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Posts Tagged ‘NC Poets’

EDGE – part two

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , on June 3, 2023| 6 Comments »

[with poems from PINESONG 2023, NC Poetry Society Anthology]

 

Ghazal: Ghost Apples (Kent County, Michigan)

 

Ice-encrusted boughs from which transparent versions
of apples hang – each fragile as hand-blown glass.
+++
Their history: fruit on the cusp of rot, winter storm trundling
down a hillside, sleet coating each apple in sudden glass.
+++
Viscous fruit leaked from apertures until only icy shells
remained – December trees bearing quicksilver bulbs of glass.
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Imagine them a vivid red or green, like cascades of apples
even humble grocery stores offer on the far side of plate glass.
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If we shattered these globes, would they taste like hard cider
or the cloying sweetness of pulp, like edible versions of glass?
++++++
Soon these crystalline shells will melt to nothingness, the way
we all disappear. Beloved, step lightly upon grief’s bitter glass.
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Lavonne Adams
Joanna Catherine Scott Award First Place, Pinesong 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Diversity often blooms at the edge. This little trail heading out from Isaac’s Trail Head on the MST is limn upon limn . . . boundary . . . transition. The wide riparian border along Grassy Creek attracts neotropical migrants for a rest stop each spring; Louisiana Waterthrush, White-Eyed Vireo, and Common Yellowthroat stay behind to breed here. The footpath parallels a pasture fenceline, and while cows with their calves stand flank-deep in meadow grass and blackberry bramble, all manner of wildflowers hug the margin of No Grazing: Blue Toadflax, Venus’s Looking Glass, Carolina Crane’s-Bill. Leaving creekside, the trail is hemmed by a moist rising woodland: Rattlesnake Fern, Sensitive Fern, Southern Lady Fern. And by the end of summer, if the farmer hasn’t sprayed, the trail edges will fill with Blue-Curl, Cardinal Flower, Goldenrod, Wingstem.
+++
Smaller fields and many interruptions make for many edges; diversity begets diversity. At one point along the trail a wide acreage of corn abuts a small hay field of mixed grasses. The corn field is solemn in its solitude; above the hay the air is filled with swallows, Bluebirds and Phoebes perch along the wire, and as we hike past we’re apt to flush an Indigo Bunting foraging.
+++
But then there are Cowbirds. For centuries they followed prairie bison herds and no doubt also the woodland bison of the Carolina piedmont. Now they follow every human disturbance, common in cow pasture but just as common on suburban lawns. Cowbirds are exclusively brood parasites, known to lay their eggs in the nests of over 220 other species. To their detriment. Kirtland’s Warbler has been pushed beyond the edge of “endangered” by Cowbird predation, and most birds do not have the ability to recognize the foreign eggs which will hatch and out-compete the rightful occupants. How to resist? Escape the edges. Reverse the fragmentation. Cowbirds will not follow into deep woods – warblers nesting deep in the forest are safe.
+++
It isn’t the Cowbird that threatens wood warblers, whip-poor-wills, vireos. It is shrinking habitat. Many species thrive at the edge. Some, though, require wide wild expanses. How much wild can we leave?
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❦
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Upon which side of the boundary does poetry perch, thrive or decline? And what would it look like, that restored, invigorated poetry habitat, a definite nudge toward thriving? More fifth graders setting pen to page and seeing their lines is print, as they have in this year’s annual Pinesong anthology by the North Carolina Poetry Society? More opportunities and promptings to write – whatever one’s background, training, preferred theme, chosen form? And more readers?
+++
That’s where we come in. This morning I broke a nice sweat hiking miles along meadow and creek, through upland forest to lakeshore and back. This afternoon with feet up I’ve covered another rewarding meander through the pages of Pinesong. Student poets, grades 4 through undergrad; dozens more of adult poets, many names entirely new to me. I’ve traveled new places, I’ve encountered the unexpected and enlightening, I’ve paused long to reflect, and I’ve even laughed out loud. As Robert Frost wrote in The Pasture: “You come, too.”
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Eleven Lines In Search of the Perfect Rhyme
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Is it accidental that bereft almost rhymes with death?
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Watching geese rise in a chevron formation The New River
at Grassy Creek, flying south to warmer waters, I think of how
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sons and daughters grow up, how the nest – that like death
almost rhymes with bereft, – empties with their flight.
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How these words fly out of my mouth like startled birds.
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How we dream of loved ones who are dead. How we forget
what happened in the dream, what we did, what we said.
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How there are hundreds of ways to leave, not only the 50 ways
in Paul Simon’s song, and thousands of ways to grieve, bereft.
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How you can both the lover leaving and the lover left.
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Beth Copeland
Carol Bessent Hayman Poetry of Love Award Honorable Mention, Pinesong 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Pinesong is the annual publication of contest winning poems by the North Carolina Poetry Society, founded in 1932. Pinesong 2023 is Number 59, edited by Sherry Pedersen-Thrasher with assistance from Joan Barasovska. This year’s volume is dedicated to David Radavich, former NCPS President and steadfast supporter of poetry and the arts.
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You can learn more about North Carolina Poetry Society and its contests, plus read previous years’ editions of Pinesong . . . here.
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If you would like to purchase Pinesong ($12, postage included) please contact NCPS Vice President of Membership Joan Barasovska: msjoan9[at]gmail[dot]com
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A free issue of Pinesong is available to all NCPS members in good standing who request ($2 mailing expense). Please contact Joan, as above.
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2020-09-08b Doughton Park Tree

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Wind & Fire

Posted in family, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , on May 12, 2023| 9 Comments »

[featuring two poems by Regina Garcia]

This Fire Tastes Like . . .

This fire won’t taste like the last ones did
Singed souls torn up, crying, wandering,
wondering how to get love back
How to fix life
How to repair
The last fires tasted like . . .
Tasted like loss
Tasted like shame
Tasted like despair
Tasted like mourning
Tasted like no way out
Tasted like no way back
tasted like Tulsa
Tasted like Elaine
Tasted like Watts
Tasted like Wilmington
Tasted like old Eppes High . . .
Tasted like all that it had consumed

This fire tastes different
This fire tastes fed up
This fire has eyes set
Beyond loss
Beyond prison
Beyond death
Beyond the graves
This fire has new eyes
Fixed on that “New New”
Jerusalem
New fire gonna propel these children into
promised land
They won’t need the water fo the oppressor
Because they are children of living waters
And Raging Fires
And earth tht has promised fertility
Yet pushed out weeds to choke and distract

This fire tasted different
It tastes like energy

Tastes like righteous fury
Its fuel is dark kindling root
It will combust from a place to deep
So misunderstood
So, underestimated
That it will not be contained
This fire tastes different
It tastes like resolve

It will reject any attempts to thwart combustion
The internal combustion
It will incinerate attempts at trickery for
It has seen the video and believes
It waw murderous hubris
It saw The Dead that were tried for dying
It saw the solid stance of patronizing defiance of other fires
It saw the lies stifling acrid air
This fire tastes different
It tastes alive
It will not stop until there is nothing left that can stop it
It will then scoop the ashes and build
Jerusalem
Yeah
This fire tastes different
This fire tastes like revelation
This fire tastes like change
This fire tastes like
Hope

Regina YC Garcia
from The Firetalker’s Daughter, Finishing Line Press, © 2023

 

 

❦ ❦ ❦

Rainstorm, windstorm, limbs thrashing the house in panic, rain attacking the windows through the screens: we can feel Amelia’s mounting fear each time the sky grows dark and she asks, “Is this a tornado?” No, Honey, just a big storm. We don’t get tornados around here.

Until this afternoon. Severe Thunderstorm pings on the phone while we’re watching a movie with Amelia in the living room. Within minutes the sky is slate and the TV goes black. When hail peppers the porch we lurch for the basement. Amelia makes it into a game, the divine gift of the seven-year old, and while we play with flashlights we hear the drumming of rain but assume those contrabasso reverberations are thunder.

It’s all over in fifteen minutes. We climb the stairs and open the front door – our neighbor’s venerable willow oak, trunk at least two meters in diameter, is angled across the road into our driveway. Not crushing our living room. One sugar maple at the end of our house has had its spine snapped and hurled, but not into our bedroom. As our neighbors emerge, we tally and discover no one is injured (although not true of several roofs).

Everyone’s yard is full of twisted trunks and limbs or huge redclay balls of the uprooted. We notice most of the trees aligned prostrate in the same direction and we mutter, “Downburst.” “Straight-line wind.” Two days later, though, the National Weather Service makes its proclamation: an E0 tornado. We wonder if Amelia will ever want to finish that movie we had started. And if we ever get our power back on, we’re ordering some more flashlights.

❦

 

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Regina Garcia’s new poetry collection, The Firetalker’s Daughter, is elemental – wind, earth, water, fire. She describes her mother and her son as Firetalkers – they can speak to pain and talk it into submission. And isn’t that what these poems do, speak to the pain? If words could remove the pain of the world, the inescapable pain of living, perhaps a new day would dawn when the earth would have no more need of words. We will never see that day.

But strong words, words of compassion and truth, can raise us out of the pain. We can stand on the shoulders of the poetry, the hymns, the stories of the Firetalker and see a way beyond the pain. We can see a road before us where pain can’t wield its power over us. We can live in this world of pain and still proclaim joy, the rise of indomitable spirits from the embers. Oh, Regina Garcia, may your poetry lead us there. You are the Firetalker.

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The Fire That Consumes: The Burnings of Black Histories

Have you ever seen fire, the kind that consumes . . . ?
a house, a block, a street?
a community?
a town?
a nation?

Have you ever stretched fingers towards fire just because you wanted to feel
the last gusts of breath before the flames melted . . . ?
Mortar from brick?
Wood from steel?
Skin from meat from sinew from bone?
Have you ever jumped at the crack and splinter before the crash?
Hid your face to escape the blowing soot?
Covered your nose to block the smell of escaping gases the incineration of
flesh? Squeezed eyes shut to restrain the release of tears?

Fire destroys completely
Everything
Except memory
Those who have lived through fire never forget that all that was lost cannot
be returned, cannot be restored
Pre-fire life flickering in memory

Have you ever known the indignity of stolen memory?
Of erasure of thought?
A disallowing of necessary history passed on from ind to mind
No collective storage
Trashed as disposable waste
Scores of nations and families of people relegated to one layer of life lived
while other layers burned away
Withdrawn from the light of day
Layers that could have lit
the illumination of minds
the awareness of conditions

the recognition of irreverence and unrighteousness
the tackling of generational traumas
the overcoming of fear
the pride of resilience

Layers of heated memory
Deemed villainous
Tossed into the ashes
By thieves, those who dread
The power that it brings
And the rise of indomitable spirits from the embers

Regina YC Garcia
from The Firetalker’s Daughter, Finishing Line Press, © 2023

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Earth Day – Rewild

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 22, 2023| 10 Comments »

 

[with poems by Jennifer Atkinson, David Radavich,
Barbara Bloom, Diane Seuss]

Today is Earth Day, April 22. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow we are publishing posts for Earth Day featuring poems submitted by our readers that touch the theme, Wild & Rewild.

Rewilding is a conservation effort aimed at restoring habitat, revitalizing ecosystems, and reintroducing animals and plants that historically occupied these wild spaces.
Rewilding may be as small as converting cow pasture to a bit of riparian Piedmont Prairie along the Mitchell River in Surry County, NC.
It may be as large as creating wildlife corridors down the chain of the Rockies for migrating pronghorns.
It may be as simple as replacing introduced invasives in your yard with native species; as complex as legislation to set aside vast tracts as wilderness.

How does the poet encounter and respond to wildness? A native wildflower struggling in an urban park? A remote mountaintop far from human presence? A wild voice speaking to the heart; wild urges propelling the soul into the unknown?

A wild call from the past, the present, into the future?
For Earth Day 2023, touch the wild. Rewild yourself.

❦

Thank you to the readers of these pages
who have responded to my call for poems this Earth Day.
Watch for new posts on April 21, April 22, and April 23.

All photographs were taken April 11-17, 2023,
along the Elkin & Allegheny Nature Trail,
part of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail in North Carolina, USA.

Earth Day 2023 art by Linda French Griffin.

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Landscape with Jeffers and the Connecticut River

Oat stalks hang their oat-heavy heads.
Panic grass shakes in the wind
off a goldfinch’s wing. Cause,
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ effect, and cause.

Drone, like the bee, of goldenrod and aster,
tool of the stick-tight and cockleburr,
I park and wade into high riverside grasses.

A dog gnaws on a box turtle, a spider rides
a floating log, straining the air of its midges and leafbits.
A fisherman lazy as late summer current,
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ casts, reels, and casts.

It occurs to me I am alive, which is to say
I won’t be soon. Robinson Jeffers
from Carmel Point, in “an unbroken field of poppy and lupin”

ashamed of us all (of himself ), took solace in time,
in salt, water, and rock, in knowing
all things human “will ebb, and all/
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ Their works dissolve.”

Me, too. And I’m not always so patient. I’ve caught myself
wishing our spoiler species gone, just swept away,
returned to rust and compost for more deserving earthly forms.

Meanwhile, flint arrowheads turn up among the plastic
picnic sporks, the glacial crags and bottom silt.
Hawks roost across the river on the now defunct
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ nuclear power plant cooling tower,

flotsam left at the human high water mark.
Like mussel shells, like driftwood or seedpod,
like the current’s corrugations in the sand.

Here, on this side, a woodchuck sits up, lustrous,
fat on her chestnut haunches, (she thinks herself
queen of her narrow realm) and munches
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ the fisherman’s crust.

Who wouldn’t smile? Who doesn’t pity—and love—
the woodchuck not only despite but for her like-human smugness?
How can I not through her intercession forgive
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ for now a few things human.

Jennifer Atkinson
Selected by Bill Griffin; from the book THE THINKING EYE, Parlor Press
Appeared online at Poem-a-Day, Poems.com, on March 13, 2023

Jennifer Atkinson’s comments: “But how do we live with our knowledge and the emotional cloud of fear, guilt, anger, grief, and helplessness, a cloud that surrounds us, each of us alone, and all of us together? That cloud has become intrinsic to my ecopoetical work. Burdened with the beauty and loss and malicious awfulness ahead, weighted with the anxiety that hits whenever a winter day dawns without frost on the ground or another ‘unprecedented’ downpour rings in the gutter, how do I live?”

Who wouldn’t despair? Who wouldn’t smile? The daily slog through politics and pollution is too heavy to be borne. The daily green that lights my kitchen window while I make coffee is too beautiful to bear. This poem drives me into the inescapable reality of damaged Earth but also offers a leafy twig of hope.

– Bill Griffin / Elkin, North Carolina

[and I couldn’t resist that title after all the Robinson Jeffers I’ve been reading this past year.]

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Back Woods

Only in the hills behind
comes solace,

winter white against
the brown verticality of reaching

bare as need,
a few lingering green

hold-outs
crying for mercy,

leaves curled
atop themselves quiet

as abandoned
lovers.

I have already
sided with the deep creviced

ravine and its snow
cheeks incised

with cares in shadow

under a sun that
promises

open sky
open hearts.

David Radavich
first published in Blueline in 2008

This poem is marked by jagged line lengths and abrupt stanza breaks that emphasize the rawness and otherness of the natural world. The speaker feels attracted to the sharp contrasts in color and juxtaposition of “creviced ravine” with the softer “snow cheeks,” but s/he is nonetheless distant from it and can only admire the scene from afar with a kind of wishful, empathetic watching.

– David Radavich / Charlotte, North Carolina

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Night Swim: Phosphorescence

We’d run down the path to the dock,
our feet knowing the rocks, never stumbling,
never falling, and we’d jump right in,
the ocean calm under the summer stars,
and swim out a little ways,
lifting our hands out of the water
to watch the drops linger and fall from our fingers,
like pearls, like diamonds, and kick our legs hard
for the trail of bright silver we’d leave behind-
and finally climb out, trembling with the chill,
sorry to wipe those jewels from our bodies.

Barbara Bloom
originally published in Pulling Down the Heavens (Hummingbird Press, 2017).

I grew up on a remote coastal homestead in British Columbia, Canada. Living in such a wild and demanding place has shaped the way I see the world. The poem demonstrates how as children we were amazed by the natural world around us, but saw no separation: it was ours to be experienced. I now live in Bellingham, Washington, not too far from where I lived as a child, and surrounded by much of the same beauty and wildness. I count myself lucky for that!

– Barbara Bloom / Bellingham, Washington

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Young Hare

Oh my love, Albrecht Dürer, your hare
is not a spectacle, it is not an exploding hare,
it is not a projection of the young hare
within you, the gentleness in you, or a disassembled hare,
nor a subliminal or concealed hare,
nor is it the imagination as hare

nor the soul as a long-eared, soft-eared hare,
Dürer, you painted this hare,
some say you killed a field hare
and brought it into your studio, or bagged a live hare
and caged it so you could look hard at a wild hare
without it running off into thorn bushes as hares

will do, and you sketched the hare
and laid down a watercolor wash over the hare
and then meticulously painted in all the browns of hare,
toast brown, tawny, dim, pipe-tobacco brown of hare,
olive, fawn, topaz, bone brown until the hare
became dimensional under your hand, the thick hare

fur, the mottled shag, the nobility of the nose, the hare
toenails, black and sharp and curved, and the dense hare
ears, pod-shaped, articulated, substantial, erect, hare
whiskers and eyebrows, their wiry grace, the ruff of hare
neck fur, the multi-directional fur over the thick hare
haunches, and did I say the dark inside the hare

ears, how I want to follow the darkness of the hare
and stroke the dark within its ears, to feel the hare
ears with my fingers, and the white tuft, the hare
anomaly you painted on its side, and the fleshy hare
cheeks, how I want to squeeze them, and the hare
reticence, how I want to explore it, and the downturned hare

eye, it will not acknowledge or appease, the black-brown hare
eye in which you painted the reflection of a window in the hare
pupil, maybe your studio window, in the hare’s
eye, why does that window feel so intimate in the hare’s
unreadable eye, why do I press my face to the window to see the hare
as you see it, raising your chin to look and then back to the hare

on the page, the thin hair of your brush and your own hair
waving gold down your back, hair I see as you see the hare.
In the hare’s eye you see me there, my swaying black hair.

Diane Seuss
Selected by Joan Barasovska; appears in Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (Graywolf Press, 2018). Albrecht Dürer’s painting is titled “Young Hare.”

I’ve selected this ekphrastic poem because it reflects the artist’s fascination with capturing an exact likeness of nature, his extravagant love of the animal so clearly displayed, and the paradox of killing or caging the hare in order to worship it. Diane Seuss’s masterful craft—see the line endings—and genius for description are on display here.

– Joan Barasovska / Chapel Hill, North Carolina

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