Journey with John Stokes

Wednesday, April 30, 2025

Mt Tabor

Mt Tabor Methodist. Columbia Co, Florida. Burned down by an arsonist around Dec 1986. Shot with Yashica Mat 124 with Plus X and developed in D76.

When the bottle tree, the quail trellis, the rope swing, the syrup shed, the swing were at Pilgrim's Rest farm in Crawfordville, there was an order about them, a place, they fit. In the selling of the home place in 2000 and the year long moving so many years arranging, the tree and trellis and other items from a life were hastily set out without the careful thought. Williston never seemed to fit. The spacing was off. It wasn't the same. With the selling of the Williston farm in 2008 and the subsequent moving again, the accumulation of a life was scattered to my home, my sisters, my brothers, further diluting the place they held. The tools in the shed in disarray, the syrup mill stored, things rusting and rotting away. No place else to go. They seemed to lament the leaving Pilgrim Rest. It never should of happened. But it did. Slowly I’ve tried to reconstruct the mill and kettle, the bell, the many amaryllis scattered about, the split rails. With my passing I fear it all shall fall in strangers hands, with no clue as to their origin.

Where is your work?

move on lana dot org

And where are your works?

She says.

Right here, I say.

She never looks.

By their looks

By my works

You shall know them.

She moves on.

It was at times exasperation magnified when I once volunteered at the Gallery where I once displayed. One good thing, when the occasional customer would stroll through, you really got to know the smoke up from the stoked up. This lady was blowing smoke. She never even stopped to look at my work right before her.

Monday, April 28, 2025

Immogene

Kindred one

The photographs picked up with expectation

On my way to find the make up aisle

There you were in the card section

As we paused to catch up and smile

You spoke of the gathering around the keys

And I of lost opportunities

One a poet musically

One a poet of melancholy

Kindred ones

Humming in harmony

Mary way

The Mary Way

Have you found the Mary way

of just sitting away the day

by some still water lake

beside some slow moving stream

beneath one sure rising moon

above a pool of circling minnow

in a meadow awaiting the Swallowtail

Find it Martha

What f stop

The novice inquired of the master. "Tell me master, you come upon a man drowning in the ocean, what f stop should you use?" Astonished, the master exclaimed to the novice, "Have I suffered so long a time with you and still you do not know the sunny 16 rule?”