Your limb

 I’m sitting watching the moon

I hear a cracking sound

A pine limb big enough to squish me

Falls within ten feet avoiding the vehicle

Don’t think tree limbs don’t have a

Master guiding them

So be prepared

Should the Master one day say

Limb, upon him.

River Narrows

 River Narrows  

 by John Clare Stokes  

  Okeefenokee paddle strokes  

Trembling under thwart 

 Bull Gators provoked  

Island hammock snorts 

 Black bear splashing 

 Paddle strokes increasing  

Into tannic crashing 

 Fear never ceasing  

Into River Narrows  

Suwannee's birth canal  

The silence grows  

 Then screams and howls  

 Conceived into flow  

 Eternal toward sea 

 New secrets unfold 

 Birthed from Okeefenokee

Bob Jones in Dougon on River Narrows

Ten Years After

 Ten Years After

Johnclarestokes 

Alvin Lee I would listen to

going home, to see my baby

I'd love to change the world

Everywhere freaks and fairies

We thought yesterday 

Back to two oh thirteen

and before that oh three

and on and on back the 

Ten years after

And how much happened

In the last Ten Years After

And wondered what could

Possibly happen in the next

Ten Years Coming.

Meme the reader

 I got the old photo of meme reading a Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan book as a girl, printed for Paula to give to Claire.

Old town life

 Old Town life

And what of this old life?

Waters paddled upon

Rivers crooked and long

Some we've been upon

Many, many a time

Others never to see

In our Old Town journey

To open a bed of worms

 To open a Bed of worms

In our Williston years, my father and I maintained a bed of worms, “the best you ever saw” said Bobby Sandlin who lived next door, the worm bed defining our property line. The bed was fed by the bantam chickens manure we raised in a pen my father made, by cow manure from the Elliot Whitehurst’s huge feedlots, and every scrap left from meals mamma made and the vegetables and leftovers from the garden beside the parsonage. 

And people would come and we’d dig for them a hundred wigglers for a dollar, an easy task for there were thousands in big clusters when you turned up the rich compost. 

When we moved from Williston to Lake City, like all our prior moves, daddy took a large quantity of worms to start a new bed. My father always maintained one where ever we lived, for he loved to fish. I don’t miss so much the digging, but I sure miss fishing with him in Pappy’s lake.

Sandman range

 Sandman Range

We climbed and climbed for hours on end

It seemed we’d never reach the summit

We heard beyond there was this vast ocean

We flung our lives as to the waves we’d plummet.

O Jude

 o jude 

Johnclarestokes 

in the latter years, came the cankerous men, burning, creating wastelands, removing the old landmarks, swarming, ravenous as locusts, wandering, devouring, in the aftermath, the drought came, in the parched wail, birthing, a new world, disordered, discordant, disconnected, decadent.

Library show

 After dropping off the entries, I see that it will be a big challenge to win, place or show, with what I saw, especially Herb Ellis large monochrome prints. We shall see Tuesday. 

Bless the zinnas

 Bless the Zinnia's

by Johnclarestokes 

Father I trust you will forgive me

For they were Dollar General Zinnias

Four packs for a mere dollar

And I am not even sure

If I can get them to grow

the way they would for you,

Even though from far,far away

the seeds you'd let me spread,

little colored buttons soon opening

to sauce pan size growing,

and we would gather up a bouquet

upon the altar bowing as you prayed

the repentant would kneel near

the zinnias between you and their tears

watering them

perhaps revealing why

the zinnias grew so greatly.

Oh father

bless from on high

the dollar general zinnias

with my efforts be pleased.

Ernest Stokes, father of Luther Stokes in Homewood, Mississippi

Library show

 The two entries came with a price. Normally I frame my own as cheap as possible from Amazon. This year I had Picture Frame Design double matt and frame them. He really liked the B@w as it reminded him of his home place in Indiana. He said it was fine art as it was printed on high quality fiber paper. I enter them tomorrow,0n a threshold of a journey and The back way home. 

Ole Homewood

 Ole Homewood

Johnclarestokes 

My father first began growing and making sugar cane syrup in the mid seventies after acquiring from Wakulla County farmers the necessary implements,the old Golden Mill, the Columbus 60 gallon kettle and various straining tools, one being an old Chevy moon hubcap with holes drilled in it. When we lived in Sopchoppy in the fifties and sixties, we would annually attend the syrup cooking of Bert Rodenberry and Kenneth Strickland who taught my father how to properly cook the syrup, though he already knew much from his growing up on a farm.  He got a local brickmason Mr Dick Snyder,  to make his first chimney and kettle holder in what we called the sugar shack, a little cabin built around the kettle with a bath,kitchen and bedroom where we spent much of our time heated by the old wood stove. He called his syrup, Old Homewood, after the town in Scott County Mississippi where he was born and raised. I drew up some labels for the wild turkey and store bought bottles. With the help of the trusty Gravely tractor rigged on the cross beam to stay locked in a turning direction, it was up to the children and grandchildren and various relatives and friends to feed the stalks of cane into the mill, remembering sometimes not to duck each time the pole came around, giving all a laugh at their expense. It was our annual tradition at Thanksgiving to cook down the cane juice in the 60 gallon kettle to about ten gallons of syrup, the process usually finishing around noon where mamma and the girls usually had the tables under the trees ready for wonderful eating. It was always a tense and sometimes testy moment just before the kerosene fire from the rabbit box burner was turned off and the boiling came to an end. Too long and the syrup would be full of black flecks or dregs, too soon and it would not have the right consistency. Knowing when to dip the syrup out at the precise specific gravity from the hydrometer, usually around 16 we used to measure the syrup, or when the syrup candied when spilling off the dipper was  often a hit and miss experiment. I still have several bottles of Old Homewood and tell myself, someday I will set up the Golden mill, which I recently did in the back yard after my father passed away in March of 2011, leaving it all to me, but it is looking more and more like this tradition may have died when my father did in Williston. I hope not.