CELEBRATING POET OF THE MONTH OF JULY - DANA WILDSMITH with an announcement and offering you her poems "A Southern Love Poem" and "Drying Peaches"

DANA WILDSMITH - Honored as Recipient of 47th Georgia Author of the Year Finalist for Essay.

July 2, 2011 from Barrow County News

Dana Wildsmith received a welcome surprise during the Georgia Author of the Year Awards ceremony at Kennesaw State University June 11. Wildsmith, who was on hand to introduce Lifetime Achievement Award honoree Terry Kay, was recognized as a Georgia Author of the Year Finalist for her book of essays, "Back to Abnormal: Surviving with an Old Farm in the New South."

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A Southern Love Poem

Honey, I love you like I love boiled peanuts.

You’re a little bit mushy, a little bit salty

and I stop for a taste of you every chance I get.

Sugar, I love you like I love dirt roads.

The only ride better than taking you

slow and easy on a hot afternoon

is when I slide your curves like a drunk in a four by four. 

The Cokesbury Hymnal would be three pages long

if blind Fanny Crosby could have seen

what a blue-ribbon hound dog you are;

she would have wooed you in common meter,

ditching her hymns to sing your praises.     

Longer than July nights in a hotbox farmhouse,

truer than Billy Graham’s prayers,

tighter than the least one’s hold on his mama’s heartstrings,

will my love forever be yours, Sweet Thing.

You’re slicker than Talladega,

as classic as Gone with the Wind,

more hometown than Patty Loveless or REM,

sweeter than Iris Dement.

How could my heart not be yours?

Honey Child, I’ll love you until

peanuts are no longer boiled,

until every dirt road gets paved.

Until ya’ll becomes singular,

until grits becomes plural,

I’ll love you

my dumplin’

my Moonpie,

my cool mint julep.

Drying Peaches


Perhaps another hurricane,

you and I in our windowless

innermost room

waiting for

the walls to stop panting,

waiting some unclockable while

for the powerless days

when we will be

shoveling roof tiles,

shoveling carpeting, glass,

insulation, our books. We will

breathe sweat,  and the sweet

of everyone’s food putrefying,

everyone’s drowned dogs,

crabs washed in by the tidal surge.

We will sit up nights

letting each other talk.

Only the trees will lie down.

Remember how

filthy we will be.

You and the floors will grow beards.

When the rains come back

as they will

by the second week,

remember 

how disheartened,

how needy we will be

for some unreckoned pleasure

such as these peaches 

I’m putting by—

saving for later—

as I have by long habit

saved for you

the last of the orange juice,

today’s mail,

my egg each month

whether we use it or not.

from One Good Hand

Want to learn about Dana Wildsmith?

www.danawildsmith.com

GEORGIA AUTHORS, DID YOU KNOW?

Since 1964, Georgia Authors of the Year AWARDS have been awarded to Georgia-based authors, with one winner and one finalist selected for each category. This year, categories included First Novel, Fiction, Poetry, Biography, Essay, Inspirational, Memoir, History, Specialty Book, Children’s Picture Book, Young Adult Fiction, and Children’s Mid-Reader.

ANNOUNCING DANA WILDSMITH POET OF THE MONTH OF JULY 2011 WITH THREE POEMS

Dana Wildsmith is the author of four collections of poetry: One Good Hand Iris Press, 2005), Our Bodies Remember (The Sow’s Ear Press, 2000), Annie (Palanquin Press, 1999), and Alchemy (The Sow’s Ear Press, 1995). One Good Hand was a SIBA Poetry Book of the Year nominee. In this her birth month, she has been named Poet of the Month of July, 2011.

Wildsmith is  also the author of an environmental memoir, Back to Abnormal: Surviving with an Old Farm in the New South (MotesBooks). 

She has served as Artist-in-Residence for the Grand Canyon National Park and for The Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska, and has been a Poetry Fellow with the South Carolina Academy Of Authors. Her work is widely published in journals and anthologies, including most recently: Writing By ear (MotesBooks), Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia (University Press of Kentucky), The Southern Poetry Anthology (Texas Review Press, 2007), and Women, Period (Spinsters Ink). Wildsmith lives in Bethlehem, Georgia.    

Double-digging

Nothing so pleases as

yanking winter grass

from a squared-off plot—

untangling the earth

one hank at a time

while afternoon

rests softly on your back

and options

grit among your thought

like seeds.

August

We break a sweat brushing our teeth.

Fish-slick, who says we gave up gills?

We’re breathing, aren’t we ? The air 

six a.m. is hot water;

the sky is a slap of blue.

We wade into miasma

in t-shirts, shorts and brimmed hats,

sweat-tides already rising

at our necks and armpits and sides

where the heat needs to bubble out.

Sweet Sweat


Wouldn’t seem honest not to sweat,

like claiming bragging rights 

on two armloads of Better Boys

half a pound each with no spots

while you stand there dry as July clay.

It’s sweat proves you grew these beauts.

Sweat’s how you earn your okra;

it’s your right to sweet iced tea;

it’s your Georgia union card.

The deeper you’ve dug 

your generational toehold

into Winder’s red dirt,

Blood Mountain’s granite,

the kaolin clay under Claxton,

the more kinds of sweat

you’re able to tell apart right off--

like knowing you can hear

south Georgia scrub

in that banker’s voice,

despite he claims Atlanta).

From birth, you know underarm sweat so well

it’s hardly worth the mention;

it’s what you get lugging groceries

from car to kitchen. Spend the morning

yanking garden weeds and you get

whole-back sweat, wet neck,

sticky back-of-the-knees.

An afternoon running fence wire

adds scalp sweat to all these,

and digging post holes

puddles hot sweat in your ears.

But it’s when eyelid sweat starts to

gum your lashes that everybody knows

you’ve hauled in groceries, hoed beans,

and by god run forty more feet of fence wire.

You should sit down. Cool off. Let the sweat dry.

Have a glass of iced tea.

You’ve done an honest day’s work.


These poems from One Good Hand by Dana Wildsmith, Iris Press


http://www.danawildsmith.com/One%20Good%20Hand.htm