Journey with John Stokes

Thursday, February 6, 2025

Turn

I have come into the world , not to determine reality, but to turn upside down reality.

At the Gallery one asked me so what made you or when did you become a bird photographer? It was at that point I said to myself, gee, I got to start taking less bird photographs. I don’t want to be known as a bird photographer.

Becky

And He walks with me

Often I reflect upon her in the perpetual chair

From a teen resigned to dwell there

One wrong overturn consigning

To a sitting suspension

Of what man was destined

To sweep her off her feet

When now not knowing if

The feet are even asleep

Not even a tingle

No pain

Just dangling below

Constant reminder

If only the curve was taken slow.

Remember

Remember beneath the half moons

The time of the full moons

For in the darkness of the no moons

It shall bring hope of coming moons.

Mammy fantasy

TBT

Something just didn't seem right about what I was seeing. I could not place my finger upon it. But mammy was seeming to be enjoying eating the greens beyond the ordinary. With the mayonaisse spread liberally with pot liquor swelling the cornbread, I had seen that closed eye look before. Be it in the Saturday evening R movies or the Sunday morning glory shouting, it was a look incongruent upon mammy, whom I held above such ecstacy in her stoic, reserved prudence. But there it was, with every slow bite the closed eyes, as if she were again lying by that Itchy Spring in the time her blush was roughed. Her flames over a lifetime doused with the hair in a bun, dressed completely to exile sinful flesh, all fallen so suddenly in the sopping of the collard greens.

Entrechat

John Clare Stokes

In the course of what we now measure with time

We shall finally stop the clock keys wind

Freed from the toil of the loosened spring

No little Cuckoo to wake us from the dream.

In the same manner upon the bedside stand

The journal of words long misunderstood

Read at last with eloquence of rhyme so clear

Hearts warmed with even angels hovering near.

Upon the cold floor we shuffle slow

The groan of bones brittle growing

Ordered steps halted now abound

The earthly obstacle no longer found.

Spectacles reached for yet underfoot crushed

Down halls dark by only touch

Made to reach constellations long

Feeling hems of light fully drawn.

Freed from the shroud of spikenard

A Cuckoo choir sings a song once known

Only hummed when alone in showers

Waters running hour upon hours.

Down halls to life the dancers ascend

The crossing rapid in eternal suspend

The first entrechat upon the Milky Way

Never more lamenting the end of day.

East River Mountain

Bluefield, WV

Wednesday, February 5, 2025

Tree by the see

Tree by the See

Once a tree

Grew right to

The edge of the see

People would

gather round the

Memory of the see to

Splash about

Blindly.

Lulu

Most are just

Passing through

Nothing to do

In Lulu

Or so they think

And we just wink

Uncle Bert

Illumination in the Flatwoods

A season with the wild turkey

by Joe Hutto

There is a book I highly recommend written by Joe Hutto and his experiment in imprinting two dozen wild turkey and living with them. The place where this took place was on the property surrounding Bert Roddenberry's old Florida home place in the Apalachicola National Forest out from Sopchoppy. The man in the overalls and boots is Brother Robertus or Bert, 1890-1981. The man in the dapper city clothes was Lawrence George of Quincy, a gospel singer along with his wife, in Sopchoppy for a revival as the song leader for my father, the late Rev Luther Stokes at the United Methodist Church in Sopchoppy, who had their Asbury College President, ZT Johnson preach. We spent many Sundays at Bert and Cora’s.