It's a new year, and I am blessed. My book of poetry, Traces of Presence, published by Dr. Sue Walker, Negative Capability Press, is now available. Poet friend, Joe Whitten, author of Learning to Tell Time says:

    Betty Spence chooses words for her poems as carefully as a master quilter chooses colors for a prize-winning quilt. She sees the joyful pattern of nature as “red feathers dusting green feeder” and longleaf pines that “needle point a piece of Alabama sky.” For her, Vincent van Gogh “paints not what is, but what seems/ in seeming swirls of yellow and orange.” Betty’s faith is stitched into the fabric of her poems, for she hears the pink and blue asters “telling the glory of God” and sees the coast of Main as “God’s Rock Garden.” Be inspired by the poems in Traces of Presence.

     Here are a few short poems from the book.

Uncurtained Window

What-cheer, red feathers
dusting green feeder swinging
on black shepherd’s hook.

Call For Calendar Reform

Tell me Spring’s not the time
to ring out the old; ring in the new.

Tell me the time of white blossoms
with a hint of pink is not the time

for bees to buzz the cup; not the time
for meadow grass to throw serpentine;

not the time for Yellow Jasmine
to trumpet strains of Auld Lang Syne.

Hey, you! You in the party hat.
Tell me the calendar didn’t say that.

Stitchery

as open and airy

as stanzas allowing

a sky blue canvas
to show through,
one evergreen stitch
at a time
Longleaf Pines
n   e   e   d   l   e   p   o   i   n   t
a piece of Alabama sky.

To order books:
Betty Spence
3446 LaCoste Road
Mobile, AL 36618
251-649-4892

$15 + $2.50 S&H

Published in Time of Singing, Volume 41, Number 1, Spring 2014
Editor Lora H. Zill

God Remembers Noah-And Me
Genesis 9:13 NIV

As present as sunlight
in the midst of rain,
as promising as a green olive leaf
in the beak of a dove,
a prism casts a rainbow image
onto the pages of Sunday's lesson
spread like bread
          on the kitchen table.

Published in Time of Singing, Volume 41, Number 1, Spring 2014
Editor Lora H. Zill

For God's Eyes Alone
Roger Morigi was a master stone carver, Washington National Cathedral, 1956-1978

Scaling a scaffold
let down like a Jacob
ladder leaning against
heaven's gate,
an artisan calls out to Morigi
who had spent days
chiseling leaves
in an all but hidden part
of a sacred tableau
as spirited as children
playing hide and seek:

Why is it taking you so long?
The leaves are beautiful.
But who will ever see them?
 

                                                           TIME OF SINGING
                                                      A Magazine of Christian Poetry
                                                                    Spring 2013
                                                                Editor: Lora H. Zill

       
                         APRIL AWARENESS
               
                         April had set in
                         without a nod from me.
                         I had been too busy to notice
                         ranks of pink and green
                         springing up outside my door
                         saluting the rise of sap.
                       
                         Then one unspectacular day
                         the brassy Captain
                         of the seasons lingered
                         just beyond my lawn and made
                         glowing gestures of command.

                         In that yellow-white moment
                         I joined a light regiment of rain
                         as it marched up the walk
                         with the quickening step
                         of Spring on parade.
                                         
                                            --Betty Spence
                                               April 2013

                         

Poems in Summer 2012 Avocet, a Journal of Nature Poems

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.

                                                               --BS

 

                           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.

                                                   --BS

 

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.

                              --BS

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.