Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
N C L R ONLINE
95
“Susan Meyers lived her life as she wrote poetry, with attention and intention.” —Pat Riviere-Seel
Barbara Presnell remembers
Susan was a vital part of the North Carolina Writers Conference and many other organizations and groups in North Carolina and South Carolina. These groups and all the individuals in them were likewise an important part of who Susan was and what she loved. Susan was kind, generous, talented, precise, and complex. She was a woman of high standards, and she made the rest of us strive to be better than we were. She was an amazingly versatile poet. She was my very good friend for over twenty years. Susan loved many things, but it seemed to me she loved three things in particular: words – the mystery and puzzle and play of them; nature – she was guided by her respect and responsibility for all living things, including the undesirable living things; and she loved her husband, Blue. Her poem “Though I Hold Nothing against Snakes but Fear” combines all those loves.* It’s a poem of conscience, of internal struggle, and of acceptance. It’s not her usual lyric poem either, but narrative, a form she also mastered. The poem also has a personal relevance to me. Susan and I were hiking the Old Santee Canal during one of my visits to her Summerville home when my foot almost came down on a copperhead. It would have too, but Susan grabbed my arm and pulled me away, and we changed our direction. Shortly afterwards, she sent me her new poem, “Though I Hold Nothing against Snakes but Fear.” n n n
PHOTOGRAPH BY JEFF DAVIS
Susan Laughter Meyers
A SONG OF THE USUAL GARDEN for Susan Laughter Meyers by Shelby Stephenson And passion? No one can break out of that, Ever, though one who does becomes part of alleviation Veering to illuminate the unknown--and this: A hummer’s ruby-colored feather smears in a flare The hurt the seer fears as death In us shags on toward some Promise: A “flock of small birds” could be a promontory, Dear Happenstance, that seeing seems As a beacon instead of, say, some Cedar Waxwings onto bliss Veering for berries and sugary fruit, their foreheads Upright over black masks covering what brain Steers them over stagger grass into Paradise.
* Read this poem in Prairie Schooner 86.1 (2012): 57.
ABOVE Susan Laughter Meyers, serving as moderator of
James Applewhite Poetry Prize finalists’ reading at the 2014 North Carolina Writers Conference, Winston-Salem, NC