Category: Ekphrastic Poetry

Published poetry

Posted onLeave a comment

Prepositional Prayer – Appalachian Journal (forthcoming)

Your Caller Tonight is Helene – Appalachian Journal (forthcoming)

The River Has Many Faces – Tiny Seed Literary Journal (forthcoming)

Dew Aflame – Amethyst Review: New Writing Engaging with the Sacred (forthcoming)

Those Troubling Obscenities of Saxophones – San Antonio Review, Fall 2024, Vol. 7, Issue 1

That Time I Held a Screech Owl – Braided Way: Faces & Voices of Spiritual Practice (forthcoming)

Suburban Blue Ridge Blues – Appalachian Journal, Vol. 50, Nos. 3-4, 2023

Congregants at Stony Fork – Appalachian Journal, Vol. 50, Nos. 3-4, 2023

An Appalachian in-migrant tale of sorts – Appalachian Journal, Vol. 50, Nos. 3-4, 2023

Six 21st Century Lectures on Wow –The Banyan Review, Fall 2023

Surface Tension –The Banyan Review, Fall 2023

The Cherry Orchard Ladders – The Banyan Review, Fall 2023

Napping in the Hostas – The Banyan Review, Fall 2023

Some Pounding Prayer – The Raven’s Perch, April 2023

Pilgrimage on Hawksbill Mountain – The Raven’s Perch, April 2023

U2 Over Tucson – The Raven’s Perch, April 2023

Autumnal – Tiny Seed Literary Journal, 2022

Trio – Jerry Jazz Musician: A Collection of Jazz Poetry, Spring 2022

Coltrane and the Flower Moon – Jerry Jazz Musician, 2022

Southern Gothic Shopping Spree – Heartwood, 2021 (see photo below)

Spilling Robins Across the Sky – The Canary, 2020-21

Background Radiation on the Arboretum Trail – Tiny Seed Literary Journal, 2019

The Anthropocene Dweller Dreams of Rivers – Light Journal, Issue 12

I Should Hope to Pray Like the Trees – Tiny Seed Literary Journal, 2019

Asta Encounters the Divine in Big Laurel Creek – The Bark, 2019

Brimful of Grace – Valley Voices, 2018

Athabasca River Glacial Melt Global Warming Blues – The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada, 2018

Photo of kudzu in window

Photo accompanying “Southern Gothic Shopping Spree”

I should hope to pray like the trees

Posted onLeave a comment

“I should hope to pray like the trees” was published in Tiny Seed Literary Journal (March 19, 2019). I took the photo outside Banff, Alberta. Here’s the link to the published poem.

I should hope to pray like the trees

“The trees can’t control their lives. We can’t always control what happens to us. The trees can teach us acceptance. And metamorphosis.”
– Linda Brown, quoted in The Nature Fix.

I should hope to pray
Like the trees, roots running deep,
Limbs singing above.

Blending earth and sky,
Supplicants sway and bow, each
Snowy branch and bough

A sylvan chorus,
A genuflective dance, a
Chance to waltz with God.

Trees outside Banff

Trees outside Banff

Asta Encounters the Divine in Big Laurel Creek

Posted onLeave a comment

Originally appeared in The Bark: the Dog Culture Magazine, September 2019. The Bark editors placed in on the inside back cover. They omitted the epigraph by Mary Oliver, which was disappointing. But then again, The Bark has a circulation of over 200,000, so that’s easily the largest audience I’ll ever reach with one of my poems.

Asta Encounters the Divine in Big Laurel Creek

The dog would remind us of the pleasures of the body with its graceful physicality, and the acuity and rapture of the senses, and the beauty of forest and ocean and rain and our own breath.   – Mary Oliver, “Dog Talk”

Sun soaked and sparkling
Asta somehow knows, sipping
Deep the light-filled creek,

Shimmering, shining,
So numinous below. The
Ripples softly speak

Of this bright altar
Of this holy flow, of this
Old dog’s raptured glow.

Asta at Big Laurel Creek

Asta at Big Laurel Creek

Brimful of Grace

Posted onLeave a comment

“When preachers in the rural Methodist churches I attended as a boy spoke of grace, I thought of rain.” 
 – Scott Russell Sanders

Grace falls into this
Measured chalice, taunting us
To cipher Heaven.
 
But who could count the
Ageless rains, cleansing countless
Pilgrims, pulsing through
 
The Ganges, the Nile,
The sylvan-clad French Broad: each
Sky-soaked to the brim?

Originally published in Valley Voices: A Literary Review, Vol .18, No. 2, Fall 2018

Brimful of Grace photo

Photo and poem © Gene Hyde

Athabasca River Glacial Melt Global Warming Blues

Posted onLeave a comment

This is the first ekphrastic poem I published. ” Athabasca River Glacial Melt Global Warming Blues” was published in The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada (Vol. 16, No. 2 2018). It’s at this link: The Goose

Athabasca River Glacial Melt Global Warming Blues

“For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple”
– Mary Oliver, “Winter Hours”

Afoot by the flow
Of temples, of hallowed snow,
Of the glacial cloak:

Peaks wrapped in white rime
Frozen, riverine, sublime,
A shroud, nigh revoked:

Athabasca blues,
Pilgrims wading in the pews:
Doused, yet still afloat.