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Posts Tagged ‘Saturday readers share’

Saturday Share – Barbee and Bates

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , on December 6, 2025| Leave a Comment »

 . Saturday morning readers share:
Sam Barbee and Jenny Bates
 . 
Tomato
 . 
I pass my time well,
but if a man is worth his salt,
he will learn his season.
 . 
I hope to die some indigo night—
un-diagnosed—preferably,
in my tomato garden.
 . 
I wait content in this fertile space.
 . 
I water each vine.
Spray rattles the dry leaves
and collects on stem bristles.
 . 
Tonight I know, plucking
ripe fruit is kind: by autumn,
so much rots, ignored.
 . 
Sam Barbee
from That Rain We Needed, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2016
 . 
 . 
Tomato was also a Poetry in Plain Sight poster poem.  I grew up in Wilmington, and am still an autumn-season beach-bum. I’ve lost my enthusiasm for fishing, but the solitude continues to delight me. 
 . 
Additional poetry by Sam Barbee at Verse and Image:
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Trimmed in Black
 . 
The bears came back yesterday then
last night you spun a black ribbon in
my hair did I mention?
the bears were black too if I could
only remember the words the turned
tune of words as you wove that ribbon
in and out and through my braid
the bears were in color as was the dream
I tried to stitch all the hues mostly the black
into the wind like trimming a tree with
memory or wishing I had umber bat wings
webbing I could spread and catch your vow
or the sound of any how hung high
in a tree so the breeze will always touch them.
 . 
Jenny Bates
 . 
 . 
I’m going through a wringer of a time in life right now, but … in reality I hope to disappear, but I would also go for becoming a Pine Marten! and really? I am my environment on the mountain and the fellow creatures I live with so the photo is the inspiration for the poem…
 . 
Additional poetry by Jenny Bates at Verse and Image:
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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/
 . 
Also note: after January 1, 2026 I will no longer be sending separate weekly email reminders.
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 4/30/2022

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Saturday Share – Rouphail and Barasovska

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , on November 29, 2025| 2 Comments »

Saturday morning readers share:
Maria Rouphail and Joan Barasovska
 . 
This small house, this big sky . 
 .  . Shapes of things: so much the same
 .  .  .  . they feel like eternal forms
 .  .  .  .  . (Adrienne Rich, “Sources”)
 . 
This small house
my heart’s center
where the world entered and sat down
and I greeted it
as a mysterious guest
my first words swelling into
sentences and song
north to the barred owl in the backyard oak
and the clothesline strung with bedsheets post to post
south to the sawmill
and the draft horses pulling flatbeds of logs
east where a gravel road snaked toward the bay
and long clouds steamed from the loud freight train
west and a highway curving into the pines
and the pond where we swam
where a laughing boy in my class
did not drown one afternoon
but caught polio instead
he never walked again
his mother cried
my mother kept me close
and the sky stared at us in silence
every day in those days
I wondered why
that boy
and not me
 . 
Maria Rouphail
 . 
This is the title poem of my 2025 book, This small house, this big sky (Redhawk Press).  I deliberately avoided punctuation, hoping to effect a kind of seamless stream of consciousness.
 . 

Papa and me, circa 1952

 . 
Here’s something weird: since childhood I’ve had the ability to “mirror write,” and spontaneously and without pause. Could be because I’m left-handed. Long ago, I was told that DaVinci had the same ability, but I’m certainly no DaVinci! 
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Additional poetry by Maria Rouphail at Verse and Image:
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Scarcity
 . 
Love, ever a torment,
a yearning—the knot
 . 
I’ve got for what I need.
Love, not blind, but stupefied
 . 
like grief, like bleeding.
The trouble with me
 . 
is agony, the piercing note
of longing, its persistence.
 . 
It’s plainly the shame
of scarcity, the freeze
 . 
of what I sprang from.
I guess I cried.
 . 
Joan Barasovska
 . 
Scarcity is forthcoming in the winter edition of Persimmon Tree.
 . 
I am sitting at my small desk, above which I have placed many, many things: a photo of the sign that hangs outside of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the cracking cover of an old Penguin paperback of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan with Joan in armor on her steed looking skyward; a clipping of a newspaper headline: “The Courage to Be Alone”; my dad’s business card; a Bazooka Joe comic in Hebrew; the poem “Crossing” by Jericho Brown; lines from Eudora Welty, Borges, Eliot, Mark Strand, Raymond Carver; Bertolt Brecht; a note from Bill Griffin: “You are the beating heart of NCPS, not to mention spleen and gizzard”; a framed arrangement of dried flowers and ginkgo leaves. More. But there’s a yellowed, brittle piece of newsprint, probably from The American Poetry Review, with these lines: “There the wind blows / There the rain falls / There god roams / on his palms, on his all four palms” Can anyone identify this? Is it familiar? I would love to know.
 . 
Also on my desk, this photo with my daughter Clare in my living room 
 . 
Additional poetry by Joan Barasovska at Verse and Image:
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Saturday Morning Submissions – Once a week on Saturday I feature one or two poems shared with me by readers. If you would like to consider having a favorite poem appear, either by you or by a poet you admire, please see the GUIDELINES here:
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Saturday Share — Radavich and Taylor

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , on November 22, 2025| 4 Comments »

Saturday morning readers share:
David Radavich and Richard Allen Taylor
 . 
Birthday
 . 
Every year a leaf falls,
one at a time, hands,
days full of raking, scattering
 . 
and I come to see
the bare tree
of us
against the sunlight
strewn in branches, shimmering
naked against all
 . 
those colors you give me
tumbling free
within a small space,
 . 
a time together
walking in woods
 . 
David Radavich
 . 
For a possible Saturday poem I have selected Birthday, which strikes me as a quintessentially autumn poem. It was first published in my book, By the Way: Poems over the Years (Buttonwood, 1998).
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 . 
The picture shows me ensconced in a park in Champaign, Illinois when my hair was not yet silver. As for a curious factoid about me, I enjoy reading German philosophy (in German), especially Schopenhauer and Cassirer. Also, casting horoscopes. Go figure.
 . 
Additional poetry by David Radavich at Verse and Image:
[April every year? David always contributes to our special EARTH DAY posts.]
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Blessed Are
+++++ After “Ode on Inheritance” by Kate Partridge
 . 
Perhaps there is no inheritance worth having
+++++that does not include a narrative of water—
++++++++++ a river, a lake, an ocean
 . 
pounding on the beach below the open windows.
+++++My father bought a farm
++++++++++with a white house on a hill, a pond
 . 
at the bottom. My mother inherited. She later sold.
+++++All of it was (shall we say) liquidated.
++++++++++Gone, the tiny lake
 . 
fed by a stream tumbling over my father’s modest
+++++ambitions. Just as well. My brothers and I sought
++++++++++ neither the view nor the serenity.
 . 
We were reaching elsewhere, for something
+++++less pastoral, more hopeful,
++++++++++something more highway
 . 
than country road. But even a cave can elicit hope.
+++++The torch goes out, we keep thrusting our hands
++++++++++ forward, groping the walls,
 . 
feet following our blindness. As if a hole could lean
+++++against its sides. All it takes is the will
++++++++++ to swap adjectives.
 . 
Trade wet for slick. Choose briny over soaked.
+++++ Here we go again with that
++++++++++narrative of water. Snow, hail,
 . 
ice melting in your palm. Later, when the drought
+++++squeezes the pond dry, the spark catches
++++++++++ and fire climbs the hill,
 . 
everything promised burns. The difference between
+++++bold and meek becomes a matter of timing.
++++++++++Bold when we rush forward
 . 
to extinguish the blaze. Meek when the flames
+++++ force us back to a place
++++++++++where faces do not melt.
 . 
When rain comes, finally, we inherit the memory
+++++of blackened hills, even if no lawyers or signatures
++++++++++ attend. When grief follows, we console ourselves.
 . 
We say the trees bury their seeds under layers of ash.
We say the trees dream of resurrection.
 . 
Richard Allen Taylor
 . 
This poem first appeared in Sheila-Na-Gig Online, and received a Pushcart Prize nomination. It is now part of a book-length manuscript, Geography of One, that will be published next year if all goes according to plan. 
 . 
 . 
This is my habitat but not necessarily the only habitat or even where I spend most of my time. But I don’t have a picture of me typing at my desk. That would be my real habitat and that would be boring. 
 . 
Interesting tidbit: After retiring from my job as Regional Human Resources Manager of Hendrick Automotive Group in 2013, I earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte in 2015. 
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Additional poetry by Richard Allen Taylor at Verse and Image:
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Saturday Morning Submissions – Once a week on Saturday I feature one or two poems shared with me by readers. If you would like to consider having your poem appear, please see the GUIDELINES here.

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