Wednesday, December 5, 2012
Monday, December 3, 2012
Plotting the Resurrection
PLOTTING THE RESURRECTION
Old,
too long Brooks raincoat,
little,
round wool hat, galoshes...
as
years went by there was something
comical, yet touching about Katharine's
gray
appearance on this one day
in
the fall she got herself up for laying out
the
spring bulb garden.
With
diagram and clipboard in hand
she
waddled to the director's chair-
a folded canvas thing placed for her
at the
edge of the plot where she sat
hour
after hour, in wind and weather
as
Henry produced dozens of brown bags
full of new bulbs and a basketful
of
old ones ready for the intricate interment.
Small,
hunched over figure absorbed
in the
implausible notion
there
would, indeed, be another springtime
with its pinks and greens and yellows,
oblivious to the end of her own days,
she
knew perfectly well was near at hand...
there
she sat with her detailed chart
beneath dying October skies
plotting the resurrection.
Betty Spence
Mobile, Alabama
* Poem found in E.B. White's introduction to his
wife's book,
Onward and Upward in the Garden.
Ivy Wild
Ivy Wild
Grandmother's screened-in-porch was ivy-bound.
The way she pinned green
leaves to the screen
you would have thought them tresses of the sun.
She had such heart spun ways of doing things-
with silver ropes of hair let down for love
she used
hairpins to pin the glory up.
NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY
Every day now
the journey-bound
hickory-
in flower before leafing out-
opens another, another,
and still another
gold-tasseled
package.
Playing pendulum
with catkins as tufted
as a young man 's chin,
the gifted tree
going green in its gold
leaves me to write
thank-you notes.
Nesting Laughing Gull
In clump
of shoreline grass
a speckled green egg
swings gently
to the lub-a-dub sounds
of laughter on the wing.
*Poems in Avocet by Betty Spence
Seeding the Mstery
Time of Singing
A Magazine Of Christian Poetry
Volume 37 Number 3
Winter 2010/2011
SEEDING THE MYSTERY
(The tomato is celebrated in legends of romance as an apple of love.)
The winter of your dying past,
it's time to seed the tomatoes.
As memory would have it,
I find you in the potting shed.
I watch through the window
as you make small drain holes
in the bottom of Styrofoam cups
and pour in a measure of potting soil
every bit as promising as desire.
The fierce grip that once operated
bulldozers with tires as tall as cars
now let go,
you moisten the tip of a work-strutted
finger, touch it to your tongue
and pick straight up a small brownish-red seed
as dry and springy as a speck of dust
and drop in a womb-like cup
an embryo embedded
with a replica of love apples
heavy with summer-sweet flesh.
Betty Spence
Mobile, Alabama
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Get to know Betty Spence, award-winning Semmes poet
Published: Tuesday, April 24, 2012, 1:15 PM
Betty Spence
MOBILE, Alabama — Betty Spence, 78, encourages everyone, particularly senior citizens, to follow their dreams and to never give up. If the dream is to write, then create poetry or stories or essays. The reward is in doing what the heart desires, she says; the awards, if and when they come, are icing on the cake.
For Spence, who's been writing most of her life, the awards are finally coming.
Though she's made a career in newspaper work and producing devotions for various religious organizations, it is poetry that Spence loves and the genre in which she's recently begun receiving recognition.
A former columnist and correspondent for the Press-Register and a devotional writer for Assembly of God and Church of God publications, Spence got "turned on to poetry" when, at age 39, she attended the University of South Alabama. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English with a concentration in creative writing.
She's had moderate success with her poetry over the years, but 2011 was her year to shine in that area. She had her works published in several print and online journals. In October, she attended the Alabama State Poetry Association Conference at the University of Montevallo, where she received the following awards for her poetry: first place in the Alabama State Poetry Society Fall contest with her entry "These are Mine"; second place in the Mississippi Poetry Society-sponsored Poet Laureate category with "Needle Delights"; and an honorable mention in the ASPS contest for "The Paper Folder."
Spence continues writing devotionals for adults (regularly published in "God's Word for Today," "Penned from the Heart" and "Life Related Learnings" and for teens ("Take Five Plus").
Get to Know Betty Spence
Birthplace: Mobile
Hometown: Crawford community near Semmes
Family: Son, Chuck
Profession: Wrote for newspaper 12 years and had a column entitled "In the Neighborhood" for eight of those; writes devotionals for adults and teens; and recently won awards for her poetry
Birthplace: Mobile
Hometown: Crawford community near Semmes
Family: Son, Chuck
Profession: Wrote for newspaper 12 years and had a column entitled "In the Neighborhood" for eight of those; writes devotionals for adults and teens; and recently won awards for her poetry
She belongs to several writers' organizations, including Alabama Writers' Conclave, the Pensters, Alabama State Poetry Society, Florida Poetry Society and the Huntsville Literary Society.
In the past year, she also co-founded, with Geri Anderson, the Greenleaf Writers' Group, which meets the third Saturday of each month at 10 a.m. at Semmes Public Library, 9150 Moffett Road.
-----
This story was written by Jo Anne McKnight, Press-Register Correspondent.
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Poem published in Birmingham Arts Journal, Vol. 8 Issue 4
ICE SKATER
Betty Spence
Always be like water
resounding in his ears,
fluid moves give a river
as breakable as bone
back its ebb and flow.
Silver-booted blades
scratch winter tracings
as fabulous as fishes caught
on alder limbs dropped into
holes in Walden's Pond
iced-over with magic panes.
* Read Birmingham Arts Journal, online at www.birminghamartsjournal.org.
Editor: Jim Reed...Poetry Editor: Irene Latham...Art Editor: Liz Reed...
Production Editor: Kathy Jolley
Also published in Winter, 2011/2012 was the following poem.
School Children View the Body
Of an 11 Year Old Gang Member
The picture in the paper
shows them looking sideways
into the casket, mothers hovering.
Robert, better known as Yummy,
(he could live on animal crackers)
was to start sixth grade in the fall.
To find the hidden picture
look for a boy putting his tousled head
in the lion's mouth.
BS
* Lora Zill is editor of TOS
School Children View the Body
Of an 11 Year Old Gang Member
The picture in the paper
shows them looking sideways
into the casket, mothers hovering.
Robert, better known as Yummy,
(he could live on animal crackers)
was to start sixth grade in the fall.
To find the hidden picture
look for a boy putting his tousled head
in the lion's mouth.
BS
* Lora Zill is editor of TOS
Time of Singing, Winter 2011/2012
"Eighty-Something" took second place in Time of Singing Winter 2011/2012 Contest, "It's a Wonderful Life."
Eighty-Something
After "coming into Eighty" by May Sarton
I think I shall live to be eighty-something--
I've seen how loath old poets are to leave.
Stick-figures in wind-puffed sleeves
staring down an ocean of words unsaid,
languishing for want of naming things
to others and themselves.
I've seen them piping like shore birds
on finding half-buried in the sand
a bottle thrown into a river at flood stage,
a bottle, for all I know, bearing the words:
Write the vision, and make it plain.
For all the times time has hurried me
I think I shall live to worry time along.
Already half-past the wakefulness of noon,
I'd like to live to sleep-in, sleep-off poems,
live until lines in my face story forth,
live long enough to give away whatever
to whomever I please and be the richer for it.
I'll say goodbye but once--and that at the gate.
You can, if you like, watch me out of sight.
--BS
Eighty-Something
After "coming into Eighty" by May Sarton
I think I shall live to be eighty-something--
I've seen how loath old poets are to leave.
Stick-figures in wind-puffed sleeves
staring down an ocean of words unsaid,
languishing for want of naming things
to others and themselves.
I've seen them piping like shore birds
on finding half-buried in the sand
a bottle thrown into a river at flood stage,
a bottle, for all I know, bearing the words:
Write the vision, and make it plain.
For all the times time has hurried me
I think I shall live to worry time along.
Already half-past the wakefulness of noon,
I'd like to live to sleep-in, sleep-off poems,
live until lines in my face story forth,
live long enough to give away whatever
to whomever I please and be the richer for it.
I'll say goodbye but once--and that at the gate.
You can, if you like, watch me out of sight.
--BS
Harp-Strings Poetry Journal
New publication: Harp-Strings Poetry, Winter 2012.
Editor: Madelyn Eastlund
Editor: Madelyn Eastlund
Home from peddling turnip greens,
Daddy poured it out like small worries
on the kitchen floor. Mama, who could
all but see germs passed from hand to hand,
wouldn't have it any other way.
That she never took a shine
two what we children were so taken by
had something to do with always having to
count it out to somebody else.
But me and my brothers... I wish
you could have seen us in the money...
coin striking coin, coins rolling
like runaway wheels across fields
of green and brown linoleum.
You would have thought us proper tellers
the way we stacked together what goes together
--pennies, nickels,quarters, dimes...
We knew all along the silver,
as Daddy called it, was not ours to keep.
Ours was the feel of it, round and smooth,
the weight of it heavy in the palm of your hand.
Ours was to count it and to know great sums.
And having this, we were content
to wrap it in little banker's sleeves
that tell (in part) what it all comes to.
--Betty Spence
"In the Money" received first place in the 1997
National Federation of State Poetry Societies
Founders Award category and was pulblished
in NFSPS' 1997 Encore.
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