V E R S E and I M A G E

Geography of One – Richard Allen Taylor

September 25, 2026 by GriffinPoetry

[ 3 poems by Richard Allen Taylor ]

Continental Divide

When I drop the word cry on the spine

of a mountain ridge, weep flows down

one side, shout down the other, one word

split into different-meaning halves,

then face will follow, turning toward

the Eastern slope while becoming the front side

on the West, and

check will hesitate at first, not sure whether

to inspect for defects or stop a moving object,

but before I drop the word orange,

I have to decide whether to eat it or wear it,

and I discover the word colonizing, when released

from high altitude, might burst into colon and zing

like a couple divorced for irreconcilable differences,

and knowing that rivers seldom head straight for

the sea, but wander sometimes in great bends

and curves before they reach home, one must

be careful when dropping a grenade like love.

Richard Allen Taylor

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Blessed Are

. . after “Ode on Inheritance” by Kate Partridge

Perhaps there is no inheritance worth having

that does not include a narrative of water—

a river, a lake, an ocean

pounding on the beach below the open windows.

My father bought a farm

with a white house on a hill, a pond

at the bottom. My mother inherited. She later sold.

All of it was, shall we say, liquidated.

Gone, the tiny lake

fed by a stream tumbling over my father’s modest

ambitions. Just as well. My brothers and I sought

neither the view nor the serenity.

We were reaching elsewhere, for something

less pastoral, more hopeful,

something more highway

than country road. But even a cave can elicit hope.

The torch goes out, we thrust our hands

forward, grope walls,

feet following our blindness. As if a hole could lean

against its sides. All it takes is the will

to swap adjectives.

Trade wet for slick. Choose briny over soaked.

Here we go again with that

narrative of water. Snow, hail,

ice melting in your palm. Later, when drought

squeezes the pond dry, a spark catches,

and fire climbs the hill—

everything promised burns. The difference between

bold and meek becomes a matter of timing.

Bold when we rush forward

to extinguish the blaze. Meek when the flames

force us back to a place

where faces do not melt.

When rain finally comes, we inherit the memory

of blackened hills, even if no lawyers or signatures

attend. When grief follows, we console ourselves.

We say the trees bury their seeds under layers of ash.

We say the trees dream of resurrection..

Richard Allen Taylor

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Song for a Wind with No One Left to Talk To

Now that you’re alone, wind,

where will you go?

north, sough, high, low

Now that you sleep, wind,

what will you know?

peace, love, war, snow

Now that you’re empty, wind,

how will you fill?

zephyr, gust, sail, chill

Not that you’re free, wind,

what else will you be?

home, afar, aloft, alee

Now that you die, wind,

how will you rise?

cloud, star, spirit, sky

Richard Allen Taylor

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About a month shy of 60 years ago, DuPont transferred my Dad (again) and we moved from Michigan to Aurora, Ohio. The first of November was my first day of eighth grade in my new school, and my first class was German with Fräulein Appenzeller. I shuffled my feet while she introduced me, then declared that they already had a Wilhelm in the class and therefore christened me Fritz. For the next five years most of the kids in Aurora thought my real name was Fritz.

I sat down and looked around the classroom. I don’t remember much from that morning, but I do recall that there was one girl with long dark hair and very red cheeks. I mean really red, like silver dollar sized lipstick circles. Was this an arcane German class ritual? Turns out it was lipstick, from Halloween the night before. Turns out she had tried really hard but hadn’t been able to wash it off. Turns out her name was Linda. Turns out eight years later, in 1974, we would get married.

Turns out we still are. During those almost 60 years now the proportion of time we have driven each other completely nuts has been far less than the proportion of time we have made each other laugh. Or at least smile. Smiling — I love that.

Smiling is what these little paragraphs are about. Richard Allen Taylor’s poetry always, always makes me smile. His new book of poetry is crammed to bursting with smiles. Not just the poems that are funny – slyly, wickedly, innocently, unexpectedly funny. Also and even more so I am smiling with Richard and with his poems about these last few years he has lived alone, and about the three decades he and Julie were married before her death from leukemia. Smiling because love remembered and relived in such a pure, tender, and honest way lights up the world. Smiling because it is a gift to discover a poet willing to give so much of himself or herself.

Turns out, Richard, that you are the world’s biggest mensch, and I love you. Keep smiling.

❀

Order Geography of One from Main Street Rag Enterprises.

Poetry by Richard Allen Taylor at Verse and Image:
https://griffinpoetry.com/2025/11/22/saturday-share-radavich-and-taylor/
https://griffinpoetry.com/2024/03/22/the-law-of-love/
https://griffinpoetry.com/2021/06/25/angels-richard-allen-taylor/
https://griffinpoetry.com/2011/05/11/geography-of-the-heart/

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Thank you for visiting Verse and Image:

. . . . . every Friday I present one or more poems I’ve read this week that particularly speak to me;

. . . . . some Saturdays I present one or two poems submitted by YOU, my readers.

If you would like to offer a poem for consideration, either by a favorite author or your own work, please view these GUIDELINES for Saturday Readers Share:

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If you would like to receive an email each time a post appears, please SUBSCRIBE to Verse and Image using the button on the Home Page.

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Thanks again for joining the conversation.

– Bill

Posted in family, poetry | Tagged family, Geography of One, Main Steet Rag, nature photography, NC Poets, poetry, Richard Allen Taylor, Southern writing | 4 Comments »

Ecobloomspaces

September 18, 2026 by GriffinPoetry

ever changing never

anything but itself

– from ouroboros by Sophia Pipik

[ 3 poems from the anthology Ecobloomspaces ]

A Geography

I tell my sons that sometimes the land shifts.

The creature of it rising

on one shoulder, regardless

of how solid

it once seemed.

Each summer, I drive them

through land they didn’t grow up in—

far enough West my eyes snag

on fault lines, trace my own

rough edged, raised up scars

like a tongue tracing teeth—

a step into air

I thought was ground.

My grandfather called them scarp—

these old land wounds—

I though he’d made the word up

like how he called me Squidunk

and my sister, Pipsqueak.

Years and years he sold typewriters

out of his car, through Montana, Wyoming,

Utah, Idaho. Wide plains and then dark rock

here and there like cliffs, a river

snaked like its name

clear through, hills–

all mumbled haunches,

mounded shoulders, giving way

to rocky edges and, closer to the road,

rock spine stacked—

maybe the Lost River Fault

or the Sawtooth or the Big Flat

or just some unnamed stretch of earth

where it once faltered.

My grandfather, his actual end,

took 10 solid days.

His hands, stammering

on the end of stick-like arms.

At the very last, he extended

his right hand to his wife

of 64 years and introduced himself.

It was only a summer or two ago

I learned escarpment:

a line of cliffs, formed by a faulting,

or a fracturing, of the earth’s crust.

Or, more simply, scarp—

not a made-up word

but one which plays close friends with scrap

as in scrap of land or scrappy,

another word for determined,

like my grandfather, my sons, me—

this is land language

meaning rock, meaning exposed fault line,

meaning the land rose up

and there, just here—

you can see how big the shift was.

Rebecca Brock

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Suburban Taxonomy of the Moose With

. . a Line From the Talking Heads

My catty-corner neighbor

erected a life-sized, rusted tin moose

at the edge of her lawn where it zeroes

my backyard. The past three mornings,

I’ve double-took this two-dimensional bull

for an alpha buck, indigenous white tail,

sporting an out-of-season rack

in the late April fog of the Anthropocene

we call the vague now. Algonquin

for eater of twigs, English for giant mammal

who would stomp your brains out

if given half a chance, who has never once

loped among these Appalachian conifers,

not wandered this range presently subdivided

and HOA’d as Greenbrier Pines, not in

the Pleistocene nor before. English for beast

who should be more feared than the grizzly

but isn’t thanks to L.L. Bean socks,

flannel sheets, and this yard ornament.

Meanwhile, the fat ticks waiting in the grass

do not care what name they’ll give the next epoch

coursing, even now, in their tiny grenade bodies,

in everything except this watchful moose that,

if it could, would say, This is not my beautiful house.

Sarah Elkins

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Owl Hill

I return again, having leaned from snails

about time. It’s slimy. It’s slow. It spirals.

One year ago I thought all kinds of things

would have happened by now. It’s quieter

than I remember, because I am quieter,

having learned from water about language:

how it builds, how it takes away.

You can make people disappear with it.

Yesterday I hiked to a stream and spread

a blanket on the earth. For hours I watched

the woods. For hours I didn’t think

about my son. I didn’t count his eyelashes

in the grass, his freckles on the leaves.

I didn’t think about how to mother

this child who loves guns. I studied the earth

in her mothering, how she holds

our endless tragedies, and only lets go

when we explode into stars.

Julia C. Alter

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Today the Environmental Protection Agency killed the last remaining regulation / restriction / monitoring of emissions from coal-burning power plants and officially changed its name to the Environmental Obliteration Agency. Today I clicked Settings on my browser and clicked off every switch that even whispered artificial intelligence and from here on out I will just have to take my chances with my own so-called intelligence. Today the last red-eyed vireo of summer before it flies to Belize wanted me to hear it singing in the top of the white oak down the ridge but the neighbor to the north is pressure washing his deck and the neighbor to the south is mowing and the two-houses down neighbor is chipping branches from a white oak that he chain sawed because it was looking too hungrily at his roof.

Today I read the closing poem in Ecobloomspaces titled THESE ARE THE DAYS THAT MUST HAPPEN TO YOU by Namrata Kasaseneni and before I went back inside the house and closed the doors and the windows to escape mowers and chippers and pressure washers and alas vireos I began again with the opening poem of the anthology and re-read all the poems I had marked that give me a particle of hope for the beauty of this world and at least a few of the humans willing to share it with each other and with me and with every other creature.

Tomorrow I will need to read this book again.

❀

Ecobloomspaces: Poetry at the Intersection of Social Identity and Nature, Environment, and Place. Edited by Ken R. Harmon, Iron Oak Editions, Charlotte, North Carolina, USA; © 2025. Available from Iron Oak Editions –

https://ironoakeditions.com/ecobloomspaces-preview-2025

Rebecca Brock, Idaho born, lives in Virginia with her family. Her first full length collection The Way Land Breaks is available from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.

Sarah Elkins lives in southern West Virginia with her husband. She is the director of the West Virginia Interscholastic Cycling League where she works to get more kids on bikes

Julia C. Alter lives in Vermont with her son. Her debut full-length collection is Some Dark Familiar (Green Writers Press, 2024)

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Thank you for visiting Verse and Image:

. . . . . every Friday I present one or more poems I’ve read this week that particularly speak to me;

. . . . . some Saturdays I present one or two poems submitted by YOU, my readers.

If you would like to offer a poem for consideration, either by a favorite author or your own work, please view these GUIDELINES for Saturday Readers Share:

https://griffinpoetry.com/about/

If you would like to receive an email each time a post appears, please SUBSCRIBE to Verse and Image using the button on the Home Page.

If you have a hard time finding the SUBSCRIBE button on this WordPress site, you can send me your email address and I will add you to the subscriber list. Send your request to

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Thanks again for joining the conversation.

– Bill

Posted in Imagery | Tagged Ecobloomspaces, Ecopoetry, Iron Oak Editions, Ken R. Harmon, nature photography, poetry | 4 Comments »

Girl Filling the Sky – Melissa McEver Huckabay

September 11, 2026 by GriffinPoetry

[ 2 poems from the winner of the

2024 Cider Press Review Book Award ]

Partial Eclipse

Hear me out: that which you call death

I remember. – Louise Gluck

The morning light is dew:

soon the sun will crescent away.

The windows of our house let

pieces of light in. Pines and oaks

undulate in the wind. Our ground

turns yellow green in shadow.

I remember my passage here:

from one house to another, neighbors

who speak and those who are silent.

Black-eyed Susans fading away,

fields turning brown in summer.

Highways leading us toward home.

My mother is here, her suffering

a slow movement across the sun.

I want to make a well of myself.

Find the water, cup my hands,

ask her to drink. Turn the soil

into something soft. tell her:

Mama, you are so clear to me—

let’s push away this swollen moon.

Melissa McEver Huckabay

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Summer

For Lynn

Wasn’t our skin sticky

in the air conditioning,

wasn’t your dark hair

smooth, your lipstick

leaving a red ring

on your wine glass? Weren’t we

all laughing while I chopped

serrano peppers into tiny

green slits, while we poured

more merlot? Didn’t we drink

so much that we started singing,

and didn’t you cover your mouth

while you giggled, like you always

do? Wasn’t this just the other day,

just the other August, before the sunset

turned bronze on South Padre,

before we all moved away,

before you walked down the aisle

in your beaded dress, your face

gleaming and pink—

before the hospital,

before the cancer,

before the call?

Melissa McEver Huckabay

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What good is anything? No, this one right here. She stops beside the nature trail and points, the juicy stem tinged pink, the flowers as little like flowers as can be. What good? Will it taste like ripe berries? Cure cancer? Stop my heart beating before I finish chewing? Who knows?

And why even care enough to answer? Although I will try. Maybe sidestep, throw in some muse about plant communities, or defer to Cherokee ethnobotany, or mumble a longish word like pollinators. What good is any of that?

All I know is that on this morning a brief breeze rises and a dozen fairies fly. They pirouette and then they’re gone. I could tell you that just below the hill the burnweed has gone to seed. Nothing special, never any grand inflorescence, only stalky climb into light then bent brown by autumn. I could consider only that and let it go.

But for a few seconds against the backdrop of the maple’s first red-limned transfiguration, poised on the slow transit of noon to afternoon, those airy wisps, those ephemera, those dancers winglit by sunflash — my God.

❀

Girl Filling the Sky is the winner of the 21st annual Cider Press Review Book Award, 2024. Melissa McEver Huckabay teaches high school English in Cypress, Texas. Her poems weave through the generations: a grandmother widowed by war, a mother scarred by deceit, a little girl abandoned by her father and forever imagining his return. And yet the warp of loss is patched and filled by the weft of love, sometimes smoldering, sometimes radiant. In the title poem, the writer is four years old and imagines she can fly from her second story balcony. Isn’t our life meant to fill the sky?

https://ciderpressreview.com/product/girl-filling-the-sky/

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Thank you for visiting Verse and Image:

. . . . . every Friday I present one or more poems I’ve read this week that particularly speak to me;

. . . . . some Saturdays I present one or two poems submitted by YOU, my readers.

If you would like to offer a poem for consideration, either by a favorite author or your own work, please view these GUIDELINES for Saturday Readers Share:

https://griffinpoetry.com/about/

If you would like to receive an email each time a post appears, please SUBSCRIBE to Verse and Image using the button on the Home Page.

If you have a hard time finding the SUBSCRIBE button on this WordPress site, you can send me your email address and I will add you to the subscriber list. Send your request to

COMMENTS@GRIFFINPOETRY.COM

Thanks again for joining the conversation.

— Bill