THE RUBY GLASS SPOONHOLDER a poem by Bettie M. Sellers

If the yellow poplars could tell a story,
they would remember back to October, 1895:
It wouldn't have cost her much.
a souvenir from the fair to take
home to College Park where a daughter
waited with her first born, my mother.

Great Grandmother Rebecca took in the sights
of the Cotton States International Exposition,
had the souvenir vendor inscribe the spoonholder:
Cosby, love from Mama, 1895. I've wondered
if she bought one for Angie and Bettie too.

Would the red maples have chattered a bit
as Grandmother strolled past the bandstand
in time to Sousa's new march, the rousing
strains of "King Cotton?" Or if she dared
to step across the grass to take in Buffalo
Bill, Annie Oakley, colorful in feats
of daring-do with horse and gun?
I suspect that Reverend Grandfather, straight
in his high collar, would have been more likely
to draw close to hear Booker T. Washington
as he delivered a landmark address, Atlanta
Compromise, a first for members of his race.

Whatever they saw, the pair walked
on smoothed earth, the scars of war no longer
testifying to battle, vain line to stand
against the swift advance of Sherman's men.
Other of my grandparents experienced
that same march near Macon, had their home saved
by virtue of a Yankee captain and Grandfather's
Masonic pin. Atlanta, Macon, the land has healed,
a new era of progress reigned,
the maple trees had grown a share of fine new rings.

Out of the acres of exposition grounds,
a park has risen to serve other years,
other generations. Red maples,
yellow poplars wave their bright leaves
each fall, new grandmothers buy trinkets
for their young, and Great-grandmother's
ruby spoonholder sits, catching the early
morning sun on a tall shelf in my den.

Written by Bettie M. Selers as Poet Laureate of Georgia





BETTIE MIXON SELLERS - SOME FAMILY HISTORY

Bettie M. Sellers has written about her father’s people, who came to America from England in 1640, and has told how they migrated from Virginia to North Carolina. Her great grandfather arrived in Oxford, Georgia in 1837. He was a builder and furniture maker. His children spread across the state. Her own father was born and raised in the rural community of Rica, Georgia west of Atlanta. They were a family of farmers, teachers, and preachers.

Her great grandfather Seale was a circuit-riding Methodist preacher who had some connection with establishing the Georgia mountain mission school that would become Young Harris College.


Bettie M. Sellers has often spoken of her maternal grandmother who came from the piedmont of Georgia to become a student at the mountain school in 1889. Her grandmother told the young Bettie stories about her life at the school. Sellers says, “Listening to my grandmother, I had no way of knowing that one day I would myself come to Young Harris College.” Sellers became a teacher of English at Young Harris College in 1965. She became Young Harris College Emeritus, Dr. Bettie M. Sellers, retiring in 1997.

Janice Townley Moore and Nancy Simpson Honored for New Anthology Publication

Nancy Simpson and Janice Townley Moore, were honored at Coffee With the Poets, (N.C. Writers Network West) March 11, 2009 at Phillips and Lloyd Book Store on the town square in Hayesville, NC. The poets were recognized for having poems included in the recently released anthology, THE POETS GUIDE TO THE BIRDS, edited by Judith Kitchen and former US Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser, (2009 Anhinga Press, Tallahassee.)



Nancy Simpson and Janice Townley Moore

Janice Townley Moore read poems from the anthology, most of them related to sounds of birds, for example, “ Songbird” by John Brehm, which she said was one of the best poems in the book. Moore also read “Cardinal” by Bruce Bond, and she read her poem, “Teaching the Robins,” which is the title poem of her chapbook, published at Finishing line Press. “Teaching the Robins,” gives the reader an image of an English teacher attempting to teach the grief poetry of Emily Dickinson to the students in her classroom.

Nancy Simpson read several poems from the anthology, including Linda Pastan’s “The Birds,” and Gray Jacobik’s “ Flamingos.” She also read , “Cranes in August,” by Kim Addonizio and she dedicated the crane poem to poet Maren O. Mitchell who is a proficient poet as well as accomplished at making paper cranes. Nancy Simpson read her poem chosen for the anthology titled, “Carolina Bluebirds.”




The editors of THE POETS GUIDE TO THE BIRDS presented 151 contemporary American poets. Nancy Simpson said, “This is a different kind of field guide. You see a bird but when you look it up in this “poet’s guide”, you will find ten poems listed under Cardinal, thirteen under Crow, only one under Carolina Bluebird, and only one under Nuthatch and so on. Twenty-five poems are listed under Birdsong/Sound.

Editor Ted Kooser expressed the hope that “readers will enjoy this book just half as much as if they’d actually seen all the birds these poems represent.”

Poets attending Coffee With the Poets read their original poems in the open mic reading. Some of those poets celebrating birds were: Karen Holmes, Carole Thompson, Brenda Kay Ledford, Ellen Andrews, Maren O. Mitchell, Ann Cahill, Linda Smith and Glenda Barrett.




Poet Maren O. Mitchell





Poet Karen Holmes




Poet Glenda Barrett, author of WHEN THE SAP RISES, Finishing Line Press



To order a copy of THE POETS GUIDE TO THE BIRDS: www.anhinga.org or www.amazon.com or contact Phillips and lloyd Bookstore in Hayesville, NC.

SONNET IN STAINED GLASS by Bettie M Sellers

My father's house is slowly falling down
since no one is about to tend the creaks
in sagging floors or smear tar on the leaks
that drip in widening circles dark and brown.
The slanting chimney drops a loosened stone
clattering down the roof of rusted tin;
and windows gape like old men caught in
toothless yawns that breathe a sigh and moan.

But lately I have hung its ancient door
from hand-wrought hinges of a new design.
Remembered shadows I hold rightly mind
are dancing green and amber on my floor
where summer afternoons, the sun will trace
a wicker chair, my father's face.


Previously published, and included in the collection
MORNING OF THE RED-TAILED HAWK,
(1981) Green River Press
University Center, Michigan 48710




Bettie M. Sellers, Poet of the Month
at LIVING ABOVE THE FROST LINE
(for the Month of March, 2009)


Bettie M. Sellers

EDUCATION:

B.A., LaGrange College, laGrange, Georgia, 1958

M.A., University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, 1958

Further Study: Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College, Vermont;

Schiller College, Paris, France;

North Georgia College, Dahlonega, Georgia;

Summer Sessions through University of California, Berkley (at Oxford University, England University of Kent, Cantebury, and a three week session of Anthropology of the Greek Bronze Age in Grece and Crete, 17 Bronze Age sites)

NEH Summer sessions on Modern Poetry at Yale University, on Greek and Roman Culture at Ohio State Univesity, on Greek Tragedy at Dartmouth College, and on Greek and Roman Comedy at The University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

Honorary Doctorate of Literature, LaGrange College 1989


TEACHING EXPERIENCE:

Taught in the English Department at Young harris College, 1965-1996

Served as Chairperson of the Division of Humanities, 1975-1985

Goolsby Professor of English, 1986-1996. Retired June 1996.





Bettie M. Sellers was installed in the position of Georgia Poet Laureate
by Governor Zell Miller in 1997.

WATER ON THE HIGHWAY by Nancy Simpson

Water on the Highway moves before me.
Witch Water, I say, as though some sorceress waits,
snapping her crooked fingers to make it disappear.
It is real, I tell you. It evaporates,
or seems to, and it is always there.

Last night a friend talked about going home,
the roadmap she followed, the brdge she had to cross.
As I listened, I studied her words on paper
describing a house with stained glass windows,
a wicker chair, her father's face. I want to believe
poets who say this is the way home, who go and come
traveling lines as concrete and safe as any interstate.

The sun is hot today and my map is marked, open.
I drive home, knowing as I go,
I will have to cross water to get there.


First published in The Georgia Review.
Included in collections Across Water and Night Student.







How and When I wrote the poem WATER ON THE HIGHWAY


In the late 1970s I became serious about writing poetry. I took a writing class at Tri County Community College in Murphy, NC. There I met the man I named my poetry mentor, Steve Harvey. No matter how many classes, workshops, critique sessions and MFA degrees later, when someone asks me who is your poetry mentor, I answer Steve Harvey. He was an English professor at Young Harris College, teaching that one night a week class at the community college. How fortunate for me! Through the years, he remains the instructor who taught me the most about writing poetry.

In the same writing class were other poets already publishing their poems, Janice Townley Moore and Bettie M. Sellers, also both on the English faculty at Young Harris College. They encouraged me in my efforts. In our weekly critique session with Steve Harvey, they astounded me, saying things like, "Send that poem to the Georgia Review." I did not know The Georgia Review was then one of the top five literary magazines in America. I did not know, but I did quickly learn that the universities of America control poetry, that basically the universities of America decide who will be allowed to practice and publish poetry and who will not. I repeated Steve Harvey's class three quarters in a row.

The next year, the same writers continued to meet once a week at the home of Bettie M. Seller in Young Harris, Georgia. Steve Harvey, who was writing short stories at the time, shared his work with us.

I especially remember one night Bettie M. Sellers read a poem she was working on about her father's house. "Sonnet in Stained Glass." The poem influenced me. No doubt about it. Soon after, I wrote a poem, "Water On the Highway." Both Bettie Sellers and I went on to see those two poems published.

BETTIE M. SELLERS, POET OF THE MONTH FOR MARCH

Bettie M. Sellers is Georgia’s most honored living poet. Governor Zell Miller appointed her as Georgia Poet Laureate in 1997, and she served in that office until 2000. She received the Governor’s Award for the Humanities in 1987 and in 1992 she was named Poet of the Year by American Pen Women. She received the Stanley W. Lindberg Award which recognizes outstanding contributions to Georgia culture. The Georgia Writers Association honored Bettie M. Sellers with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004.


In this her birth month, we celebrate the life and the achievements of Georgia Poet, Bettie M. Sellers.





COMPLAINT TO BETELGEUSE by Bettie M. Sellers

I used to know that stars were stars
and stayed wherever in that distant place
their ordered orbit was. The sky
was snug with Cassiopeia's Chair,
and night had big and little bears to hunt.

Then, winking moving lights began to stitch
an arch from Sunset Ridge to Raven Cliffs--
planes to Birmingham and points beyond
with travelers drowsing past sleeping hills
folded like dark velvet, with ribbons wound
for lake and stream, silver in reflected light.

Now, satellites invade the ridge--
the star I thought was Venus rising
keeps on rising out of sight
to bring the morning's news--and wars
are instantaneously played on beams
that tear Orion's belt, divide Andromeda.

From MORNING OF THE RED TAILED HAWK
Green River Press, 1981


Bettie M. Sellers was born on March 30,1926 in Tampa, Florida. Almost immediately, her parents retuned to their Georgia home. The first seventeen years of her life were spent on a farm west of Griffin, Georgia. Life changed for her when she was eight years old, when a traveling theater troupe came to Griffin. At that time she fell in love with Shakespeare, and she fell in love with words.

She married Ezra Sellers in 1945, became the mother of a son and two daughters. She began working on her education, earning a B.A. from La Grange College in 1958 and an M.A. from the University of Georgia in 1966. She moved with her husband to Young Harris, Georgia where he became head of the Art Department at Young Harris College and she began teaching English. Her teaching career at Y.H.C. spanned thirty-one years.

In the spring of 1972, she began writing poetry, and she saw her poems published in top literary magazines throughout America. She celebrated the publication of one poetry collection after another. She traveled to many states answering invitations to read her poems.

In 1986-87, Sellers began working on a project about the life and poetry of Byron Herbert Reece, a nationally known poet who had taught at Young Harris in the fifties, before his death in 1958. In 1989, the film, “Bitter Berry” won many awards, including a Georgia Emmy for Bettie M. Sellers and gained her an Honorary Doctorate of Literature from La Grange College.

She served on many boards and she is responsible for helping to start the Georgia State Poetry Society and for advancing the Institute of Continued Learning at Young Harris College. In the fall of 2008, at the Annual Meeting of The Institute of Continued Learning, Young Harris College, Bettie M. Sellers was honored with a lengthy testimonial.

Although she was raised in the Piedmont region of Georgia, Sellers’s work is touched by all things Appalachian. When one considers that 45 years of her life was lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Georgia, it will not come as a surprise that her poems are filled with images of the mountains and that she is honored and claimed as an Appalachian poet by literary scholars. In 2008, Southern Appalachian Poetry, An Anthology of Works by 37 Poets( McFarland Press) was published. Five of Bettie M. Sellers’s poems were included.

Bettie M. Sellers continues to live at the foot of a mountain in Young Harris Georgia where she has lived for the past 45 years. She still writes, does her pool exercises, attends book club meetings, and speaks on her favorite topic, literature.


PUBLICATIONS OF BETTIE M. SELLERS.

Western From Bald Mountain (1974) Out of Print

Appalachian Carols ( 1976)

Spring Onions and Cornbread ( Pelican Publishing 1878)
available www.alibris.com

Morning of the Red Tailed Hawk (Green River Press 1981
available www.alibris.com

Satan's Playhouse (1986)

Liza’s Monday (Appalachian Consortium Press, Boone, 1986)

The Bitter Berry: The Life of Byron Herbert Reece
(1992 University of Georgia Press)

Wild Ginger (Images 1988, Reprinted by Kennesaw State University Press 2004)

Wild Ginger also available at www.alibris.com.
Note from Alibris:About this title: Best known for her poems
about life in southern Appalachia, Bettie Sellers is a poet
of profound humility and humanity, writing from the heart.
This collection of poetry from the former poet laureate of Georgia
was chosen by Georgia Center for the Book for its
Georgia 2005 Top 25 List.

JOHN STONE, POET AND HEALER

by Poet Janice Townley Moore

One of the most memorable occasions on which I ever saw John Stone was a beautiful October day in Atlanta during and after another triumphant performance of The Poet and the Pianist. The year was 2006 and perhaps the fifth or sixth time that he and musician Will Ransom had held an audience spellbound with a rare combination of composers such as Chopin, Debussy, and Schumann interspersed so well with John Stone reading his poems. It should be stated that one of the earlier performances had been held at Carnegie Hall in 2001.

On this particular day at Emory University, the large windows of the Carlos Museum Recital Hall looking out on the quadrangle offered a stunning view of autumn hues against marble buildings and a dramatically overcast sky. John and Will had also revised the program, adding new poems about John’s mother, close to one hundred years old at the time and residing in nearby assisted living. I remember that the poems about her brought an especially enthusiastic response. As an introduction he held up a recent photograph of his mother, her face slightly shaded by an attractive straw hat in “lighting by Vermeer” as one poem described her.

All of the above I hold dear in memory, but a personal portrait of John after he left the stage remains as the chief indelible image from that day. Shortly after the ovations, the bows, and more ovations, as the crowd started to make its way out, I found John seated near the back of the hall. He was chatting with a woman wearing one of those open boot type casts. Edging closer, I could hear his inquiries about her condition and her replies. His focus was entirely on her in the pressing patchwork of the crowd. In the midst of those still waiting to congratulate him, he was forever the patient physician, showing concern even when he was the major event of that gathering. The easy way in which he spoke to her, the sincerity of his interest have remained as a living portrait in the chasm of his loss. I think of how many others, both patients and friends, were the fortunate recipients of his kind words.

If words can help in physical healing, they can also help in healing the other pains that assault “this mortal coil.” This is where John’s poetry is extremely valuable, equal to the pleasure found in reading it. The human encounter that he relished so much in his medical practice is the same human encounter that one is privileged to be part of in his poems. Whether in the memory of those he spoke with, either medically or in casual conversation, or read on the pages of his remarkable and award winning books, his words are what we are left with. They keep us alive and living better.

Janice Townley Moore
February 23, 2009

Nancy Simpson and Janice Townley Moore - Two of the NC Poets With Poems in the New Bird Anthology titled THE POETS GUIDE TO THE BIRDS

Are you a bird watcher? A Lover of the natural world? Nancy Simpson and Janice Townley Moore are two of the NC poets who had their Poems included in the new bird anthology titled THE POETS GUIDE TO THE BIRDS. Both of these poets live and write in the Southern Appalachian Mountains. The anthology contains only bird poems, some of them by the most noted poets writing in America today. It was edited by Judith Kitchen and Ted Kooser and published at Anhinga Press, Tallahassee, Florida, 2009.

Janice Townley Moore's poem is "Teaching the Robins," which is the title poem of her chapbook Teaching the Robins published at Finishing Line Press, 2005. Nancy Simpson's poem is a previously unpublished poem titled "Carolina Bluebirds."




The Poets Guide to the Birds is available at www.anhingapress, at amazon.com and at Phillips and Lloyd Bookstore on the square in Hayesville, NC.

TEACHING MYSELF How to Burn Last Years Leaves by Nancy Simpson

If you live in a forest
don't burn on a windy day.
Look on the boundary oak
for the surveyor's orange ribbon.
If it is not dancing, if it dangles,
you can hope burning is safe.
Best, burn when rain is predicted.

Rake leaves onto the dirt driveway.
Make small leaf mounds.
Burn one or two leaf piles at a time.
Don't let yourself think of the day
your young sons scorched the mountainside.
Do not look across the drive
where your old home place used to be.

Forget it. The cabin was dismantled,
buldozers to the ground, buried.
Don't think of the man who found you
burning leaves one spring and said,
"Let me help you." He will not come back.
They're all gone now. Rake and burn
leaf piles 3&4, 5&6.




Let sudden wind frighten. Rake faster
when your hear thunder. Rake hot coals
into the gravel. Stop only when rain
drives you back to the tool shed.
Tomorrow you will see bright green foliage
of five thousand daylilies lining your drive,
promising to bloom.

Previously published in Journal of Kentucky Studies

Kathryn Stripling Byer Special Guest Poet at Coffee With the Poets Feb. 11, 2009

Nancy Simpson Introduced Special Guest Kathryn Stripling Byer

Poet Michelle Keller Coordinates Coffee With the Poets and Serves as Publicist for all of NCWN West.

Glenda Beall, NC Writers Network West Program Coordinator and Founder of Coffee With the Poets

Glenda Beall is the glue that holds NCWN West together. Under her watch, she began Coffee With the Poets, a monthly program that is attended by poets from the Netwest area. It is a program that is open to the public. There is always a special guest poet and there is always an open mic reading.

Brenda Kay Ledford, Maren O. Mitchell and Richard Argo at Coffee With the Poets

Lynn Hamilton Rutherford, Georgia Poet

Georgia Poet Carole Richard Thompson

Poet Brenda Kay Ledford, author of Patchwork Memories, Shew Bird Mountain and Sacred Fire from Finishing Line Press

Poet Linda M. Smith

Georgia Poets Lynn Hamilton Rutherford, Karen Holmes, and Glenda Barrett

COFFEE WITH THE POETS Featured Special Guest Poet Kathryn Stripling Byer

Kathryn Stripling Byer, NC Poet Laureate gave a special reading of her poems at Phillips and Lloyd Bookstore in Hayeville,NC on February 11, 2009. Kathryn Stripling Byer's reading marked the official opening of the 2009 monthly poetry reading program sponsored by NC Writers Network West that is held at the bookstore. The program features a guest poet each month and there is always an open mic reading. Poets within driving distance are wecome.


Kathryn Stripling Byer grew up in southwest Georgia, graduated from Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, and earned her Master of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she studied with Allen Tate, Fred Chappell, and Robert Watson. Her books of poetry include Coming To Rest (Louisiana State University 2006) Catching Light (Louisiana State University Press, 2002); Black Shawl (1998); Wildwood Flower (1992), which was the 1992 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets; and The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest (1986), which was published in the Associated Writing Programs award series.

Byer's poems have appeared in Arts Journal, Carolina Quarterly, Georgia Review, Hudson Review, Iowa Review, Nimrod, Poetry, and Southern Review, as well as numerous anthologies. Her essays have appeared in Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers (edited by Joyce Dyer; University Press of Kentucky, 1998), Dream Garden: The Poetic Vision of Fred Chappell (edited by Patrick Bizzaro; Louisiana State University Press, 1997), The Boston Globe, and Shenandoah.

Kathryn Stripling Byer has received writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council. She is poet-in-residence at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina.

The Poet Must Do Some Digging in Serious Dirt - John Stone, POET OF THE MONTH OF FEBRUARY

Physician Poet John Stone talked about the poetry process as a way of going deep. I was privaleged to hear him in writing classes and workshops he taught at Callanwolde Fine Arts Center in Atlanta and at Winthrop College in South Carolina, back when I first began to write poems. What stuck with me all these years was John Stone's belief that poetry has to go below the surface. The poet must do some digging in "serious dirt."

Poets often discuss the poetry process as an act of going deep, digging up something, bringing up something that was buried below the surface, such as finding the ore, mining for gold. The metphor of fishing comes up in such a discussion of the poetry process. The poet casts a line, snags something, hooks something that lies below in the murky deep. Seamus Heaney's famous poem " Digging" is an example as is Adreinne Rich's famous poem "Diving Into the Wreck."

Here are two poems by poet John Stone. "Digging" and "Looking Into a Ditch" show his writing process. These are two poems I read again and again and often share with my students. --Nancy Simpson

"Digging" and "Looking Down Into a Ditch" - Two Poems By John Stone

DIGGING by John Stone

My son is following
a tree root to its source,
learning connections,
dirt and purpose
all at once.

He has attacked it before,
but from topside,
monkeying the limbs.

He shows me the branches
underground,
makes me believe
there are leaves on them
in some different season

when we must come back and look.


from the collection THE SMELL OF MATCHES
Louisiana State University Press



LOOKING DOWN INTO A DITCH by John Stone

Watching the workmen dig a ditch
watching them lay in the pipe

for the waste and gasses
and liquids of our living

I think of the lost maps
of lost cities, their pipes
still moving off
in important directions

of people I knew
who are now in the serious dirt

of the ditches at Dachau

of my father.

It is hard
to keep remembering
across the ditches we have made
and covered over
with terrible earth-moving sound

how much of our dying
we must find ways not to need,
how much of what keeps us alive
is underground.

from the collection IN ALL THIS RAIN
Louisiana State University Press


John Stone was born Feb. 7, 1936 in Jackson, Mississippi and he died on November 6, 2008 at his home near Atlanta. He was four times honored as Georgia Writer of the year . A memorial poetry reading was held in his honor January 14, 2009 at Callanwolde Conservatory. During parts of the 1970s and 1980s John Stone served on the Callanwolde Poetry Committee.

He was the author of The Smell of Matches 1972, 1989 LSU Press, Where Water Begins, LSU Press 1998,In All this Rain 1980 LSU Press, Renaming the Streets, 1985 LSU Press, Music From Apartment 8: New and Selected Poems 2004 LSU Press. In 1990 Delacorte Press published In the Country of Hearts: Journeys in the Art of Medicine, (Essays). The book was reprinted by LSU Press in 1996.

Dr. John Stone was Professor Emeritus of Cardiology at Emory University in Atlanta. He also taught English Literature at Emory and at Oxford University in England.

POEMS BY Physician Poet John Stone

We celebrate the life and the poetry of Physician Poet, John Stone. He is the Featured Poet here for the month of February 2009.

LIVING ABOVE THE FROST LINE celebrates John Stone, his life and his poetry. In February, his birth month, Janice Townley Moore and I received permission from his wife Mae Nelson Stone to reprint some of his poems.

In talking with others who know his work well, it was felt that often the doctor poems and the patient poems get the most attention. Doctor Stone was Emeritus Professor of Cardiology at Emory University Hospital. The doctor poems such as “He Makes a House Call” and “Resuscitation” are great poems and they among others are often named as favorites.

The poems here were selected by John Stone’s widow, Mae Nelson Stone. She chose her favorite poems that show him more as the private person and the family man that he was.

We will continue to talk about John Stone and his influence on our lives and on our poetry. We will talk about his poems, and we know we shall read them again and again. --Nancy Simpson

POEMS BY Physician Poet JOHN STONE

THE BASS

Because I was 37 and he was 10
I was presumed and of course
to know everything important

plus
how to take the fish off the hook.
I'd been told largemouth

and striped bass
both either
waited for us below

the still crystal of the lake
I had no expectation though
of actually catching a fish

when somehow we did
After we hauled it heavily
in over the gunwales

like a glittering glory
no way was I about to touch
that wide mouth, those razor fins

gills, those sparkling cold-blooded
scales
until all spasm stopped

To this day my son
may think the way
to take a fish off the hook

is to place it, hook still intact
in the bottom of the boat
place a paddle over the fish

and keep your foot gently but steadfastly
on the paddle on the fish
After the flailing and flopping

I managed with something like
experience to get the hook out
Then as morning broke over us

we made our slow electric way
back to the boathouse
That fish won for us

a trophy
which I keep here on my desk
to remind me of that morning and of

how unexpected the end may be
how hungry
how shining

--John Stone
Music From Apartment 8: New and Selected
Poems, LSU Press 2004



NOON THURSDAY

I dropped in
on my mother
dazzling in her yellow sweater
having lunch.

I sat down
at her table.
I'd seen her
two days ago

but this time
I startled her
I think--too early
in the week

for another visit.
You just appeared
out of nowhere!
she said

then asked me, smiling:
What have you been doing
all these years?
I didn't know what to say.
It's the very
same question
I've been asking myself.

--John Stone
Music From Apartment 8: New and Selected
Poems, LSU Press 2004



VISITATION
December 2001

At Serenity Gardens, winter
has surrounded us. My mother's room
is way too warm for me,

just right for her--with an extra sweater.
Outside, this uneasy year, her 93rd,
lurches through December.

She is surely serene in this place,
thanks to whatever goodness;
queen of the electronic piano.

Among my chief duties now
I have become her human calendar,
a stay against time, her reach for the past.

Each visit, we review the years.
We sit and talk, fragile mother,
absent-minded son.

This afternoon, I assemble for her
some semblance of my long-dead
father, the only husband she had.

I tell her his story
We study his photograph.
Do you remember him, I ask?

She looks again.
No, she answers, softly. No.
But isn't he good looking!

She smiles. I chuckle.
In the gathering dark,
we cry a bit together:

I for what she has forgotten,
she for what I remember.

--John Stone
Music From Apartment 8: New and Selected
Poems, LSU Press 2004



John Stone was born Feb. 7, 1936 in Jackson, Mississippi and he died on November 6, 2008 at his home near Atlanta. He was four times honored as Georgia Writer of the year . A memorial poetry reading was held in his honor January 14, 2009 at Callanwolde Conservatory. During parts of the 1970s and 1980s John Stone served on the Callanwolde Poetry Committee.

He was the author of The Smell of Matches 1972, 1989 LSU Press, Where Water Begins, LSU Press 1998,In All this Rain 1980 LSU Press, Renaming the Streets, 1985 LSU Press, Music From Apartment 8: New and Selected Poems 2004 LSU Press. In 1990 Delacorte Press published In the Country of Hearts: Journeys in the Art of Medicine, (Essays). The book was reprinted by LSU Press in 1996.

GROUNDHOG DAY WEATHER REPORT FROM ABOVE THE FROST LINE

On Feburary 2, 2009, Punxsutawaney Phil in Pennsylvania saw his shadow and the word is out, "Six more weeks of winter for residents living in the Northeast."

In Atlanta, General Beauregard Lee who lives at the Yellow River Game Ranch in Lilburn did not see his shadow. It was announced. Spring is just around the corner for resident of the Southeast.

Do you believe this?

Yes, I do. Our resident groundhog (woodchuck) here above the frost line declared at daylight this morning that as soon as new green shoots appear, he will be climbing his favorite tree and dining in luxury once more.