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Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.-Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry is when emotion has found its thought and thought has found words--Robert Frost

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance--Carl Sandburg

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry--John Cage

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you--Joseph Joubert

Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. ~Dylan Thomas

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Snapshots in Verse and Sunsets


As I have begun doing recently, I will share the poems and pictures and then provide an explanation at the end. See you at the bottom of the page! Enjoy!


Snapshots


Sunbeams

The sunbeams skitter through mid-May shadows,

Flicker across the fusty forest floor,

Glimmer among the dazzling damp meadows,

And glare full force on the stream’s stony shore.


At the Mouth of the Spring

The bubbling spring murmurs;

Its breathless echo shimmers,

Rustling the tender green leaves

On wood oats budding in sheaves.


Komorebi

(Japanese for “scattered light through the trees”)

It is light at war with darkness;

It abides no murky places,

Nature’s clarity and starkness,

Dappling all her empty spaces.


A Row of Birches Along Sylamore Creek

Pale shepherds of mossy brown stones,

Thin birch trees, like vertical bones,

Stiffen against an absent wind

That will never convince them to bend.


Butterflies, Blue Stars, and Fire Stars

Butterflies brilliant as lucid dreams

Tickle the hairs of Blue star blooms.

The Fire star’s crimson dreamily streams

Through a waft of wild plum perfumes.


Lonely Fern on a Bluff Edge

Lonely fern nestled

In a rooty nook

Beneath a gray stone overlook

Where the sun’s sustaining beams

Are never seen,

How do you thrive?

How do you survive?

How do you stay so green?


A Grave Vine in a Fence

The possum grape tendrils tightly wind

Through the links of a wove wire fence.

The stem is leafless and gray near the ground,

On the barbed arms, bushy and dense.

Suspended in three prickly strands,

The vine stretches higher and higher.

Clearly, it must misunderstand

It has bound itself to the wire.


Well, here I am again. Let's start with the pictures. All of these pictures were taken during the walks that Kellie and I take--surprise!--in the evenings around sunset. They are also all taken at the same place, which is by the shooting range at the Fulton County fairgrounds area. In some photos, you can see the same trees and hills. In others, the blackness of the trees and hills seemed to clash with the colors or fade them out, so the pictures were taken above them or I cropped them out. Still, all of these pictures were taken at the same place in the last few days not more than a week past. The first and second pictures were actually taken of the same sky about 40 minutes apart. The second is the latter one.


The verse snapshots here are lines that I am stealing from old poems that I will never rewrite. These few lines of verse are not nearly long enough to be nature songs, so I have come up with another "thing" that I will do for the next book: snapshots in verse. We will see how that goes.


As always, I would like to know what you think about the snapshots--and the sunsets as well. Remember, I do take requests for poems.


Oh, and check this out! I will be not be going to work from December 14 through January 9. I might have some time to write! I should probably spend that time revising, but, if I haven't told you before now, I dread looking at works that I have already written with a mind to review and revise. Yeah, I know. It is necessary, but...


I have no more to say after the "but." See you around in a few days, I hope.


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I find that I cannot exist without Poetry--without eternal poetry--half the day will not do--the whole of it--I began with a little, but habit has made me a Leviathan.-John Keats

We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value.-T. S. Eliot

A man may praise and praise, but no one recollects but that which pleases.-George Gordon, Lord Byron

The great beauty of poetry is that it makes everything in every place interesting.-John Keats

Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery.-S. T. Coleridge

The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation.-W. B. Yeats

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