poetry | V E R S E and I M A G E

Posts Tagged ‘poetry’

The Beauty of Form – Arthur Sze

Posted in Imagery, tagged Arthur Sze, Copper Canyon Press, Glass Constellation, imagery, nature, nature photography, poetry on February 27, 2026| 1 Comment »

Trout Lily, E&A Nature Trail, Elkin

[ 2 poems by Arthur Sze ]

Entanglement

Along the shore, bald eagles nest in the yellow cedars—

my clothes reek of cedar smoke—

I wrap clothes around glass jars of king salmon in my knapsack—

standing on a dock, I board a floatplane—

floaters in my eyes, wherever I go—

wherever you go, you cannot travel faster than light—

synapses firing in my body are a form of light—

threads of fugitive dye entangled in neural firings—

scent of summer in the blackening leaves—

a black bear swipes a screen door and ransacks a kitchen—

we ransack the past and discover action at a distance—

entangled waves of near and far—

a photon fired through a slit behaves like a wave—

we inhale, and our lungs oxygenate a cosmos—

a fire breaks out of the secret depths of the earth—

revel in the beauty of form.

Arthur Sze

❀ ❀ ❀

. .

Transpirations

Leaving branches of a backyard plum—

branches of water on a dissolving ice sheet—

chatter of magpies when you approach—

lilacs lean over the road, weighted with purple blossoms—

then the noon sun shimmers the grasses—

you ride the surge into summer—

smell of piñon crackling in the fireplace—

blued notes of a saxophone in the air—

not by sand running through an hourglass but by our bodies igniting—

passing in the form of vapors from a living body—

this world of orange sunlight and wildfire haze—

world of iron filings pulled toward magnetic south and north—

pool of quicksilver when you bend to tie your shoes—

standing, you well up with glistening eyes—

have you lived with utmost care?—

have you articulated emotions like the edges of leaves?—

adjust your breath to the seasonal rhythm of grasses—

gazing into a lake on a salt flat and drinking, in reflection, the Milky Way—

Arthur Sze

Adam & Eve Orchid, E&A Nature Trail, Elkin

❀ ❀ ❀ ❀ ❀

. . . . . Last night, gazing

at Orion’s belt and sword sparkling in the sky,

I saw how we yearn for connection where

no connection exists: what belt, what sword?

from Ravine, Arthur Sze

And yet when I try to separate things, pull them apart to understand, they feel like they are all connected. Like the lines in these poems. At first each is its own crystallized moment, its individual monoku of presence. I slow myself to read the lines again, calmer, unhurried, in sequence, and they begin to speak to each other. They entangle and combine. They spark little flashes at the back door of consciousness. Meaning wants to come in from the dark. I can’t necessarily tell you Meaning’s dimensions nor her Latin binomial, but I can say that she seems companionable. She looks and smells and speaks like someone I’d like to have come in and set a spell.

Meaning, are you out there waiting patiently to be found, or are you nothing but a fancy my mind creates? I know your cousin Reality is not really comprised of infinitesimal billiard balls in orbit but rather clouds of potentiality. Nevertheless, Reality and mind do interact. Quantum superposition – the wave function collapses to a defined presence when touched by consciousness. This line of poetry is infused with meanings. I bring all my history and my own potentialities to its moment of reading. Who could foresee how all those elements might react? But they do. And Meaning and I leave the event arm in arm.

❀ ❀ ❀

Arthur Sze is the twenty-fifth Poet Laureate of the United States, appointed in 2025. He was born in New York City in 1950 and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife poet Carol Moldaw. The Glass Constellation collects poems from ten earlier collections spanning fifty years, as well as twenty-six new poems (sampled here). It is the winner of the 2024 National Book Foundation Science and Literature Award.

The Glass Constellation is available from Copper Canyon Press, and you can sample two poems from Arthur Sze’s newest book, Into the Hush, at an earlier poste HERE

Cranefly Orchid, E&A Nature Trail, Elkin

❀ ❀ ❀ ❀ ❀

Thank you for visiting 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, either by a favorite author or your own work, please view these GUIDELINES for Saturday Readers Share:

https://griffinpoetry.com/about/

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

Read Full Post »

Buoyed Minutes – Arthur Sze

Posted in Ecopoetry, tagged Arthur Sze, Copper Canyon Press, Ecopoetry, imagery, Into the Hush, nature photography, poetry on February 20, 2026| 4 Comments »

[ 2 poems by Arthur Sze ]

Architectures of Emptiness

Mark the shadows of aspen leaves

rippling on grass; beneath a veil

of white bark, aspens have a photosynthetic

layer that absorbs sunlight

through winter; a magpie sails

across a yard, flutters wing feathers,

and, landing on spruce, squawks—

it speaks to you; thin-leaf alder

shoots rising out of the ditch speak;

you stand in Tree pose: inhale,

exhale, inhale, exhale: water

is to emptiness as sun is to language;

you sluice into the infinite tangle

of beginnings and ends: cottonwood

seeds swirl in the air; a wild

apricot blooms by the ditch; suddenly

each aspen leaf on a tree is a word,

the movement of leaves their syntax:

burns diamond light diffuse it

so we green green,

diamond light burns so we

diffuse it into greening—

suddenly you parse the leaves,

and they are speaking to you now:

Arthur Sze

❀ ❀ ❀

Farolitos

We pour sand into brown lunch bags, then place

a votive candle

inside each; at night, lined along the driveway,

the flickering lights

form a spirit way, but what spirit? what way?

we grieve, yearn, joy,

pinpoints in a greater darkness, and spy sunlight

brighten craters

on a half-lit moon; in this life, you may try, try

to light a match, fail,

fail again and again; yet, letting go, you strike

a tip one more time

when it bursts into flame— now the flames

are lights in bags again,

and we glimpse the willow tips clutch at a lunar

promise of spring.

Arthur Sze

❀ ❀ ❀ ❀ ❀

Yogis call these buoyed minutes / the moment of the universe, and who knows . . .

Who knows? Knowing has been the false hare speeding in front of me, dragging my greyhound brain around and around this crazy dog track of a life. Learn another thing, cinch it down into the sack of knowing with all those others. Linda’s disgust is apparent: “You know everything.” Well, I know I don’t, but that’s not because I wouldn’t like to. . . . if spruce, aspen, and a golden rain tree / converse, like mycelium, through roots? Ooh, I would like to know that.

Meanwhile, in the buoyed minutes of not knowing, the universe is trying to speak. Perhaps I do know that I will not get far with parsing the language of rustling leaves while perched at my desk with graph paper and pen. I remember riding in the car with my mother when I was six, suddenly realizing I couldn’t NOT read the signs as they passed. So hungry is the hound brain for something to know. But Time, being a line and therefore composed of an infinite number of points between each moment A and moment B, cannot be filled with knowing. What remains unfilled, the emptiness – is that the domain of despair? of wisdom? of grief? of joy?

❀ ❀ ❀

Arthur Sze is the twenty-fifth Poet Laureate of the United States, appointed in 2025. He was born in New York City in 1950 and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife poet Carol Moldaw. Into the Hush, his twelfth book of poetry, travels the geography of tropics and desert, seaside and riverside. It also travels the geography of memory, contemplation, suffering, and redemption. When the buzz of molecule and distant star, the thrash of tempest and desecration, the murmur of guilt and doubt, when all of these have stilled we enter into the hush.

Into the Hush from Copper Canyon Press.

❀ ❀ ❀ ❀ ❀

Thank you for visiting 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, either by a favorite author or your own work, please view these GUIDELINES for Saturday Readers Share:

https://griffinpoetry.com/about/

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

Read Full Post »

Creation and Desecration — Liza Wolff-Francis

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, tagged 48 Hours Down the Shore, Ecopoetry, Kelsay Books, Liza Wolff-Francis, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing on February 13, 2026| 3 Comments »

[ 3 poems by Liza Wolff-Francis ]

The land before we came

My friend Shelly gets a text

from a woman she’s dating

down south with a picture

of a bullfrog the size of my

hand, caught in a bucket.

Its circle ear, a tympanum,

its habitat, the sound of a waltz,

its body, green camouflage.

As a teenager, I wore combat boots,

though never camouflage.

Camouflage for people is military wardrobe.

Parts of Atlanta were like battlefields,

people fist fighting about race, others

hobbling along asking for spare change.

To walk through those streets, I needed

combat boots, to run, to kick, to escape,

but, as part of the natural world,

I don’t camouflage well into city.

I could make a list of all the ways

people get by

and all the things to change.

The bullfrog doesn’t live well on asphalted land.

We are meant to be in connection with each other,

where no one is spare.

ii.

I imagine the land before we came.

Acres of thicket, trees and bramble.

Humans measure all of this by acreage,

kilometers, miles, rather than

the jump reach of a bullfrog,

rather than the size of its tympanum

and whether it is larger than the eye.

❀ ❀ ❀

Wheelchair in Sand

Even in this cool air,

a woman in a magenta

bathing suit, unable

to stand alone, is held,

at the edge of ocean,

by a man her height.

Water billows and turns.

He stands her up as if

he plans to stand her up

over and over again.

Ocean pulls her into tide,

swallows her with mouth

of whale. Her legs dangle

like bait, she is steady

in his arms and I think

he must be a man with

the heart of a whale. A young

woman yells Hold on Mama,

runs for the chair, drags

its robot wheels through

beach and saltwater until

it’s behind her and they push

against swelling ocean

and sinking sand.

❀ ❀ ❀

Atlantic City’s Great Black-Backed Gulls

Each one like an animal

++++ you could spoon or cradle if they wouldn’t fly away.

They stand facing the wind, lined up

++++ away from the ocean.

Even people who’ve never seen the ocean, I think,

must know its waves, like a rhythm of Earth

that water must know even without knowing,

just as grass knows sun,

like desert cactus know rain.

It’s different just beyond the gulls.

Shiny baubles and buildings,

casinos and their flashing lights,

siren sounds, bell-clanging promises,

oohs, and ahhhs.

Perfume brings back my grandmother.

A gasoline smell reminds me of riding

on a boat on a Georgia lake.

I could never know a casino in my body

in the same way as I know

how thirst is quenched with water.

If there were a hurricane here, like

the one headed toward Florida,

I would sense it in my muscles,

my legs, my head, the heaviness

heaving my body into the menace.

I know that feeling, knew it once,

don’t think it every completely left me.

Shape of storm pushes at all of nature—

and I feel it within me,

like Earth feels it’s coming.

I learn it at every threat of destruction.

Liza Wolff-Francis

❀ ❀ ❀ ❀ ❀

Three writer friends escaping the grinding dailies for a few days together: on the one side ocean, mystery and seduction, infinite expanse of watery planet; on the other side greed and tinsel and different seductions, the exploited and the exploiting. Liza Wolff-Francis’s poems can be arms spreading wide cymbals of glass before they clash and shatter, or arms that lift again the creature in its brokenness and wish for healing. During 48 hours down the shore, as one says in New Jersey, Liza celebrates love and kindness and the dignity of surf and sea-creature. Never, though, does she overlook the struggle all around us, of person and of planet. She describes herself as ecopoet. I feel in these poems not only the ecology of our threatened and suffering earth, but also the social ecology, cultural ecology, human ecology so twisted and strained, so threatened and threatening that it is easy to become overwhelmed.

What to do when overwhelmed? My reptilian hindbrain is more likely to retreat than lash out. Close your eyes, close your ears and ignore the impending destruction. Or do lash out – hurt someone before they can hurt you. Or look there – a man is introducing his crippled lover to the surf. Listen – gulls are laughing with you as much as at you, and the waves’ approach and retreat murmur . . . you belong here. Small acts will save our planet, a million small acts of love, a billion. A poem is just such a small act of invitation. You are invited to advance rather than retreat. To embrace rather than to strike. Each act of love declares we are not giving up.

❀ ❀ ❀

Liza Wolff-Francis is the 8th Poet Laureate of Carrboro, North Carolina, USA. She teaches creative writing workshops, has written plays and reviews, and whatever is happening around the world or down the street, she never looks away. 48 Hours Down the Shore is available from Kelsay Books. More about Liza at http://www.lizawolff.com.

❀ ❀ ❀ ❀ ❀

Thank you for visiting 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, either by a favorite author or your own work, please view these GUIDELINES for Saturday Readers Share:

https://griffinpoetry.com/about/

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