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Posts Tagged ‘Redhawk Publications’

Convolutions

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

 . 
[with 3 poems by Beth Copeland]
 . 
Fog
 . 
Morning fog erases the mountain and trees.
No, not an erasure but unseen.
 . 
Not an erasure but unseen.
The mountain, the laurel still green.
 . 
Unlike the mountain and laurel still green,
the dearly departed lie beneath white sheets.
 . 
The deer depart beneath white sheets
of fog, stepping into a forgotten dream
 . 
of fog slipping into a forgotten dream
the ghost mountain dreams.
 . 
The ghost mountain dreams.
Crows fly to pines on mascara wings.
 . 
Crows fly to pines on mascara wings,
mourning. Fog erases the mountain, the trees.
 . 
Beth Copeland
from I Ask the Mountain to Heal My Heart, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory NC; © 2025
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
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.
 . 
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.
 . 
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.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
October Valentine
 . 
A heart-shaped leaf spied in the weeds on my walk
down the hill to the mailbox. I didn’t see a redbud tree
 . 
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?
 . 
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
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
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.
 . 
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?
 . 
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.
 . 
❦
 . 
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.
 . 
Sample poems from Shibori Blue at Verse & Image HERE.
 . 
More information about the North Carolina Museum of Nature Sciences HERE.
Dive into the K Chronicles with Keith Knight HERE.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
My Daughter Paints a Mountain
 . 
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
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Doughton Park Tree 2020-11-22
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
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Elemental – Scott Owens

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on March 28, 2025| 4 Comments »

 . 
after rain the hills
fill up with mist, everything
else just memory
 . 
[poetry by Scott Owens]
 . 
Elemental
 . 
Having been raised in shadow of pecan trees
he learned to keep his insecurities
concealed in shells the color of earth, almost
inextricable and gathered in brown paper bags.
 . 
Having been shaped by twisted logic of weather
in South Carolina’s Tornado Alley,
he learned when to move with wind and when
to stand fast and howl against the blow.
 . 
Having been dipped in yellow water
without being held by anything but current
he learned to sink to the bottom, plant his feet
in mud below and walk back to shore.
 . 
Having been burned in fires of passion and forgiveness,
faith and disbelief, he learned to trust little
but what he could see: bird flight, dirt
beneath the nails, quiet eternity of mountain.
 . 
Scott Owens
from Elemental, forthcoming in 2025 from Redhawk Press, Hickory NC; © Scott Owens.
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Where is the transition point between cluttered and ungodly mess? I gave up long ago any hope of keeping my desktop tidy or my bookshelves neatly organized. For the past year, however, the normal books and papers and camera gear have been invaded and overcome by bins, boxes, and bags. Here’s a sampling:
file boxes of my parents’ financial and tax records, 2023 to present;
banker’s boxes of photos I’m bound and determined to sort, 1920’s and even earlier;
crumbling carton of 35 mm home movies shot by Grandpop, who died in 1958;
and before I totally blame Mom and Dad, one chair is completely full of books and magazines I’ve read or intend to, and the other chair is completely loaded with gear, field guides, and two dozen clip boards with botanical checklists I’ll hand out at my next naturalist walk in a week.
 . 
And one other thing among so many others that have not yet discovered or been granted their ultimate place of repose: a heavy oak urn containing my mother’s ashes.
 . 
The urn I will keep close and heft from time to time. Is any of this other stuff really essential? I don’t believe I will ever lose the picture in my head of Mom on her bicycle, luminous smile, age 11 – perhaps these boxes don’t hold anything that can surpass that memory. I can’t conceive of a meaningful life that doesn’t include a camera in my hand, but after all I can only hold one at a time. And the books! I’m planning to surprise thirty or so friends with a (comfortably read) book for Poetry Month, but the groaning weight of the remainder will scarcely feel the loss.
 . 
Whelm: To cover, submerge, engulf or bury; to overcome. Why have I made myself responsible for these accumulations? Am I their curator, conservator, salvager? Or do I expect this stuff to somehow save me? Buried by the non-essential all around me, perhaps I can thrash and claw my way through while I ignore my own ultimate burial.
 . 
In a minute perhaps I’ll withdraw my hands from typing, swivel away from the screen, actually open one of these bins and boxes. Maybe I’ll chuck a dusty double handful in the trash. But maybe I’ll pull out a talisman that opens my soul to more luminous memories. I will smile and share what I’ve found. It will be a treasure not of precious metal or envious resale value but because of the door it opens. A sliver of light finds its way through and reveals one moment that has made meaning in this life. A moment that still has meaning. Not the old material stuff but the memories it carries on its back: from something here I might discover something new about myself, the ones I love, this overwhelming life. I might find something essential.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Of Mint and Memory
 . 
The smell of mint makes everything feel clean,
clears the senses like bells ringing,
or wind chimes, maybe, on a summer day
in 1973, after the war but before
the bomb became too real a thing to ignore.
 . 
They say that smell is our most powerful sense,
not the strongest, not the one
we use the most, but the one we find
closest to memory and feeling, the one
most difficult to ignore, resist, overcome.
 . 
I’ve given up patches of my yard to mint
so I’ll always have it for tea,
for homemade chocolate chip ice cream,
for the times I need to go back to days
when I didn’t know enough to be afraid.
 . 
Scott Owens
from Elemental, forthcoming in 2025 from Redhawk Press, Hickory NC; © Scott Owens.
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Linda listening to Fauré while she reads. A brown thrasher sneaking into the holly just outside my window. Lacing up for another afternoon walk in the woods. I could list a dozen necessary things that have intruded on this morning, but if I take a deep breath and reflect on what is essential those first three seem like a good start. Last night we drove by a church signboard with this suggestion: “Do one thing today that makes the world a better place.” Essential. I would add, “one thing that makes you a better person.” Paying attention. Gratitude. Joy. If even for a moment, make space in the necessary for the essential.
 . 
Scott Owens is always on the lookout for the essential. His new manuscript, Elemental, expands and reinforces the search. Expect to encounter the essential and you will! Scott has written thousands of poems to ground himself in the seeking and yet he still finds joyful surprise in the daily happenings and encounters that make real meaning in life, if you allow them to. Perhaps it is because he is intentional and systematic in his noticing that he discovers joy all around him. This book includes a section on the seasons, a travelogue section especially exploring North Carolina, a final section of life’s lessons. I will use it as a field guide for the truly essential.
 . 
Oh, and trees. Scott really, really loves trees, both in their grand collective leafiness and in their individual personalities. He mentions that he grew up around pecan trees and learned something about hiding vulnerability from the way their shells hide the sweet kernel. I’d like to sit down with Scott and swap yarns about the pecans in Granddaddy’s back yard. Or my beloved beech I will not forsake even though it dropped a branch through my windshield. Or the hundred colors of lichen on the holly’s bark. Then we will move on to birds, and mountains, and the sound of moving water. We will discover how much we have in common. We will nod and share a slice of joy in the discovery that every single creature on earth holds that much in common and more. That joy, that knowledge, is truly essential.
 . 
❦
 . 
Keep your eyes peeled at Redhawk Publications for Scott Owens’s new book, Elemental, due out by this August, 2025.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
All That Is
 . 
It’s winter,
a hard time of year
for noticing things,
except the wide sky
through limbs of trees,
and the shapes of trees
stripped of leaves,
and a white-breasted nuthatch
hopping sideways
down the trunk
of a peeling paper birch,
and the omnipresent cold,
and the quiet
of everyone staying inside
as long as they possibly can,
but all that is not there,
in the haunted austerity
of a winter landscape,
is what makes it possible
to see all that is
 . 
Scott Owens
from Elemental, forthcoming in 2025 from Redhawk Press, Hickory NC; © Scott Owens.
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Doughton Park Tree 2020-06-11a

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Everything New

Posted in family, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , on January 17, 2025| 6 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Ralph Earle]
 . 
The Body’s Small Purposes
 . 
His lungs like exhausted fishermen
drew in their glittering catch
of oxygen and his heart
called to the receding tides of the blood.
His bony fingers curled around mine.
I read from Mary Oliver
 . 
how the soul may be hard, necessary,
yet almost nothing, how we all know
the sand is golden under the cold waves
though our hands can never touch it.
 . 
The hearing goes last, the doctor said.
 . 
There are not words for this communion,
this hope that his eyes, turned from
the sunny branches outside, could summon
a vision of loved ones long gone,
wife of fifty years, sister dead in childbirth,
souls knowing already this passage
and awaiting him in whatever form of glory
the living can conjure: my brothers, me,
our children, all the others
still casting the nets of our breath,
still sifting the golden sands.
 . 
Once in his search for love after my mother died
he told me it never ends. But it does.
On a broken day the breath stops
and the cells gently fall asleep
and the soul, perhaps puzzled
by this coming to rest
of all the body’s small purposes
rises and looks on the silence.
 . 
Ralph Earle
from Everything You Love is New, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory NC; © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
After I sit through lunch in the nursing home dining room with him and his friend, Dad and I roll back to his room to hang out for an hour or two. Maybe he tells me about the birds that have discovered the feeders I set up outside his window – he can name most of them. He always offers me something from his overflowing snack drawer – it began as his sock drawer but over three months the socks have all had to find new digs. If I prompt him he’ll recall talking to his sister on the phone last Sunday, or he’ll show me a card someone sent. This is his home now.
 . 
When Dad returned to his townhouse from the hospital after his fall in July, we called Hospice. For a week he barely ate, barely knew us. We set up dual hospital beds so he and Mom could continue to share a bedroom like they had for just shy of 74 years. She would sit and hold his hand for hours, couldn’t bear to have him out of sight, but once told us, “There’s a man in a coma in my bedroom.” He was home only three weeks before she died, but during their last days together he certainly knew her. They ate a few bites together. Watched the news. When she was gone, although the house was never empty it was completely empty.
 . 
“Good as new,” just what does that mean? Six months after Dad’s fall he can get himself out of bed by himself, putter himself down the hall in his wheelchair using his feet like Fred Flintstone, polish off his lunch. He wins quarters at bingo. Today he and I play our weekly Rummikub, exercise for the little gray cells. Last week he beat me for the first time. Right now we’re each down to just two tiles remaining until I draw the winning combo – for a second I consider feigning a bad draw to give him a couple more chances for victory, but nah, I win.
 . 
And at this very moment the activities coordinator sticks her head around the door to remind Dad – a local church has arrived to share a worship service this weekday afternoon. Dad, I’ll pack up the game if you want to attend. We hug, he rolls himself away. I dump the tiles into their case, stash it on his dresser, put on my jacket, and by the time I walk down the hall Dad is out of sight.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Cormorants Arrive
 . 
Like a gang of legislators
+++ dressed in grey
+++ +++ from somewhere
 . 
outside of town,
+++ the cormorants loiter
+++ +++ on the lake’s little float
 . 
strutting a step or two,
+++ dropping
+++ +++ into the water
 . 
for a fish.
+++ The represent
+++ +++ some constituency
 . 
I don’t recognize,
+++ shuffling around
+++ +++ their little island.
 . 
They disturb me,
+++ they embody my fear
+++ +++ of narrow minds,
 . 
of self-assured
+++ self-inflated strangers,
+++ +++ fear of my own silence.
 . 
Still, when I approach
+++ they dwindle
+++ +++ into a smattering
 . 
of awkward fishing birds,
+++ all angle and tackle, waiting
+++ +++ their moment of excitement,
 . 
the shadow of small prey
+++ out of reach
+++ +++ in the darkening water.
 . 
Ralph Earle
from Everything You Love is New, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory NC; © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
They are here. They are gone. Does Ralph Earle mean the birds, flock of black specks flapping, or does he mean the curses his wife calls to herself? Is nothing permanent, not grief, not joy? Everything You Love is New – perhaps it is your love that makes something new, or seem new in that moment of loving, that wonderful fleeting moment when you know you can’t hold something forever and yet you are able to rest in not having to.
 . 
So delicate — Ralph Earle’s poems touch ever lightly all the heavy things we encounter as human creatures. How we do all hurt each other after all, sometimes careless but sometimes intentional. How the things we imagine will bring us joy fall to dust. How apt we are sometimes to turn away rather than reach out. Yes . . . but. These are not poems of despair but of awareness, of acceptance, and sometimes of bright heart-swelling discovery and joy. Reading a poem requires a pause, a brief silence. The mind as it embraces that silence creates an opportunity to fill it with love.
 . 
A damselfly, so delicate, hovers above the mirror of pond. Her abdomen curls to touch the water’s surface so lightly there is no ripple, yet she leaves behind an egg that may become a new damselfly. Perhaps everything you love makes you new.
 . 
❦
 . 
Ralph Earle’s new full-length collection Everything You Love is New is available from Redhawk Publications.
 . 
Read an additional poem by Ralph Earle at last week’s post, Tenacity.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Birthday Ending in Zero
 . 
No rain for days, and on the pollen-dusted porch
a vase of flowers arrived from nowhere:
 . 
yellow roses, lilies, carnations, tulips with orange tips
and stems of electric-blue buds like paper lanterns.
 . 
We were happy in that second Covid spring, gathering
our loved ones on Zoom, cooking fish with asparagus,
 . 
ate our apple pie and still it didn’t rain. In the pollen
on the back deck, small animals left yellow footprints.
 . 
That week, after so long alone, you let go
into the space we had begun to share.
 . 
You stood the flowers on the kitchen table
surrounded with gifts and letters from my friends.
 . 
Our hearts opened like small animals looking around.
We slept skin to skin, your presence rippling like a lake.
 . 
That week the huge heads of the roses unfolded
in radiance even as the water started to cloud,
 . 
even as carnations drooped and tulip petals dropped.
When the rain began I found a ravine where no one goes
 . 
and under the trees, scatted the globes of the roses,
tulips with their falling petals, lilies and lanterns.
 . 
Ralph Earle
from Everything You Love is New, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory NC; © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Doughton Park Tree 2019-02-09
 . 

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