Rosemary Royston's Poem for Poetry Month

 

Dogwood Winter

Ants raid the bath, wasps claim the washroom

even as the cool of winter looms.

The forsythia sings against a chorus
of green, yet the hue of winter looms.

The bunting’s a blur of vibrant blue,
off-setting winter’s gray loom.

Calves nurse in the open field, chilled
as the nip of winter looms.

Blood buds of azaleas burst forth,
even though winter looms.

The creek hums a rain-filled song
oblivious to the winter that looms.

Rosemary, thyme, and sage grow
in the sunroom, even as winter looms.

Rosemary Royston, author of Second Sight (forthcoming 2021, Kelsay Press) and

Splitting the Soil (Finishing Line Press, 2014), resides in the northeast Georgia mountains with her family. Her poetry and flash fiction have been published in journals such as POEM, Split Rock Review, Southern Poetry Review, Poetry South, KUDZU, Literary Accents, and *82 Review. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Young Harris College.

https://theluxuryoftrees.wordpress.com/

 

 

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Rosemary Royston

https://theluxuryoftrees.wordpress.com/about/

More Poetry for you

 

Write a poem a day -https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-poetry/poetry-prompts/april-pad-challenge

Read a poem a day - Your Daily Poem    http://www.yourdailypoem.com/

Read a poem by Kathryn Stripling Byer.   http://www.yourdailypoem.com/listpoem.jsp?poem_id=184

Read a poem by Glenda C. Beall.  http://www.yourdailypoem.com/listpoem.jsp?poem_id=3204

Catherine Carter receives state’s excellence in teaching award

Catherine Carter

Congratulations to our Netwest member, superb poet and teacher, Catherine Carter of Jackson County, NC.  

Read the article: https://www.wcu.edu/stories/posts/News/2021/04/catherine-carter-to-receive-states-excellence-in-teaching-award.aspx

Catherine Carter, a professor in Western Carolina University’s Department of English, received one of the University of North Carolina System’s top awards.

Carter, a WCU faculty member since 1999, is among 17 recipients of the 2021 UNC Board of Governors Awards for Excellence in Teaching.

“These award recipients are among the finest faculty our state has to offer," said UNC System President Peter Hans. “They provide another reminder of the high-quality educations that our students receive each day across the UNC System.”

Carter will receive her award at WCU’s spring commencement ceremony, along with a $12,500 stipend and a bronze medallion.

April is Poetry Month - Keeping in Place by Mary Ricketson

How to Get Happy

Wait for a breeze, hope that vine of honeysuckle
smells stronger, stirs a rush of fragrance in the air.

Will these climbing roses to open, dazzle the day with red.
Allow a prick of thorns when you grab a stem to keep.

Thank the gold and black buzzing pollinators in the garden.
Beware of attack. That territory is their own.

Taste the air when the tickling breeze finally bustles,
fresh as cold spring water from the source.

Push one honeysuckle blossom to your lips,
slip under the spell of sweet wishes and dreams.
Lazy away, charmed into a summer’s day.

                                         --- Mary Ricketson

Published:  Enjoy the Holidays, a poetry and prose anthology by Old Mountain Press, October 2020, and forthcoming chapbook July 2021 Keeping in Place, Finishing Line Press

 

Mary Ricketson’s poems often reflect the healing power of nature, surrounding mountains as midwife for her words.  Her published collections are I Hear the River Call My Name, Hanging Dog Creek, Shade and Shelter, Mississippi: The Story of Luke and Marian,  Keeping in Place, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

www.maryricketson.com

 

Bob Grove is the featured guest for Mountain Wordsmiths Thursday morning, April 22, 10:30 AM.

Bob Grove

Mark your calendars! Mountain Wordsmiths will be gathering Thursday, April 22, at 10:30 a.m. on Zoom. The event is sponsored by North Carolina Writers’ Network-West.

Our featured reader this month will be Bob Grove. You don’t want to miss his stories.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Bob now lives in the mountains of North Carolina. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree at Kent State University and his Master of Science at Florida Atlantic University. He has taught courses in English, journalism, and creative writing as well as the sciences and psychology.

Bob was formerly an ABC-TV public affairs director and program host, the funder and publisher of Monitoring Times magazine, and is now a popular reader of his works. A member of the North Carolina Writers’ Network and an officer with the Ridgeline Literary Alliance, he is the facilitator for the Cherokee County prose critique group.

Bob has published twenty books and hundreds of articles in sixteen magazines. Most recently, he has written a mystery novella (Secrets of Magnolia Manor), his memoir (Misadventures of an Only Child), a collection of children’s stories (Adventures of Kaylie and Jimmy), some flash fiction including the gold medal award-winning entry in the 2013 Silver Arts literature competition (The Visitor), and a little poetry.

Here’s a refresher on what we’re doing in Mountain Wordsmiths:

Meeting Date and Time: The fourth Thursday of every month, 10:30-12:00 noon

Contact Carroll Taylor for an invitation to this meeting. vibiaperpetua@gmail.com 

Hosted by: Carroll Taylor

The featured reader will share for approximately 20-25 minutes, and Open Mic participants will read afterward. There’s no need to sign up for Open Mic in advance. You can do that when you enter the Zoom meeting. Open Mic readings should be no longer than five minutes. We welcome all writing genres. We also welcome those who just want to listen!

Special thanks to Kanute Rarey for being our technical Zoom guru!

Happy writing!

Carroll Taylor

(706) 464-0819

April is Poetry Month with Joan Howard

 

Joan Howard

                 The Kayak Ride

You lived and are the summer sun and wind,
I close my eyes and feel soft warmth and light
in waves and twisting ribbons on my skin,
quick golden circles’ ever-upward flight.

Yet still, my dreams and memories of you

 are  shards, ice barriers, so when I ride

lake’s mirrored glass, reflected clouds describe
my loss in watered depths of heaven’s blue.

An emptiness as vast as sky’s clear height
of clouds’ reversal in the water’s deep
their shapes extending down the infinite,
slow whites that drift a fathomless abyss.

And you―this―are embraced by warbler’s call,

shore’s forest reach, the waiting, radiant all.

 published in  www.mezzocammin.com January 2020

 

Joan Howard earned a B.A. In German Literature at Indiana University, an M.A. from the University of Oregon and studied in Munich, Germany, and the University of Georgia.  She is a former teacher and lives in Athens, Georgia, and on the beautiful waters of Lake Chatuge in Hiawassee.  She enjoys birding, walking and kayaking.  She has written another book about her sister entitled Death and Empathy: My Sister Sue.  She is a member of North Carolina Writers Network, North Carolina Writers Network West, and the Georgia Poetry Society.

April is Poetry Month with Karen Paul Holmes

 

Karen Paul Holmes

On Being Quarantined with Stink Bugs (Halyomorpha halys)   

                                   -In Buddhism, dukkha refers to
                                    suffering, anxiety, anything unpleasant.

Armored cars of pungent bullion—

odorous cargo with zero value.

They putter up and down our windows.
Or take flight only to divebomb.

Shield-shaped, gator-tough, God help us:
Don’t crush or you’ll discharge
their eponymous defense.
Vacuuming not recommended—
your rugs will have halitosis.

 
Ten stink bugs today already.
Catching/releasing, grumbling until
I thanked them for drawing my focus
away from this aging body.

Perhaps they’re little lamas,
teaching me to practice letting go
of life’s inevitable stuff:
Viruses we need to squash but can’t.
Things that buzz our heads at night
as we’re sinking into dream.
Stink bugs are just one reminder
to accept: Dukkha happens.

  

First appeared in Gyroscope Review, Fall, 2020

Karen Paul Holmes has two poetry collections, No Such Thing as Distance (Terrapin, 2018) and Untying the Knot (Aldrich, 2014). Her poems have been featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer's Almanac and Tracy K. Smith’s The Slowdown. Publications include Diode, Valparaiso Review, Verse Daily, and Prairie Schooner.

April is Poetry Month with Maren Mitchell

 

Maren O. Mitchell

What we don’t know

is why do we live, and pulling up behind in second, do we live
after this one death that we know about, that hasn’t neglected any

of those before us, or those we miss, and why this planet,
are there others with relatable beings, this planet where

so many leaves, morning glory, sweet potato, wild violet, are heart-shaped,
and did we adopt the heart shape from them, finding our hearts

 too complicated, ungraceful, frightening, and why are we out 
in the elements naked, little hair, no color variations to turn on

for camouflage, and then, why does distant thunder sound companionable
while we’re outside within a mild day, adding atmosphere,

and we with no concern for those under the storms, the gods throwing
their interminable tantrums of power, yet, as thunder nears, we note

our smallness, until overhead rumbles sound personal, fate catching
up with us as we hear our clock, so we busy ourselves with cooking potato soup,

watching an old sitcom, and why, when the rain drips from leaf tips,
the outside world is a new world, clean as Eden, a mini-spring,

obviously filled with lives so much shorter than ours,
flying, mating, singing, crawling, unquestioning—being, can’t we?

                                                             —Published in Tar River Poetry, Fall 2016

 A North Carolina native, in her childhood Maren O. Mitchell lived in Bordeaux, France, and Kaiserslautern, Germany.  After moving throughout the southeast U.S., she now lives with her husband on the edge of a national forest in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Georgia. 

Mitchell has taught poetry at Blue Ridge Community College, Flat Rock, NC, and cataloged at the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site. For over thirty years, across five southeastern states, she has taught origami, the Japanese art of paper folding. 

Mitchell’s poems appear in The Antigonish Review (Canada), Still: The Journal, The Cortland Review, The MacGuffin, POEM, The Comstock Review, Tar River Poetry, Poetry East, Hotel Amerika, Appalachian Heritage, Pedestal Magazine, The South Carolina Review, Southern Humanities Review, Appalachian Journal and elsewhere. Work is forthcoming in Cider Press Review, POEM, Slant, Tar River Poetry and Chiron Review. 

Two poems, “X Is a Kiss on Paper” and “T, Totally Balanced,” have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. In 2012 she received 1^st Place Award for Excellence in Poetry from the Georgia Poetry Society. Her nonfiction book, Beat Chronic Pain, An Insider’s Guide, (Line of Sight Press, 2012) www.lineofsightpress.com is on Amazon.

 

 

 

 

 

April is Poetry Month - a poem by Carroll S. Taylor

 

Carroll S. Taylor

In Memoriam

One by one
they drop from the sky
and find their perches among
thin, lithe boughs
of a leafless white oak tree,
now a sharp silhouette sketched in inky black lines
against an ominous steel-gray sky.
Only a few stubborn patches of lichen
dare to cling here or there like crepe
left behind on the empty branches.
Dried sunflowers in the garden
hang their heads in grief and disbelief.
They know their end has come.
The mourners are wearing their funereal finest.
Sleek, ebony feathers reflect the slanted rays of
the afternoon sun but find no warmth in this place.
Shiny, black eyes survey the sight below them.
One of their own, felled by the farmer’s gun,
is strung from a rope on the barbwire fence.
A warning, a sign to his kindred.
They are not welcome here.
They might share his fate.
The mourners sit in silence,
a brief corvine ceremony of respect.
Then all at once, the service concludes
as if some unseen chorus master has waved his baton.
They lift their wings and fly away together,
each one calling out to one another
in discordant voices only they understand.
A benediction for their fallen comrade.

Carroll Taylor, a retired educator, is the author of two young adult novels, Chinaberry Summer and Chinaberry Summer: On the Other Side, and a children’s book, Feannag the Crow. She is currently hosting Mountain Wordsmiths each month on Zoom. Originally from Cataula, Georgia, she and her husband now live in Hiawassee, Georgia.

April is Poetry Month - meet Catherine Carter

 Because April is Poetry Month, we will be posting poetry sent to me by some of our members who are poets. 

Catherine Carter

Photo by Terri Clark Photography in Sylva. 

WITCH HAIRS 

Not hairs. Boar
bristles, thistle
thorns, catfish barbels,
wolf whiskers, sprung
from a nose and chin
that’ve called to each
other forty-five years
across the short chasm
of philtrum and lips, and only
now drawing nearer
and nearer, connected
by folds turned to grooves
turned to dry ditches
only deepened by the rare
brackish flash-flood.
Old women have always been
witches, and these are
the marks of the witch:
these wires with roots
deeper than teeth.
They smack of a witch-curse,
a desperate bargain,
the kind of deal
you strike with the dark
when there’s little
left in your hand—
two low hearts,
a single waiting spade—
a deal with the powers of air
and hair.

Catherine Carter’s collections of poetry with LSU Press include The Memory of Gills, The Swamp Monster at Home, and Larvae of the Nearest Stars.  She is a professor of English at Western Carolina University.