Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘Paul Jones’

Poetry and Earth – Love, and

Posted in Ecopoetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on April 10, 2026| 2 Comments »

 . 
[ poems by Connie Green, Kari Gunter-Seymour, 
Jenny Bates, Annie Woodford, Paul Jones]
 . 
Song at Daybreak 
 . 
Behind the mountains this morning
a soft curtain of pink, dawn dipping
into her palette, my soul the recipient
of her artistry, this small moment
that would not have occurred
had I not wakened early, wandered
sleep-deprived into the kitchen
and turned my face toward the ridges-
 . 
those ridges that daily wait for me
to look up, to accept, if only
for a minute, the gift they offer
and have offered since the forces
of nature, the work of time pushed
them from plain to towering majesty,
our common stardust knitting mountain,
kitchen, aging woman into song notes that lift
and drift, the finite urging toward the infinite.
 . 
Connie Jordan Green
selected by Kari Gunter-Seymour. First appeared in Women Speak, Volume Eleven (Sheila Na Gig Editions 2025)
 . 
This gorgeous Song at Daybreak by Connie Green reminds me that there is so much splendor and joy to be had if we let ourselves be still long enough to truly embrace all that the earth (and sky) has to offer, and that aging too is a gift, because it means we have been given so many more opportunities to stand in awe and wonder of it all.  — Kari Gunter-Seymour
 . 
❀
 . 
Ten Miles North of Lore City, Guernsey County, Ohio
 . 
Oh, Salt Fork, I’ve come to hide
inside your autumn, walk
beneath the cathedral of your branches
become a meditative painting,
a Cézanne—your impressions
 . 
revealed in planes of pigment,
the slow study of light,
pin oak and American beech awash
in swaths of topaz and carnelian,
the lake a reverie of reflections.
 . 
The universe is out of whack, tremulous
in the pathos of floods, wildfires and drought.
Here, red squirrels wax comedic,
all bark, tuck and tumble, a white-tailed
snorting at their antics.
 . 
Tangy pockets of mugwort
and mountain mint intoxicate my airways
weak-knee me into giggles.
Chickadees hip-hop branch to thicket,
their black caps adorably gangsta.
   . 
Above, an osprey chirps its tea-kettle whistle,
ascends, thrusts,  disappears,
returns, as if parleying ancestral maps
stored inside the lace of its bones.
Cricket songs stitch the afternoon.
 . 
I don’t know how long your trails can hold
such abundance, your fervor of tints and textures
winding their way to my insides, transcendent
as a psalm, the rhythm of your balms and breezes
rumoring their promise of peace.
 . 
Kari Gunter-Seymour
First appeared in The Nature of Our Times (Paloma Press 2025)
 . 
Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to submit a poem I love by poet Connie Green and one of my own as well, in honor of Earth Day. KG-S
 . 
✿
 . 
Connie Jordan Green lives on a farm in East Tennessee where she writes and gardens. She has published award-winning novels for young people, newspaper columns, poetry chapbooks and collections, most recently Nameless as the Minnows, Madville Publishing. Her poetry has been nominated for Pushcart Awards. She frequently teaches writing workshops.
 . 
Kari Gunter-Seymour is the immediate past Poet Laureate of Ohio and author of three award-winning poetry collections, including Dirt Songs (EastOver Press, 2024) winner of the 2025 IPPY Bronze, NYC Big Book and Feathered Quill Awards. Her newest collection, What Teethes Within is forthcoming from University Press of Kentucky, August 2026. Her work has been featured in a variety of publications including the American Book Review, Poem-a-Day, World Literature Today and The New York Times.
 . 
❀ ✿ ✾ ❁
 . 
 . 
Virga
 . 
Every raindrop panics me now
long before it arrives
I feel like an old Dog who hides
in the bathroom sniffing grey skies
 . 
I go out walking anyway make
myself brave but I don’t really don’t want
it to rain
I want fear to evaporate like a virga
line I want to become a cloud dropped
full of reflection and affection
when I listen to rain I hear echoes
of your voice not in my ears anymore
asking under any circumstance
will you want to make love again?
 . 
Jenny Bates
selected by Paul Jones
 . 
✾
 . 
Love Poem for the Appalachian Rainforest 
 . 
The trees as rib cage, as sea-
bare branches tapping each other,
signing furiously the word
 . 
for wind. Temperate rainforest
filled with broken trees,
bracken tinder. I pray
 . 
for damp weather, fog, snow-
a proper frozen sojourn
among High Country clouds
 . 
plumping moss & lichen.
To keep fire at bay.
Needle and loam, trees breathing
 . 
wet breath against each other,
heavy enough to float, to form
their own ecology of hope.
 . 
Annie Woodford
selected by Paul Jones
 . 
✾
 . 
In the Cards
 . 
Outside of Beaverdam, an old lady told the cards.
As close to a crone as the mountain side could grasp,
could hold there, cling-rooted and knotty as laurel.
 . 
She was sour on life by now, hers, which had been hard,
and the mountain itself. “It must change,” she rasped.
Fingering the whirling figure, she hissed, “This is the World.”
 . 
“It’s in the past. Better that the dancer held a sword.”
The next up, the seemingly indifferent Four of Cups.
“Ignoring the gifts and threats of the sky and earth. Peril.
 . 
That’s where we are now. In danger, but not acting. Bored
with it all. Not doing what we need to do.” She gasped,
“No not this! I would rather be telling the Devil,”
 . 
as if she already had seen, but dare not disregard,
the next card, the future told by the Tower. The last.
“The end that comes to us all both good and evil.”
 . 
Soon the storms came as they had never come before.
She and her house were washed away. Among the lost.
She saw but was not saved. Not found. Except her skull.
 . 
Paul Jones
 . 
Thanks for combining Poetry Month and Earth Day (all month long). These three poems are from the award winning anthology, Had I a Dove: Appalachian Poets on the Helene Flood, edited by Hilda Downer (Redhawk Publications 2025). Each of these poem connects human awareness and in some cases human agency in the face of the experience of the flood and what followed. The whole of the anthology is rich with the appreciation of nature during and due to climate based disaster. Besides the three poems attached, Virga by Jenny Bates, Love Poem for the Appalachian Rainforest by Annie Woodford, and In the Cards by me, the anthology holds many treasures. — Paul Jones
 . 
 . 
❀ ✿ ✾ ❁
 . 
We do not live in a Nuclear Age or an Information Age. We do not live in a Post-Industrial Age, a Post-Cold War Age, or a Post-Modern Age. We do not live in an Age of Anxiety or even a New Age. We live in an Age of Flowering Plants and an Age of Beetles. 
– Sue Hubbell, from Broadsides from the Other Orders
 . 
Thank you for celebrating the month of April with International Earth Day (April 22) and National Poetry Month. Readers have selected poems that connect us to our planet and each other. If you have a poem that has rooted you to the earth and spread your branches into bright sky, please share! It can be a poem by your favorite writer, living or dead, a poem of your own, or both.
 . 
Send a your poem(s) in the body of the email or as .DOC or .RTF to:
ecopoetry@griffinpoetry.com 
 . 
Please include your comments or reaction to the poem. And publication acknowledgments if previously published.
 . 
We will share one or two posts each week, multiple posts during the week of Earth Day, and we will keep sharing into May and beyond if you continue to respond!
 . 
Feel free to invite others to send their favorite Earth Day poems. Perhaps some day we will be able to say we live in the Age of Connection.
 . 
❁
 . 
Thank you for visiting Verse and Image: If you would like to receive an email each time a post appears, please SUBSCRIBE to Verse and 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 add you to the subscriber list. Send your request to
 . 
COMMENTS@GRIFFINPOETRY.COM
 . 
Thanks again for joining the conversation.
 . 
— Bill
 . 
❀ ✿ ✾ ❁
 . 
Doughton Park Tree, 2022-05-17B
 . 

Read Full Post »

Earth Day Prelude – One

Posted in Ecopoetry, Photography, tagged , , , , , , on April 15, 2024| 4 Comments »

 . 
April 15, 2024
 . 
In the end we will conserve only what we love.  
+++ We love only what we understand. 
++++++ We will understand only what we are taught.
+++++++++ Baba Dioum, Senegalese environmentalist
 . 
Everyone enjoys the smell of earth after rain. No one wants to cough every breath.
Everyone thirsts for a drink of cool water. No one wants to sicken from drinking it.
Everyone needs bread. No one wants to go hungry.
 . 
On April 22, 2024 every human being will wake up on the only planet where humans can live (well, not counting a handful of folks waking up on the International Space Station). Seems like cause enough to celebrate! To be honest, though, the threat of what we have lost and are losing so often seems much greater than the joy of what we have saved and are preserving.
 . 
How far have we come since the first Earth Day in 1970? It was just eight years earlier that Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, the wake up call to industrial pollution and the poisoning of the earth. In 1970 there was no Environmental Protection Agency, no Occupational Health and Safety Administration, no Clean Air Act or Clean Water Act. When we protested air and water pollution, we had little inkling of the even greater threat; we couldn’t imagine needing an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
 . 
Twenty million Americans marched, demonstrated, and celebrated that first Earth Day. Ten percent of the nation’s population. I was a junior in high school photographing our events for the year book: carrying a coffin through the parking lot to signify the dying planet. Earth Day is now celebrated in 193 countries; one billion people are expected to commemorate Earth Day 2024. That still leaves some eight billion to get on board. Legislation and politics won’t take us there. In the end we will conserve only what we love.
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back. . 
+++++++++ Alice Walker, The Color Purple
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Field Index
Abandoned field, Orange County, North Carolina
 . 
Asters: lesser stars in these constellations, for the native bees, late-summer smatterings of a color I might call blue, blue petals and fireworks along the margins of the track, and
 . 
broomsedge, bluestems: stooped in the fall and shimmering, shivering in the wind, spinning out seed, bird fodder, tangled (insert here) into brambles, blackberries, this year’s, last year’s canes knotting and weaving, and
 . 
crabgrass: crabby claw and crab leg of a herb: edges into the wilding mint and onion grass, the tall stands of raggedy, wing-stemmed (my favorite) crownbeard gone to seed, where I am with my small dog, and
 . 
dogwood: not here yet, but it will come; also redbud (q.v.) and holly; the birds will bring it, in their guts, its white bracts and inconspicuous flowers, its small understory leaves will open and turn into the sunlight, before the canopy leafs out and shades
 . 
exotics: migrants, stowaways and hitchhikers, too much at home; see invasives, stiff-stemmed privet with its small dark leaves, and the clustered graceful arcs of autumn olive, honeysuckle vines, dead stiltgrass flopped into heaps, good for nothing except time
 . 
ferns: rise and unfurl like our letter f, old as fossils, here before letters and fiddles and bows and Michaux and his acrostics, first and last green under the trees, with
 . 
ghost plants: the ancestors, clusters rising from damp, unsunned patches of leaves along the margins of wood;  also: smatterings of green-and-gold, the droop-headed goldenrod
 . 
honeysuckle: announcing itself in scent on the wind and winding up and around the living and the dead: colors coral (see natives), creamy white curling to yellow (see exotics)
 . 
invasives, see exotics; index of vexed and vicious cycles; see also, kill
 . 
jaywalkers: I, alive, among others, on and off the old farm road, on pirate paths, seed-spreader, compacting soil, alarming insects and deer, stealing berries and sprigs and twigs and clumps of lichen or moss, colored leaves, I
 . 
kill: by ice and drought, sapsuckers, larvae, blight, competition, succession (it happens, why do I grieve?), deer rub and browse, humans; see jaywalkers
 . 
loblolly pine: its spiny cones and bundles of three long needles green, or fallen and draped in the shrubberies; aka oldfield pine, straight up, above all, old-meadow native homesteader in the lobby-lolly soil of this wide floodplain
 . 
milkweed: var. swamp milkweed, its pink inflorescence and faint scent, drawing monarchs among butterflies and pollinators, queen of weeds, fecund, its large brittle-dry pods burst and spewing cloudy seed over the bewilding meadow
 . 
 . 
natives: as in, before our time here, before this language and its metaphors and usages, before people, and which we watch with sorrow as they fall back and dwindle, are cut down; see exotics, see
 . 
oaks, passim, and Osage orange, spiny along the branch bank, its large green nobble-skinned fruit fallen in the path and long grass, bitter, slow to blacken and rot, unscavenged by all but small seed-eaters
 . 
persimmon (native), privet (not; see exotics): one, provender for all comers, all creatures, i.e., small bell-shaped flowers, small sweet ripe fruits; the other just minding its own business, i.e., to thrive
 . 
Queen Anne’s lace: umbels and fine-cut leaves, branching stems, aka wild carrot and medicine, queen unknown and from elsewhere, and the lace medallions for her bodice and gown, for her headdress, her cuff, all scattered to the people (winged and crawling insects), self-seeding
 . 
red cedar: modest, upright, native, pioneer in this process of succession, spindle of evergreen and scent rolled between the fingers (here I am again, breaking the rule of no taking and leaving of souvenirs); and redbud: see understory, flights of pink-purple blossom in the spring woods, pleiades, announcing light and wings again, after all that
 . 
stiltgrass: Japanese, Microstegium vimineum, in summer blithe, feathery and green under the trees over creeper and grass, but poor food, tick haven (see exotics; see also  jaywalkers); and sweetgum: all over this old field, native and opportunistic, prolific and prodigal, Liquidambar of the spiny round seedhead and star-shaped, lobed leaves, their margins calling to mind (my mind) calligraphy or the gestures of dance, delight of form that is mutable and has prickly edges, deliquescence, decadence, a nuisance, really
 . 
tulip tree: tulipifera, the saplings standing here and there, innocuous, like any other small tree, but give them time, they’ll rise; the yellow-and-pale green petals of their flowers say in English “tulip,” the Tutelo-Saponi name lost, yellow-green the heartwood, yellow the leaves in fall, and early to fall
 . 
azalea
 . 
understory: native holly and redbud and dogwood, parsimonious and irregular in habit, sparse fruit, sparse flower; now also autumn olive, privet, and exotic forbs and grasses, the introduced and naturalized, myself and dog under the canopy
 . 
vines: Virginia creeper, close-to-ground native; grape vine, gangly fox grape, looping and loping up branch and stem, dbh often equal to small trees; poison ivy, not the inconspicuous three-leaved forb of the northlands, but (learn this, human) rampant, thick-stemmed, hairy vine, stuck fast to the trunks of trees
 . 
winged elm: small tree of delicate, dry stem, and long, corky flanges along its branches; old (to my eye) before it’s old, strange (to my eye); unknowable why those wings
 . 
x: Xanthium through Xyris in Radford’s Manual, as in chicory and the yellow-eyed grass; also, a sign for canceling and for marking you are here, this is the place, this, my mark, my thumbprint
 . 
yellow poplar: see tulip tree and weep
 . 
zigzag: of silk in the web of the orb-weaving spider, homespun look-at-me and distraction, quirk among zoologies of abandoned gardens and meadows; zee, zed, the end of bee flights and alphabets
 . 
Maura High
 .
 . 
Notes:
Acrostic: Med. Lat. acrostichis, from Gk. akrostikhis, from akros“at the end, outermost” (from PIE root *ak– “be sharp, rise (out) to a point, pierce”) + stikhos “line of verse,” literally “row, line,” from PIE root *steigh- “to stride, step, rise” [Online Etymological Dictionary]. The Christmas fern’s botanical name is Plystichum acrostichoides (Michaux) Schott.
André Michaux (1746 –1802), French botanist, author of Flora Boreali-Americana (1803; “The Flora of North America”), made at least five visits to North Carolina.
Loblolly: Pinus taeda, From Wikipedia: The word “loblolly” is a combination of “lob,” referring to the thick, heavy bubbling of cooking porridge, and “lolly,” an old British dialect word for broth, soup, or any other food boiled in a pot. In the southern United States, the word is used to mean “a mudhole; a mire,” a sense derived from an allusion to the consistency of porridge. The pine is generally found in lowlands and swampy areas.
Manual of the Vascular Flora of the Carolinas, by Albert E. Radford, Harry E. Ahles, and C. Ritchie Bell (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968). Commonly known as Radford.
Pleiades, Gk., perhaps literally “constellation of doves” from a shortened form of peleiades, plural of peleias“dove” (from PIE root *pel-“dark-colored, gray”) [Online Etymological Dictionary].
 . 
Shared by Paul Jones, Chapel Hill NC, who writes:
 . 
Maura High knows her field from A to Z. She sings individual songs of the particularity of the place so clearly and precisely that we learn and love the place as she does. Field Index is an ideal field guide to place and the places of nature that compose this quilted lively patch of our earth.
 . 
Every day as I walk my own favorite patch of the planet, Merritt’s Pasture and Morgan Creek, I keep Field Index in mind as a guide that shows how to attend to this world and to prepare for the next.
 , 
+++++++ Paul
 . 
❦
 . 
On an Okra Flower
 . 
A pollinating wasp sliding
from white lip to purple darkness,
the shadow-heart so deep inside,
the plant, itself, tall African
in the kitchen garden’s last row,
speaks of passage and endurance,
those far too common abstractions,
made real here in the summer heat.
 . 
Let it lead us, serve as a guide,
tell how each struggle leads to bliss
and what to bless when we decide
to see the past and present blend
into what we need to know
– a mind aware or in a trance? –
what to keep close, what to shun
made real hear in the summer heat.
 . 
What song can a wasp sing gliding
the flower’s dark throat? A long kiss
like winged tongues tangled deep inside –
a blind passion, an obsession.
I hear it as a prayer now,
music for the world’s whirling dance.
Sound, sight and scent. An orison
made real here in the summer heat
 . 
Paul Jones
from Something Wonderful, Redhawk Publications, Hickory NC, © 2021
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
A man’s feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
++++++++ George Santayana
 . 
. 
To celebrate EARTH DAY 2024 we are featuring seven posts of poems submitted by readers – poems by William Blake to Walt Whitman, Robinson Jeffers to A.R.Ammons to Linda Pastan, and a number of contemporary poets. Check in every day or two – connect to the earth and to each other!
 . 
 . 
Doughton Park Tree 4/30/2022

Read Full Post »

Cusp

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on December 1, 2023| 11 Comments »

 . 
[with 5 poems from Kakalak 2023]
 . 
Autumnal Asymptote
 . 
The sun’s last red is seeping through the maple now,
and umber too, like the webbing of a frog, like the shadow of winter.
How tenderly the ground holds each leaf. How lightly they rest
before they snuggle down under the rain.
Such a wealth of dying. The coin of the land is on its edge,
a membrane, the balance of water, seeping –
even the roots break light together.
Even the fungus breathes its gifts
to the soil.
 . 
Even the breath of me shatters this silent grace.
My steps churn leaves, worm-cast, root, stone.
The arc of reaching out is endless, airless –
I cannot kiss the earth’s brow so lightly.
She cannot sigh and settle beneath my hand.
 . 
Hannah Ringler
from Kalalak 2023, Harrisburg, NC. © Moonshine Review Press 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
I am about to read an online poem titled Bicuspid and I immediately tell myself it will be about that congenital heart syndrome in which the aortic valve has only two leaflets instead of the normal three (“tricuspid”). The man in the poem won’t even know he harbors the cardiac defect. His life will be flowing along its secure expected trajectory until suddenly in his 30’s he won’t be able to walk up a flight of steps or have sex without gasping for breath. Everything crashes – painful tests & procedures, dangerous surgery, bankrupting bills, a foot-long scar down his sternum. The life he was a moment before so confidently devouring has abruptly turned to eat him up and spit him out. Will he discover a new center?
 . 
The title also launches me into another favorite pastime – etymology. Just what is a cusp, anyway? Whenever you open yourself to a new field of exploration, your first big hurdle is its vocabulary. In scientific parlance, its nomenclature, but, hey, still just words. Don’t your non-poet friends’ eyes glaze over when you wax rhapsodic about enjambment? I know when my grandfather G. C. Cooke attended medical school in the nineteen-teens his required courses included Greek and Latin. Maybe he couldn’t do anything about Bicuspid Aortic Valve Syndrome, or even diagnose it pre-mortem, but he definitely was armed with all the nomenclature he needed to know cusp derives from Latin cuspis, a spear or a point, and the first recorded use of tricuspidem for “three-pointed” is from the 1660’s.
 . 
Dig deep beneath the words growing in these lines, whether cultivated garden or rank unruly weeds, and you discover that all is metaphor. The cusp of the moment is a fulcrum impossible to balance upon; leap left or leap right? The spear prods your back; it will not permit you to remain standing on this spot of ground you imagined so stable. The motion of your very heart is arrested, worn out of synch, its fluttering leaflets no longer able to manage the flow of your minutes.
 . 
Wow. I read the poem. Turns out it’s describing teeth. Bicuspid, duh. But it is still all about getting chewed up by life. And it’s awesome.
 . 
❦
 . 
[ read Bicuspid by Clemonce Heard on poets.org HERE ]
[ and HERE is my favorite online Etymology Dictionary (or download the app Etymology Explorer) ]
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Under
++ from the early Chinese philosopher Mencius:
++“The ten thousand things are part of me.
++ Treat those things as you would treat yourself.”
 . 
Under the cloud, a man in the airplane
looks down from the window and yawns
at the mountain’s green canopy,
the towering tree where, under
a branch, the owl sleeps.
Under the owl, a young mother
leans against the rugged trunk;
under her eyes, a small screen,
her frog thumbs hopping;
under the screen, her hands.
Under her darting glances,
her child squats. Under the child
the tumbling river dances;
under the river, the rock.
 . 
The child lifts the rock and squeals
as, under the rock, the crayfish wakes.
Between two fingers, under her gaze,
its curious feelers, its wiggling tail,
its many legs running midair,
its hooked fingers; its eyes
examine her. It whispers in her hear.
The water stirs. She lifts the rock again
and tenderly tucks the crayfish
under, for now she knows
the ten thousand things are part of her.
 . 
Martha O. Adams
from Kalalak 2023, Harrisburg, NC. © Moonshine Review Press 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Fox Moves in Nearby
 . 
As incense from a censer,
+++ wildness wafts about him –
he saunters
+++ outside our sliding door.
 . 
Red as cinnamon,
+++ gray-flecked belly,
he swings his head side to side,
takes everything in
+++ his black pearl eyes.
Squirrels scatter,
+++ grackles fly.
 . 
He lifts his leg and marks
+++ the stoop
and, with deliberation,
+++ three stones by the fountain.
 . 
He hesitates, concludes,
+++ and prances
through the hostas,
+++ slows beneath the forsythia,
squeezes through the fence.
 . 
We spend sever quiet breaths,
+++ fingertips on glass,
before we step out to sense
+++ his leaving.
The birds flit back
+++ to feed and chatter
Shadows underlying trees
+++ are darker,
redbirds, redder.
 . 
Preston Martin
from Kalalak 2023, Harrisburg, NC. © Moonshine Review Press 2023
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
A few weeks back a friend in my writer’s group (holy poesy, Bill is in a writer’s group now!) mentioned that she has edited an anthology by poets near her home in northwest Ohio. Imagine opening a collection and recognizing the writers by name! See their faces as you read their lines, hear their inflections and cadence. You might realize immediately that the poem is about teeth and not heart valves. Such a concept!
 . 
Welcome to Kakalak 2023. Although the editors no longer require a North or South Carolina connection in order to submit, I still discover many friends and acquaintances in the pages of this annual anthology. This year’s book very much retains the flavor of the South – has there ever been an issue without at least one mention of red clay or grits? But these almost 200 pages span most everything that could be said to make us human, whether grief or exaltation, recollection or discovery, love or despair, current events or origin stories, even a raised middle finger to the Home Owner’s Association.
 . 
I’ve read the book through from page one to the end. I intentionally avoided skipping straight to the names I know in order to discover names I want to get to know. I used my standard criteria to select three poems to feature here, which is no criteria at all except what grabs me in the moment of reading (and the three quickly becam five, eleven, fifty). Do you need some new friends? As Robert Frost invites when he heads down to clear the pasture spring – You come too!
 . 
❦
 . 
[ Kakalak 2023 is edited by Angelo Geter, David E. Poston, and Kimberlyn Blum-Hyclack; learn more about Kakalak, and purchase  HERE ]
 . 
 .
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Moon-Child
 . 
+++ +++ +++ Sophie has pummeled the beach all day
+++ with the unbridled vigor of a one-year-old
dog, her tail held aloft like a kite gaining the wind
 . 
She is tired and wonders why we’ve come back at this hour,
+++ though sand feels coos as the night sky peels off
+++ +++ the top layers of heat. She pants and leans into me.
 . 
+++ +++ That’s enough, isn’t it?
+++ To feel day draining into atmosphere?
+++ +++ To hear the surf recite the history of a planet –
 . 
+++ +++ +++ extinction events,
+++ +++ +++ +++ rise and fall of Rome,
+++ +++ +++ discovery, war, conquest,
+++ +++ pandemics, and underneath it all,
+++ echoes of lost Atlantis rumbling in the waves?
 . 
Sophie’s nose twitches.
+++ Something in the dark has put her on alert.
The cone of my flashlight reveals where a ghost crab
 . 
+++ +++ has been sidling. A moon-child
+++ +++ +++ gleaning alms offered by the tide
+++ +++ has scribed in the sand abstract patterns,
 . 
ragged as the Milky Way,
+++ like a record of all the small events
that drive the Earth, too delicate to see.
 . 
Gregory Lobas
from Kalalak 2023, Harrisburg, NC. © Moonshine Review Press 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Hive in the Wall
 . 
Sometimes, when a soul has more to say,
it holds on to some place, some person,
or just moves in between joists and frames,
 . 
taking the shapes of bees, even their names,
their endless buzz near the too-warm kitchen.
Unlike other ghosts, they work by day.
 . 
They still need light and the scent of wet grass,
flowers that love summer and last until fall.
They, I say they, but I mean they act as one.
 . 
Many creatures made of one spirit, a mass
that’s a fused, united, yet scattered, all.
That’s what it takes to get the job done.
 . 
This may not be true, but here’s what I believe:
that one day, all bees, in one swarm, will leave.
 . 
Paul Jones
from Kalalak 2023, Harrisburg, NC. © Moonshine Review Press 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Hannah Ringler (Durham, NC) is a poet, gardener, and educator.
 . 
Martha O. Adams (Hendersonville, NC) includes drawings for coloring with her recent meditative poem In Your Meadow.
 . 
Preston Martin (Chapel Hill, NC) facilitates classes in poetry and literature at Duke Continuing Education.
 . 
Gregory Lobas (Columbus, NC) won the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize in 2022 for Left of Center.
 . 
Paul Jones (Chapel Hill, NC) is a member of the NC State Computer Science Hall of Fame and some of his poems crashed on the moon.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
2020-03-07 Doughton Park Tree
 . 

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »