns. The difference between
+++++bold and meek becomes a matter of timing.
++++++++++Bold when we rush forward
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to extinguish the blaze. Meek when the flames
+++++ force us back to a place
++++++++++where faces do not melt.
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When rain comes, finally, we inherit the memory
+++++of blackened hills, even if no lawyers or signatures
++++++++++ attend. When grief follows, we console ourselves.
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We say the trees bury their seeds under layers of ash.
We say the trees dream of resurrection.
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Richard Allen Taylor
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Additional poetry by Richard Allen Taylor at Verse and Image:
❀ ❀ ❀ ❀ ❀
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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.
Your Shallow Place in All of This — Lucinda Trew
Posted in family, Imagery, tagged Bill Griffin, Charlotte Lit, Lucinda Trew, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing, What Falls to Ground on November 21, 2025| 2 Comments »
[2 poems by Lucinda Trew]
if you wish to grow a garden, first seed
your soul with sadness
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for it helps to have an ache, a molecule
of sorrow that will swell, release and drench
the patch of earth you claim
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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
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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
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for a garden is forgiving – a copse confessional
a place for penance – pulling weeds, snapping
roots, kneeling in dirt
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and tending, gently tending, to fragile shoot
breaching bud, those in need of holding up
and the healing grace of fresh tilled ground.
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♦
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when trees fall
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from natural cause – nor’easter, drought
decrepitude – they lean in, one upon another
++++ a prayer of knotty hands
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we pray, too, in other ways, holding one another
close in crook and crutch of branch, and nests
++++ for those in need of cradling
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we unfist fingers, unwind clocks, hold one another
in a basketweave of leaf and twig and comforting
++++ like trees, we slant
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against wind and time, hearts and boughs that break
from storm and thorn and toppled crowns
++++ we ease one another
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to ground, to the resting place of forest floor
to beds of moss and tender mercies yielding to ash
++++ as we all fall down
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Lucinda Trew
from What Falls to Ground, Charlotte Lit Press, Charlotte, NC; © 2025
++++
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♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
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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.
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♦
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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.
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Additional poetry by Lucinda Trew at VERSE and IMAGE:
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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:





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You are planting wonderful seeds. ---B