Poet of the Week Archive: December 2005 Part II

A Garland of Holiday Poems

Before Christmas began being hawked in stores even before Halloween, we were able to save the magic of it until after Thanksgiving. The week before Christmas was especially exciting, when we would sit down to string garlands of popcorn and greenery to hang over the doors and windows and drape over the Christmas tree. This year I decided that we needed a garland of poems to celebrate the week of Christmas and the beginning of Hanukkah, on December 26th, and so each day this week, you'll find on our website a gift of a seasonal poem by one of our North Carolina poets (two on the 25th!). I'll return to the weekly format at the end of this month, with poems you can read on the screen or listen to with just a click.

Feel free to print them, string them into a real garland, and hang them wherever you wish. It's a way of reminding us of the gift of poetry and how it can bring both mystery and light into our lives. -- K.S.B.

December 19, 2005: Heather Ross Miller

Christmas Gothic

Familiar cedars barb the strange sky
thickening on snow
the way custard thickens on egg, and she knows
he's fixing himself up to die
the way he goes on about sleds, wooden ones,
with wet slow runners, They never get you through the snow,
they soak it up and stop. They kill you.
She tells him to sit still a minute, listen to her,
be quiet, stick things on the tree.
A little star in his hand,
Hey! he hears something in the yard, Hey!
something faster, Hey! a sled
flying over his hard white pasture.
Something signifies something,
something multiplies endless worlds
for him to slip through
light and effortless
as custard, and No wonder! No wonder!
he points at the phantom sled, Hey! You see?

Rough snow mottles his denim
and soaks through to the skin
as she watches him launch some sled,
a remote enchanted figure, a tough old man disquieting
her candled window.
Gathered in their winter pasture,
his uneasy herd stares and darkens the snow.
Then snow whitens him to his knees,
thickens and swarms down thousands
of bitter bees until he founders a boot at a time,
tangling the cedars with the sled,
and her warm breath splotches
the window as she says like a baby,
keeps saying, dabbling a finger in candleglow,
Dead out yonder, dead.

Heather Ross Miller, with more than a dozen books of poetry and fiction, is Distinguished Professor Emerita at Washington and Lee University. She lives in Albemarle. Her most recent collection of poems is Gypsy With Baby(Hammond, LA: Louisiana Literature Press, 2005). Ms. Miller was honored by the North Carolina Writers Conference this past July for her teaching and writing. This fall she was the Rachel Rivers Coffey Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Appalachian State University. This poem is drawn from her collection, Friends and Assassins(University of Missouri Press, 1993).

December 20, 2005: Rodney Jack

Jack Frost

On a glacial slope,
inside a root cellar,
Jack Frost lives, quietly
suffers from perpetual rhinovirus,
has protopathic fingers,
likes to fool around with porcelain
objects, promises warmth,
exhibits reverse polarity,
attracts crystals that stick
against his cold-blooded skin --
has a blackening bite,
tail between legs,
bristly fur, doesn't think he is
numb, therefore, is.

Rodney Jack lives in Laurinburg and teaches creative writing at St. Andrews Presbyterian College. His poems have appeared in many journals, includingPloughshares,Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and AGNI. He has had residencies at Yaddo, Breadloaf, and the MacDowell Colony and has received numerous grants and prizes. Last year he was a finalist for the Walt Whitman Award.

December 21, 2005: Isabel Zuber

Solstice

Longest night
the sacred sweep
from light to dark,
dark to light.
We draw the rhythm
of our breath
rise, fall, ease, flow.

In the kitchen
a woman sings
hymns of another
time, a steadier
faith, and a winter
rose blooms on
the window sill.

Isabel Zuber was a librarian at Wake Forest University for many years and is now writing full time. Her novel,Salt(New York, NY: Picador USA), was selected for Virginia Commonwealth University's 2003 First Novel award. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in a number of literary magazines, including The American Voice,Poetry, Now & Then, Pembroke Magazine, andShenandoah. Some of her prizes include the North Carolina Writers' Network's poetry chapbook competition, the Lee Smith Award for Fiction from the Appalachian Writers Association, the University of Tennessee Press Prize for Short Story, and a Forsyth County Arts Council grant. Her poetry collections areOriflamb(Carrboro, NC: North Carolina Writers' Network, Harperprints Chapbook Series) and Winter's Exile (Southern Pines, NC: Scotch Plaid Press, 1997). "Solstice" is drawn fromWinter's Exile and is reproduced here with the permission of the author, who holds the copyright. It originally appeared in a booklet printed as a gift for subscribers to Jackpine Press.

December 22, 2005: Mark Smith-Soto

Fogueres de Sant Joan*

It worries my sister we want that poster
On the wall, my wife and I -- the couple
Raising their hands up to the sky, the bonfire
Lapping at their waists -- it looks like hell

To her, two souls suffering forever
For their sins, their arms open to a heaven
They never counted on, imagining that life
On this earth was good enough, imagining

Themselves happy even to suffer together...
And you might think, if you were a sister looking on,
How sad, how sad...except maybe for the way
The bodies sway in the flames like flames,

The almost smile on their man's and woman's faces,
And the many, many stars around their heads.

* In Alicante, as in many regions in Spain, a festival held in honor of St. John during which the people jump through bonfires.

Fogueres de Sant Joan*

Mi hermana se preocupa al ver en la pared
Ese cartel que mi esposa y yo colgamos -- la pareja
Las manos en el aire, la hoguera lamiéndoles
Las cinturas -- todo un infierno, parécenle,
Dos almas pagando para siempre
sus pecados, brazos abiertos hacia un cielo
con que nunca contaron, figurando que
la vida en esta tierra bastaria, imaginándose
felices aun en sus sufrimientos compartidos --
y fácil pensarías, si fueras la hermana meditando,
¡qué triste! ¡qué triste!... salvo tal vez al ver
como se mecen los cuerpos como llamas en las llamas,
la casi-sonrisa en los labios de hombre y de mujer,
y los muchos muchos astros circundantes.

*En Alicante como en varias regiones de España, la gente celebra la fiesta de San Juan saltando por hogueras.

Costa Rican-American Mark Smith-Soto is director of the Center for Creative Writing in the Arts at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he edits the journalInternational Poetry Review. A 2005 winner of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in creative writing, his poetry has appeared in Nimrod, Carolina Quarterly,The Sun, Poetry East,Quarterly West,Americas Review,Callaloo, Literary Review, Kenyon Review and various other literary magazines. His Green Mango Collagewon the North Carolina Writers' Network Persephone Competition in 2000, and a second chapbook, Shafts, won the North Carolina Writers' Network's 2001 Randall Jarrell-Harperprints Poetry Competition. His first full-length book of poetry, Our Lives Are Rivers(University Press of Florida, 2003), was runner-up for the Best N.C. Poetry Book of the Year award, offered by the Poetry Council of North Carolina. His most recent collection, Any Second Now, is slated for publication this spring by Main Street Rag Press.

December 23, 2005: Robert Morgan

Firecrackers at Christmas

In the Southern mountains, our big
serenade was not the Fourth but
always Christmas Eve and Christmas.
Starting at midnight the valleys
and branch coves fairly shook with barks
of crackers, boom of shotguns, jolt
even of sticks of dynamite.
You would have thought a new hunting
season had begun in the big-star
night, or that a war had broken
out in the scattered hollows: all
the feuds and land disputes come to
a magnum finale. The sparks
everywhere of match and fuse
and burst were like giant lightning bugs.
Thunder doomed the ridges though
the sky shone clear and frost sugared
the meadows. Yankees were astonished
at the violence and racket
on the sacred day, they said, as
cherrybombs were hurled into yards
and placed expanding mailboxes
same as Halloween. Perhaps the custom
had its origins in peasant-pagan
times of honoring the solstice
around a burning tree, or in
the mystery centuries of
saluting the miraculous
with loudest brag and syllable.
Certainly the pioneer had
no more valuable gift to bring
than lead and powder to offer
in the hush of hills, the long rifles
their best tongues for saying the peace
they claimed to carry to the still
unchapeled wilderness, just as
cannon had been lit in the Old
World to announce the birth of kings.
They fired into the virgin skies
a ceremony we repeated
ignorantly. But what delight
I felt listening in the unheated
bedroom dark, not believing in
Santa Claus or expensive gifts,
to the terrible cracks along
the creek road and up on Olivet,
as though great rivers of ice were
breaking on the horizon and
trees were bursting at the heart
and new elements were being born
in whip-stings and distant booms
and the toy chatter of the littlest
powder grace notes. That was our
roughest and best caroling.

Born and raised in the North Carolina mountains and educated at UNC-CH and UNC-G, Robert Morgan has been a professor of creative writing at Cornell University since 1971. Over the years he has received a number of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1991, he received the North Carolina Award for Literature and the James G. Hanes Poetry Prize from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Mr. Morgan is the author of a number of collections of poetry and short fiction. His novel, Gap Creek(Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1999), received the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for 2000 and was chosen as a "Notable Book" by The New York Times. It was also an Oprah Book Club selection. In 2004, Louisiana State University Press publishedThe Strange Attractor: New and Selected Poems, from which "Firecrackers at Christmas" is drawn. We reproduce it here with Mr. Morgan's permission.

December 24, 2005: Irene Honeycutt

Driving Up 181 to Jonas Ridge

The winter moon rises
full to brimming --
a gold-hammered icon
shimmering above the overlook
where generations have seen
the Brown Mountain Lights.
Its December face radiates gilt
enough to paint the ridges stiff
in gold leaf.
It pours itself out and still
has more to spare,
so spreads a Byzantine angel's wing
over Jonas Ridge.
When I drive past an ochre field
close to Joe Poore Road,
I want to stop, for someone
has decorated a weathered shed
with Christmas lights;
and the ancient moon,
having followed me up the mountain,
glows on the horizon of this simple farm.
I think of the magi following
their star
and have read that
in every icon the artist leaves
a space for the viewer's soul
to enter. Somehow I feel
I have often been in this scene
standing beside the road,
gazing across a field
at the moon brightening
the ashen sky.

Once upon a time Irene Blair Honeycutt lived in Jacksonville, Florida, where she loved to read fairy tales and to write poems in her palm hut in the woods. When she grew up, she began teaching creative writing and fairy tales at Central Piedmont Community College, in Charlotte. She received the college's Teaching Award for Excellence and founded the Annual Spring Literary Festival. She still lives in Charlotte, teaches at Queens University, and leads writing retreats. She hikes, bikes, travels, and retreats to her cabin in the woods on Jonas Ridge. She believes, as Rilke said, that writing is an extension of who we are. Her two poetry books are: It Comes As a Dark Surprise(Sandstone Publishing, 1992), and Waiting for the Trout to Speak(Novello Festival Press, 2002), from which this poem is drawn. The Prince with the Golden Hair, her first children's book--a fairy tale -- will be published in the spring of 2006 by D-N Publishing.

December 25, 2005: Anjail Rashida Ahmad and Stephen Smith

a December's blessing
by Anjail Rashida Ahmad

the grandmother shuffles about the kitchen
pushing and stirring a heap of grayish pilings
and paring what has come to ruin
"...down to the good part."

washed in the hush of an early morning
reverie: contemplations to the lord
for making it through yet another year,
almost in tears, she remembers

the times since the mill closings
when an invisible hand seemed to pull
her and her children's children
from the brink of hunger and homelessness
once more.

There was the time the lights were restored
after Edna, her younger sister,
gave her half the earnings from
her gospel piano playing at the tiny baptist churches
dotting the carolina countryside

...or the time she had to kick the screen door open,
as she left the two bedroom apartment,
only to find a bushel basket tipped
with canned beans, cereals and other goods
blocking her way with no sign
of who left this gift
or who else cared how they fared.

today, in the midst of the morning's frail air,
she gives thanks for the blessing
of her soul, her heart's delight
in swimming on past debris
that neglect spawns.

accustomed to bobbing up
in conditions that push, yet again, down,
like a seasoned sailor, she has come
to love the boat
that keeps her from the waves

under her breath, slow and measured,
she hums to the lord,
to the invisible ones turning at her heels.

by noon, the room shimmers
in the midwinter heat
of something imagined
in the oven.

Anjail Rashida Ahmad lives in Greensboro and is a professor of English and director of the Creative Writing program at North Carolina A&T State University. She holds a Ph.D. in African American Literature with a specialization in 20th Century American Poetry and Women's Literature from the University of Missouri-Columbia and an M.A. in 20th Century Poetry from New York University. Her first collection of poems, necessary kindling, was published by Louisiana State University Press in 2001 and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award, judged by Dorian Laux. Her chapbook, the color of memory, was published by Clear Vision Press, in 1997. Her work has appeared in publications such as Ikon, The Washington Square Review, The Missourian Weekend Magazine, Midlands, The Black Scholar, All that Jazz, The Greensboro News and Record and The African American Review.

Ms. Ahamd is currently the North Carolina Poetry Society Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for the Central Region, and she has received numerous other awards and honors including The College Language Association Margaret Walker Alexander award for Poetry, The Academy of American Poets Janef Preston Prize for Poetry, the Robert Frost Prize, the Agnes Scott Writer's Festival Award for Poetry and the Southern Literary Prize for Poetry as well as awards for academic excellence. She conducts readings and writing workshops at public libraries and at colleges and universities around the country.

Christmas Poem
by Stephen Smith

I cannot write a Christmas
poem for you,
not with all those slick verses
oozing through the mail,
the schmaltzy music whining
on the radio.

But what I can do
is tell you of a December
afternoon in 1957
when I sat in Miss Judy's
fourth grade class
listening to the radiators clank
and staring at my scarred desktop
and how Danny Chapman,
hunched in the seat beside me,
looked up suddenly and whispered,
"It's snowing!"

I looked up too,
along with the rest of the class,
out the tall warped windows,
across the empty playground,
to Idlewild Avenue,
and saw that it was true:
the first graywhite dust just drifting
the blue cedars.

If you are an old believer,
even on this bluest of December days,
I would give you that pale afternoon,
the chalkdust scuffle of shoes
on the worn floor,
those children's faces
eager as light.

Stephen E. Smith was born in Easton, Maryland, in 1946. After graduating from Elon College, he attended the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he received his MFA in 1971. His poems and stories have appeared in Quarterly West, Poetry Northwest, Southern Poetry Review, Light Years, The Arts Journal,Southern Exposure, and many other periodicals and anthologies. In 1981, he was awarded the Poetry Northwest Young Poet's Prize. He is the author of a book of stories, The Great Saturday Night Swindle; a novella, The Honeysuckle Shower and Other Parables; a book of creative nonfiction, Worst I Ever Had Was Wonderful; and six books of poetry, A Short Report on the Fire at Woolworths, The Bushnell Hamp Poems, Most of What We Take Is Given, The (More) Complete Bushnell Hamp Poems, Loose Talk, and The Complete Bushnell Hamp Poems, which received the 1992 Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize. He is the recipient of three North Carolina Press awards, and he has contributed more than 2,000 columns and features to newspapers and magazines in North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland. He lives in Southern Pines, where he is a columnist for The Pilot and an adjunct professor of Creative Writing at St. Andrews College. "Christmas Poem" is drawn from his collection, Most of What We Take Is Given (Singular Speech Press, 1991) and appears here with Mr. Smith's permission.

December 26, 2005: Richard Chess

The Jewish Angel

It doesn't answer to a Polish name
though it was once Polish, it isn't the light
going up like smoke to graze the ceiling,
it doesn't live for a cold bowl of borscht
with an island of sour cream floating on top,
it doesn't die each time it hears a sad violin.

The Jewish angel -- it may be two angels,
two brothers, a farmer and a hunter,
a left arm and a right arm -- this is my angel
as much as it is yours, it makes each of us
a little Jewish, each of us wander a little
from moon to moon, state to state,
it makes one of us crazy with coffee,
one of us drunk on tea.

I'm building my house out of old paperbacks,
westerns for the den, mysteries for the kitchen,
I'm saving the psalms until I've lived like David,
escaped to the woods, recruited the local birds
to my army, returned in a helmet of woven palmetto leaves
to claim my kingdom and God's, I'm polishing the candlesticks
and propping the window open, winter and spring, day and night,
for the wind.

Richard Chess is Professor of Literature and Language at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. He directs UNC-A's creative writing program as well as its Center for Jewish Studies. He has two books of poetry, Tekiah (1994; 2001), from which this poem is drawn, and Chair in the Desert (2000), both currently available from the University of Tampa Press. His next book of poetry, tentatively titled Seventy Faces, is forthcoming from the University of Tampa Press next year. His poem "Kaddish, after Charles Reznikoff," is included in the anthology Best American Spiritual Writing 2005, published by Houghton Mifflin. Later this academic year, he will be the featured artist of the month on the website for IMAGE: A Journal of Arts and Religion.
Click here to read Mr. Chess's essay "Original Light -- Poetry from the Bible"
"The Jewish Angel" appears with the permission of the author and the publisher.

December 27, 2005 - January 1, 2006: Jeffery Beam

Jeffery Beam's forte is the natural world; his poems present the wondrous idea that humankind is an intrinsic part of nature rather than an observer. He understands that in the natural world, "Death & Being exchange vows" forever. His poems, coiling and uncoiling, put prickles on the back of my neck. Poet of the week? He should be given a month at the very least. -- Janet Lembke

Janet Lembke's translation of Virgil's Georgics, a long poem on farming, appeared this year from Yale University Press. She's published many collections of essays. Her next, coming in January, is From Grass to Garden. About this book, Ms. Lembke writes, "It deals with my grass extermination project. Out with grass! In with everything else!"Janet Lembke lives in Virginia, and makes occasional forays here for the North Carolina Writers' Conference or a book-signing/reading.

An Invocation for North Carolina

The Green Man's Man

The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas,
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.
--Andrew Marvell

Green, I want you green.
Green wind. Green branches.
--Federico Garcia Lorca

For a long time I
stand at the oak's foot
asking it

What can you tell me of
timeweather

Its heartbeat doesn't stop
It moves ahead in
its rooted place
swaying its canopy in the wind

Dark windBright wind
It never says a word
It just keeps talking

In order to make sense
of the ground
I build an earthen hill and sit upon it

The ants welcome me as their brother
Bees radiate out in golden circuits
while above the oaks' light-hungry leaves
spread wideThe clouds
call me
changing their forms

Each day I visit my mound
till one day the rains come
Then I float
happy and wet
among the tadpoles' delight
the moccasins' white-mouthed praise

I ask the wind to carry me
and it does
Opening my catkins
I make it rain yellow
I make sunshine into powder

I open Nature's book
finding:
The more I know
The less I know

Finding under the oak:
"majesty in a creeping snail"
"deliberation"     "seriousness"
"shyness and yet
what absolute trust"
"the deeply slumbering spirit within"*

Once when the hurricane slammed the oak
to the ground
I walked stunned within its branches
elaborate with mistletoe

Girth sacrificed to its friend wind
Dignified even then

Oak:
"A garden and country"**
Father to perpetual fire
Channel of the gods and goddesses
Opening heaven's crack
Last leaf never falling

I, in my green shirt,
put on my broad antlers
sure-footed, Druidic, lichen-dressed

A wizened-woodman

To entice the eye
into the mysteries of time and weather
I sprout leaves

The oak my father

Twig in winter
Bud in spring
Leaf in summer
Acorn in autumn

All that I am:

A woodpecker at dusk and dawn
on the white oak trunk

A cardinal flower at field's edge reading cloud shadows

The cardinal points - every direction a good and purposeful one