Ute Carbone's Blog, page 8

A New #Poem: Impossible Light

Sky reflected in water. Beaver Brook, New Hampshire July 2017 I've been thinking, lately, of the meaning of home and the nostalgic memories we have of childhood. This poem, like the picture, is a reflection.
​
​Impossible Light
 
The geography of home
holds the soft topography of undulating hills,
is reflected in clouds playing hide and seek with sun
in water so blue it strikes the heart.
The smell of pine is sweet in the green yard where you skipped rope
and the treehouse where you told your secrets to the wind.
There is the doorway where your mother called your name,
the garden where daisies and roses grew in midday sun.

At least, this is what you remember.
The maps of your memory have been washed over by the salt of your life
until they are diaphanous and shiny.

You’ve packed and unpacked a thousand suitcases to find that country again,
a place that says to you, ‘this is what you are looking for’
The land that eludes you is fragile as the scent of winter.
it wafts past like the ghost of those you knew--
those red warm faces gathered by a fire,
their bell like laughter an echo.
You’ll go all the way to where the landscape dissolves to a vanishing point
to find it again.
And all the while it remains just beyond the reach of your feet,
the impossible light you search.
.

Shades of #HenryDavidThoreau

Henry David Thoreau was born this day, July 12, two hundred years ago.  America was a newborn place then, still learning to walk with freshly formed independence. There was no mass media, no cars, no electricity, no airplanes.  There were no superhighways, no skyscrapers, no noisy honking cities. I imagine Concord, Massachusetts as pastoral, farms whose boundaries were marked by stone walls, wood lots alongside fields, a dot of houses on a country lane, horses snorting as they hauled hay wagons from field to barnyard.
And yet, Henry David sought escape from the hustle of everyday life, sought the refuge of the wild and natural world for solace, for the reflection of his own soul.   His words, “In wilderness is the preservation of the world,” might have been written for today.  In fact today, we need to remember those words more than ever precisely because our world has gotten so much busier, so much nosier, so much faster than it was in the days when Thoreau wandered alongside the banks of Walden Pond.
We have disconnected from the wildness of the world. Thinking, wrongly, that we have conquered nature we divorce ourselves from it.  If Henry David were here, I believe he’d tell us we are making a devastating mistake.  We are nature.  It is in our bones, in our blood. We cannot cut ourselves off from the natural world and survive. 
The dunes of Cape Cod, the canyons of Utah, the green hills of Cumberland Gap, are more than just pretty places to take selfies. They are our refuge, the place where we can find solace, the reflection of our beautiful and immortal souls.  Let’s listen to Thoreau. Let’s preserve these wild places. Because in preserving them, we preserve the world.

#Poetry Portraits.

From time to time, I need to refuel my creativity. One of the best ways to do this, I've found, is to play. I love messing around with words and, lately, I've been messing with images.  I'm posting some of the better results on social media. So why not add my blog to the list of posting places.
​This poem was revised from an original version I'd written about snapdragons. The picture was taken at a local farm stand a few weeks back. It had been raining, and I loved the way the plants looked after the rain.

#SizzlingSummerReads

The Romance Reviews and a whole lot of authors (including yours truly) are partying all month!
​There will be contests and prizes daily, and you can enter to win a $50 Amazon gift card for all your summer reading fun.
​You're invited, of course. So get out the beach chair, slather on some suntan lotion, and drop by often for your chances to win. TRR Sizzling Summer Reads

#Snaps Monson Village

A wonderful hike with friends, a gorgeous spring day, and a new phone with a better camera than I've had before led to these pictures. 
​I'm so grateful to live in a place where woodland hikes like this are an easy car ride and walk away.

The Lilac Hour

Hi Readers,

I'm pleased to announce that the Lilac Hour, my short story trilogy, is going to be available as an Amazon e-book once more.
These three short stories are all about love. It's a short sweet read perfect for a quiet hour of reading.
The e-book releases on June 1, but you can pre-order it now for only 99 cents. And if you're an Amazon Prime reader, you can read it for free! The Lilac Hour

Cover Update The Lilac Hour #amwriting #reads

As some of you know, I'm going do-it-yourself with republishing The Lilac Hour. To that end, I've updated the cover just a tad. The photo is the same one used on the original cover. It's a picture of  Hendrick's Head Lighthouse by Alex Kerney.
​I'm hoping to have these three short stories out again at Amazon as an e-book on June 1.
​Meantime, there's more on the stories, including a short excerpt, on The Lilac Hour page.

A Path in the Dark Wood

 
The Dante quote above could be changed to ‘in the middle of my writing journey’ and it would be a perfect way to describe the last year or so of my writing life. 
Like in most things, opportunities come and then pass away again. I’ve spent a long time writing and publishing and trying to get a toe hold into the slippery slope of book sales.  The upside—I love writing, I love making stories, I could no more stop than I could stop breathing. The downside—publishing is hard. Sometimes, from my end of things, it seems like there are more books than there are people to read them. When one of my publishers, the one who’d been pubbing my women’s fiction, shut down for lack of sales, I felt disheartened. I was lost in a dark wood, metaphorically speaking. 
It’s taken me a long time, but I’m finally taking another first step into pub world. I’m re-releasing The Lilac Hour, the short story trilogy that first got me noticed by publishers. It had gotten a few scant good reviews in it’s former life. Here’s hoping the resurrection will be a success.
The other part of Dante’s quote resonates with me, too. The path forward is never straight. Sometimes it feels as though I’m walking in circles. But if I can distance myself and really look, I notice those circles are concentric. Each a little bigger than the last, each encompassing a bigger piece of life. My life, both writing and personal, expands. Like the universe. May it always be so.

#NationalPoetryMonth The Weaver

This poem is a personal one, written in memory of my mother, who was a weaver. I have fond memories of her sitting at her loom.
The Weaver
Before her thoughts began
to unravel,
​past and present warped together
into a single strand of yarn,
​my mother spent ​her Sundays
pushing a shuttle boat ​across a loom.
​Red and white thread spooled into roses and hearts,
​her fingers playing over light and dark colors,
recounting the world with their own
​ordered brilliance, creating
a story in the weave of fabric.

There is no way to tell her story
​without speaking of hands,
​the way they craft a life
​and how the craft is passed
mother to daughter
​like a shuttle through the weft
​changing imagination into something touchable
​that can be caressed between finger and thumb,
​and smoothed against troubled days.
​

#PoetryMonth Penelope

In honor of National Poetry Month, I'm posting some of my poems on my blog. Penelope by Dante Garbriel Rossetti 1868 In Homer's epic, the Odyssey, Penelope is the wife of the hero Odysseus. When he doesn't return from sea, it is presumed he's dead. Suitors come by to try and win Penelope's hand in marriage now that she's a widow, but she insists that she cannot remarry until she has finished weaving a shroud for Odysseus' father, Laertes. Every day she sits at her loom to weave and every night she unravels her weaving in order to buy time, for she is sure that Odysseus will one day return home to her.
This poem comes out of the story

​Penelope
​Each day I sit by the fire
​and weave a shroud
with the thread of my tears.
Would be lovers pass by the window,
​the cool shadows of their bodies fall
through the doorway.
​Their wooing voices are carried away
​by the wind and only
the click of my loom fills the silence.

​I turn my longing into cloth,
​touchable, I can run it under my fingers.
When night comes, I unravel my hunger
​and send it to the dark skies, hoping
the warp of stars will find you.

​Once finished with the night work,
I fall into a sea of dreams--
​gold breaking at sunrise,
​billowing white sails--
the linen promise of your return.