You have arrived at my place. Let me show you round.
What you’ll find here
Speak Forest
Why so still, they ask, why so heavy on the crisp needles your crush-grass, moss-wheezy, flopsy limbs? You sad? Your roots not fingering down into the soil and playing with stones and small tunnels, voles, beetle shells? Not sifting the crumbled leaves? You clomp. We is what was planted or what sprouted, willy-nilly, in a…
North Carolina Poetry Society
The NCPS every year holds a competition for poems in a variety of categories. I was happy to learn that in 2022 I won the Mary Ruffin Poole Award for a poem on a theme of “American heritage, sibling-hood, or nature,” for my poem “Copperhead.” I also won the Alice Osborne Award, “for children 2…
William Matthews Poetry Prize
I was delighted to learn from Keith Flynn, editor of the Asheville Poetry Review, that I was awarded first place in the 2022 William Matthews Poetry Prize competition, for my poem “Verbesina occidentalis.” The judge was Marilyn Nelson. The prize is a generous one, including not only enough money to buy a good many books…
Land
It opens, and then opens again, grows over, and changes,
lose-some, gain-some.
There were trees, once, deer cover, and browse,
hunting grounds of hawk and owl, squirrel runs,
old stumps and bark, nothing if not hospitable ….
Ancestors
All my mothers are here
in their best dresses: mother
grandmothers, great-grandmothers;
of the men only my father
posed with cigarette in hand
and my grandfather on the sofa ….
Embroidered Field
Who pulled the floss from the skein and knotted it, choosing among the colors of flowers the colors of these
perfect, impossible asters, flower within flower, corymbs and umbels, stitched in a time, I will, I will not, I will, I will not. Knot ….
Field as Auditorium
You say my messages did not get through
What sound do messages make as they lose themselves in the ether
glissando diminuendo
What is the sound of my lost language ….
The Puddle
In a rut in the dirt road: a vernal pool. A few small, almost transparent water striders twitch the surface, and below them, tadpoles wriggle and float in the limpid water, hundreds of them—all straining cell by cell to be among the living, the fat, full-throated racket and splurge of spring up and down the…
Excerpts from MILLSTONES
The millstone set in a front yard at the intersection of two roads in Carrboro, North Carolina,
knows what we lost …. Continue Reading >
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Maura High 