All posts by Eric Robert Nolan

Eric Robert Nolan graduated from Mary Washington College in 1994 with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology. He spent several years a news reporter and editorial writer for the Culpeper Star Exponent in Culpeper, Virginia. His work has also appeared on the front pages of numerous newspapers in Virginia, including The Free Lance – Star and The Daily Progress. Eric entered the field of philanthropy in 1996, as a grant writer for nonprofit healthcare organizations. Eric’s poetry has been featured by Dead Beats Literary Blog, Dagda Publishing, The International War Veterans’ Poetry Archive, and elsewhere. His poetry will also be published by Illumen Magazine in its Spring 2014 issue.

So, these guys are back.

He wouldn’t sit still for a photo, but he did alight my shoulder to say hello.

 

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“Death and Life,” Gustav Klimt, 1915

Oil on canvas.

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Are you tired of me running this poem yet?

If so, I’m sorry.  I just found the perfect image for it.  (Gotta love that Wikimedia Commons.)  It’s like this picture is an homage to the closing lines of “Roanoke Summer Midnight.”

Roanoke Summer Midnight

Its midnight moon is newly minted coin —
a white-hot silver obol
forged in burning phosphorus.
The crisping clouds around it blacken.
Its silhouetted mountains
are great blue gods at slumber
the faded-haze azure horizon’s
giants in the dim.

Those slopes have known a billion bones of hares
that raced upon them other midnights, then,
pausing, one by one,
and drawing up their downy legs at last to final sleep.

Where the Shenandoahs’ driving
beryl falls to black,
ultramarine to onyx,
lay legions of hares — generations resting.
There are the hills where ivory
rabbits sleep among gods.

Ahead and under moonlight
the curving rural road obscures its end.
At right, an intersecting well-lit modern block
confuses the curling topography.
The fresh and symmetrical asphalt’s angle
mars the winding thoroughfare with order —
a ninety-degree anachronism.

That new and perfect subdivision
affronts the corner’s antebellum chimney,
broken down to stones and overrun in lavender
— its lilac colors driven plum by sunset.
That last century’s smokestack
was itself effrontery once
to the formless places where natives stayed,
their only edifice the stars,
their only currency the blinding coin of moon.

Eyeing, then, the summits’ crowning cobalt
driving down in royal blue to coal,
I hope to one day take my rest
there, in the darkening indigo,
alongside giants,
among white rabbits in myriad easy stillness,

to pause myself at last and sleep beneath
what meadows stretch in cerulean dark,
where hares will race like moon-kissed silver,
or comets of darting pearl.

(c) Eric Robert Nolan 2017

 

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Photo credit: Anagoria [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)%5D

Cover to “Detective Comics” #69, Jerry Robinson, 1942

DC Comics.

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“Die Glut,” Sascha Schneider, 1904

“The Embers.”

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“Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.”

“Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.”

— Emil Cioran

 

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A hard rain’s gonna fall.

This is Peters Creek Road in Roanoke, VA, nearly becoming a creek itself last Monday.  Look at those sheets of rain pummel the asphalt.  Hey, everyone I spoke to was thrilled — the sudden storms brought a welcome drop in the temperature.

I swear that the storms here arrive and exit faster than their counterparts in New York. Maybe it has something to do with low-lying storm clouds funneling through the mountains?

Yeah, I like Hardee’s, what of it?

 

United Kingdom poster for George A. Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” (1968)

Continental Distributing.

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“There is no more sombre enemy of good art …”

“There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.”

— Cyril Connolly

 

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Photo credit: CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=436978

Cover to “Red Lanterns” #3, Ed Benes and Nathan Eyring, 2011

DC Comics.

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