Garden Thought

May I be taken swiftly

Avoiding appurtenances

Of profitable compassion

Perhaps, collapse lifeless among

Tomatoes and dahlias,

Impaled upon the joy of my work

-Wayne H. Swanger

Golden Trees

By Ramey Channell

All through that passionate summer, 

with our intemperate sun

burning and beckoning,

your face remained the face of a child,

still dreaming dreams of childhood

as you played beneath summer trees.

 

Then, like changing leaves and seasons,

so quickly you became

what you had not been.

Climbing skyward into the mass of gold and red,

you left behind familiar earth and dreams,

seeking higher, newer things.

 

I watched the sudden change as you,

bewitched by one cool breeze,

balanced in a world

I had forgotten many autumns before.

Now, with your new cool and careless face before me,

I am haunted by memories of golden trees.

 

 

 

 

Published in Ordinary and Sacred as Blood: Alabama Women Speak, 1999, River’s Edge Publishing

In The Season of Drought

 By Ramey Channell

I grow weary of poetry

when I see the way the end will be:

a slight stuttering of the universe,

a quiet pause, then undefined eternity.

A small light,

then, uncharted night,

and a few angels wafting.

 

I grow inquisitive and loosely buoyant

when I think of angels wafting.

What they do and why they do it

is celestial and mostly mystery.

All I know 

is dig a hole, plant a seed,

and watch for miracles.

Eden Road

 By Ramey Channell

The road from Mama’s house snakes down the mountain,

narrow and black, tar-fragrant under heavy summer sun.

Alabama sun beats down like judgment, but also blesses;

beatitudes resound beside the road where blackberries glow

like fat black juicy bits of down-to-earth Heaven.

 

Voices singing Hallelujah! from the bushes;

loud whirring mechanical heartbeat of insect chorus;

katydids, hot and happy Hallelujah chanting,

till the air runs over with too much sound;

the world runs over with too much joy.

 

Mountain voodoo blackberry joy!

Katydid chanting Hallelujah joy!

 

The narrow black road snakes down the blessed mountain,

cutting right through the middle of hotter-than-hell Paradise, 

like a keen heavy knife, a gleaming two-edged sword,

plunging clean and deep, down to the pulsing center,

of a humid, sugar-sweet blackberry pie. 

 

And I stand beside that road, enchanted, heat-dazed, fingers poised

above the fruit of hot summer katydid Hallelujah Heaven,

motionless, enraptured, listening to another sound.

Deep in sacred shade, under heavy bushes of Paradise lost,

He sings, He rattles: dusty sound like pebbles roiling in a tin can.

 

Voodoo mountain blackberry joy!

Rattle and snap Hallelujah joy!

 

And He sings of blackberries from the beginning of time,

and the many blessings of summer, sun, and shade.

Glassy sharp obsidian blade of rattling sound,

cutting through the sultry heat and heartbeat, down to the quick;

He lays claim to bushes, shade, sunshine, earth and Heaven.

 

Alabama sun beats down like judgment, but also blesses;

hasty beatitudes back up the magic mountain road,

away from the bushes of Paradise and the lust of the berries.

Those who have ears, let them hear: Hallelujah!

And those who have blackberry mountain voodoo joy,

 

Let them rattle, rattle, blackberry joy!

Blackberry voodoo Hallelujah joy!

Knightvision

An out of sorted knight 

some way rides into a 

tumbling zig saw puzzle wall

upending the beginning he craved.

He finds what he didn’t know

he was looking for;

his questions answered

he didn’t think to ask.

In bum fuzzled flux, he 

barely balances on his steed’s two legs,

his own armored feet dangle out of stirrups.

Never the less, the knight hovers almost fearlessly

on the matte plateau, only moving forward laboriously,

searching for righted-ness.

Although angled into it now 

the desperate upside-down knight’s

head swims in thumping blood

coursing through his helmet

until a new kind of experience suggests itself.

Deciding to take the path with heart,

 the knight’s saddle mysteriously straightens, 

his feet discover the dangling stirrups,

and the earth shifts back right side up

And then, opens up to new possibilities.

-Susan H. Evans

https://www.facebook.com/womanacrossthewater/

Untitled

By Charles A. Perrone

The solidity and concretude

of this frigid block of material

prompts me to ponder

the liquidity and lightness

of this aerial being of flakes

each intricate and distinct

from the next and all others

designed to make me think

of an ethereal alternative

to the prescribed dosage. 

A Compilation of Smoke

Larry Thatcher              

 

And smoke. There’s always that smoke 

down the lane. Waiting, it seems. I go to work 

as town wakes up. As someone’s pitching 

split oak and maple into the hungered blazing mouth 

of a brick oven at the local pizza joint.  

Something windless holds chimney smoke 

at the intersection.

                 Waits for me. I drive up, dividing, 

sweeping the scent into curls before seeing it,  

 

taken back to flashes of campfires, realizing 

where I am along my morning journey, 

as the red light grows into green. 

 

Smoke rises on the early ridges of mountains

south of town today. A prescribed fire, 

to keep the easily agitated highland spirits of the Cherokee 

National Forest satisfied with a wide birth of smudging. 

If it was up to me, we’d all line up before the fire. 

 

                        Find our own cleansing. 

 

The morning is haze-tinted. The snowy gray of clouds. 

The patterned bits of red and pink yet burnt away,  

wanting singed off like early work from our minds. 

Visions of what’s always asleep in the layered forest floor, 

dangerous enough to need 

       annihilation, prescription. 

 

Do we keep enough stores along our ridges, 

dry goods dragged up safe out of the deadwood valleys 

to the rocky tops,

     thoughtful of sight-to-sight peaks

we’ll set afire when words are needed in the sky

for the world to know we’re in trouble again? 

 

But does anyone really watch anymore? In their sleep. 

Can they distinguish between the dangerous fires  

of the world and the even more dangerous fires

of dreams? 

Who watches? Whether they believe

or not? Are there watchers still in the world?   

Upside Down

It was a day for ghosts.

Fog hanging in the air,

a mist that never turned

to rain.  Leaves slick 

as ice and the ground 

underneath in a surface

thaw making walking 

tricky.  I saw plenty,

all deer no parents 

or grandparents or family

stretching back to my

beginnings.  Only deer,

the ones who couldn’t leave

the woods, the weather: 

peripheral visions disappeared

in each step, each pause,

each pawing. Each head bob.

I wondered if that was the kind

of ghost I’d be, the one unable

to leave, the one so in love

with here that eternity means

nothing, some promise land

a fragment of slivered eyes

unable to see why no one,

once here, would want to leave

like the deer I saw all day

while I hunted the living deer

of which I saw none.

Only the ghosts that turn

heaven upside down.

-Byron Hoot

https://hootnhowlpoetry.com

Gravestones

I wonder how the gravestones 

have worn in that cemetery

in Rising Son, behind 

The Church of the Brethren.

Mom and Dad and his parents,

two sets of Reverend and Missus

Hoot.  There’s cornfields and woods

and deer trails across the graves,

the granite holding minerals 

the deer try to pry loose with

their tongues.  I wonder if the deer

see the ghosts – the ones content 

to be where they are, the others

in a disarray of time and place,

the refusal of acceptance.  I have

not visited in years and worry 

about remembering how to get 

there.  In my heart it’s just a step

away – the casket, the preacher,

the living and the dead, the drive

away, the look back.  The corn 

and trees and wind.

 

-Byron Hoot

https://hootnhowlpoetry.com

Fear

 I fear my grandchildren are beyond 

the redemption of the hunt.

Which worries me.

They may never know the primal truths

that hone a soul to be a person  – 

hard enough but more so when removed from trees

and hills and stream, learning game,

reading sign. 

All necessary to being better today than yesterday. 

Lessons that can be taken in.

I hunt and fish religiously.

In ways sacred, where knowing and honoring

and deciding in a split-second matter 

as the metaphysical realities they are.

Metaphors full of meaning the wilds give 

what no cities can.  I worry what kind of stories 

my grandchildren will tell sitting around a fire.

hootism:  for one day . . . i'd like to not waste a word.

-Byron Hoot

https://hootnhowlpoetry.com/