Here I am posing with award-winning poet Ralph Earle, who kindly autographed a copy of his book, The Way the Rain Works. To the folks gathered at the Central Carolina Community College Creative Writing Program’s Open Mic Friday night, he treated us all to a few sample poems.
If you haven’t yet read The Way the Rain Works, you should do yourself a favor and order it today from Sable Books. The individual poems weave a powerful and poignant story about the slow dissolution of a family. There is great sadness, yes, but there are also touches of humor (“The Insulating Properties of Trees” and “Sweater Weather”, for example).
The primary landscape, North Carolina, is familiar but at the same time, new again, through Ralph’s intellect and imagination. In “The Mill Dam at Bynum” he writes: “In the summer I wander the overgrown farm road / like Whitman, mad and undisguised, observing / how broad the river grows there, how poised.” I am not the only one who will never think of the Bynum mill dam in the same way again!
There are many other gems, from “The Flight Back Home” to “The Sea and Sand Did This” to the title poem itself. For me, the best way to summarize my own personal experience with this book is in the concluding lines of “Snow Falling Silently”: “No matter how often / we start the story / differently, it ends / the same: water flows,/ Night grows old./ Snow falls in the silence.”
A number of other writers regaled us into the evening at the Open Mic, with diverse poems and tales of deviled eggs, dancing queens, fathers, birdsong, crisper drawers, and much, much more. A huge thanks to the members of the Board (in addition to Ralph) who organized the evening: Maggie Zwilling, Kim Overcash, Judith Stanton, Michele Berger, and Mary Barnard (who doubled as poet AND photographer for the event).
If you missed it, no worries. Stay tuned because we’ll do it again in the fall!
Ashley Memory 