Parade
Among the children’s faces
dressed in red, white, and blue,
one Chinese baby daughter smiles,
waves her flag and blows kisses.
Day One: River of Stones
Some call it cowboy killer, some, century plant. Dormant for years, it suddenly burst into life, shooting its single bloom skyward.
River of Stones
Kaspa & Fiona have taken over my blog for today, because they
need our help.
They are both on a mission to help the world connect with the world
through writing. They are also getting married on Saturday the 18th of
June.
For their fantasy wedding present, they are asking people across the
world to write them a ‘small stone’ and send it to us using this form. You can also post the stone on your blog, or facebook or on twitter using the #aros hashtag.
A small stone is a short piece of observational writing – simply pay
attention to something properly and then write it down. Find out more
about small stones here.
If you’re willing to help, we’d love you to do two things:
1) Re-post this blog on your own blog any time before June the 18th and
give your readers a chance to hear about what we’re doing. You can
simply copy and paste the text, or you can find the html
here.
2) Write us a small stone on our wedding day whilst we’re saying our
vows and eating cake, post it on your blog, and send
it to us.
You can find out more about our project at our website, Wedding Small
Stones, and you can also read our blog at A River of Stones.
We also have a July challenge coming soon, when we’ll be challenging
you to notice one thing every day during July and write it down.
Thank you for listening, and we hope we’ll be returning from our
honeymoon to an inbox crammed with small stones, including yours.
Kaspa & Fiona
April 16 PAD
This month, I’m participating again in Poetic Asides’ Poem a Day Challenge. Today’s challenge was to use a photograph as a starting point. After I posted the poem below, I wanted to share the photograph too of my great grandmother Vernice Yancey and her fiance James Hamilton (who became my great grandfather, although he died while his wife was pregnant with my grandmother). That’s the short version. Here’s the poem and the picture:
Paper Moon
Boxed up for decades now, the picture lay
beneath dozens more, along with clippings,
postcards, tattered treasure-filled envelopes—
wedding invitations, old report cards,
teaching certificate, tracing my people,
our people, all the way back before the last
turn of the century. The note on the back
confirmed my guess—my mother’s mother’s
parents—engaged, not married yet, perched
side by side on the lip of the crescent moon,
its face painted with a knowing smirk, against
a starry handmade backdrop. How odd,
her sad expression, not even a trace of a smile,
as she sat beside her handsome beau, dapper
in his hat, boutonniere pinned on his suit lapel.
Could she have felt the premonition of loss,
her young husband who’d not live to love
the child he fathered before his death?
I see for the first time in her face the look
identical to the one her daughter wore,
my grandmother, the burden maybe never
voiced, but haunting nonetheless: her birth
at such an inconvenient time, following
as scandalously close upon her father’s wake
as Hamlet’s frail mother’s wedding vows.
January 30: Today’s Stone
Ten Perfect Toes
After months of poking and prodding,
ten perfect toes wiggle free, never yet
touching the ground, yet unstained
even by the ink pad recording
that you are ours.
Big Tent Prompt
This week in response to the prompt at Big Tent Poetry, I wrote a poem based a photograph (in this case my father’s maternal grandparents) as if from the point of view of a traveling photographer:
The Pursers Sit for a Photograph
While my city subjects preferred posing
in parlors, familiar furnishings, oak mantles,
doorways framing the family group,
the rural photographs I captured
never failed to take me by surprise.
Always out of doors, they chose backdrops
of mailboxes, ancient oak trees, wishing wells.
They carried shotguns, whistled for bird dogs.
Sometimes they lugged the dining chairs
into the yard, seating mother and father, sober
and unsmiling, while the children, so many
sometimes, some not much younger
than the current Mrs., evidence of ravages
of toil and childbearing with little time
to regain strength. These two, though,
proud of their automobile, no mule
required, chose to perch in its foreground,
its headlights like bug eyes, as they look
right at me, squinting into the sun,
him silent just long enough for flash,
then resuming his tale, sipping his RC Cola ,
daring to look me right in the eye, to call me Son.
And when she smoothed her skirts, retrieving
the apron she had laid across the mailbox,
just out of the camera’s view, ready to head
back inside where chores awaited, he reached
his giant hand, putting it on her shoulder,
as if to tell her Tarry awhile, little lady.
We’ve got company. Work will wait.
January 14: Small Stones
one small gold
ornament
half hidden
beneath the sofa;
the spirit of Christmas
refuses
to give up the ghost.
January 12 Stones
The nine-year-old shoveling
my drive, unrecognizable
under all his clothes,
looks up at the sky and shouts,
“Dear Lord, keep
this snow a’comin’!”
thankful not for work
but for one more day’s
reprieve.
January 10 Small Stones
Who can begrudge the footprints
of small children or puppies
across the perfect palette
of snow?
January 9
I’ve been away from this blog post while my son was in the hospital with emergency appendectomy. Hope I’m back for the rest of January!
The birch trees
lining the road toward
the mountains reach
their frail limbs, willing
to catch the snowfall.
Alabama Tar Heel 