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Southern Light

Southern Light - ISBN 978-0-9827252-2-1
Ford, Falcon and McNeil, publishers, released Southern Light: Twelve Contemporary Southern Poets in April, 2011. Each poet speaks, with a unique voice, of a land illuminated by the hot southern sun. Over 180 poems celebrate both regional traditions and life in the New South. Many of the works are published in this volume for the first time while others are well known and award winning.

Ray Zimmerman, Executive Editor

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These two poems appeared in Southern Light. 
​
Cranes


Their voices
call to my ears,
pull my eyes skyward,
heard before sighted,
Sandhills from Michigan.

Cranes overhead
wing southward,
call my thoughts to fly with them
to Okefenokee
or the Gulf Coast of Florida.

Cranes arrive, bring news of winter,
their voice compared to barking geese,
to the bugling of wild elks.

These are no geese,
their words no honk,
no barnyard bark for them.
It is a rattling coo,
doves amplified 1000 times.

Arrows shot from a bow,
they neither swoop nor slow,
they rocket southward,
abandon me here
rooted to the ground.

The poem “Glen Falls Trail” won second place in the Tennessee Writers Alliance poetry contest, 2007. It appears in Southern Light: Twelve Contemporary Southern Poets along with “Cranes.” The two poems also appeared in the now out of print chap book, Searching for Cranes.

Glen Falls Trail

I climb the limestone stairs
through an arch in rock,
into the earth’s womb,
pass through to a surprise:
George loves Lisa painted on a wall.

I wonder, did he ever tell her?
Did she ever know or think of him,
raise a brood of screaming children?
Did they kiss near wild ginger
above the stony apse?

Did lady’s slipper orchids
adorn their meeting place
where deer drink from rocky cisterns?

Did their love wither
like maidenhair fern,
delicate as English Lace?

The symbols have outlived the moment.
There is only today, only
the murmur of water underground,
my finding one trickle into a pool.

I never knew this George or Lisa.
The rock bears their names in silence,
names the stream forgot long ago.



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