Journey with John Stokes

Friday, August 8, 2025

Beyond the pail

All about the past permeates

every pail, plant and pot

holding something at one time

a tale, a moment, not forgot

Cemetery like yet alive

Resurrection like

Awaiting consummation

in hope another after we are gone

will see in the pail, the plant, the pot

Things this one

Never forgot.

Due to flooding of the Suwannee...The Nephila Clavipes Patrol have volunteered....To keep all fools from the swollen banks...To keep them from wading into currents swift....Where...if they do not obey...will be swept under...to be spit ashore below White Springs....where Johnny Bull will retrieve thee....burying thee at Prospect Primitive....your marker shall read....One Swift Suwannee took him ...One Giant Spider warned him.

Paddle quietly

Yes...perhaps I shall paddle with you...but first....promise me....not to speak of eschatology( pridefully), philosophy( unintelligibly),democracy( ignorantly) or ecology(religiously)....but silently....breath in poetry....exhale knowingly....and possibly... take fewer strokes....as you paddle SLOWLY along with a mute john stokes.

Spires

The Morning Glory and the gourds grow beside one of the old spires from the steeple that once was on the Sopchoppy Methodist Church. When the old Methodist Church was torn down around 1960, my father, who was pastoring the church at the time, saved them.

Do this…

In Remembrance

In fifty-six our father

Placed my sister and I

upon

The altar

At Easter

In the old Sopchoppy

Methodist church

Now placing one

Upon an altar

Does not mean

Much to many

But to those called

It means more

Than memory

Ever recalls

Falling Creek

TBT

An old view of Falling Creek falls

One of the favorites of the gallery curator was a shot of the falls. I have this feeling today like last year I will be skunked in the Branford Show. I must choose wisely what I put in the Gallery.

Focus John

Nothing stokes me more than mariposa photography. Especially flight. Now I shot this Gulf Fritillary at about 3200 at F8 in manual with auto ISO set at 1600 max with a plus one exposure compensation, had the focus set on group.

Well, I would have been capital Stoked had I got the eyes sharp. The new eye recognition mode on Sony cameras would have been welcome.

Granny’s sill

Granny's Sill

Johnclarestokes

Today the sills are sealed

Nothing gets in

Nothing goes out

Not so Granny's Sill

Mostly open

To hear the children

To cool the baking

To lean upon for conversation

I miss the scents inside

I miss the sounds outside

Sills sealed

Sealed away

303

An I-10 prophecy

For the day is near, even the day of the Lord is near, a cloudy day; it shall be the time of the heathen.

Ezekiel 30:3.

And how. If ever there was a time of the heathen, Tis now. Mandates, masks, vaccines, distance, close down, isolation, no singing, brother against brother, love unnatural, infantilism, it’s cloudy alright.

This was 2021 and it’s vastly improved in 2025 though the left still rages.