Friday from the Archives: “Blossoming Poplars,” “Unpublished Interview,” “Repairing the Farmhouse,” “The Home Place,” and “Along the Ridge”: five poems by James Applewhite with art by Paul Hartley in NCLR 2010
It is time for this year’s Applewhite Prize contest! Fittingly, we kick off the National Poetry Month with one of the contest’s namesake’s many poems we’ve published over the years.
In Rebecca Godwin’s review of Cosmos, the book this poem is from, she writes, “Applewhite brings his curiosity about cosmic beginnings to the fore in this collection, not forgetting the local landscapes also central to his poetic output but integrating them into this study of the universal ordering principle. Light and dark, nature, past and present, movement and stasis form motifs allowing the poet to show correspondences of all things in creation. North Carolina settings such as Stantonsburg, Durham (where Applewhite taught at Duke University for thirty-four years and still lives), Goldsboro, and Banner Elk join Normandy, France, and Oahu,
Hawaii, as places where connections form the meaning that gives purpose to humans’ lives.”
Poetry sees both the intimate and the universal. Send us your best!
Blossoming Poplars
by James Applewhite
Daylight, May-bright, incites
these poplars’ blossoming, at heights
my eye achieves, following flights
of bees. They arc in half-orbits,
hovering trees, that they nimbus against
the horizon. There, gray striations hint
at depths beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
I remember the light-bits densely far,
where in Orion’s sword, new suns appear.
My telescope, in earlier years,
glittered with pin-prick beginning stars:
nebula-births, that no eyepiece captures.
Shielded from cosmic magnitudes,
the poplars’ leafy finitudes
upraise a glory in green-gold floods.
In the trembling eyepiece, slight
points of light would then represent
intense weights, collapsing to ignite,
upon their black antecedent. Here,
these Earth-rooted blossoms appear
highest to aspire. They measure
Earth-distance, their boles uphold
a color’s ascendance, as I behold
light’s crowning of sight with gold.
We know by feeling, nursed to trust
the scent of fruit, our heart’s thrust
answered in quests on this planet.
Pained to know of centerless space,
we are held in breath by gravity close,
in beauty of our grave Earth-place.
Exceeding it, these poplars spring
into inflections of sun, which seeing
aligns as toward an everlasting.
Add the NCLR 2010 issue to your collection and Cosmos is still in print!
