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Saturday Share – Barbee and Bates

Posted in Imagery, tagged Jenny Bates, NC Poets, poetry, Sam Barbee, Saturday readers share, Southern writing on December 6, 2025| Leave a Comment »

. Saturday morning readers share:

Sam Barbee and Jenny Bates

Tomato

I pass my time well,

but if a man is worth his salt,

he will learn his season.

I hope to die some indigo night—

un-diagnosed—preferably,

in my tomato garden.

I wait content in this fertile space.

I water each vine.

Spray rattles the dry leaves

and collects on stem bristles.

Tonight I know, plucking

ripe fruit is kind: by autumn,

so much rots, ignored.

Sam Barbee

Tomato was also a Poetry in Plain Sight poster poem. I grew up in Wilmington, and am still an autumn-season beach-bum. I’ve lost my enthusiasm for fishing, but the solitude continues to delight me.

Additional poetry by Sam Barbee at Verse and Image:

2025-07

2022-04

2021-07

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Trimmed in Black

The bears came back yesterday then

last night you spun a black ribbon in

my hair did I mention?

the bears were black too if I could

only remember the words the turned

tune of words as you wove that ribbon

in and out and through my braid

the bears were in color as was the dream

I tried to stitch all the hues mostly the black

into the wind like trimming a tree with

memory or wishing I had umber bat wings

webbing I could spread and catch your vow

or the sound of any how hung high

in a tree so the breeze will always touch them.

Jenny Bates

I’m going through a wringer of a time in life right now, but … in reality I hope to disappear, but I would also go for becoming a Pine Marten! and really? I am my environment on the mountain and the fellow creatures I live with so the photo is the inspiration for the poem…

Additional poetry by Jenny Bates at Verse and Image:

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Thank you for visiting VERSE and IMAGE:

. . . . . every Friday I present one or two poems I’ve read this week that particularly speak to me;

. . . . . every Saturday I present one or two poems submitted by YOU, my readers.

If you would like to offer a poem for consideration, either by a favorite author or your own work, please view these GUIDELINES for Saturday Readers Share:

https://griffinpoetry.com/about/

Also note: after January 1, 2026 I will no longer be sending separate weekly email reminders.

If you would like to receive an email each time a post appears, please SUBSCRIBE to VERSE and IMAGE using the button on the Home Page.

If you have a hard time finding the SUBSCRIBE button on this WordPress site, you can send me your email address and I will add you to the subscriber list. Send your request to

COMMENTS@GRIFFINPOETRY.COM

Thanks again for joining the conversation.

– Bill

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Release the Distances – Betty Adcock

Posted in family, tagged Betty Adcock, Bill Griffin, family, imagery, Intervale, nature photography, NC Literary Hall of Fame, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing on December 5, 2025| 6 Comments »

[two poems from Intervale]

Poem from November

The leaves have fallen, releasing the distances.

This year of my turning moves

in an arc like a preying bird’s,

purposeful.

My loves have dried. I find

I can remember only the least things:

mouse-gray of my grandmother’s hair

dead in the silverbacked brush,

the smell of hardpacked dirt

under black grease in the smokehouse.

Here is the old sky, the one we always had.

Everything in it is small,

punctuation for a vanished story.

I have forgotten the trick

an old man taught me: how the voice

can be made to nest in the cupped hands,

calling. Was it the dove

or the owl I brought close then?

There was a calling.

Something came.

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Penumbra

The child in the cracked photograph sits still

in the rope swing hung from a live oak.

Her velvet dress brims with a lace frill.

Her pet Bantam is quiet in her lap.

It is the autumn day of a funeral

and someone has thought to take a snap-

shot of the child who won’t be allowed

to go to the burying – the coffin in the house

for days, strange people going in and out.

She’s dressed as if she’d go, in the blue church-

dress from last Christmas, almost too short.

The rooster loves her, she guards his perch

on her lap, his colors feathering the mild air.

She concentrates on this, now that her father

is unknowable, crying in his rocking chair.

Her mouth knife-thin, her small hands knotted hard

on the ropes she grips as if to be rescued.

She’s growing a will that won’t be shed

and something as cold as winter’s breath

tightens in her, as later the asthma’s vise

will tighten – hands on the throat, the truth.

Black and white, she is hiding

in every one of my bright beginnings.

Gold and deep blue and dark-shining

red the cockerel’s feathers, gold the sun

in the skyblue southern fall, blue

over the four o’clocks and the drone

of weeping that drains like a shadow from the house

where someone is gone, is gone, is gone –

where the child will stay to darken like a bruise.

I am six years old, buried

in the colorless album.

My mother is dead.

I forgive no one.

Betty Adcock

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This is the season of perfect-family photos arriving by text after reunions for feasting or bursting from the envelopes of early Christmas cards. These cousins with their complimentary sweaters on the front steps, their lovely smiling children and companions. I spent the first day with my father after our dual week-long Covid quarantine helping him watch a home movie from 1936, his little sister on a tricycle, he barefoot astride his cousin’s pony. His aunts and grandmother crossed in the greytone background like hovering angels or benevolent wardens. And then the next reel, in color, my father in white t-shirt is twenty-six and I am a flame-haired infant in my grandfather’s arms.

These two poems and others in this collection by Betty Adcock take me deeper than I’ve ever labored into my own past. She sees everything. What no one but she had yet noticed, the voices, the smells, all are now alive in her sharp, unsentimental, raven-eyed truth telling. What memories are waiting half-asleep for each of us? What memories call us to create them fresh from fragments and tales and slowly disintegrating histories? A few words from Betty Adcock and forgotten ghosts materialize. There was a calling. Something came.

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Betty Adcock (b. 1938) was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2014. She has taught and served as writer-in-residence in the state for many decades. Among her numerous awards and publications, this comment by Mary Oliver stands out: Adcock “writes poems that are as upright as houses, and as flighty as clouds. She never postures. The poems … are beautiful, meaningful, and very real.” (for The Difficult Wheel, 1995)

Intervale and Betty Adcock’s other books are available from LSU PRESS.

Another poem by Betty Adcock at Verse and Image:

2012-07

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Thank you for visiting VERSE and IMAGE:

. . . . . every Friday I present one or two poems I’ve read this week that particularly speak to me;

. . . . . every Saturday I present one or two poems submitted by YOU, my readers.

If you would like to offer a poem for consideration, either by a favorite author or your own work, please view these GUIDELINES for Saturday Readers Share:

https://griffinpoetry.com/about/

Also note: after January 1, 2026 I will no longer be sending separate weekly email reminders.

If you would like to receive an email each time a post appears, please SUBSCRIBE to VERSE and IMAGE using the button on the Home Page.

If you have a hard time finding the SUBSCRIBE button on this WordPress site, you can send me your email address and I will add you to the subscriber list. Send your request to

COMMENTS@GRIFFINPOETRY.COM

Thanks again for joining the conversation.

. – Bill

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Saturday Share – Rouphail and Barasovska

Posted in Imagery, tagged Joan Barasovska, Maria Rouphail, NC Poets, poetry, Saturday readers share, Southern writing on November 29, 2025| 2 Comments »

Saturday morning readers share:

Maria Rouphail and Joan Barasovska

This small house, this big sky .

. . Shapes of things: so much the same

. . . . they feel like eternal forms

. . . . . (Adrienne Rich, “Sources”)

This small house

my heart’s center

where the world entered and sat down

and I greeted it

as a mysterious guest

my first words swelling into

sentences and song

north to the barred owl in the backyard oak

and the clothesline strung with bedsheets post to post

south to the sawmill

and the draft horses pulling flatbeds of logs

east where a gravel road snaked toward the bay

and long clouds steamed from the loud freight train

west and a highway curving into the pines

and the pond where we swam

where a laughing boy in my class

did not drown one afternoon

but caught polio instead

he never walked again

his mother cried

my mother kept me close

and the sky stared at us in silence

every day in those days

I wondered why

that boy

and not me

Maria Rouphail

This is the title poem of my 2025 book, This small house, this big sky (Redhawk Press). I deliberately avoided punctuation, hoping to effect a kind of seamless stream of consciousness.

Papa and me, circa 1952

Here’s something weird: since childhood I’ve had the ability to “mirror write,” and spontaneously and without pause. Could be because I’m left-handed. Long ago, I was told that DaVinci had the same ability, but I’m certainly no DaVinci!

Additional poetry by Maria Rouphail at Verse and Image:

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Scarcity

Love, ever a torment,

a yearning—the knot

I’ve got for what I need.

Love, not blind, but stupefied

like grief, like bleeding.

The trouble with me

is agony, the piercing note

of longing, its persistence.

It’s plainly the shame

of scarcity, the freeze

of what I sprang from.

I guess I cried.

Joan Barasovska

Scarcity is forthcoming in the winter edition of Persimmon Tree.

I am sitting at my small desk, above which I have placed many, many things: a photo of the sign that hangs outside of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the cracking cover of an old Penguin paperback of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan with Joan in armor on her steed looking skyward; a clipping of a newspaper headline: “The Courage to Be Alone”; my dad’s business card; a Bazooka Joe comic in Hebrew; the poem “Crossing” by Jericho Brown; lines from Eudora Welty, Borges, Eliot, Mark Strand, Raymond Carver; Bertolt Brecht; a note from Bill Griffin: “You are the beating heart of NCPS, not to mention spleen and gizzard”; a framed arrangement of dried flowers and ginkgo leaves. More. But there’s a yellowed, brittle piece of newsprint, probably from The American Poetry Review, with these lines: “There the wind blows / There the rain falls / There god roams / on his palms, on his all four palms” Can anyone identify this? Is it familiar? I would love to know.

Also on my desk, this photo with my daughter Clare in my living room

Additional poetry by Joan Barasovska at Verse and Image:

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Saturday Morning Submissions – Once a week on Saturday I feature one or two poems shared with me by readers. If you would like to consider having a favorite poem appear, either by you or by a poet you admire, please see the GUIDELINES here:

https://griffinpoetry.com/about/