Celebrating 25 Years of the North Carolina Literary Review
N C L R ONLINE
BY JAMES APPLEWHITE
Pine Woods Annunciation
O sane and sacred death.—Walt Whitman
COURTESY OF CITY ART GALLERY
The Woods (ceramic and mixed media, 18x18) by Vicky Smith
VICKY SMITH was raised in Eastern North Carolina and maintains a ceramics studio in Greene County. She earned a BA in Studio Art at UNC Wilmington and an MFA at East Carolina University. She was an adjunct professor in ceramics at UNCW from 2002 to 2013 and a recipient of the North Carolina Regional Artist Project Grant in 2012, which included a solo show at 621 N Fourth Street Gallery in Wilmington. Her work has also been shown in juried exhibitions in 2005 in Minnesota and in 2007 and 2010 in Texas. The Woods was inspired by “Pine Woods Annunciation” and included in the Sixth Annual James Applewhite Poetry Invitational exhibit at City Art Gallery in Greenville. See more of this artist’s work on her website.
Pines lean alive through a space aslant as if breathing in distance foreshadowing the beams of stars shining through these pine-needle rays. A bole with its alligator bark rolls with the Earth into dark continuing the round of existence. The strand of a spider is spending its shining defying oblivion – as if plucked by light into trilling first being. A warbler strings the sun’s straight heat with the drops of its notes, and modulates time into moments. Then a sparrow on a wire waves its wings in fire of the low sun behind it, a heartblood beat in this light. There was once a pregnance a nothing before existence. Now in time so aligned from a weed by this spider-web shine I sweat in ignorance – the beat of my blood encoded in some first word I cannot read. I encounter the countenance of sacredness in each bright breath and life’s erasure.
JAMES APPLEWHITE is Professor Emeritus of Duke University and a regular NCLR contributor. His numerous honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Award, the Jean Stein Award in Poetry from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Associated Writing Programs Contemporary Poetry Prize, and the North Carolina Award in Literature. In 1996, he was elected to join the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and in 2008, he was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. Read more about the poet in Rob McDonald’s interview with him forthcoming in the 2016 print issue of NCLR.
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