April is National Poetry Month, and this year, the timing couldn’t be better. Over the next few issues of Lowcountry Weekly, we’ll feature the work of 14 local poets.
Quiet Tide
Oh Quiet Tide
Your surface ruffled by the morning breeze
Ripples dazzle and dance
Marsh grass bows to you with grace
while floating leaves and things submerged
slip by secretly in the power of your flow.
Oh Quiet Tide
Rushing rivulets purge rich clouds of softened silt
into your lazy lingering current
blending life and death
in the broth of new creation.
Life seethes along your edges as you recede
Sunlight warms busy fiddlers’ backs
Pluff mud pops and oysters squirt
a juicy succulence shorebirds savor.
A world of air and wind and sun and sky,
a world of water, dense and deep,
share a surface as they surge.
Two worlds that thrive in parallel
abiding by their separate laws
With give and take between the two
in balance and respect.
Oh Quiet Tide
a gift to me.
The wisdom that comes with the knowing
that the cycle begins again.
The back and forth and back again
The in and out and in again
Water shares the rhythm of my breath
a second chance
a fresh start
a return home
in the soft surrender to each Quiet Tide.
– Carolyn S. Jirousek
Carolyn Jirousek grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. She and her husband, Bill, divide their time between Cleveland, Ohio, and Beaufort. She is a Registered Nurse and Lowcountry Master Naturalist, and has a Masters Degree in Art History from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. In retirement, she is letting her inner child guide her back to the joy of writing she felt as a teenager.
Ecstatic Query
What amount of courage will it take
To appear in my own skin
Even if I’m in company,
Company so sure of itself
That its trumpet drowns my silvery flute,
Even though my flute is in tune and knows
The music and has played with symphonies
And speaks with clear, true notes
Emerging from its heart?
What amount of courage can I tap
From a heart bound by tradition
That served generations of women
With thoughts worth thinking,
Words worth writing,
Love worth feeling.
Instead they said, “Yes, sir,”
Let their light shine behind closed doors,
Kept their opinions to themselves,
For fear of losing the anchor
That kept them safely moored
In the harbor of the past.
– Katherine Tandy Brown
Katherine Tandy Brown is a longtime freelance travel writer, workshop leader & writingcoach. She has led writing workshops at USC Beaufort, Tech College of the Lowcountry, numerous area retreat centers, & homes in Hawaii, Kentucky & her cozy cottage in Beaufort. Founder of Sea Island Spirit Writers(SISW), Katherine, who hails from Kentucky, is writing her first novel, One to Go: An Equine Thriller.
Spanish Moss Trail
The fiddlers lift their glasses,
which is the sea, “Tchin, tchin!”,
or claws, as wrens and cardinals
declare spring from Paul’s woods
to here where I watch the pull
of that toast through a culvert,
one side of an old rail line,
gone to pleasure, to another.
Such force defies the fact,
whether the pipe was laid right
or not. Tide will pour and it will roar
in and out from all over the world.
– Quitman Marshall
What Love Is
I am pulled toward all your pixels,
but with a Jamesian nuance,
for which, alas, I don’t have the words.
You don’t know, but I see you always
in my dreams, and what you do there
is also what love is.
– Quitman Marshall
Quitman Marshall’s book of poems, his fifth, You Were Born One Time, won the SC Poetry Archives Book Prize in 2013. A founding host of the Literary Series at Spoleto Festival USA and a winner of the Writers Exchange Award (Poets & Writers), he is presently sailing three manuscripts: Swampitude (nonfiction); The Bloody Point (novel); and American Folklore (poetry). Since 2001 he has lived in Beaufort, SC, with his wife and now three children.
The Shadow’s Truth
She used magic potions, prayed before the window facing east, and walked counter clockwise three times under the full moon
Still she knew the rhythm of their hearts were out of tune,
And their breaths, which once rose and fell in sync no longer did
In the village’s center she sat with the woman who had long ago stopped bearing children, whose
husband had left her by way of death, and her children, now grown, had wandered away
What will they think of me, if I leave she asked?
What will you think of yourself if you stay, the old woman said.
What will you tell your wings when they ask you why you didn’t let them fly away,
How will you pacify your heart when it wants to love again one day,
Which knot will you use to anchor your spirit to keep it from soaring and twirling and playing with joy,
How will you mask the stench that comes from failing to live?
They sat still in the village’s center without words,
When sun disappeared behind the distant hills the old woman spoke once more,
You can be right, or you can be well.
– Susan Madison
Susan Madison is a published author, poet, visual artist and workshop facilitator. She lives on St. Helena Island with a variety of song birds where she watches the ebb and flow of the tidal creek. Madison is currently working on a nonfiction book on the feminine aspect of the spiritual nature.
