Poems from New Books by Western North Carolina Poets

by Ted Olson

Sepia Print: Nov. 2, 1919

They sit on the old wooden swing,
The sun on their faces.
They are nineteen and in love.
She leans against him
And looks as happy as
She said she once was.
Clasping her tightly,
Claiming her,
He is handsome and sober.

What did they know then of
Distances
That would cause him to
Loosen his clasp–
Her to move to the
Far end of the swing,
Her smile fading?

We never saw those
November lovers,
Gone long before that
Rainy Saturday we spent looking
At the old picture album
And finding them there–
Two young strangers
In unfamiliar dress
And unfamiliar closeness.

We knew two gray persons
Meshed by
Forty years and
Four children,
Distanced by
The people they had become,
Their hearts grown numb.

But we wished all our lives,
As children do,
To see those lovers in the print
Close on the swing.

And at last, 63 years later
In this sunless November ground
They are side by side again
With hardly any distance at all
Between them.

 

~ Donna Lisle Burton
From “Letting Go: Poems, 1983-2003” (Pisgah Press, 2012)

Jogging Through Jane Austen

He has been through most of the books
in the libraries around town and discovered
the best places tend to be in British novels
of the nineteenth century, as long as they aren’t
set in London or the industrial north.
Twentieth century literature is too riven
with wars, class struggles, grammatical
experiments, identity upheavals. The ground
continuously shifts, and he’s always in danger
of turning an ankle. As for the Renaissance,
he tried working out there for a while
attracted by the easy access to Shakespeare,
but found the weather too unpredictable.
Tempests would suddenly appear, making
it difficult to find the way home, plus
no one would leave him alone. In a world
of witches, no one is too strange, even a man
in blue Nikes, headband, and running shorts.
So now he sticks mostly to Austen novels,
loping along paths between Bath and Bristol.
If anyone sees him, they’re either too polite
or too skeptical to say anything. Or maybe,
in this milieu, no one can admit they’ve seen
a bare-legged man covered with sweat,
scissoring rhythmically across the countryside.
In these stories, he feels safe. He knows
where they go, the twists and turns, everything
as comfortable as broken-in running shoes.

 

~ Joseph Mills

From “Sending Christmas Cards to Huck and Hamlet” (Press 53, 2012)

Domestic

The sows are in heat, squealing and pink.
The wild boar comes from the forest
to batter at their pen.

I go out and smash the ice
on the trough. The water
breaks free. This takes
a pick ax. Wielding it, I feel wild.

But the only strength in this story
is the fences’. Not even boars are wild –
imported for hunting a hundred years ago,
crossing the sea in a rich man’s crate.

When I hang up the pick ax
it freezes to the nail, clinging as I do,
making my living elsewhere and

returning to farms after sunset,
the barns symbols
just discernible in the dark.

 

~ Rose McLarney

From “The Always Broken Plates of Mountains” (Four Way Books, 2012)

Rapid River Magazine’s 2012 Poetry Contest Winners –>