Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
N C L R ONLINE
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2023 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE FINALIST BY ROBERT W. HILL
After Midnight —dum spiro, spero There are 17 cattle in the pinecones. At 1st, as I was settling to sleep, I started to say, as a startlement, to my sleeping wife COURTESY OF HIDELL BROOKS GALLERY, CHARLOTTE
that the dog is walking on the pond, but it wasn’t sleepy, edgy enough to be real, to be really what I wanted to say. I didn’t want to alarm her by saying, well, that, but to think cattle and say it into the dark, chiseled runes inside my eyelids (burning), I was sure I’d conjured famine-dreams from cheap-book illustrations of pharic courts astonished by Joseph’s visionary schemes. Not wise enough to slake my children’s thirsts, balm my dogs’ aging organs and frames, cut free my nation’s wrangled corpus – yet lurking
Dream Waking, 2018 (acrylic on canvas 48x60) by Herb Jackson
like a burrowed beetle in spines of cones knocked by wind and other passings, I try tonight to say myself to sleep, while cattle surprise the jogging neighbors, sunflowers work toward August, stone fruit, bleached wing-bones of hope, tender exhaustions of our powers, two who love each other, talking into sleep-mist about foolishness – I hear 7-plus-10 prophetic animals treading our tree-fall.
ROBERT W. HILL was born in Anniston, NC, and raised in Charlotte. A five-time finalist, he has published several poems in NCLR and NCLR Online, as well as numerous other venues, such as Appalachian Journal, Broad River Review, Cold Mountain Review, Shenandoah, South Carolina Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Southern Review. He is also the co-author with Richard J. Calhoun of James Dickey (Twayne, 1983).
HERB JACKSON, a native of Raleigh, earned his MFA degree at UNC Chapel Hill. In 1999, he received the North Carolina Award for Fine Arts and in 2015, the North Caroliniana Society Award for extraordinary contributions to the state’s cultural heritage. He is a Davidson College Professor Emeritus of Art who has had over 150 one-person exhibitions and has been featured in numerous group exhibitions in the US and abroad. His work is in the permanent collections of over a hundred museums, including the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the British Museum in London.