POET OF THE DAY: ABRIANNA BERRY

Last fall the Great Smoky Mountains Bookfair sponsored a Poetry Contest for K-12 students in Macon, Haywood, Jackson, and Swain Counties. The winners were posted on my NC Laureate blog in November. Going through the rest of the poems submitted, I was struck by how many were just plain good, worthy of being enjoyed by readers of this blog. For the next two weeks I will be featuring one of these young poets daily. Each one will receive a small "thank you" from me. Please stop by everyday to read their work.

This first poem is by Abrianna Berry, who lives in Franklin, NC, and is in the sixth grade at Macon Middle School.

Squirrel Hunting With My Dad

We went up the mountain where

My dad hunted when he was little.

It was cold the wind

Whipping up the holler, trees shaking.

Me and Daddy went to the top of the mountain.

We sat down and waited and had

A silent talk.

*******

by Abrianna Berry,

daughter of Mark and Stephanie Berry

Franklin, North Carolina

Someone teaching in the 6th grade at Macon Middle School is doing a wonderful job encouraging students to write from their most cherished experiences. This young poet presents a moving and thoroughly believable scene; the wind whipping up the holler uses sound to make us feel the effects of the cold and the climb to the top of the mountain. The "silent talk" shows a depth and maturity beyond a sixth grader's years. Abrianna is already a poet, and I hope she continues to read poetry and to write it.

MAGPIE TALES: LES FENETRES

Cinquains are fun: the syllables run in this order per 5 lines--2, 4, 6, 8, 2. I used to day-dream in classes about when I'd be able to wear my French looking open-toe sling backs after a long winter. I wish I owned a pair of shoes like the above from Magpie Tales.

LES FENETRES

Windows

I look out of

while I sit in English

Class wondering how long before

I can

wear sling

backs, how flirty

these windows look, filling

with green buds and snazzy birds blitz-

ing by!

MEMORIAL DAY

Precious Little “

“... the passageway down which they had just gone was bright as the eye of a needle.”

Eudora Welty, Losing Battles

So we’d gathered to talk about writing,

remembering great ones who’d recently gone

from our midst and the various ways

they had followed each voice through

the needle’s eye into the clearing of art,

when a novelist slouched

on the front row opined

that the only real subject is battle

and how men survive it.

I seethed while my student poets,

all of them women, sat waiting for someone

to challenge his vision of literature,

belligerent canon

where warring tribes battle it out

in their epics and blood-spattered novels.

“Miss Welty,” I countered, “stayed

clear of the battlefield, if you recall.

She sat down every day at the same desk

and made language raise the world up

from the grave of our common amnesia.”

He barely acknowledged

my comment. He wanted to flirt.

with my students. He shrugged at me,

stood up and showed off the fit

of his tight jeans. My god,

what a chasm he opened up right there

between us: we stared like combatants

across the trench, loading our weapons,

his now on full frontal display,

along with a first novel already lobbed

to reviewers by Random House. As for me,

middle-aged poet, what were mine?

Precious little. The shot I recalled

having seen months ago of a woman my age

holding up to the camera a photo of daughter

or sister or good friend who’d disappeared

into the rubble of felled towers, the same woman

I had seen sifting through ruins in Fallujah

or Kabul, even now cringing

when she hears the gunfire in Baghdad,

a woman who stares back at me

when I’m dusting my daughter’s face

framed on the shelf,

smiling out at a day that’s been gone

for so long I can barely remember it,

nothing much going on, no bombs,

no fireworks, just late summer afternoon

and the dogs asleep under the oak tree.

(from COMING TO REST, LSU Press, 2005)

THE GARDEN: an update

I simply couldn't resist going outside before lunch to take a few photos of our garden today, so here they are, beginning with the heroic cabbage!

"In my grandmother's garden grew cabbages

so big I dreamed they could fly...."

She grew mustard greens, too. She added them to her turnip greens pot. A memorable combination. She didn't grow lettuce, though. Or spinach. Or, horrors, broccoli! That would not have made my grandfather happy.

The mountain laurel is blooming now. And the iris!

Our spirits are alive again

That had been frozen in ennui.

Winter, say a short goodbye,

There's not one reason you should remain:

Summer has ordered his footmen in.

Fred Chappell, from Spring Garden: New & Selected Poems

Magpie Tales 13: Gladiolas

THANK YOU TO ALL MY MAGPIE TALES FRIENDS, AS WELL AS OTHER VISITORS TO MY BLOG. I'LL BE TAKING A BREAK FROM THE BLOG OVER THE NEXT COUPLE OF WEEKS, I SO I WON'T BE ABLE TO GO BLOG-HOPPING. FAMILY OBLIGATIONS CALL, AS WELL AS A NEW MANUSCRIPT ON WHICH I'M WORKING. I HOPE YOU ALL HAVE A LOVELY MAY!

(Magpie Tales)

Gladiolas


Or glads, as we called them,
their spikes shooting up every summer
in my grandmother’s garden.
Finally a wife with a small plot
of ground, I planted my own,
pushed the tubers down
deep. Wiped my hands on my jeans.
Waited two months. They bloomed.

Bending over their folds of magenta
and scarlet, I raked my left cornea
over the stub left behind by my scissors.
I stood with bouquet in arms, Oh,
this means nothing, nothing at all,
but the world had become blurred
and stayed that way. One week. Another,
until I was forced to admit I could not change

this other world no longer sharpened
by edges. It floated like what lies
beneath a pond’s surface. It shimmered.
The skin of my eye had been sheared
by the wound of a cut blossom,
liquid of Lorca’s doomed verde.
No help but to let the eye doctor
scrape off the crud of that old skin
and let the new grow back again.

Aren’t you glad, my eye blinked,
once the bandage came off,
that again you can see how
the stamens hang quivering,
the hand reaching out for the stalk?

This poem first appeared in Aretha's Hat: Inauguration Day 2009, Ash Creek, Press. For more about this publication, go to www.poemeleon.org. To order the chapbook, go to www.citylightsnc.com.

ASHEVILLE WORDFEST 2010

(Laura Hope-Gill)

ASHEVILLE'S 3RD ANNUAL CELEBRATION OF POETRY BEGINS TODAY AND WILL CONTINUE THROUGH THE REST OF THE WEEK. To see the schedule, please go to www.ashevillewordfest.org. Creator and guiding spirit of this festival is Laura Hope-Gill.

Poets reading this year are Mark Doty, Natasha Trethewey, Keith Flynn, Katherine Soniat, Holly Iglesias, John Hoppenthaler, Linda Hogan, NC's new Poet Laureate Cathy Smith Bowers, and NC's old Poet Laureate, K.S. Byer, among others.

A lively group! Please plan to attend!

MAGPIE TALES 12: i am

i am

such a tiny

movement

through stillness

around and

around

the incarnadine

mystery

raised from

the floor

of my fishbowl

through which

i look out

at your

world, tiny

self that

i am,

my gills opening

closing,

my small

supple spine

weaving ripples

nobody

can see