Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
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2023 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE FINALIST BY RICHARD BETZ
Isaac Hollif ield We all drap off one by one. And when your time comes, we’ll miss you fer a spell. And then – we’ll fergit.—Isaac Hollifield
COURTESY OF CHRIS HOLLIFIELD AND DAVID BIDDIX
Here’s the irony, Isaac: we do remember you, even now, for your succinct view of mortality, people dropping like the last leaves of autumn, one by one when the season comes around, and for your handsome handlebar mustache, arms crossed defiantly in that photo on the wall of Switzerland Inn, from a vanished time, the long slope downhill, the corner of the shed, the team of horses just out of sight waiting to take summer tourists to Mount Mitchell camp, and the delicious relish in your sharp old eyes as those tender outsiders climbed aboard your most uncomfortable horse-drawn wagon, eighty-seven years old, five children from Millie Shuford, nobody but a neighbor and sometimes-midwife to help a woman in labor, as tough as old leather as you, I expect, you, who did not go gently before you dropped and expected us all to forget, would never have expected to be preserved this way, have believed I would be standing here today in this comfortable old inn, studying your face, while the morning fog rolls away slowly, down the Blue Ridge to distant Lake James.
Isaac Hollifield (1860–1947)
RICHARD BETZ grew up in New England but has lived in North Carolina for almost fifty years, first in Asheville, then in Highlands. An outdoorsman and an avid runner, he has run twenty marathons including the Boston Marathon. He has been a finalist for the James Applewhite Poetry Prize seven times now, twice receiving Honorable Mention. His poetry collection Bells in the Night was published by Outskirts Press in 2021.