Prelude to "A Poem A Day"

When I read Margaret Rabb's poem "Dogwood Alert," I was taken with her "looseblown momentary bloom of April," so I decided to use her image of dogwood blossoms as my motif for this Poem-a-Day celebration of National Poetry Month. What better way to envision the profusion of poetry in this state?

To follow through with her image, I wrote the titles of each of the poems I had chosen on pieces of white paper and scattered them to the winds of my office floor. I then went about gathering them up in whatever order my fingers reached for. Thus the sequence of poems! With a slight adjustment.

We begin with our former Poet Laureate, Fred Chappell, on April Fool's Day, an honor Fred will appreciate, I'm sure!

So, for the month of April, here is a gathering of a few of North Carolina's finest poets. I say a few, because there are not enough days in the month to represent all of our fine poets. The truth is, every month is Poetry Month in North Carolina! Therefore, we will continue to run poetry features during the rest of the months of the year. If you are a North Carolina poet and your work is not represented in this group, don't worry. I will find you!
- -Kathryn Stripling Byer

Part II

Saturday, April 16, 2005
John Lee Hooker
by Jim Clark

Boom Boom Boom Boom! John Lee Hooker's in town,
And Memphis holds its breath as the Kingsnake stomps
To splinter the rickety stage. The swamps
Beyond the bridge tremble. New Madrid slides down.
His voice, a raw, raucous rumble we drown
In, swoops, slides, simmers, soothes, and Hooker chomps
His pipestem, leans into the story and whomps
His Gibson a lick or two in G. A frown
Creases the cracked leather of his fine face
And his dark glasses fog. Ancient as the river
Two blocks over, he conjures devil weather--
The great flood of Tupelo--and to that place,
And us, listening, declares "I won't ever
Forget it, and I know you won't either."

Jim Clark has published two books of poems, Dancing on Canaan's Ruins (Eternal Delight Productions, 1997) andHandiwork (St. Andrews College Press, 1998), and has edited Fable in the Blood: The Selected Poems of Byron Herbert Reece (The University of Georgia Press, 2002). In June of 2002 his first full-length play, The Girl with the Faraway Eye,was given a public staged reading at The Portland Actors Conservatory Theatre, Portland, OR. A CD of poems and Appalachian folk music, Buried Land, was released in September 2003. With Susan Underwood of Carson-Newman College, he is editing an anthology of modern Appalachian poetry, to be published by The University of Georgia Press. His stories and poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and in journals and magazines such as The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Negative Capability, Asheville Poetry Review, Appalachian Heritage, Now and Then, Charleston Magazine, CrossRoads: A Journal of Southern Culture and Rolling Stone. Clark has taught at the University of Georgia, where he directed the creative writing program, at Auburn University, and at Christian Brothers College. He lives in Wilson, where he is professor of English and writer-in-residence at Barton College, founder and director of The Barton College Creative Writing Symposium, and an editor of Crucible Magazine. His readings often include music and songs performed on the guitar, banjo, autoharp, and mountain dulcimer.

Sunday, April 17, 2005
Imperfections
by Mark Smith-Soto

No one washes windows anymore; on ours
the dust has hardened into trails even the rain
respects. But so what, really? Let it all go,
everything cracked, diminished or dull, let go

the new moles on your face, the hair
thinner and thinner on your graying crown,
the strangling collar on your best dress shirt,
that broken molar your tongue dotes upon.

A word misspelled will rankle, but less and less.
And that twisted trunk on the Japanese maple
that bothered you so much you tied it down
with rubber ropes all winter like some captive slave,

It has begun to leaf out, twisted as ever, and turns
to preen, up toward your window, to show itself.

A scholar specializing in the modern Spanish American lyric, Mark Smith-Soto is a professor of Romance Languages at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he won the 1997 Senior Alumni Teaching Excellence Award. A long-time editor ofInternational Poetry Review, his own poetry has appeared in Kenyon Review, Poetry East, Literary Review, Carolina Quarterly, Quarterly West, Nimrod (where he was a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize) and many other literary magazines. HisGreen Mango Collage won the North Carolina Writers' Network's Persephone Prize in 2000, and another short collection,Shafts, was published as a winner of the Harperprints/Randall Jarrell chapbook competition in 2002. University Press of Florida published his first full-length book of poetry, Our Lives Are Rivers, in July, 2003. The Greensboro Playwrights Forum has produced five of his short plays. Trio, his first play in verse, was inspired by a visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. It was produced by Theater Orange of Chapel Hill/Carrboro as a winner of their 2003 Ten by Ten festival competition and will be published by Dramatic Publishers this year. Mr. Smith-Soto received a 2005 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for his poetry. "Imperfections" is reproduced here with the permission of the author, who holds the copyright.

Monday, April 18, 2005
Lament for a Daughter
by Gail Peck

I dream you are in water,
and I'm pulling a rope toward you.
No rope can stretch to California
where you've gone to live and work.
Now there are no posters on the walls,
and the books left behind
suffocate in boxes.
In another room I've hung the masks
you didn't want, and the glass wind chimes
that toss the sun.
Snow falls here covering our yard
where Red-winged Blackbirds never come.
Your day overlaps my night.
Talking on the phone I forget,
say, Sweet dreams,
yet you are hours from sleep
with every window full of light.

Gail Peck, who lives in Charlotte, is the author of four collections of poetry. Her work has been published widely in a variety of literary magazines (for example, Pembroke, Southern Review, Carolina Quarterly, Potato Eyes, Negative Capability,and The Greensboro Review) as well as many anthologies. This poem is taken from her most recent book,Thirst (Charlotte, NC: Main Street Rag, 2004). It is reproduced with the permission of the author, who holds the copyright.

Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Dogwood Alarm
by Margaret Rabb

By pairs and threes they crash
and spin to the shoulder, drivers
stunned, unable to keep their eyes,
wheels, the tingle in their fingertips
from bark and open drifts of silk,
the looseblown momentary bloom.

April. They pass, retreat sideways,
floating away from the little accident.

A specimen tree in a suburban yard
is one thing, fertilized, gravid, buds
popped out all over, azaleas snapping
at its knees. But the woods at the edge
of plowed fields are another story, a waltz
at the dogwood diner, the dance that slays us:

four or five flowers hover over a branch,
crossed, notched, whiter than this world allows.

Margaret Rabb teaches in the creative writing program at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where she has lived more than thirty years. Her first book of poems, Granite Dives(Kalamazoo, MI: New Issues Press, 2000), received North Carolina's Roanoke Chowan Award. Her poems have also been recognized with awards such as the Louisiana Literature Prize for Poetry and the Hackney Literary Award from the Writing Today conference. She received a writers' fellowship from the North Carolina Arts Council in 1998 as well as grants from the Council in subsequent years for residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts and Vermont Studio Center. "Dogwood Alarm" is reproduced here with the permission of the author, who holds the copyright.

Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Whoosh
by Alan Michael Parker

Whoosh

My friend, my love, my onliest affliction,
Why so sad? It's just one day.
And now, at last, come dusk - - the light
Shredded in the valley o'er the battlefield - -
We can climb the stairs to our amnesia,
We detonate the barbeque, and swirl inside

Our conversation built for two.
My dear, my favorite angina, now - -
The moment, now - - is but a splinter

Of our discontent, a jot, a mite.
Come. Hold my hand, and let us stop the shaking;
We are far from all our wanting.
My love, my ache, my doting critic,
Soon it will be night, and down below
The tents will ignite in silhouette,

The mares will nod beneath their manes,
And the engines or war will drowse in their grease.
Come. From the balcony we can see

As the last of the day bursts into smoke,
Meat upon a spit, and rises:
Of the body, nothing more is made.

Come, my heart's-ease, my fracas and my thrill,
Let us fill the air and all we were, strike a match,
and whoosh, and delight in our daily dying.

Alan Michael Parker is the author of a novel - Cry Uncle (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2005) and three books of poems: Days Like Prose (Alef Books, 1997), The Vandals (Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 1999), and Love Song with Motor Vehicles (Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2003), from which this poem is drawn. He is co-editor of The Routledge Anthology of Cross-Gendered Verse and editor for North America of Who's Who in 20th Century World Poetry. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review,and The Yale Review, among other magazines. His prose appears regularly in journals including The New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker. Mr. Parker is director of the creative writing program at Davidson College and is a core faculty member in Queens University's low-residency MFA program. "Whoosh" is reproduced here with the permission of the author, who holds the copyright.

Thursday, April 21, 2005
A Quiet Rhythm of Sleep
by Lenard D. Moore

March midnight creeps upstairs
while my wife and daughter sleep
on the new brass bed that darkness blankets
as a hard wind rattles the panes
and thunder booms like artillery rounds
blasting the vast night.

I sit downstairs writing about night
while slight snoring scatters upstairs
as the TV talks of exploding rounds
like those that shattered my father's sleep
in a building with shivering panes
on a green cot without blankets.

In the jungle no one needed blankets.
Terror must have gnawed bones at night
like rigid wind splinters panes
and infinite chill climbs stairs.
No matter how hard I try I can't find sleep
while late night TV resonates rounds.

I imagine how my father ducked rounds
beneath a sky like heavy blankets
that smothered soldiers in sleep
and snuffed out lifelong dreams of night.
I pray to the Man Upstairs
to rid that charred land of constant pains.

With pen I tap sturdy brilliant panes
in this house of memory where rounds
are falling like rain; here it is safe upstairs:
my woman and child rest beneath blankets,
their chests lift and fall with night
in a quiet rhythm of sleep.

I wish my father might fathom such sleep
without the rattling of cracking panes
in the dubious, dwindling night,
without patrolling like a guard making rounds
but wear his nights beneath blankets
as peace settles like dust-motes upstairs.

My wife and daughter sleep without dreaming panes
and rounds shaking away the inkblack night.
I imagine my father walking upstairs, blinking at blankets.

Lenard D. Moore, founder and executive director of the Carolina African American Writers' Collective and executive chairman of the North Carolina Haiku Society, is the recipient of the Haiku Museum of Tokyo Award (2003, 1994, 1983). His poetry, essays and book reviews have appeared in more than 350 magazines and newspapers and more than 40 anthologies. He's the recipient of a number of awards and his work has been nominated twice for The Pushcart Prize. In July, he will be a Counselor-Writer (for the fourth year in a row) at the summer writing camp of the National Book Foundation (sponsor of the National Book Awards). He is the author of Desert Storm: A Brief History (San Diego, CA: Los Hombres Press, 1993); Forever Home (Laurinburg, NC: St. Andrews College Press, 1992); and The Open Eye (North Carolina Haiku Society Press, 1985). His poetry has been published in more than a dozen countries and translated into several languages. His most recent manuscript, titled "Dear Maiisha," is about the loss of his daughter and in memory of her. Poems about his daughter appear in the online and print journal The Heron's Nest as well as the magazine American Tanka. Other poems about his daughter are forthcoming in Pembroke Magazine, The Los Angeles Review, Main Street Rag, and Midwest Quarterly. This poem was published in Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora (volume 3, number 2) and is reproduced here with the permission of Mr. Moore, who holds the copyright.

A note from Kathryn Stripling Byer on this poem's form: "A Quiet Rhythm of Sleep" is written in a form called a sestina. The sestina is composed of six sestets (6 line stanzas), followed by a tercet. The six words at the end of each of the first six lines must be repeated in a defined order at the end of each line of the remaining sestets. The three-line envoi must use all six of the repeated words.

Friday, April 22, 2005
Geometry Teacher
by Janice Fuller

For Mary Nicholson

Mama Nick we called her.
She'd shuffle up and down the aisles
like Saint Nick's evil twin,
dropping shoddy work before us,
red Xs like prickly switches.
She thumped "Wrong!" on our desks
like a hard lump of coal.
Her disgust for those of us
too obtuse to calculate circumference
was an icicle, isosceles and sharp.

Still teenagers, we longed to intersect,
form complementary angles
while she taught and lived resolutely alone.
Did she believe in infinity? Or know it
as only how long those lonely parallels
could run without touching?

Yet, in those ephemeral days, she gave us
numbers we could sit on, sleep in, climb.
She was the radius jutting
from some center we couldn't find.
In a sixties world without shape or sense,
she enclosed us in her perfect sphere.

Even now, the undertaker tries to unbend what gravity
has worked to curve for ninety-four years.
Come Tuesday, the cube, the pyramid,
the cone will rise to salute her,
tall on the bases we have drawn for them,
trailing their dotted lines delicately behind.
She will lie in the ground, straight and flat,
the shortest distance between math and eternity.

Hypotenuse, rhombus, Pythagoras, parabola
will circle her like a compass and sing.

Since 1981 Janice Fuller has taught at Catawba College, in Salisbury, where she is writer-in-residence. Her poems have been published in a number of journals and she is also the author of four plays, most recently Dix, which was performed last summer at the Minneapolis Fringe Festival. She received a grant from the North Carolina Arts Council in 2000 for a residency at the Vermont Studio Center, in addition to many other residencies in the United States and Europe. Her most recent collection of poems is Sex Education (Oak Ridge, TN: Iris Press, 2004), from which "Geometry Teacher" is drawn. The poem is reproduced here with permission of the author, who holds the copyright.

Saturday, April 23, 2004
Some Short Ones
by Shelby Stephenson

My Grief in Time

The love that flowers
The grief my body grooms
Leaves me to root the seeded row.

*****

Balm

The rain has swollen
the cloudy-singing of hidden
hums: the ruby-throats to the feeder come
hunkered over water shadows.

*****

September Mourning

What design there is in dominion's ring
A twitter in the field
Color in the wind
A spider on feet of purest gossamer
Numb in the name
Of the fluttering flag
O say can the tattered
Defend the fences fenced around
And in and through this century of all times
The way a baby's wrapped in a shawl or shirt for the
Tucking into the arms
Clutching dear life so thin
The stubborn holding on
A giving in

Shelby Stephenson lives in Benson and teaches English at Pembroke University, where he has edited Pembroke Magazine since 1979. He is the author of nine collections of poems - - most recently Possum (Bright Hill Press, 2004) - - and his work has appeared in many journals and anthologies. With his wife Linda he has also made a CD: Hank Williams Tribute. In 2001 he received the North Carolina Award for Literature. "My Grief in Time" first appeared in the May-June, 2004 issue of Blink."Balm" first appeared in the spring/summer 1987 issue ofThe Crane's Creek Review and was reprinted in Greatest Hits: 1978-2000 (Columbus, Ohio: Pudding House Publications, 2002). "September Morning" first appeared in the November 18, 2001, issue of The News & Observer. These three poems are reproduced here with the permission of the author, who holds the copyright.

Sunday, April 24, 2005
White-out
by Andrea Selch

"Why does darkness make us not see?" - Paul

Once, in a snowstorm - - the flakes falling sideways - -
the car seemed to skate through tinny space while
the baby snored, my son asked Why? Why? Why?
and I, driving nearly blind, couldn't help but rest.

Why, Why, Why not close my eyes? I was crawling
down the two-lane county road, but there was no ice,
or deer on the shoulder in that snow, and no answer
why cold chills, snow flies, night comes, brights fail.

I might as well sleep, I told myself; I know
this road like the back of the baby's hand,
and something in sleep is equally delicate,
digits as fine as deer limbs in the distance.

Deer! My son need only know our eyes require
light's reflection, and I'll deny fatigue's opacity,
the stormy nights when high beams only hide the road
and instinct, simply, brings us bumping home.

Andrea Selch grew up in New York City and came to North Carolina to attend Duke University in 1983. Her poems have been widely published in magazines such as Calyx, The Greensboro Review, The Asheville Poetry Review, Oyster Boy, Luna, andPrairie Schooner. Her chapbook, Succory, was published by Carolina Wren Press in 2000. In 2004, Turning Point Books published her first full-length collection of poems, Startling. She lives with her partner and their two children in Hillsborough. This poem is reproduced with permission of the author, who holds the copyright.

Monday, April 25, 2005
Day Moon
by Dede Wilson

Shy. No
glitter of brooch
on a black crepe dress. No
wantonness. Oh, pale smudge of ghost
oblique,

I see
through you. Heedless
in the sun, in your sheer
batiste. Curled in sleep. Where is your
mystique?

Dede Wilson is the author of Glass, published as a finalist in the Persephone Press Competition, and Sea of Small Fears, winner of the 2001 Main Street Rag Chapbook Competition. She has edited a memoir, Fourth Child, Second Daughter, and her poems and short stories have been published in many literary journals, including Spoon River Poetry Review, Carolina Quarterly, Flyway, Cream City Review, Southern Poetry Review, New Orleans Review, Tar River Poetry, Negative Capabilityand Light, the Quarterly of Light Verse. This poem is taken from Ms. Wilson's book One Nightstand (Charlotte, N.C.: Main Street Rag) and is reproduced with permission of the author, who holds the copyright.

A note from Kathryn Stripling Byer on this poem's form: "Day Moon" is a cinquain - a five-line poem with a syllable count of 2,4,6, 8, 2. An American poet, Adelaide Crapsey, created it in 1910.

Tuesday, April 26, 2005
The Work of Dreams
by Sally Buckner

We have yet to come to terms with dreams.
Joseph and the Pharoah thought prediction
the work of dreams, interpreted the image
as promised harvest or as looming famine.

Joseph and the Pharoah sought prediction.
Freud looked back, not seeking to explore
the promised harvest or the looming famine,
but male and female, bound or crossed in conflict.

Freud looked back, not forward, to explore
how we behave from cradle to the coffin
as male and female, bound or crossed in conflict.
Now scientists who try to understand

how we behave from cradle to the coffin
read our meanderings as nervous static.
Those scientists trying to understand
the residue of every day's detritus

read the mind's meanderings as static
and confront yet one more mystery:
the residue of every day's detritus
reliably conforms itself to story.
So we confront yet one more mystery:
those random sparks escaped from memory
surprisingly conform themselves to story,
plot themselves, draw characters and crises.

From random sparks escaped from memory,
dreams do their work, interpret images,
plotting them with characters and crises.
We have yet to come to terms with dreams.

Sally Buckner edited the anthology Word and Witness: One Hundred Years of North Carolina Poetry (1999) and alsoOur Words, Our Ways: Reading and Writing in North Carolina(1995), both published by Carolina Academic Press, based in Durham. She is professor emeritus of English at Peace College and lives in Raleigh. She wrote this poem for the 2004 North Carolina Writers Conference, at which she was the honoree. The poem is reproduced here with the permission of the author, who holds the copyright.

A note from Kathryn Stripling Byer on this poem's form: "The Work of Dreams" is a pantoum, a Malayan form in which the second and fourth lines of each quatrain are repeated as the first and third lines in the next quatrain. The first line of the poem becomes the last line.

Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Open, Open
by Isabel Zuber

I want to put the album
in your lap, ask who is
this child with ribbons
in the back row? Do you
remember the woman
on the rock? Who is that
dark-haired man, kneeling,
arms around two little girls,
one wearing his big straw hat?
The people in your wedding party?
Whose funeral these flowers?
Who did up the braids
that caused such a look
of eternal surprise? Or
hung the swing for a young man
to lounge in, one hand
on his elegant narrow boot?
Where does that flight
of stone steps go? Out of the picture
to what trees, what house,
what lifelong love?

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, and Shenandoah. 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 are Oriflamb (Carrboro, NC: North Carolina Writers' Network, Harperprints Chapbook Series) and Winter's Exile (Southern Pines, NC: Scotch Plaid Press). This poem is drawn from Winter's Exile and is reproduced here with the permission of the author, who holds the copyright.

Thursday, April 28, 2005
Apocalypse
by Denise Blue Hunt

Time is drawing near
say all the old folks.
Everybody should live in fear.

Look at the signs. They're right here.
Chickens are laying eggs with no yolks.
Time is drawing near.

The new preacher drinks beer
and his wife tokes.
Everybody should live in fear.

The cow's milk is clear.
And listen to the way that frog croaks.
Time is drawing near.

Look at the cloven feet of the deer.
They're shaped all wrong, say the old folks.
Everybody should live in fear.

Pack all your spiritual gear.
God don't like no slow pokes.
Time is drawing near.
Everybody should live in fear.

Ahaluna
by Debora Kinsland Foerst

A thirsty Spring this year, behind
the Easter Squall, a careless spark ignites
the mountainside. The flames begin to wind
around the fighters at the ancient sites
of dance and feast. A Bureau worker seeks
to find a break to slip from death.
Da ga li wo tsi. On Coopers Creek
amidst the ring of fire, his eyes are met
with yesterday. Aganunitsi stands
inside a pine cone ring of fire.
This great Shawano medicine man
has killed Uktena near the mire
on Mount Gahuti chanting song of death.
He chants the song of death.

Both Denise Blue Hunt and Debora Kinsland Foerst studied poetry under Kathryn Byer in Western Carolina University's MFA program. Denise Hunt was born and raised in Robeson County and now makes her home in Ayden, where she is an award-winning seventh-grade teacher in the C.M. Epps Middle School. She's expecting her first child at the end of this month. Debora Foerst is a lifelong resident of the Qualla Boundary, home of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. She earned a BSEd and MA in English from Western Carolina University, and she teaches eighth-grade language arts at Cherokee Middle School. Ms. Foerst is currently working toward the publication of Do You Just Say My Words?, a creative non-fiction manuscript of collected Cherokee stories.

Kathryn Byer's notes on form: DeniseHunt's poem is a villanelle-- a French form consisting of six three-line stanzas and a final quatrain. The first and third lines of the first stanza alternate at the ends of the subsequent stanzas. The quatrain at the end uses the same two lines for the refrain. Debora Foerst's poem is a sonnet - - a poem in fourteen lines written in iambic pentameter, with strict rhyme scheme. Sonnets can be either Shakespearian or Italian, depending on the structure of the rhyme.

Friday, April 29, 2005
The Old Homes of Beaufort
by Carol Bessent Hayman

Old houses with high peaked roofs,
balconied porches, banistered stairs and fences
seem alive
as if they are the enduring defenses
of this town with the sea at its door,
the wind in its face
and a past filled with mystery and magic.

They sit quietly confident,
white or blue or gray
in blocks laid out by ghosts.
One can imagine children who played,
lovers who wandered
beneath century-old oaks on neat green lawns.
At night, they wear mantles of clouds and moonlight.
By day, staid and proper,
they take sunlight or rain with equal grace.

Each has a personality,
individual, unique.
The strong lines and gentle curves
of their sturdy posts and tall slender columns
send messages:
We are heritage.
We survive.

A Latent Prescience
by Patrick Herron

I want to talk about my little girl,
about the way she wants to grow.
I want to talk about my little girl,
and all of the lives she has to live.
I want to talk about my little girl
and so I will and this is what I say:

there was this life and inside this life a tree
and inside this tree was a mouse
and inside this mouse was a heartbeat
and inside this heartbeat was a spark
and inside this sparking was the beginning of the first explosion
and the end of the little girl. And so the little girl,
she pulls up her socks and whispers,

"This is the train of my surrounding. I am bridled,
scraped, unlatched, and in possession of
a latent prescience. I was formed from the red clay
of your dreams and fired in the realm of the ovens
fueled by your words for me. I am both the shelter
and the sheltered and the seasons seeping through."

And so as you talk about me this little girl
or my inspection in your small doctor's office, coverless
out-of-date magazines with wrecks in pieces on the floor
and as you speak about this little girl of small pink flowers
ideal on ice hands bench steel thighs trapped in your box,
as you ignore the galaxies spinning out of my bleeding knees,
and as you wish goodbye to this little girl
you're forgetting which subscription was right for me.
So listen to me. You can hear me breathing as I try to run away.

Carol Bessent Hayman has been poet laureate of the town of Beaufort since 1989. In 1993 she was also named poet laureate of Carteret County. In 1993 Beaufort adopted Ms. Hayman's poem "Beaufort by the Sea" as the town poem. "The Old Homes of Beaufort" (reproduced here with the permission of the author, who holds the copyright) is the official poem of the annual Beaufort Old Homes and Gardens Tour, which celebrates its 45th anniversary this June 24-25.
www.historicbeaufort.com/bha2.htm

Since 2003 Patrick Herron has been poet laureate of the town of Carrboro, where he organizes an annual poetry festival (http://carrboropoetryfestival.org