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Time’s Shift

Posted in family, Imagery, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, By Stone and Needle, Catherine Carter, Ecopoetry, imagery, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing on October 17, 2025| 5 Comments »

[with 2 poems by Catherine Carter]

Crow cosmogony

The day we made the world, scattered

shattered sand across the deep

steeps and hollows of the sea,

we were playing with chance,

a stance few other gods admired.

We retired then from creation and let things

sing as they would, go

to whatever end luck called good.

We could, and did, breath in a platypus here,

a shearwater there – evolution

our solution to dogma and fate,

the weight of always being in charge

of stars, shoals, plague, all that –

but by and large, we let go, let

sweat and thought fall away,

stray like questing possums

or blossoms of blown snow.

So it was. We didn’t worry how

our sowing would grow. We went back

to hacking with our thick

black bills at death and waste, harrying

carrion, even as the dead

bled ever more numerous over the new

true-straight roads, here

where we shaped the bright turns

and returns of the world, invited

night in: do that, and you get

what you get. Despised

as flies, we pick through pale grass

for carcasses gone flat and dry;

we rise under your very wheels

from meals scant and cold, bring

strings of gut back to our young. But so

goes the world, when you let it go,

throw yourself in its rolling motion, chance

chance: we live on broken squirrels

in the world we made this way.

Catherine Carter

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The postmark is 03-09-97. Linda found the torn envelope, letter inside, at the bottom of a box of mementos she’s still sorting from her parents’ home after their deaths over a decade ago. Dear Dad . . . It’s me writing to my father-in-law, the nuclear physicist. I’ve got an idea for a new story and I need your help. Dad French and I would sometimes share first drafts with each other, his hard science fiction that could use a cool breath or two of metaphor, my airy prose in desperate need of some fact checking. So here’s my pitch:

Imagine a craft traveling to Proxima Centauri, 4.25 light-years away. It’s under a constant acceleration of 2G for the first half of the voyage, then 2G deceleration for the second half. What would be its peak velocity at the mid-point? And how much time will pass for the voyagers relative to earth time?

Relative is the operative word. Dad French was an Einsteinian guru. His favorite Saturday afternoon pastime was to lean back on the couch with a big yellow legal pad and work through the equations of Special Relativity. He felt that he had identified a flaw and was determined to elucidate (from the Latin, “bring it into the light”). The most I could understand from his explanations of time dilation is that any object, whether charged particle or self-aware being, as it approaches the speed of light experiences a slowdown in the passage of time. To me on that spaceship there’s no difference in the ticking of my clock, but if my buddy back on earth could listen in he’d hear an expanding silence between each tick and the next.

But big deal. Who hasn’t felt time speed up or slow down in certain situations? Man, last week was so busy it just flew by. – or – I feel like I’ve been sitting in this waiting room for a week. We human beings are just rubbish at time. If you asked that charged particle, it would know to the femtosecond how long since it got spat out of the cyclotron. My perception of time, though, is all tangled with context and saturated with subconscious. Don’t even ask me how long I’ve been sitting here at this keyboard, much less whether a certain something happened five years ago or ten.

Which is why, when I wake up in the dark, I avoid looking at the clock. If I should still happen to be lying there with my brain in fifth gear when light begins to seep around the shades, when any hope of re-entry into the land of Nod is laughable, then I don’t want to know how long it’s been. I don’t want to know that I’ve just spent two hours on this inventory of all my faults and failings. Surely no more than a handful of ticks. Grant me the bliss of imagining I’m half way to Proxima Centauri at nine-tenths the speed of light and I have all the time in the universe.

❦

Oh, and here is what else I found in that old envelope along with the letter: a Post It stuck to the page with these lines in Dad French’s handwriting.

Park French

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Choptank bluegills take part

in the creation of the world

You couldn’t say bluegills create the stream.

Torn from the stream, they choke

on blazing air. And yet. Those nests,

those few dozen shallow divots together

pocking the creek bottom in dimples

rich with sunfish generations: changing

creekbed, reshaping foundation.

That steady fan-flow of air-

bearing water over eggs settled among

the pebbles, ever so slightly changing

the river’s braiding and unbraiding. That labor

of life: the work to work

with the current as it is and yet

to change it just enough, to manifest

a place a little better for bluegills, co-creating

the world in concert with oxygen exchange,

tectonic motion, that smashed and gash-

edged hubcap pinning down an immortal

plastic bag, the gravity of the moon, whirligig

beetles inscribing creek-skin with runes

written in water, whatever God you say. Flood

of protestors in the street’s torrent, choking

on blazing air. A woman stirring cut

onions over heat, changing them just enough

to turn their burning tears to something

a little more sweet. Fingers moving the pen, the keys,

the lever, and the air and ground

of our lives ever so slightly shifting

in response, recreated (ever so slightly) anew.

The fearful fact: it matters what you do.

Catherine Carter

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What is left for us to believe in? What even matters? When hate is the day’s currency, those who can’t bring themselves to live on hate are emptied and cast aside. As if! Whatever. It’s all just relative, anyway. But stone is still stone, underfoot, under earth, under all, and if you rub the lodestone along the needle and suspend it by a thread, it will still swing north.

And so these poems. Crows and bluegills continue to create the universe and stirring onions in a skillet continues to make the world just that much sweeter. There is still truth you can pin down, categorize, calculate, and right alongside that truth is the truth of breath, discovery, awe. I am not afraid to say it, Catherine: you make me believe that even I matter. How could any of us walk through a world that smells a little of skunk; feel sun on our face while the grass turns that sun into sugar; tremble one moment at the closeness of death and the next moment laugh as life surprises us; travel these lines of verse into strange realms and incantations that transform into our own familiar muscle and blood and mind; how could we do all this and not discover that we matter and that this planet we love matters?

I believe. That there is still hope for us all. And for all that surrounds us.

❦

Catherine Carter’s By Stone and Needle is available from LSU PRESS.

If you read one book of poetry this year, make it By Stone and Needle. These poems are comforting and harrowing, enlivening and enlightening. They are true.

I featured two additional poems from the collection at last weeks posting (October 10, 2025).

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Time’s Line

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, By Stone and Needle, Catherine Carter, Ecopoetry, family, L. E. Phillabaum Poetry Award, LSU Press, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing on October 10, 2025| 3 Comments »

[with 2 poems by Catherine Carter]

Earth says

I am your mother as the horse

is mother to the louse, endlessly

intricate interlocking systems

which the blissfully sucking louse

cannot imagine and never must,

which it sums up

in some louse-sign for God

a quiver of hairs of the thorax,

a shimmer of inarticulate

gratitude for satiation and for

preservation of self, self, self.

I am sick of it, mother

with eight billion toddlers

not counting my beautiful beetles,

a horse plagued with lice, and yet.

I am your mother as you are mother

to the mosquito which hovers

over your arm as you write,

mote of thirsty gold quivering

with desperation to the boom

of great rivers in blue tunnels

and pipes just below the soft leather

scrim of skin, endless life

you’ll never miss and won’t let her have,

enough for a thousand generations.

If she tries to drink you will want

to swat her flat, and she must try,

for her unborn young, for her life. And maybe

eventually, weary of swatting,

worn down by importunity,

unwilling compassion, fear

of the insect apocalypse blossoming

all around you like the mushroom

cloud, you will incline your head. Fall

still. Let her drink her fill

and float away, a dandelion spore

on the summer air, in the hot flash

of May morning light.

Catherine W. Carter

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Imagine a straight line. It’s Geometry’s simplest one-dimensional structure. It’s the shortest distance from here to there. It’s a diagram of my life on earth. Maybe my life seems bumpy and ridden with twists but no, it starts at my beginning, forges straight through, and ends at my ending. My timeline. Beyond that it becomes someone else’s line, “me” in their memories.

It’s no accident that we all use the word timeline. (Instead of timepolygon or timecube?) Time’s line, even though it wields only one dimension, is all the vessel I have to contain my life. In fact, there is one single point on that line that holds the entirety of my awareness. I’ll label that point now. Every part of the line to the left is the extent of what has already been now and is now no more. Label it past. Everything to the right consists of nows yet to come. As I write this, several nows have just slipped by me.

How many? How many nows have I filled up (wasted?) with staring across the room wondering what to write next? Do next? Think next? Be? I shudder to even attempt an answer to that, because in exactly the same way Geometry tells us that the line is continuous, no gaps, an infinity between each point, time is also a continuum. No missing pieces. No quanta. I could fit an infinity of nows between any two nows I choose.

That adds up to a helluva lot of timeline spent worrying about my son. An infinity imagining the conversations we could have had that would have set us right, the conversations we could have tomorrow that would correct our course, revising those conversations, projecting out to the right the results of our conversations or absences thereof. Not to mention replaying out to the left the segments of line I’ll label regret.

Until now. I return home late and my son is waiting up. He tells me he’s come to a turning point. We hug. How many nows does that fill? How many is infinity? Hey Time, just for a moment, please stop now.

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When you know a witch’s true name

she has to do what you ask. If she tries

to refuse, her name lets you tighten the wire

on marrow-fears she’s spent forever

trying to hide, secret shames which sicken

her so she’d almost rather strangle than share:

the reason she wraps herself in that caul

of hexes, chainsaws, shielding spells.

This makes witches cautious.

Except something in them, in us

all, wants to hear someone say

our names with recognition, no matter

what comes after. Curled round

our glint of treasure, our shimmer

of power, we’re gongs hung

to tremble to our one true name

or one true question, the one we’ve awaited

forever, whose answer is our whole lives,

the one almost no one is interested

enough to ask. It’s why I’d come

if you summoned me up, despite.

If you knew the right question,

I would tell you anything.

Catherine W. Carter

❦ ❦ ❦

I’m just / what comes next when everything touches everything.

Is By Stone and Needle a book of charms and spells? Are its lines sigils and hexes that, in the hands of the seeker, reveal arcane wisdom? Is it the words of Myth and Magic, Nature and Earth that we have feared to hear and at the same time longed for?

Catherine Carter’s language is afraid of nothing. It breaks down every door. It wrenches meaning from syllables that never before dared to be said so close together. Earth, though I tremble to admit it, I guess I’ve suspected you may well be tempted to swat us like a mosquito (although I’ve always known you love your beetles). And Love, I do believe you are out there hoping to strike the gong of our true names. I am still traveling the journey of these pages. By stone and needle I trust I will find my way. And at the end find myself.

❦

Catherine Carter’s By Stone and Needle is available from LSU PRESS.

These poems are dense, delicious, scary, enlightening. I will feature two more poems from the collection at next weeks posting (October 17, 2025).

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The concepts of the line as unbroken continuum, the inseparable connection we make between that line and the set of all real numbers it compasses, and our human perception of time as an unbroken line are developed in a small book my wife Linda studied in college fifty years ago and which we discovered cleaning out bookcases this month:

One cover blurb states, “This is beyond doubt the most interesting book on the evolution of mathematics which has ever fallen into my hands.” Albert Einstein

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Poetry at Cary Arts Center (2)

Posted in Imagery, tagged Anne Myles, Becky Nicole James, Bill Griffin, Cary Arts Center, Charles Wheeler, Claudine Moreau, Dionne D. Hunter, imagery, NC Poetry Society, NC Poets, NCPS, Southern writing, Susan Laughter Meyers Fellowship on October 3, 2025| 8 Comments »

NCPS at Cary Arts Center (2)

Has this old Cary High School building ever before been filled with such light and creativity? Standing just inside the high windowed doors, I see Joan Barasovska and Kathy Ackerman greeting arrivals. In a moment they will look up at smile at me. To my left Deb Doolittle stands in quiet contemplation of the long table where authors display their books. A few meters behind Joan, beside the large coffee tureen, is the lavish spread of fruit and pastries Chad Knuth has prepared – I wish I hadn’t eaten that protein bar during the 2+ hour drive from Elkin. All around me people are coming together and dispersing only to regroup, old friends and new acquaintances simmering with excitement and joy. It is already a great morning for poetry.

Each September at its fall meeting the North Carolina Poetry Society features readings by the winners of the following contests:

Brockman-Campbell Book Award: for the best book of poetry published by a North Carolina author in the preceding year.

Lena Shull Manuscript Award: for a manuscript by a North Carolina author; the winning book is published by NCPS.

Susan Laughter Meyers Poetry Fellowship: an annual residency and honorarium offered to one North or South Carolina poet.

Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize (sponsored by North Carolina Writers’ Network): for an individual poem by a North Carolina author.

Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Award (co-sponsored by North Carolina Literary Review at East Carolina University and NCPS): for an individual poem recited / performed.

In 2023 the September meeting was held at the NC Museum of Art in Raleigh, in 2024 at the NC Arboretum in Asheville, and this year’s meeting on September 13 was at the Cary Arts Center. Since 1939 the building served as the (former) Cary High School and is now on the national registry of historic places. Today’s and last Friday’s post feature some of the poetry shared by the 2025 winners; see the post from September 26 for more photos and poetry offerings!

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The Way I Love Him in Durham

Now, when we argue, he yells,

Why don’t you love me the way you did in Rome?

He means: the way we got lost

in the Gallery of Maps on the way

to the Sistine Chapel, how we’d drink

Aperol at breakfast, filled our days

with too many Caravaggios and Berninis.

The way my mouth was so open

to his at the Vatican. How we explored

the Forum and imagined the games

of the Colosseum: venationes, naumachia.

How we stuffed our bellies

with black ink pasta, ox, and marrow.

The way we escaped a thunderstorm

under an awning and kissed

while lightning lit the Pantheon.

Our joy buying a wool hat

in the Campo de’ Fiori at the stone

feet of the first martyr of science.

How our bodies fit as we descended

into the Capuchin’s crypt of pelvises,

the dark ossuary that left us humble and mortal.

How crossing the Tiber to Trastevere

meant we’d soon make love in our cellar

apartment below young drunk revelers.

The way I love him in Durham

is washing sheets and dishes,

grocery shopping and cooking,

waiting until dinner to uncork wine.

A slow dance on the patio to The Smiths

under the crisscross of air traffic.

The commutes and kids tiring our libidos,

watching him fall asleep to sci-fi.

I know the pink scars over his heart

as if they were my monogram.

We wait for the sign, the burning

of our bread, of our ballots,

for which color smoke rises out of us.

Claudine Moreau

Claudine Moreau teaches physics and astronomy at Elon University and also serves as faculty director of a first-year student neighborhood. Someday she hopes to retire on a mountaintop where the sky is dark enough to see the Milky Way. She has also published the chapbook Dark Machines, Fugitive Poets Press, © 2012.

Claudine Moreau

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Our History Revealed

The foundation of our nation is built on the backs and bones of African Americans

Our Heart, Hands, Blood, Sweat, Tears and Intellect all serving as fertilizer to a burgeoning country

Our Ancestors’ Grave Sacrifices and Noble Contributions must be Revealed and Recognized

Consequently we employ the Power of the Fine Arts

As palette is to canvass

Documenting Our Pain

Commemorating Our Achievements

and Celebrating Our Triumphs

Because History, like the Arts is a Living, Breathing entity

Unceasing and Beautiful when the Majesty of all the Shades and Tones of the African Diaspora, are TRULY Represented

Dionne D. Hunter

Performed at Cary Arts Center on September 13, 2025; Second Place Winner in the 2025 Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Award.

As a United States Navy Veteran, mother of two, and grandmother of four, Dionne Hunter has gravitated to Spoken Word as an expression of her emotions and ideals. Her work has been included in anthologies published by Writing Knights, The Poet’s Haven, and Crisis Chronicles Press. Contact: http://www.dionnehunter.com

Dionne Hunter

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Other winners of this year’s JSG awards are JeanMarie Olivieri, Marcial CL Harper, and (not pictured) Asthma Olajuwon. (Contest guidelines here.)

JeanMarie Olivieri

Marcial CL Harper

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Core

Papa, you tailor your trousers with spider silk.

So many bottled nectars on bronze carts

flank your marble table, pour down

the slender throats of your petal-gowned women.

Papa, I am a stemless apple.

Papa, no ice and alcohol

could help me drizzle a glass.

Papa, you open my skull with an Alaskan blade.

So many blossoms crammed there,

Papa, and they will fly out in the perfumed,

string-quartet wind and I will be

a dark bowl of bone.

Papa, there is pollen on your hand.

That hum is not your pale-haired companion.

Papa, the bees are coming.

Becky Nicole James – finalist for the Lena Shull Manuscript Award

Core first appeared in Gingerbread House, (June 2022)

Becky Nicole James holds an MFA from Queens University. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in many publications including MARGIE, Echo Ink Review, Illumen, and Moon City Review. Contact: https://beckynicolejames.com/

Becky Nicole James

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Toolbox

Tan leather scraps

cover brass grommets,

rusted finishing nails,

a small bag of thumbtacks

bound by sea-green rubber

band,

single-edge Gem blades,

a boxed emery stone:

Use only light machine oil.

Deeper –

bristly twine,

household cord,

looped and neatly bound

like his favorite

sky-blue tie,

knotted four-in-hand.

Charles Wheeler – finalist for the Lena Shull Manuscript Award

Toolbox is from his unpublished manuscript East of Candor, and was first published in Pinesong 2016, the annual anthology of North Carolina Poetry Society contest winners.

Charles Wheeler

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Thicket

– Guilford Courthouse National Military Park, NC, 2021

Cutting crosswise through the battlefield

on narrow trails I realize I’m lost, not lost

but can’t tell where I am, the smooth

dotted and dashed lines on my folded map

untranslatable to this hill, this stream, this woods.

The bright moment, a leaf twirling down, a lurch

of tiny fear and I think then, on this very ground,

they couldn’t see the line that was coming,

only they knew it was. I’ve gone to ground

in my new world, as if I hoped to glimpse myself

in the quiet face of some particular earth,

or as if the trace of those distant lives

might slide wide like a curtain. . . . But I get lost

every time, until I wonder if disorientation

is my true condition. I think disoriented:

unable to find the east. Still I found my way here,

homed but unfamiliar, a southern campaign

of red dirt and magnolia. Meeting my own mind

again in the vital thicket. What did those men

watch and listen for, to steady them? What call

do I wait for now, what drumbeat, what rising?

Anne Myles – finalist for the Susan Laughter Meyers Poetry Fellowship

Thicket first appeared in Pinesong 2022, the annual anthology of NC Poetry Society contest winners, and in Anne’s book Late Epistle, Sappho’s Prize, Headmistress Press, 2023.

Anne Myles is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Northern Iowa and holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Originally from New York, she lives in Greensboro with her greyhound and cats. She has also published What Woman That Was: Poems for Mary Dyer, Final Thursday Press, 2022. Contact: http://annemyles.com.

Anne Myles

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A grieving of a tree

When the chainsaw begins,

I sit at our small round kitchen table

over a bowl of oatmeal, alone

with only the whir of fridge, view

of backyard grass, bushes, pine straw.

At the buzzing, I know they’ve come

for the Bradford pear tree next door.

Invasive species, spreads in forests,

these trees aren’t helping anything.

But, this tree is glorious today,

its death day. White flowering branches

drape over the sidewalk, cascade

over the street. The neighbor told me

twice, that our tree, the one eight feet away

from this one to be taken out, will be

happier. Trees who grew up together,

who must have known each other

for a couple of decades, at least.

Two days ago, I pat the tree to be downed,

thanked it, and yesterday too, but today,

I walked right by it without saying

anything at all, thinking about how

I woke up crying about all that the dark

does and does not hold. I didn’t pat the tree

this third day, the very day the saw sound began

and I wished I had. I knew the sound

was coming and I wonder if the tree

knew its fate as we sometimes know things.

In the height of its flower, each branch falls

with an odd grace, like the most beautiful dance,

by a dancer whose arms are being cut off

one after another until petals litter the asphalt

as if it were a wedding not a funeral.

A buzzing. A buzz. Until the tree

becomes wood stacked just feet

from its cut trunk. Branches full of light, gone,

as if they had never been there, as if their glory

had been a prayer taken with the breeze.

Liza Wolff-Francis – finalist for the Susan Laughter Meyers Poetry Fellowship

First published online at Braided Way on October 21, 2024, this poem is part of the collection submitted in application for the fellowship.

Liza Wolff-Francis, the 8th Poet Laureate of Carrboro, North Carolina, holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College. She is a feminist ecopoet and has taught creative writing workshops for over a decade. Her most recent book is 48 hours down the shore, Kelsay Press, 2024. Contact: https://www.lizawolff.com

Liza Wolff-Francis

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This year’s NC Writers’ Network Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize is awarded to Molly Bolton for her poem Still Deer Ballad, with runner-up Janis Harrington for Ode to Our Last Prepubescent Summer and Ross White as Honorable Mention for Ship of Theseus. Bolton’s poem will be published in poetrySouth.

More information about the winners and the contest at NC WRITERS’ NETWORK