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Posts Tagged ‘Southern Appalachians’

Requiem for Trees

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 7, 2025| 2 Comments »

[#Beginning of Shooting Data Section]<br /> Nikon CoolPix2500<br /> 0000/00/00 00:00:00<br /> JPEG (8-bit) Normal<br /> Image Size: 1600 x 1200<br /> Color<br /> ConverterLens: None<br /> Focal Length: 5.6mm<br /> Exposure Mode: Programmed Auto<br /> Metering Mode: Multi-Pattern<br /> 1/558.9 sec - f/4.5<br /> Exposure Comp.: 0 EV<br /> Sensitivity: Auto<br /> White Balance: Auto<br /> AF Mode: AF-S<br /> Tone Comp: Auto<br /> Flash Sync Mode: Front Curtain<br /> Electric Zoom Ratio: 1.00<br /> Saturation comp: 0<br /> Sharpening: Auto<br /> Noise Reduction: OFF<br /> [#End of Shooting Data Section]

 . 
[with 3 poems from Had I a Dove]
 . 
Grief for These Trees
 . 
Nearly half, we’re told, downed by wind,
wrenched from river-flooded ground.
 +++ Clogging streets, parks, schoolyards,
 . 
blocking our hiking trails. Our town is dank
as a worn graveyard, branches and brambles
 +++ strewn among marble stones.
 . 
 +++ So what to do with the haunt
of these crippled trees? My muse would say
go to the woods, hike the trail anyway.
 . 
And I will. But before lacing my boots,
let me honor what we’ve learned of nature,
 +++ how in mystery
 . 
trees speak to one another – give support
 +++ and shade, share water and sun.
And like old friends, mourn when one dies.
Let me rub my fingers into the wound
 +++ of this tulip poplars’s bark,
nod to the beetles and lichen who thrive.
 . 
Smell the sweet air of pine sap.
 +++ Scrunch my body
over broken bones of oaks and willows,
 . 
cling to the dead the way I’d cling
as a kid to our sugar maple
 +++ next to Daddy’s tomato patch.
 . 
Limbs holding me safe,
 +++ a flutter of breeze through leaves
always whispering my name.
 . 
Let me linger here in the trees I”ve known,
the ones now gone, the ones
 +++ still upright and grieving.
 . 
Barbara Conrad
from Had I a Dove: Appalachian Poets on the Helene Flood, edited by Hilda Downer. Redhawk Publications, Hickory NC; © 2025
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
It was cold enough to frost last night but I hear music outside my bedroom window and raise the sash. A sparrow is calling, perched on a branch just a few feet from the house. He swivels his head west-south-east and at each turn chirps a metallic almost musical tink. He means business. He is not just any little brown bird – he’s a White-Throated Sparrow, migrated here from Canada to spend the winter. And his perch is not just any tree – it’s a native dogwood. It holds onto color, its coppery leaves, while the tuliptree and maple are already browning in the road. This tree holds onto life when so many of its kinfolk have been taken down by blight.
 . 
Tink, tink, tink. I am here. Brassy foliage and scarlet berries. I am here. We are here for each other.
 . 
Poets who survived hurricane Helene mourn their trees. The poems in Had I a Dove bear witness – trees uprooted, splintered, tumbled down mountainsides, tangled in rivers. Trees crushing houses and blocking roads, trees wiped from entire ridgelines, and with every fresh breeze our own reborn fear of trees falling. We being a species which can grasp large numbers, we try to calculate. How many trees destroyed by wind and flood? Millions? Dozens of millions? It becomes unimaginable. At the loss of even one tree, the heart suffers. That big hickory that shaded the garden. The righteous oak that lifted and held the kids’ tire swing. The dogwood where sparrows perched.
 . 
Hurricane Hugo roared through Charleston in 1989 and felled thousand-year old cypresses in the blackwater swamps, then stomped on up the Appalachian chain to leave behind downed trees all the way to Ohio. Near our home a hundred year old oak blocked Flat Rock Ridge trail where it winds from Basin Cove up to the Blue Ridge Parkway. An anonymous Park Service volunteer with a huge chain saw cleared the trail, and into the face of that massive stump he carved “Hugo 9-21-89.” I have paid homage every time I hike past, until a couple of years ago I had to stop and cast about to find the stump. Rot and lichen and a thick beard of moss had cloaked the inscription. Overhead, the canopy had closed as fellow trees shouldered their way in. In the midst of grief and loss, we hold onto life.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
I could not hear the trees fall
the morning that yowling she-wolf,
Helene stormed up from Florida,
sank blood-stained fangs into Appalachia,
her torrential mad-drool rain,
drowning wide river valleys,
and all those skinny little hollers.
 . 
From a kitchen window I watched
her lay into a neighboring ridge, her super-charged
breath knocking down magnificent oaks,
colossal hickories, and hundreds of tall pines
which dominoed one by one by one.
She left nothing standing in the upper hillside grove.
 . 
The next day, after that noisy bitch moved on,
I heard an immense tree fall somewhere
close by. There was a crack,
a ghostly groan, a swoosh of leaves,
then, as it met the ground, a tremendous bellow.
And I whispered a prayer for the passing.
 . 
Suzette Clark Bradshaw
from Had I a Dove: Appalachian Poets on the Helene Flood, edited by Hilda Downer. Redhawk Publications, Hickory NC; © 2025
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Barbara Conrad has lived in North Carolina all her life and in Asheville since COVID. She edits Waiting for Soup, an anthology created by her writing group with houseless folks.
Suzette Clark Bradshaw lives in western North Carolina, writes and sculpts, and is employed by her county to manage Helene recovery projects and FEMA grants.
Molly Bolton lives in Foscoe, North Carolina, and upholds the spiritual practice of collective liberation with weekly posts at enfleshed.com.
Had I a Dove: Appalachian Poets on the Helene Flood, an anthology collected and edited by Hilda Downer, includes a preface by Joseph Bathanti. More than 80 poets, voices as various and deep as those wild mountain ridges and hollers, share the night that hurricane Helene’s “thousand year” flooding and gales devastated the mountain counties of North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee. They share the days and weeks and now months that have come after, the scars and healing. Available from Redhawk Publications at Catawba Valley Community College Press in Hickory, NC.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
somehow bloodroot
 . 
For Western North Carolina & Gaza
 . 
still blooms, the same
spot as last year
at the crumbling edge
 . 
of the driveway
in the seam
of march and April
 . 
under the body
of a fallen elder oak
each flower coming up
 . 
wrapped around
its stem like a windless
white flag.
they say
among the rubble
there will be dancing –
 . 
beautiful people
in ancient lands
tending fires
 . 
while they are hunted
ghosts unsurprised
by the power of greed
 . 
to route bombs towards
children, a hurricane
to the mountains. my sister
 . 
had to come get me
through maze of
washed-out roads &
 . 
Here
I am, still alive
same spot as last year
 . 
bumming a cigarette outside
the todd community square dance
just to watch smoke rise
 . 
from the creaky porch
past the blown-open riverbank
to the cold white stars.
 . 
Molly Bolton
from Had I a Dove: Appalachian Poets on the Helene Flood, edited by Hilda Downer. Redhawk Publications, Hickory NC; © 2025
 . 
2016-05-08b Doughton Park Tree
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
2015-06-15Doughton Park Tree
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Deep Time

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 15, 2024| 5 Comments »

Thunderhead Sandstone outcrop below Ft. Harry Falls, GSMNP

 . 
[with poems about Geology . . . (say what?!)]
 . 
Erosion
 . 
Edges fall first,
silt grains cemented
under thousands of years
sloughed away by wind, rain,
footstep of dog,
sandstone alchemized beneath
weight of mountain
turns sand again
 . 
Subtle rubbing of days shapens us anew,
weathering, the
slowest song of change
 . 
No wonder we wake up some days
wondering at who we used to be.
No wonder we don’t always notice
as our outer edges strip away.
 . 
No wonder the children build castles
made of sand at water’s edge,
even though the castles fall.
 . 
They are practicing for
when they too will feel
what once seemed enduring
slip inside the rising tide.
 . 
Emilie Lygren
from What We Were Born For, Blue Light Press, San Francisco CA. © 2021. Reprinted by permission of the author.
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Geology never intended to trip us up. A mountain’s day is steady and measured, calm as the drip of water, languid as the North Pole’s precession that turns to aim the spinning globe at heaven. All night the mountain’s flow, her stretch, recumbent but restless; at first light she yawns and shudders, her turn and crouch and slow rise; then all morning’s long knotting and gathering to her full height; her relentless stride; a forceful journey, this full day’s labor into evening even as her form, still imposing, diminishes and she reclines.
 . 
Did the mountain even feel the pinprick of water seeping and freezing in minute fissures at her neck? Perhaps a vague itch as lichens scratch to enlarge their circumference, little acid fingernails, a thimbleful of soil. Windborne seeds – would she notice such a light caress when one descends, then its rootlets, its swelling cambium and lignin? One and now another trunk emerges from the crevice, breathing, drinking sunlight, and here comes the day in mammal-time when gravity prevails. A crack, thunder without lightning, slabs and chunks release and roll downslope until they hold at a narrow rib where it crosses below the mountain’s shoulder. Bedrock settled into the new bed it has found.
 . 
Ten thousand human-years pass until you and I puff into view. We slow our pace to climb over and around. Here embedded in the footpath is a softer stratum that has been polished to ebony by a thousand boots. Here alongside the trail we greet the rounder edges and pitted face of earliest falls, sharper clefts and angles  from falls a mountain-day later. Water proving its strength. Lichens still hard at work. Wait a while and this path will open. Geology never intended to trip us up. She simply hopes that we will slow our frantic climbing. Pause here with her for a moment. Look, and simply see.
 . 

USGS map & quartzite vein in Elkmont (?) Sandstone GSMNP

 . 

Common Blue Wood Aster & Thunderhead Sandstone GSMNP

 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Anything the River Gives
 . 
Basalt, granite, tourmaline, the male wash
of off-white seed from an elderberry,
the fly’s-eye, pincushion nubbins yellow
balsamroot extrudes from hot spring soil,
confetti of eggshell on a shelf of stone.
Here’s a flotilla of beaver-peeled branches,
a cottonwood mile the shade of your skin.
Every day I bring some small offering
from my morning walk along the river:
something steel, blackened amber with rust,
an odd pin or busing shed by the train
or torqued loose from the track, a mashed penny,
the buddy bulge of snowmelt current.
I lie headlong on a bed of rocks,
dip my cheek in the shallows,
and see the water mid-channel three feet
above my eyes. Overhead the swallows
loop for hornets, stinkbugs, black flies and bees,
gone grass shows a snakeskin shed last summer.
The year’s first flowers are always yellow,
dogtooth violet dangling downcast ans small.
Here is fennel, witches’ broom and bunchgrass,
an ancient horseshoe nailed to a cottonwood
and halfway swallowed in it spunky flesh.
Here is an agate polished over years,
a few bones picked clean and gnawed by mice.
Her is every beautiful rock I’ve seen
in my life, here is my breath still singing
from a reedy flute, here the river
telling my blood your name without end.
Take the sky and wear it, take the moon’s skid
over waves, that monthly jewel.
If there are wounds in this world no love heals,
then the things I haul up – feather and bone,
tonnage of stone and the pale green trumpets
of stump lichens – are ounce by ounce
a weight to counterbalance your doubts.
In another month there won’t be room left
on the windowsills and cluttered shelves,
and still you’ll see me, standing before you,
presenting some husk or rusty souvenir,
anything the river gives, and I believe
you will love.
 . 
Robert Wrigley
from The Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street, Trinity University Press, San Antonio, TX. © 2020
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
“Find yourself a stone, one you can pick up and carry,” our instructor tells us. “Then find me bedrock.” All weekend Elizabeth will be offering us something new every few minutes  – strange vocabulary, stranger stories in deep time, paths upward toward heath balds and downward into the past – but first she offers these two commands. Our substratum. We will build everything upon a stone from the Middle Prong of the Little River, edges knocked round, compressed bits of texture a hundred shades of gray (soon we’ll know to call those bits clasts); and ponderous gray stone rising beside the river, its layers, its planes and fissures (soon we’ll know which is bedding and which foliation). Here we begin our weekend course in the Smokies, 500 million years beneath our feet, asking how it all got here.
 . 
I’m taking my final elective offered by Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont in their Southern Appalachian Naturalist Certification Program – Geology of the Smokies. This is the first time Linda has accompanied me to Tremont, so she’s taking her first course. We know from our readings that these are the most folded, tortured, elevated/eroded/re-elevated/re-eroded square miles in North America. We know that for the next 48 hours we’ll be continuously outdoors except a few hours to eat and sleep. From my previous nine courses, I know Elizabeth Davis as an excellent teacher, patient yet challenging. What we don’t yet fully know is just how truly challenging, physically and intellectually, this weekend is going to be. But here we are on Friday night and we should be getting a clue – Elizabeth is leading us on a hike into pitch darkness, across the shallows on a single-log bridge, and has turned us loose on an island to find our river stones.
 . 
Success. No one falls into the river.
 . 
Tomorrow morning we’ll be picking our way up through a pathless boulder field to a massive outcrop of Thunderhead Sandstone (its compressed sediment, clasts, recycled from the Grenville mountains built almost a billion years ago). We’ll spend the afternoon literally on hands and knees beneath laurel and rhododendron, climbing to a heath bald summit where some really cool rocks are exposed and where we’ll take samples of the low pH soil. Sunday morning we’ll hike a trail so hazardous that the Park won’t even include it on their maps, but along the way we’ll cross major and minor fault lines to discover their rocky transitions, investigate geology’s effect on plant communities, devise some crazy poems and songs about our findings, and end up at beautiful Spruce Flat Falls.
 . 
Late Sunday night, after driving five hours, Linda and I will pull into our driveway and our old bones will creak as we lug our gear back into the house in pitch darkness. At least we don’t have to cross a log bridge to make it to the kitchen door, but when we wake in the morning, stiff and aching, will Linda have a few choice cusswords for me after dragging her along on this adventure? Oh yeah, we’re sore, but only in body. What Linda does have for me is a list of books I need to order. And this proclamation: “You know, after this weekend I really love Geology!”
 . 

Nodding Ladies Tresses growing up through Anakeesta Slate GSMNP

 . 

Elizabeth displays bedding vs cleavage at summit of heath bald near Chimney Tops GSMNP

 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The End of the Age
 . 
With wash and ripple and with wave,
Slow moving up the long deserted sand,
The little moon went watching the white tide
Flood in and over, spread above the land,
Flood the low marshes, make a silver cover
Where the green sea-weed in a floating mist
Creeps under branch and over.
The wide water spreads, the night goes up the sky,
The era ends.
 . 
Tomorrow comes warm blood with a new race,
Warm hearts that ache for lovers and for friends,
And the pitiful grace
Of young defeated heads.
Tomorrow comes the sun, color and flush
And anguish. Now let the water wash
OUt of the evening sky the lingering reds,
And spread its coolness higher than the heart
Of every silver bush.
Night circles round the sky. The era ends.
 . 
 . 
Geology
 . 
“Look,” said God;
And with slow fingers
Drew away the mantle rock.
Man followed groping
To touch the flesh of his true mother;
And, standing in great valleys,
He saw the ages passing.
 . 
 . 
Fossil
 . 
I found a little ancient fern
Closed in a reddish shale concretion,
As neatly and ans charmingly shut in
As my grandmother’s face in a daguerreotype,
In a round apricot velvet case.
 . 
Janet Loxley Lewis (1899-1998)
from Poetry Magazine, No. 111, The Poetry Foundation. © June, 1920
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Emilie Lygren has published poems and anthologies and developed dozens of publications focused on outdoor science education. Her first collection of poems, What We Were Born For, was selected by the Young People’s Poet Laureate as the Poetry Foundation’s monthly book pick for February 2022.
 . 
Robert Wrigley has said that “poetry can have a redemptive function. It can look at the chaos you see and make a kind of sense of the smallest part of it.” His poems are concerned with rural Western landscapes and humankind’s place within the natural world.
 . 
Janet Loxley Lewis (1899-1998) wrote novels, stories, and librettos, but she considered poetry the superior form. Theodore Roethke describes her poetry as “marked by an absolute integrity of spirit and often by the finality in phrasing that can accompany such integrity.”
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
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Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont GEOLOGY course November, 2024

 .  . 
Doughton Park Tree 2018-02-09

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Community

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 11, 2022| 12 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Scott Owens]

Which came first? Separate a few of the living creatures in the photo above and see what you can identify: the distinctive mottled leaf of Saxifrage; beneath it a glimpse of moss, its diminutive creeping green; a big hairy leaf, I should know that one but I don’t. Down in the damp there’s bound to be a little township of bacteria, waterbears, wormy things, arthropods.

And what’s that right in the center? A little stemmed goblet corroded like verdigris growing out of that patch of gray-green flakes (squamules)? Center stage – lichen, probably Cladonia pyxidata. Its tiny cup is pebbled within by extra lichen bits growing there (more squamules!) and some of the rough and powdery appearance may be an obligate lichen-loving fungus taken up residence. So which came first in this little community of many kingdoms and phyla?

Most likely the lichen comes first. It can hold onto bare rock where nothing else lives. It gathers moisture into itself out of the very air and how could a wandering moss spore resist? Anything drifting by may land and latch. Plus that little lichen chemical factory can break down rock so that others may use the minerals. Pretty soon a Saxifrage seed finds just enough earth to sprout and enough wet to grow and wedge its roots further into rock (saxifrage = rock-breaker). Everything discovers what they need; everyone adds to the life of the community.

What gifts may I add to my little community? A bit of cautious optimism and encouragement. An appreciation for all living things (OK, yes, that does extend to human beings, at least I’m trying my best). Appreciation of a good joke and appreciation as well of the folks who tell bad jokes. Curiosity and a sense of wonder. The world’s best recipe for Nutty Fingers.

We all need something but we all bring something. Who knows, maybe what I’ve got is just what you need. When one really gets down to it, all the stuff growing in that photo looks pretty haphazard and messy. Just like a real community. Just like life.

And if you know what that hairy leaf is, please tell me!

.     .     .     .     .     .     .

In the Cathedral of Fallen Trees

Each time he thinks something special
will happen, he’ll see the sky resting
on bent backs of trees, he’ll find
the wind hiding in hands of leaves,

he’ll read some secret love scratched
in the skin of a tree just fallen.
Because he found that trees were not
forever, that even trees he knew

grew recklessly towards falling,
he gave in to the wisteria’s plan
to glorify the dead. He sat down
beneath the arches of limbs reaching

over him, felt the light spread
through stained glass windows of leaves,
saw every stump as a silent altar,
each branch a pulpit’s tongue.

He did not expect the hawk to be here.
He had no design to find the meaning
of wild ginger, to see leaves soaked
with slime trails of things just past.

He thought only to listen
to the persistent breathing of tres,
to quiet whispers of leaves in wind,
secrets written in storied rings.

Each time he thinks something special
will happen. He returns with a handful
of dirt, a stone shaped like a bowl,
a small tree once rootbound against a larger.

Scott Owens
from Sky Full of Stars and Dreaming, Red Hawk Publications, © 2021

.     .     .     .     .     .     .

 

I’ve admired Scott Owens for many years, not only as a poet but even more so as a builder of community. Scott’s writing wields its openness, its wonder, its unflinching honesty to invite us to realize we are all part of one human family. As in his poem, Words and What They Say: the hope we have / grows stronger / when we can put it into words. Not only words – in everything else he does Scott is building as well. He teaches, he mentors, he makes opportunities happen for the people around him. Perhaps his poems are a window into why he values people as he does, and why he works so hard to make hope a reality.

Sky Full of Stars and Dreaming is Scott Owens’s sixteenth poetry collection. He is Professor of Poetry at Lenoir Rhyne University, former editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review and Southern Poetry Review, and he owns and operates Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse and Gallery where he coordinates innumerable readings and open mics, including POETRY HICKORY, and enlarges the community of creativity.

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The Possibility of Substance Beyond Reflection

I didn’t see the V of geese fly overhead in the slate gray sky as I sat waiting for a reading in my Prius in front of the Royal Bean Coffee House & Gift Shop in Raleigh, NC.

What I saw was the V of geese presumably flying overhead in the slate gray sky reflected in the slate gray hood of the Honda CRV parked before me in front of the Royal Bean Coffee House & Gift Shop in Raleigh, NC.

And they took a long time to travel such a short distance, up one quarter panel, across one contoured crease, then the broad canvas of the hood’s main body, down the other crease and onto the edge of the opposite quarter panel before

disappearing into the unreflective nothingness beyond, where even they had to question just how real they were or just how real they might have been.

Scott Owens
from Sky Full of Stars and Dreaming, Red Hawk Publications, © 2021

.     .     .     .     .     .     .

Sharing a Drink on My 55th Birthday

Sharing a drink on my 55th birthday,
my son, his tongue firmly planted
in his cheek, asks what advice I have
for those not yet as old as I,
and I, having had too much to drink,
miss his humor and tell him
always get up at 5
as if you don’t want to miss
any part of any day you can manage.
Clean up your own mess
and don’t clean up after those who won’t.
Take the long way home,
hoping to see something new,
or something you don’t
want to not see again.
Stay up late, drink in as much
of every day as you can.
Be drunk on life, on love, on trees,
on mountains, on spring,
on rivers that go the way
they know to go,
on words, on art, on dancing,
on poetry, on the newborn
fighting against nonexistence,
on night skies, on dreams, on mere minutes,
on the ocean that stretches beyond
what you ever imagined forever could be.
And when someone asks you
what advice you have, give them,
as you’ve given everyone and everything,
the best of what you have.

Scott Owens
from Sky Full of Stars and Dreaming, Red Hawk Publications, © 2021

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*** Extra Geek Credit — the lichen Cladonia pyxidata is host to the lichenicolous (lives on lichens) fungus Lichenoconium pyxidatae. Such fungi are parasites of their lichen host and mostly specific to a single genus or even to single species of lichen, but although some may be pathogens for the lichen in many cases the relationship is commensal. No harm done. Join the party!

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