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Poetry and Earth – Love, and

Posted in Ecopoetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on April 10, 2026| 2 Comments »

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[ poems by Connie Green, Kari Gunter-Seymour, 
Jenny Bates, Annie Woodford, Paul Jones]
 . 
Song at Daybreak 
 . 
Behind the mountains this morning
a soft curtain of pink, dawn dipping
into her palette, my soul the recipient
of her artistry, this small moment
that would not have occurred
had I not wakened early, wandered
sleep-deprived into the kitchen
and turned my face toward the ridges-
 . 
those ridges that daily wait for me
to look up, to accept, if only
for a minute, the gift they offer
and have offered since the forces
of nature, the work of time pushed
them from plain to towering majesty,
our common stardust knitting mountain,
kitchen, aging woman into song notes that lift
and drift, the finite urging toward the infinite.
 . 
Connie Jordan Green
selected by Kari Gunter-Seymour. First appeared in Women Speak, Volume Eleven (Sheila Na Gig Editions 2025)
 . 
This gorgeous Song at Daybreak by Connie Green reminds me that there is so much splendor and joy to be had if we let ourselves be still long enough to truly embrace all that the earth (and sky) has to offer, and that aging too is a gift, because it means we have been given so many more opportunities to stand in awe and wonder of it all.  — Kari Gunter-Seymour
 . 
❀
 . 
Ten Miles North of Lore City, Guernsey County, Ohio
 . 
Oh, Salt Fork, I’ve come to hide
inside your autumn, walk
beneath the cathedral of your branches
become a meditative painting,
a Cézanne—your impressions
 . 
revealed in planes of pigment,
the slow study of light,
pin oak and American beech awash
in swaths of topaz and carnelian,
the lake a reverie of reflections.
 . 
The universe is out of whack, tremulous
in the pathos of floods, wildfires and drought.
Here, red squirrels wax comedic,
all bark, tuck and tumble, a white-tailed
snorting at their antics.
 . 
Tangy pockets of mugwort
and mountain mint intoxicate my airways
weak-knee me into giggles.
Chickadees hip-hop branch to thicket,
their black caps adorably gangsta.
   . 
Above, an osprey chirps its tea-kettle whistle,
ascends, thrusts,  disappears,
returns, as if parleying ancestral maps
stored inside the lace of its bones.
Cricket songs stitch the afternoon.
 . 
I don’t know how long your trails can hold
such abundance, your fervor of tints and textures
winding their way to my insides, transcendent
as a psalm, the rhythm of your balms and breezes
rumoring their promise of peace.
 . 
Kari Gunter-Seymour
First appeared in The Nature of Our Times (Paloma Press 2025)
 . 
Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to submit a poem I love by poet Connie Green and one of my own as well, in honor of Earth Day. KG-S
 . 
✿
 . 
Connie Jordan Green lives on a farm in East Tennessee where she writes and gardens. She has published award-winning novels for young people, newspaper columns, poetry chapbooks and collections, most recently Nameless as the Minnows, Madville Publishing. Her poetry has been nominated for Pushcart Awards. She frequently teaches writing workshops.
 . 
Kari Gunter-Seymour is the immediate past Poet Laureate of Ohio and author of three award-winning poetry collections, including Dirt Songs (EastOver Press, 2024) winner of the 2025 IPPY Bronze, NYC Big Book and Feathered Quill Awards. Her newest collection, What Teethes Within is forthcoming from University Press of Kentucky, August 2026. Her work has been featured in a variety of publications including the American Book Review, Poem-a-Day, World Literature Today and The New York Times.
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❀ ✿ ✾ ❁
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 . 
Virga
 . 
Every raindrop panics me now
long before it arrives
I feel like an old Dog who hides
in the bathroom sniffing grey skies
 . 
I go out walking anyway make
myself brave but I don’t really don’t want
it to rain
I want fear to evaporate like a virga
line I want to become a cloud dropped
full of reflection and affection
when I listen to rain I hear echoes
of your voice not in my ears anymore
asking under any circumstance
will you want to make love again?
 . 
Jenny Bates
selected by Paul Jones
 . 
✾
 . 
Love Poem for the Appalachian Rainforest 
 . 
The trees as rib cage, as sea-
bare branches tapping each other,
signing furiously the word
 . 
for wind. Temperate rainforest
filled with broken trees,
bracken tinder. I pray
 . 
for damp weather, fog, snow-
a proper frozen sojourn
among High Country clouds
 . 
plumping moss & lichen.
To keep fire at bay.
Needle and loam, trees breathing
 . 
wet breath against each other,
heavy enough to float, to form
their own ecology of hope.
 . 
Annie Woodford
selected by Paul Jones
 . 
✾
 . 
In the Cards
 . 
Outside of Beaverdam, an old lady told the cards.
As close to a crone as the mountain side could grasp,
could hold there, cling-rooted and knotty as laurel.
 . 
She was sour on life by now, hers, which had been hard,
and the mountain itself. “It must change,” she rasped.
Fingering the whirling figure, she hissed, “This is the World.”
 . 
“It’s in the past. Better that the dancer held a sword.”
The next up, the seemingly indifferent Four of Cups.
“Ignoring the gifts and threats of the sky and earth. Peril.
 . 
That’s where we are now. In danger, but not acting. Bored
with it all. Not doing what we need to do.” She gasped,
“No not this! I would rather be telling the Devil,”
 . 
as if she already had seen, but dare not disregard,
the next card, the future told by the Tower. The last.
“The end that comes to us all both good and evil.”
 . 
Soon the storms came as they had never come before.
She and her house were washed away. Among the lost.
She saw but was not saved. Not found. Except her skull.
 . 
Paul Jones
 . 
Thanks for combining Poetry Month and Earth Day (all month long). These three poems are from the award winning anthology, Had I a Dove: Appalachian Poets on the Helene Flood, edited by Hilda Downer (Redhawk Publications 2025). Each of these poem connects human awareness and in some cases human agency in the face of the experience of the flood and what followed. The whole of the anthology is rich with the appreciation of nature during and due to climate based disaster. Besides the three poems attached, Virga by Jenny Bates, Love Poem for the Appalachian Rainforest by Annie Woodford, and In the Cards by me, the anthology holds many treasures. — Paul Jones
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 . 
❀ ✿ ✾ ❁
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We do not live in a Nuclear Age or an Information Age. We do not live in a Post-Industrial Age, a Post-Cold War Age, or a Post-Modern Age. We do not live in an Age of Anxiety or even a New Age. We live in an Age of Flowering Plants and an Age of Beetles. 
– Sue Hubbell, from Broadsides from the Other Orders
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Thank you for celebrating the month of April with International Earth Day (April 22) and National Poetry Month. Readers have selected poems that connect us to our planet and each other. If you have a poem that has rooted you to the earth and spread your branches into bright sky, please share! It can be a poem by your favorite writer, living or dead, a poem of your own, or both.
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Send a your poem(s) in the body of the email or as .DOC or .RTF to:
ecopoetry@griffinpoetry.com 
 . 
Please include your comments or reaction to the poem. And publication acknowledgments if previously published.
 . 
We will share one or two posts each week, multiple posts during the week of Earth Day, and we will keep sharing into May and beyond if you continue to respond!
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Feel free to invite others to send their favorite Earth Day poems. Perhaps some day we will be able to say we live in the Age of Connection.
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❁
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Thank you for visiting Verse and Image: 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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I See You Waving – Sherry Siddall

Posted in family, tagged , , , , , , on April 3, 2026| 3 Comments »

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[ with 3 poems from Transformed and Singing ]
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The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough of is love.
— Henry Miller
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   ❀
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Night Ship
 . 
The compass of our bodies leads us
through another moonless night,
cresting waves of sleep, steered
by phosphorescent dreams that
knit our cells whole again,
or as whole as they can be
after years on this sea.
 . 
The dark has no power over us
as we roll on our ship of tossed
and wrinkled sheets, the shushing
of syrupy crickets a white noise
leaking beneath the cracked window.
As dawn approaches once again,
the dogs stir and lick our hands.
 . 
Sherry Siddall
from Transformed and Singing, Main Street Rag Enterprises, Edinboro PA; © 2026
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❀    ❀    ❀
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The Beautiful Dead
2020
 . 
are half a million human souls
lost the way spring is lost
in deepest winter.
 . 
I go about the day
as if everything is fine,
as if safety can be found
 . 
in the folding of laundry,
the arranging of
store-bought flowers.
 . 
Outside where life is shuttered,
still, there is some comfort
in the wildness of branches
 . 
twined on winter trees,
or a scatter of bird seed
on frozen ground.
 . 
I turn to the simplicity
of sunlight on a well-worn chair,
how it warms me if I sit there.
 . 
From the window I watch
a male bluebird who studies
the birdhouse on a maple tree.
 . 
Its round entry is exactly the size
for birds of his kind, and also snakes,
because no home is absolutely safe.
 . 
The bluebird will make up his mind
to nest or not, and when spring
erupts in its ruthless way,
 . 
with green possibilities
and warmth suffusing all
that was brown and bare,
 . 
I’ll half-expect the dead to return
cross some impossible border,
overwhelm me with joy.
 . 
Sherry Siddall
from Transformed and Singing, Main Street Rag Enterprises, Edinboro PA; © 2026
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❀    ❀    ❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
Daily reality sometimes washes over us like a wave, slams us down, sucks us into the darkness. How are we to stand? What if, as Sherry Siddall suggests in her poem Time Chop, we can know love as a ripple in the fabric of spacetime? Perhaps the deep nature of reality is not particles and energy, not wave functions and uncertainty, but the moment by moment expanding web of experiences and relationships. And every bubble of experience is under the influence of the nudge of love.
 . 
When I was half-way through Sherry’s book, Transformed and Singing, I became aware of the thread of love that weaves these poems together. I stopped and went back to each to discover love’s signature: sometimes explicit as love for strangers . . . nothing to be done but love, and always implied, as this clockwork beauty of the cosmos and one of may favorite images, I see you / waving to me from far away, and I wave back. Sometimes we find meaning as we reflect on our past – the stab of loss countered by the fullness of companionship – and sometimes meaning finds us in a moment of simple presence. Feelings swirl within us as restless as the sea, at times threatening but just as often beautiful as sunlight on water. A struggle, a jewel. Reality. As Sherry discovers in Conch – same joy, same something too difficult to name.
 . 
❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
Transformed and Singing is available from Main Street Rag. Sherry Siddall lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA. She is also the author of a poetry chapbook, Sweet Land (Finishing Line Press, 2021). Thank you as well, Sherry, for the Henry Miller quotation which I have lifted from you book.
 . 
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❀    ❀    ❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
Conch
 . 
After his death we flew south,
like storm-tossed birds, mother
and I, to get away.
 . 
I walked the beach, fourteen,
sunburned, heron-thin,
a shadow me of years ago.
 . 
The surf was pounding
like today’s, the sun jolly,
its own relentless self.
 . 
One wave shoved forth
a perfect conch, pearly pink as
flesh inside, rough whorls
 . 
hard and soothing. I picked it up.
Here was joy, and something else
too difficult to name.
 . 
Today, on a different beach, a sturdy wave
delivered another whelk as I walked,
this one battered, pocked, unique.
 . 
Its only beauty might be in a garden,
green tendrils winding through the holes.
My scarred body greets this new shell
 . 
as kindred after fifty years.
Same joy, same something else
too difficult to name.
 . 
Sherry Siddall
from Transformed and Singing, Main Street Rag Enterprises, Edinboro PA; © 2026
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❀    ❀    ❀    ❀    ❀
Today’s photos were taken this spring along the Elkin & Allegheny Nature Trail in Elkin, North Carolina, USA. As you read this, Foamflower is just about to bloom. Perhaps you would like to join me and other curious seekers on one of this spring’s naturalist walks, a program of Elkin Valley Trails Association. Upcoming dates are April 11 and April 25. Details and registration (free!) here:
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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 also 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 2025-07-10
 . 

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Why Sing – Scott Owens

Posted in poetry, tagged , , , , , , , on March 27, 2026| 2 Comments »

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 . 
[ with 3 poems by Scott Owens ]
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Now and Then
 . 
The mountains came down to Hickory today.
It happens now and then.
Clouds low, mist hanging between the trees,
a coolness that makes everything feel
less urgent, more contemplative.
I saw a boy on a hillside, sitting,
back leaning against a tree,
not minding the fine mist
against his skin at all.
I imagine he was writing.
I imagine it was a poem
about the mountains coming down to Hickory.
I imagine he was me.
It happens now and then.
 . 
Scott Owens
from The Song Is Why We Sing, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press; Hickory NC © 2026
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❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
Existential Knot
 . 
I picked up a knot from the ground today,
not an important knot,
not of significant size,
not of any significance really,
at least not initially,
but then I realized if not for the knot
I likely would not have noticed it at all.
In fact, the knot would have just been
 . 
a string, not of any special size,
not of any noticeable color,
not anything special about it at all,
but the fact that it was tied into a knot
made it not exactly like every other
unknotted expanse I’d seen.
Of course, I thought about unknotting the knot
but ultimately decided not to,
as the knottiness was exactly what made it
exactly what it was and continues to be,
 . 
a knot not like any other,
insured by its knottiness
not be left unnoticed.
 . 
Scott Owens
from The Song Is Why We Sing, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press; Hickory NC © 2026
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 . 
❀    ❀    ❀     ❀     ❀
 . 
Ten. You, after all,
are half the poet, and in all
likelihood, the better half.
from 13 Ways of Reading a Poem
 . 
Reading a poem is like turning over a mossy log. As you approach, you appreciate the appealing form of the log without even thinking about it. Its green cushion, so inviting, perhaps a scent of fresh pungent life. But when you turn the log over, who knows? I am personally a fan of grubs and larvae, flabbergasted ants grabbing their white nits and sprinting in all directions, an oozy slug or two. Double bonus if there’s a salamander.
 . 
But beneath some logs there’s just not much. A few bark fibers lingering in their immediate pre-humus status. A tired worm casting. Dirt. If that’s all there is beneath the mossy log of the poem, I’m done. Maybe I’ll go turn over that rock over yonder instead. I, the reader, need something to discover when I get down on hands and knees and shift the poem. I have to do the work of coming closer, of noticing, and the poem has to do its work of sharing.
 . 
Scott Owens’s newest collection of poems, The Song Is Why We Sing, is about poetry. Writing poetry, to be certain, but even more this book is about reading poetry. And maybe most of all so many of these poems are about the partnership, let’s even call it companionship, between writer and reader. The lines and stanzas break down the fourth wall. I as reader become part of the process, part of the poem. Perhaps in reading no other book of verse have I been so intimately invited into the mind and life of the writer. Scott’s offer is sincere – here I can be half the poet.
 . 
Scott’s poems are existential knots that freely allow themselves to be untied. They offer up their essence like a flower offers nectar, hidden but discernable, just follow your nose, and always keeping the promise of a sweet droplet on the tongue. I first encountered the term “quiddity” in a philosophy book but I know I first read the word “dailyness” in a poem, and so are these poems, filled with essence and substance. Here is the world with its warts and its wonderfulness. Scott takes seriously his poet’s calling of showing you what you already know in a way you’ve never seen. That mossy log, what lies beneath? I am dying to turn it over. And throughout these pages I know I will find what this poet is determined to show me, because as he says, You have to care / enough about the world / and all who live in it / to take the time / to not just find the words / but also get them right.
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 . 
❀    ❀    ❀     ❀     ❀
 . 
Chores
 . 
fr. Latin, chorus, those who do the work, who carry the play forward
(titles from Poetry in Plain Sight selections July 2025)
 . 
I rise from my knees, not from prayer,
not from planting autumn blooming crocuses,
but from fixing a table bending beneath
the weight of too many ovens. Still,
any rising is a good thing.
In the heat of early July in the South
I head out to make my monthly delivery
of poems. One called “Tomato Sandwich,”
transforming the taste of summer to art,
for the front window of my coffee shop.
One called “Hum,” for the community theater,
about a boy remembering the sound
of his father blowing on his face to cool him
off in a Louisiana Church on Sundays.
Another called “Wild Women,” for the wine shop,
about girls who were told they couldn’t be cowboys,
who hitched up their chaps and spat on the ground.
And one for the library, called “Song
to a Little Tree under the Eve of Terminal 2
at Raleigh Durham International Airport,”
just about a tree in an unlikely place
refusing not to grow.
 . 
Scott Owens
from The Song Is Why We Sing, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press; Hickory NC © 2026
 . 
❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
Scott Owens teaches at Lenoir Rhyne University, coordinates the Poetry Hickory program, and promotes poets and poetry year round at his coffee shop and gallery, Taste Full Beans. The Song Is Why We Sing is Scott’s twenty-sixth volume of poetry. Among his many honors and awards are two nominations for the National Book Critics Circle Award and appointment as Hickory, NC, Poet Laureate. Scott’s most recent books are available from Redhawk Publications.
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Sample additional poetry by Scott Owens at Verse and Image:
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Perhaps you’d like to turn over a mossy log (metaphorically speaking)? Walk along Elkin Creek and discover Foamflower in bloom (for real beginning early April)? Watch a Blue Head Chub build its spawning nest in the creek? Breathe deep? Join me and other curious comrades on one of this spring’s naturalist walks, a program of Elkin Valley Trails Association. Upcoming dates are March 28, April 11, April 25. Details and registration (free!) here:
 . 
 . 
❀    ❀    ❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
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:
 . 
 .  . 
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
 . 
2016-10-17b Doughton Park Tree
 . 

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