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Posts Tagged ‘Southern Appalachians’

As His Name – Ron Rash

Posted in family, Imagery, poetry, tagged family, nature photography, NC Poets, poetry, Ron Rash, Southern Appalachians, Southern writing on July 10, 2026| Leave a Comment »

Violet Wood Sorrel, Oxalis violacea

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[ 3 poems from New and Selected ]

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Barbed Wire

. .

New strung, it sparks a live wire

when sun hits right, and can be

thumbed like guitar string, its tune

pure country twang, but given

enough time rain rusts metal,

fence posts wobble like loose teeth,

barbed wire burrows in laurel

and goldenrod before found

by fishermen or hunters.

As I found out once, deep in

the Smokies when something latched

to my calf—coil of old strands

not quite elemented back

into ground ore, and though I searched

no chimney-spill or hearthstone,

no sign but rusty fence-thorns

of one whose hammer tapped out

a claim on this land traveling

through bright lines from post to post,

traveling time to a moment

one man’s tenuous hold on

the earth snagged like memory

surfaced long after, time-dulled,

but still able to draw blood.

. .

Ron Rash

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❀ ❀ ❀

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Plowing on Moonlight

I rose with the moon, left the drowsy sheets,

my nine months wife singing in her sleep,

left boots on the floor, overalls and hat

scarecrowing a bedpost so I could plant

my seeds with just a plow between

the earth and me, my pale feet deep

in the ridged wake where I labored,

gripped the handles like a divining rod,

my eyes closed to the few stars out.

All night I plowed, beard budded by frost,

chest nippled, my breath blooming white,

and felt in me the sway of the sea,

rain’s fall and soak, the taproot’s thrust,

the cicada’s winged resurrection.

I opened my eyes to dawnlight,

left my field and lay with my wife,

warming as I pressed against her body,

my hand listening to her waxing belly.

. .

Ron Rash

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Common Milkweed, Asclepias syriaca

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❀ ❀ ❀

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The Exchange

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Between Wytheville, Virginia,

and the North Carolina line,

he meets a wagon headed

where he’s been, seated beside

her parents a dark-eyed girl

who grips the reins in her fist,

no more than sixteen, he’d guess

as the come closer and she

doesn’t look away or blush

but allows his eyes to hold

hers that moment their lives pass.

He rides into Boone at dusk,

stops at an inn where he buys

his supper, a sleepless night

thinking of fallow fields still

miles away, the girl he might

not find the like of again.

When dawn breaks he mounts his roan,

then backtracks, searches three days

hamlets and farms, any smoke

rising above the tree line

before he heads south, toward home,

the French Broad’s valley where spring

unclinches the dogwood buds

as he plants the bottomland,

come night by candlelight builds

a butter churn and cradle,

cherry headboard for the bed,

forges a double-eagle

into a wedding ring and then

back to Virginia and spends

five weeks riding and asking

from Elk Creek to Damascus

before he finds the wagon

tethered to the hitching post

of a crossroads stone, inside

the girl who smiles as if she’d

known all along his gray eyes

would search until they found her.

She asks one question, his name,

as her eyes study the gold

smoldering there between them,

the offered palm she lightens,

slips the ring on herself so

he knows right then the woman

she will be, bold enough match

for a man rash as his name.

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Ron Rash

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❀ ❀ ❀ ❀ ❀

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Ron Rash will take you there. He will take you deep into to the forest where the unvoiced past may suddenly reach up from the earth and bite your leg. Into the night where moonlight unveils dreams and deep desires. Up a lonesome mountain holler where one of his own kinsmen once scratched to farm a living. Even deeper, farther, he will carry you into generations long grown cold but where a story of his early ancestor can still wring a warm and sudden smile.

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This collection, Ron Rash’s New and Selected, covers decades of his writing but hundreds of years of settlement and stories, of life and death in the southern Appalachians. Each poem is the flare of a match that lights a lantern to limn a face, a moment, another turning point in another life. A history book might teach you about the Tennessee Valley Authority and farmers displaced by lakes filling behind its hydroelectric dams, but these poems will teach your heart how it felt to live on that land and watch it go under. The poems will teach you that poverty in possessions is not poverty of the soul. They might teach you that following your God can still involve some wrestling matches. Most of all, these poems connect – they tell one expansive enlarging straggling and struggling story of people and families each one of us is a part of. We are a part of these stories if we call ourselves Americans, and especially Southerners. Or if we just call ourselves human beings.

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❀

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Ron Rash – POEMS, New and Selected is available at Bookshop.org.

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Also by Ron Rash at Verse and Image:

https://griffinpoetry.com/2026/04/27/poetry-and-earth-awe/

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Common Buckeye, Junonia coenia

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❀ ❀ ❀ ❀ ❀

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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;

. . . . . some Saturdays I present one or two poems submitted by YOU, my readers.

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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:

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https://griffinpoetry.com/about/

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Thanks again for joining the conversation.

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– Bill

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Requiem for Trees

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, tagged Barbara Conrad, Bill Griffin, Ecopoetry, Had I a Dove, Hilda Downer, hurricane Helene, imagery, Molly Bolton, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Southern Appalachians, Southern writing, Suzette Clark Bradshaw on November 7, 2025| 2 Comments »

[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

❦ ❦ ❦

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

❦ ❦ ❦

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

❦ ❦ ❦

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Deep Time

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, tagged Bill Griffin, Ecopoetry, Emilie Lygren, Geology, Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, imagery, Janet Loxley Lewis, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, poetry, Robert Wrigley, Southern Appalachian Naturalist Certification Program, Southern Appalachians 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

❦ ❦ ❦

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

❦ ❦ ❦

“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)

❦ ❦ ❦

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.”

❦ ❦ ❦

Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont GEOLOGY course November, 2024

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1. As His Name – Ron Rash | V E R S E and I M A G E on About/SubmitJuly 10, 2026
  […] About/Submit […]
2. As His Name – Ron Rash | V E R S E and I M A G E on Poetry and Earth – AweJuly 10, 2026
  […] POEMS, New and Selected is available at Bookshop.org. . . Also by Ron Rash at Verse and Image: https://griffinpoetry.com/2026/04/27/poetry-and-earth-awe/…
3. Waking Up Alone – Michael Hettich | V E R S E and I M A G E on About/SubmitJuly 3, 2026
  […] About/Submit […]
4. Waking Up Alone – Michael Hettich | V E R S E and I M A G E on ArchetypeJuly 3, 2026
  […] https://griffinpoetry.com/2026/04/20/poetry-and-earth-night/ https://griffinpoetry.com/2025/12/26/a-sharper-silence-michael-hettich/ https://griffinpoetry.com/2025/09/26/poetry-at-cary-arts-center/ https://griffinpoetry.com/2024/09/27/anticipate/ https://griffinpoetry.com/2023/07/14/magic/ https://griffinpoetry.com/2023/07/07/catch-fire/ https://griffinpoetry.com/2023/03/17/archetype/ […]
5. Waking Up Alone – Michael Hettich | V E R S E and I M A G E on Catch FireJuly 3, 2026
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Posts Tagged ‘Southern Appalachians’

As His Name – Ron Rash

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Requiem for Trees

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Deep Time

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