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Birds & Bees (& Worms)

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , on August 22, 2025| 6 Comments »

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[with 3 poems by Sarah Small]
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Dad, Peeling Apples
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++++++ The color of wheat
bread speckled
like the skin of a Golden Delicious,
freckles on top of freckles
and tiny nicks
from his knife, dots of blood
turned to brown scabs.
My father’s hands
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have never changed. Every night
a different apple
skinned naked,
split and seeded without him
ever looking down, loving the fit
 + 
of apple
in the left hand, brown-handled
knife in the right.
He licks the tip of his finger
where the juice runs clear
and skewers a slice
 + 
for me, which I take
regardless
of whether I want
an apple or whether
the flesh has begun to brown
around the edges.
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When he is done,
knife set down and fingers wiped
clean against the legs
of his beige corduroys, I will take
the leathered back
of his hand to my cheek
and hold it there, begging
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his weathered roots to spread
their soil-caked fingers
long and strong
as deep as the generations will go.
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Sarah Cummins Small
from Stitches, Finishing Line Press, Georgetown, Kentucky. © 2025
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Last week I was out on the Mountains-to-Sea Trail with Bob and Steve digging ditches. “Erosion mitigation features” – yeah, ditches. Along one stretch we kept turning up huge earthworms, dozens of them, fat and long as little snakes. As we rescued each one and chucked him/her off the trail, Bob turned to me, local naturalist, and asked, “Say Bill, can you tell which is male and which is female?” Smirk on, Bob. If I recall correctly from Mrs. Schilling’s high school biology, every worm is both. One end is boy and the other end is girl, hermaphrodites. When they want to make little wormlets, they line up parallel head to tail and exchange genetic material. Slimy but exciting!
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Thank you Hermes, Aphrodite, and Mrs. Schilling, whose motto was, “There’s no place in the world for weak women!” Everybody, now, hands on! as we dissected our earthworm. And each 9-week term Mrs. Schilling also sent us out collecting: leaves, insects, fungi. In mid-winter Ohio it was bare bud identification time, each labeled per Linnaeus. I’ve never forgotten Acer rubrum and Quercus alba. My lab partner Dave tried to foist off the bare tip of his defunct Christmas tree as one of his collected buds. Just before he turned his project in, I replaced its label (Pinus pinus?) with Gluteus maxiumus. It was exactly five minutes before Mrs. Schilling’s menacing contralto penetrated to our back row table: “Mr. Mason, come forward!”
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Mrs. Schilling was one of my three most memorable teachers (Mr. Geigel, English, and Herr Watt, German, the other two). I am still in love with Latin binomials and squishy things thanks to her. Mrs. Schilling would certainly never shrink from describing in the most squirm-inducing detail the reproductive habits of earthworms. And at age 15 who is not obsessed with sex in all its varieties, manifestations, and practices? I can’t in all honesty confess that the mystery has even now been fully dispelled, although I think I may have finally figured out the convoluted sex life of ferns. (Listen up, y’all, that’s pronounced Thallus.)
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When I was 12, Dad never sat me down for THE TALK. He just handed me a slim pamphlet, mysteriously titled Where You Came From, then sent me off to read it somewhere my little brother couldn’t peep. “When you’re finished, let me know if you have any questions.” I returned it to him later with the 1965 equivalent of “All good,” but for at least the next two years I still confused female anatomy with British monarchy (Elizabeth Regina). And now I’m supposed to be the one to sit Dad down at 98 and explain to him the facts of why he can’t be asking his physical therapist out on a date? I think I’d rather just stick with the earthworms.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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War
 + 
++++++ Our mother is beautiful
Without makeup, with the round balls
Of her cheekbones like crabapples
Or plums, and her crooked front
Tooth. But with a little
Pencil to shade in the sharp arch
Of eyebrows and bright red lipstick, she becomes
A black-and-white
Photograph hung in a young man’s barracks
Where in the early evening before dark
And after a green supper, one soldier lies
Sideways on his cot facing her,
Tracing the soft outline of her cheek
With one knuckle, three fingers from his lips
To hers and back. We will never be
So carefully memorized.
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Sarah Cummins Small
from Stitches, Finishing Line Press, Georgetown, Kentucky. © 2025
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❦ ❦ ❦
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We will never be / so carefully memorized – Sarah Small begins her collection Stitches with a portrait of her parents in the 1940’s, deeply imagined, drawn deep from her heart. Poem by poem she pieces a quilt of memory and legacy, reverence and longing. This is one poetry collection that left me wanting more when I had turned the final page. Its beautiful pattern gradually emerges, on each page so carefully felt and conveyed. The simplest things conceal the greatest mysteries. Within the simplest the greatest is revealed.
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The poet’s eye and ear, her imagery and music, each delicate detail and meticulous observation, all the lives shared, every secret revealed: the colors and textures arrange themselves until we recognize not only the poet’s family but our own place among the tribe of humankind. These are indeed the stitches that gather us into a single human family.
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❦
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Stitches is Sarah Cummins Small’s debut collection and is available HERE.
The book’s cover art and design are by Summer Small.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Unstitched
 + 
I am held together
by tiny stitches
on small scraps of feed sack,
snatches of wool, snips of gingham.
A patchwork of pastels—
a slipshod collage of cotton.
I’ve been silk, satin, taffeta;
I’ve been flowers, polka-dots, and plaid.
 + 
Thin white thread
++++ ++++ zig-zags
++++ across
++++ ++++ the decades
++++ hemming me in, keeping me
from ripping.
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I’ve been zipped.
++++ Buttoned.
++++ ++++ Unsnapped.
I’ve been bumblebunched, twisted,
and straightened. Held pins in my mouth,
pricked fingers, and calloused
my thimble-less thumbs.
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I am done.
Unravel me now:
Rip out the seams
one by one, untwist strings
and untangle knots. Fold me gently.
What I haven’t finished—
take now.
Begin again.
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Sarah Cummins Small
from Stitches, Finishing Line Press, Georgetown, Kentucky. © 2025
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Just a reminder that I m leading a naturalist hike the morning of Friday, September 12, 2025 on the Mountains-to-Sea Trail near Elkin and you are invited. During the month of September we celebrate the birthday of the MST! It’s an easy walk, 2 hours or so, lots of stops to check out flora and fauna. Sign up at:
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And if you can’t come on the Friday, we will probably repeat the hike on Saturday, September 27. Sign up with Elkin Valley Trails Association at Meetup.com to receive notices.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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2014-06-30a Doughton Park Tree

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Uncertainty and Innocence

Posted in Imagery, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , on August 15, 2025| 4 Comments »

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[with 3 poems by Jack Kristofco]
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The Walkways at the Marsh
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counterfeit geometry,
as if our straight lines matter,
railing, spindles, planks,
pressure-treated pathways
over bluegill, newt,
below the heron’s pterodactyl flap to
shifting clouds,
across an azure sky;
 . 
sun pays close attention to the boards,
like children lined at school,
the impudence of rooflines
in their misbegotten hope
of order out of chaos,
believing in a dreaming land of precept
in a teeming world
that seethes alive, primeval,
crawling in its mess
beneath our feet
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Jack Kristofco
from After the Harvest, The Orchard Street Press, Gates Mills OH; © 2025
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❦ ❦ ❦
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When I wasn’t looking it crept up out of the jungle (below my driveway). Never seen before, unnamed, it has climbed into the reluctant arms of the hemlock and draped itself like a boa for the cotillion. What the ? What stealthy hand sowed these seeds? From what alien universe has it landed here? But when I look closer at the pale frill and awkward angles around each blossom, I realize I know its sister well.
 . 
After the tornado introduced light to our wooded lot, I gathered seeds from autumn pastures and broadcast them on the new bare clay. My friend Joe brought me labeled paper bags from his own Mitchell River meadows. Boneset, ironweed, asters, goldenrod, wild senna – I thought I knew what would sprout to fill my little parcel, but seeds have their own agenda. Two years after the bulldozer finished clearing away downed trunks, I am discovering the unexpected. I (try to) ignore the invasive Japanese stiltgrass, and I’m not at all surprised by Fireweed which rises everywhere at the least sunny opportunity, but how did this spleenwort get here? Which Symphiotrichum aster is this? I don’t recall pulling seeds from boneset six feet tall. And these giant leaves now lifting above my head can only be from the pumpkin I tossed down here after Halloween three years ago.
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Soil seed bank / bud bank – some annuals and perennials will survive, buried in earth, longer than human generations. Can that be possible? Still viable five years from now? Piece of cake. Charles Darwin was the first to systematically consider the soil seed bank in 1859 when he noticed sproutings from muck dug out of the bottom of a lake. University Ag departments publish studies of weed seed persistence; Lambsquarters will still germinate after 40 years and possibly 1600 years. And some seeds are just waiting for a good scorching to spring forth.
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So what about this delicate vine I have never seen in 40 years of living here? Has it been waiting for this unusually wet summer? Or did a blue jay drop its seeds here last fall? Gently lobed leaves, truly unworldly blossom with narrow angled corolla and robot-finger pistil and stamens, it has to be a smaller, paler relative of gaudy Maypops – Passionflower. I will loop its tendrils away from the hemlock and into the sunlight maple and simply say, “Welcome to the Jungle.”
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Creed
 . 
we watch the comet rifle by,
light our milky pebble in a sky
so vast we only hold it with
some primal clutch of faith:
fidelity of those who know that god has died
or never was
because they’ve never seen the corpse,
aren’t impressed with winding sheets and veils,
though they seek the certitude
embraced by hearts they don’t respect,
+++ bowed heads and cathedrals
+++ where with confidence they pray for resurrection
+++ from this maze;
 . 
even the agnostics all believe,
+++ if only in their unbelief,
the truth of their uncertainty,
lighthouse on the journey
through the saints and sinners sea,
faithful travelers all,
milky-eyed sojourners
every one
 . 
Jack Kristofco
from After the Harvest, The Orchard Street Press, Gates Mills OH; © 2025
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❦ ❦ ❦
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After the harvest the trucks rumble heavy to the silos and disgorge their corn to be elevated, a plenty, certitude for the seasons. The man stands in the middle of the bare field. Perhaps he imagines the tall stalks still reaching above his head, elbow to elbow, their humid breath and the creak of their joints. Perhaps he notices lesser things that have thrived in the corn’s shade, a twisted morning glory, a puffball, moss. The field has opened – he can see to the treeline and hear the buntings singing their territories, he can feel hot September on his back. All the giving in and the taking away, the uncertainty of sowing and bearing fruit, the golden wealth has been removed and is distant. The man feels his feet on earth; here some wealth remains.
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Jack Kristofco’s new collection, After the Harvest, cultivates contradiction and ambiguity. Life, as he demonstrates, is convoluted. He discovers even in the innocent paths of his childhood the latent struggles to come – a quiet ride with his father reminds him that some day he will take the wheel. The world of school kids playing baseball and dreaming of the girl across the street held us but a moment / then rose up all at once / and threw us to the fancy of the wind. We might strive to impose some order on existence, strive all our lives in fact for straight walkways and neat flower beds, but in a moment the stooping hawk of uncertainty will slice it all to bits.
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Maybe I should embrace uncertainty. Maybe there are times when not being able to decide is exactly the right decision. Maybe it’s worth reflecting from time to time that there might be other right paths besides the one I seek so desperately to dig and smooth for myself. Jack describes meditating on his reflection in a pond – when he finally stands he sees himself both rise and sink. Our daily reality can never be quantized, regimented, predictable, no matter how we might desire it. Uncertainty itself is the lighthouse on our journey, and we are milky-eyed sojourners every one.
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❦
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Jack Kristofco is founder of The Orchard Street Press in Ohio and editor of its annual poetry journal, Quiet Diamonds. Explore back issues as well as the Press’s many published poetry collections HERE.
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Check out a list of plants whose seeds can persist in the soil seed bank for ten, twenty, thirty years and even longer HERE.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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The Hawk and the Man Watch the Yard
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he looks across the slices
of a setting sun
splintering through trees
at peace with all his trim and sweeping,
lines of roses,
green of bright hydrangea leaves,
newly painted house for birds,
spray to keep the deer away
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while on a silver maple in the neighbor’s yard,
its nest behind a school
where children study science and the paradigms
that lead to roses in a flower bed,
a red-tail pivots its sleek head,
jet-black eyes
to scan the sea of green and brown,
the arrogance of rooflines and concrete,
seeking any movement, any twitch,
a shadow, a fateful turn to light,
 . 
and then it falls
with such a sudden strike
it startles every leaf and branch,
the blossoms and the man
 . 
slicing their contentment
like a knife
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Jack Kristofco
from After the Harvest, The Orchard Street Press, Gates Mills OH; © 2025
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❦ ❦ ❦
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2016-10-17b Doughton Park Tree
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Convolutions

Posted in ecology, family, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on August 8, 2025| 6 Comments »

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[with 3 poems by Beth Copeland]
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Fog
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Morning fog erases the mountain and trees.
No, not an erasure but unseen.
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Not an erasure but unseen.
The mountain, the laurel still green.
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Unlike the mountain and laurel still green,
the dearly departed lie beneath white sheets.
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The deer depart beneath white sheets
of fog, stepping into a forgotten dream
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of fog slipping into a forgotten dream
the ghost mountain dreams.
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The ghost mountain dreams.
Crows fly to pines on mascara wings.
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Crows fly to pines on mascara wings,
mourning. Fog erases the mountain, the trees.
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Beth Copeland
from I Ask the Mountain to Heal My Heart, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory NC; © 2025
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❦ ❦ ❦
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It’s a big web, here in the corner of our screened porch, but I’m not ready yet to broom it down. The spider is a jointed dried kernel in its center; when I blow, she doesn’t twitch. I don’t see an egg pouch or spiderlings. The strands are not an orb but a diffuse tangle, a chaos of delicate angles and tensions — a miniature of filaments revealed by the background microwave radiation that weave the structure of our entire universe. And what are they made of, those filaments? These I can see before me are nanometer reworkings of hemolymph from mosquitoes denied the opportunity to bite me. Most visible when dusted with pollen. A mess. But I and my broom are not ready yet to offend, to say farewell to the tribe of spiders.
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Last week we visited Blue Whales with our grandson, turning eight. The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh is hosting this exhibit of the largest creatures that have ever lived on our planet – the mystery of their migrations, language, culture; the vital interconnections between their diet of krill, their massive enriching orange poop, and the entire deep ocean ecology. Linda and I stood in silence before the model of a blue whale brain and a model of our own. The whale’s is twice as large and twice as complex, convoluted with its twisting gyri and deep sulci. Surely such an abundance of neurons and synapses must create thoughts as complex as our own. Or more so. And yet blue whales struggle to survive as a species in a world degraded by human beings. I am thinking of that brain and I am not ready yet to say farewell to the tribe of whales.
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Chapel Hill cartoonist Keith Knight draws a weekly panel titled (th)ink. Today’s is a portrait of and quotation by James Baldwin (1924-1987): “To be a Negro in this country & to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” Human being who is relatively conscious, choose your own rage focal point du jour – human beings caged like animals in a Florida concentration camp; children intentionally starved to advance a particular political agenda; boosting fossil fuels burned to appease a few billionaires; an ocean filled with plastic nanoparticles and deafening human vibrations where blue whales may soon be extinct? Some days I feel like I am not ready to go on living. Some days I am more than ready to say goodbye to the tribe of humans. In a few years I will depart as an inhabitant of planet Earth. Some years after that the last memory of my having been an inhabitant will finally depart as well. On that day, will any whales still remain to swim the depths? Will any love between humans remain, or any love for other creatures? I am not ready yet to answer.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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October Valentine
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A heart-shaped leaf spied in the weeds on my walk
down the hill to the mailbox. I didn’t see a redbud tree
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on the roadside, so it must have lifted on the wind
and dropped – a gift! – near my feet. Is it a message
 . 
from someone I love – my sweet mother in a halo of light,
my father singing the names of trees in his strong baritone?
 . 
Or is it from someone I’ve never seen and may never meet?
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As I hike up the hill, I tuck the leaf in my pocket, rubbing it
with my thumb – as if I could read it – skin to skin – by osmosis.
 . 
Halfway home, I stop to study it. Cerise with splotches of green,
dark spots, a wormhole bored like a bullet wound, a battered
 . 
heart, like yours, like mine, but maybe its scars make it more
beautiful than before. My friends, there’s still so much
 . 
love in this world even when you’re alone.
 . 
Beth Copeland
from I Ask the Mountain to Heal My Heart, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory NC; © 2025
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Is it strange for me to be toying with despair while reading a book of healing and love like Beth Copeland’s I Ask the Mountain to Heal My Heart? Actually, if you’re not toying with despair you are the strange one. Give grudging thanks, though. Thank the stars and the mysterious hemlocks and the dark fecund earth that in a world full of rage and despair there are poems like Beth Copeland’s. These poems know the feeling of being lost in endless night. These poems have been battered, they have fallen, they have doubted plenty of times whether there is any wholeness or healing available to them, but these poems stand up to testify, My friends, there’s still so much love in this world even when you’re alone.
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Often I tell myself it is ridiculous to imagine that any sort of inner peace is possible. I have my share of personal regrets and ongoing grief, and even though I’m tempted to look around and envy those people who don’t, when I’m really honest I admit that no one escapes whipping. But peace can’t be a wall built around my sadness – walls keep more things in than out. Despair is inevitable. How foolish is it, then, and how strange, to spend a few hours with a book of words arranged in lines on paper and discover the tightness in my throat is easing? The mountain has rested in one place for 480 million; today its peak is less than a third of its height when it was first thrust up in the big crunch. Does it reflect on loss and diminishment, or does it find peace in the weight of its daily being? Am I inflamed and scarred by the revelations of Beth Copeland’s battles and pain, or am I grateful for her gratitude and strengthened by her strength?
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The tribe of human beings seems determined to destroy itself. The tribe of human beings seems determined to link arms and hearts in love. Perhaps discovering a moment of beauty is not a cowardly attempt to escape dire reality – perhaps it is the only thing capable of healing us.
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❦
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Explore REDHAWK Publications, including Beth Copeland’s I Ask the Mountain to Heal My Heart and Shibori Blue: Thirty-Six Views of the Peak HERE.
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Sample poems from Shibori Blue at Verse & Image HERE.
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More information about the North Carolina Museum of Nature Sciences HERE.
Dive into the K Chronicles with Keith Knight HERE.
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
My Daughter Paints a Mountain
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She wasn’t thinking as her brush swept
across canvas in wave-length strokes,
 . 
channeling a crest she’d never seen,
while I was still in the Sandhills
 . 
where there aren’t any hills, just fields
of cotton, soybeans, and cedar stumps
 . 
in swamp water, sleeping on an air mattress
in a small apartment with prints and paintings
propped against walls instead of hung,
newly separated, newly sober, living
 . 
between the husband and home I’d left
and a haven I hadn’t found yet.
 . 
*****
 . 
As I drove up a steep road to see a house
in the Blue Ridge, a large buck leapt
 . 
in front of the car to welcome me,
and I knew I’d found my new home.
 . 
I didn’t know the mountain seen at the top
of the hill was the mountain she’d painted
 . 
months before, and she didn’t know I’d move
to that house with a view of the mountain
 . 
she’d painted as if in a dream or fugue.
How could her mountain – purple, lavender,
 . 
pink, and forest green swirled to a peak
with white streak of snow against a blue sky –
 . 
mirror the one framed in my window?
Was it coincidence or synchronicity
 . 
that the mountain in her mind’s
eye was more map than metaphor?
 . 
It was a message from the universe:
You’re home. Open the door.
 . 
Beth Copeland
from I Ask the Mountain to Heal My Heart, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory NC; © 2025
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Doughton Park Tree 2020-11-22
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❦ ❦ ❦
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