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Posts Tagged ‘Southern writing’

Candescent – Linda Parsons

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , on July 24, 2026| 2 Comments »

Meadowbeauty, Rhexia virginica

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[ 3 poems by Linda Parsons ]
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The Vale
 . 
I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall
be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture.
— John 10:9
 . 
To brave the vale, to spread its curtain,
like my father on the hillock of his final pass,
our common purgatory. My father, who fingers
 . 
my knuckles with one hand, counts the abacus
of my backbone with the other. We’re in a waiting
period, he says is if to apparitions come
 . 
for the main event, time is winding down.
Nothing in my own life matters, not that I share
his descent on shards of marriage vows,
 . 
that I roam the sheepfold in search of oasis.
Only that the weather is good or overcast,
lunch is coming or done. We sit skin to skin,
 . 
as never before, his hands the picture of his mother’s.
Maybe she’s the one in white organdy, her hair
still strawberry blond, tapping her ladies’ Bulova:
 . 
Lordy, how the time goes. Maybe she’s the shepherd
disguised, the one who lies down at the mouth
of thievery, both door and gatekeeper for the huddled
 . 
bleating. Let us enter the door without pleading
or birthright and be known by the one, the voice
leading us in and out to find pasture,
 . 
fingers woven at our breast so weary from being
and trying, so strayed we can only be gathered.
 . 
Linda Parsons
from Candescent, Iris Press, Oak Ridge TN; © 2019
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❀    ❀    ❀
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Phantom
 . 
Strange the great presence in absence—
book I remembered on the second shelf
of the red bookcase, next to Flannery
 . 
and Ole Fred, rounding the corner to bare
wall, or brushing my left hand, indentation
on the ring finger from years of gold.
 . 
The mind plays tricks, clasps the gilt frame
if imagined life even after the moving truck
with his furniture barrels off, even after
 . 
I sit shiva with my grief, days unraveled
partly by my own device, and I have, thread
by knotty thread, woven a new silken skin.
 . 
Ghost pain, phantom pain, a limb lopped
clean, the dead bee’s sting. We are good
amputees, efficient little starfish and lizards,
 . 
regenerating feet and tails in the shadows
where no one watches us spin and weep,
where no one sees me turn a corner
 . 
in the dark before bed, giving wide berth,
my body’s radar still beeping and flashing
to sidestep a bookcase no longer there.
 . 
Linda Parsons
from Candescent, Iris Press, Oak Ridge TN; © 2019
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Ironweed and crab spider

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Inner Work
 . 
for Paula Capps Kyser
 . 
The inner work must be done in the well
of drawer among pebbled buttons kept
 . 
for whenever, lavender sachets spilling
their guts, Grandmama’s cat’s-eye glasses,
 . 
my pride pierced on her pincushion.
Only there can I sift what hangs loose
 . 
on my shoulders, the stained, the torn,
crocheted illusories never seeing
 . 
light of day. Keys to nowhere, Irish
pence, the pocket Psalms and Proverbs
 . 
have no providence, no commerce
in my wilderness, though I rub each
 . 
faux pearl as talisman, the Long Nights Moon
heartsick at my window. Strayed, undone
 . 
in the layers, I dig to the bottom, wooden
thud that nips my heel, turns me to the field
 . 
of what never emptied in the first place,
not bargain or plea but steppingstones,
 . 
uneaten breadcrumbs, one then another.
Buckeye and amethyst still harbor luck.
 . 
Old stockings will do for garden stakes,
for spring coming sure.
 . 
Linda Parsons
from Candescent, Iris Press, Oak Ridge TN; © 2019
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what never emptied in the first place . . . spring coming sure.
 . 
What we truly lose – is it possible that is something different from what we think we’ve lost? The love of so many years now parted, disdaining; the beloved parent now departed, buried. Who wouldn’t be shattered to pieces? Who wouldn’t doubt in any power to restore?
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Linda Parson’s poems do not skip lightly across the landscape of grief. She stabs her fingers into the cold clay and wrestles with the spiky roots. Stiffened and wearied along with her, we ourselves wonder if there is any hope that warmth may return. Loss is not defeated but confirmed, in all its guises of loneliness and disruption. But we also accompany the poet into her intentional silence. She will release the past from strangling her present, from projecting her future. Perhaps what she thinks she has lost does threaten her with the loss of hope, the loss of joy. With the loss of the inner knowledge that spring comes sure. But then she turns to the field of what never emptied in the first place, and there she finds a way back. A path. Steppingstones. She is not truly lost.
 . 
Candescent is a glowing meadow with all its messy diversity of creatures and themes. Vines and briers may twine and choke, but full fecund life grows strong through the past into the present. Life will not be overcome. This collection of poems, colorful and fragrant, affirms the resilience of the human spirit. Struggle and pain are part of us but do not make us. I take encouragement from the poet’s words: Let dead be dead . . . return, to cress beneath your feet, return to real and true.
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Boneset and Swallowtail

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Linda Parsons is a member of the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame and has served as the Poet Laureate of Knoxville. She will be poetry instructor at the 2026 Tremont Writers Conference in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Her bio at The Poetry Foundation is available HERE; her fifth poetry collection, Candescent, is available from IRIS PRESS.
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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.
 . 
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:
 . 
 . 
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, 2022-05-17B
 . 

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As His Name – Ron Rash

Posted in family, Imagery, poetry, tagged , , , , , , on July 10, 2026| 3 Comments »

Violet Wood Sorrel, Oxalis violacea

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[ 3 poems from New and Selected ]
 . . 
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
from POEMS, New and Selected, HarperCollins, New York NY; © 2016
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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
from POEMS, New and Selected, HarperCollins, New York NY; © 2016
 . . 
Doughton flora milkweed

Common Milkweed, Asclepias syriaca

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The Exchange
 . . 
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.
 . . 
Ron Rash
from POEMS, New and Selected, HarperCollins, New York NY; © 2016
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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.
 . . 
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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 . . 
Ron Rash – POEMS, New and Selected is available at Bookshop.org.
 . . 
Also by Ron Rash at Verse and Image:
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NOTE: you can share three additional poems by Ron Rash at the sequel to today’s post, from July 17, 2026;
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Common Buckeye, Junonia coenia

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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.
 . . 
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:
 . . 
 . . 
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
 . . 
IMG_0880, tree
 . . 

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Waking Up Alone – Michael Hettich

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , on July 3, 2026| Leave a Comment »

  .  

[ poetry by Michael Hettich ]

Waking Up Alone

—Colleen Ahern-Hettich, 1955-2025

[from section 11]

Though it can’t be true, I imagine I’ve been in love
since before I was born; and because it can’t be true,
I imagine the same is true of her, my true love.

As a child, before I knew her, I was moving toward the day we’d meet.
As a young man, confused, I ws moving toward that day,

even as I met other women and seemed
to find myself with them, or nearly, I was really
moving toward her, my true love.

Now I don’t know anything about anything at all.
Not even where I am. Every morning

I move another stone from the creek bed to the path
I’m building through the broken woods, toward her. I don’t know
who I am otherwise, and the stones are heavy.

I stumble a little as I lift and put them down.

•

Once I was a girl, she shays now. I didn’t know you.
Once, before that, I was earth, I was air.

Once, before I knew you, someone took a breath of me,
someone drew a path up the mountain, above the trees
and slept there for years, like nothing really can

and survive. I survived in the gleaming.

Once I was a shadow, the shape of a sleeping
body in the grass, in the morning. Next morning
the grass stood straight again. There was no trace of me.

•

I’m tring to write only of what seems essential now,
though I don’t know what that is. I’m trying to find it

like a man in the dark of a motel room somewhere
trying to locate his keys.

[from section 12]

Sometimes I can only write about Colleen
without writing about her, just as I can only
say what needs to be said by telling
a story: Yesterday, I sat on a hillside
and waited for something. It was sunny. I was not
hoping for an animal or a change in the weather.
No, instead something like a letting-go of language,
forgetting the person I’ve made of myself.

I could crawl inside your body, my love, and disappear
like most memories. You were here; then you were gone
and never gone. The wind through the young trees
moving as though it remembered the old ones,

their massive trunks, their canopies and vast root systems,
their voices. Then it falls silent.

Michael Hettich
from Waking Up Alone, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory, NC. © 2026. Winner of the 2025 Lena Shull Book Award of the North Carolina Poetry Society.

❀    ❀    ❀

Insomnia

If I could remember to breathe the way
you breathed beside me, sleeping, I might
slip into the absence you left me

and sleep, myself, inside the rhythms
your dreaming embodied—not the dreams
themselves but the deep in-and-out of your sleeping
beside me.

 . . . . . .   So I lie here, in the bedroom we loved in,
under the roof of the house we loved,
under the stars and moon, the clouds
and migrating birds, the winds and all

I’ve forgotten, and I try to match the rhythms
of my breath to yours, my love, absent
but still here beside me in the darkness.

Michael Hettich
from Waking Up Alone, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory, NC. © 2026. Winner of the 2025 Lena Shull Book Award of the North Carolina Poetry Society.

 

❀    ❀    ❀    ❀    ❀

Although it is quiet this morning here on the porch, somewhere rain lashes at sharp angles and a thrashing tree threatens to fall on a house. Although here the morning birds have settled themselves in the rising heat and only one cicada is singing, I can hear in the distance the low hum of an engine. Men and women are working, children are getting bored with summer, everyone is wading through life in this silence. Maybe for a moment, as they look through their windshields or at their screens, as they look at their mother making a sandwich or their co-worker so intent, maybe for a moment they also look inside. What do they discover there?

Michael Hettich’s Waking Up Alone is stillness and storm. It is confusion and stumbling insight. It is looking back and looking inside, but mostly it is silence. Awakening to days when dreams do not relinquish their hold as the sheets fall aside. Nor nightmares. But also waking into the continuous tangle of story and dream and memory that gradually resolves itself into recognition. Waking up One but not really Alone.

Few books of poetry have so gathered me up and taken me into the mind of the poet. So into the poet’s heart. These poems, and especially the extended titular poem that is the center of their universe, urge me out of my distractedness. They open a space for me to encounter my own silence. The smoke and ashes of my own dreams rise to swirl and struggle into life around me. Perhaps a mark of the most insightful poetry is how it prompts the reader into contemplation and insight of their own. Writer and reader join together on the journey of awakening.

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Purchase Waking Up Alone from Redhawk Publications HERE

More about the NC Poetry Society Lena Shull Award HERE

Other poetry by Michael Hettich at Verse and Image

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/

 

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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.

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/

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

 

IMG_0880, tree

 

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