Shabbat Shalom

Continuing the theme of poetry from earlier this week, and as Shabbat settles upon us -- hopefully bringing with it some small reprieve from the record-setting heat that has smothered Arkansas this week -- I thought it only appropriate to share a couple pieces from my dear friend Naomi Stone:

The Sabbath

Today do nothing as

you usually do. Time is pooling

open. No sorrow in this blue

breathing air. Do not touch

the light; do not brush your hair;

do not even speak

of what binds you in the week..

You have come here to

learn to be like us, or

not. For now we each inhale our sweet

share of sky. We will not release it until

sundown.

Outside of Time

During the Sabbath you are in other time. You carry nothing

but your continuing

breath. Enter here, where

time is not

time, inside an alignment of the heavenly

and earthly worlds. The same happens when two bodies

join: the worlds rowing under each

skin climb into a zygote. Birth. And then no-time again

when the ram's horn

possesses your walled village. The men

blow the horn on each day of rest --

when you hear it, you stop

your breath and wish.

Listen. Your breath

held.

And those stars

behind the stars you recognize,

they stay.

Both can be found in Nomi's first book of poetry, Stranger's Notebook, published under the name Nomi Stone (TriQuarterly Books, 2008).

Greg Brownderville of Pumpkin Bend

I have tried to like poetry. It seems the literary, sophisticated thing to do.

But thus far, I haven't encountered much that I feel I can sit down and soak up, enraptured for any actual length of time.

Greg Brownderville, on the other hand, is one poet/folktale teller I have come to like. The young writer from the tiny Arkansas town of Pumpkin Bend -- it's in Woodruff County, I looked it up -- conveys life in the Delta with language so rich you can almost taste his words.

Two of my favorite lines come from separate parts of his poem, "Mystery":

"It's nice to know a passage of the world by heart."

And

"Everything that shatters, everything that scatters, everything that matters is a mystery."

I first fell in love with Greg...I mean Greg's poetry...when I heard him read some of his work at the yearly Arkansas Literary Festival soon after I'd moved here. I think all that's required to begin adoring a good writer is to hear him read his work aloud. Greg's velvety phrases are like verbal molasses, slowly dripping over you until you're enveloped by the sweet, Southern rhythms.

To whet your appetite, here's the poem with which he closes Deep Down in the Delta (The Doodlum Brothers Press, 2005):

Reasons

An utterly unlabored thought

That takes away the sting,

Like an unexpected crystal rock,

Polished by a spring;

The day that dawns when nights are swarming,

Like sun on the blade of a knife;

Your breathing in my bed this morning:

Reasons men have clung to life.

GO FIND HIM. Most recently, he published an essay, "Squirrel Soul," in the August Little Rock Soiree.

http://www.inarkansas.com/19178/squirrel-soul