The Wall Street here has a different feel to it than the Wall Street in New York.
Tag Archives: Roanoke
Roanoke, Virginia, November 2018 (2)
It’s a sleepy Southern city, but it’s nonetheless easy to love — especially on an encroaching Autumn morning.
Roanoke, Virginia, November 2018
The Coincidental Cat.
I ordered my copy of the Peeking Cat Anthology 2018 this morning, and the poetry gods were evidently pleased enough to thank me via emissary. (The little lady below accosted me at the stores a little while ago and made it clear she wanted to be my new best friend.)
She was a weeee bit scratchy for someone hoping for human companionship. But I didn’t hold that against her, even if I couldn’t take her in.
What’s weird is that there are very few stray cats at all in Roanoke — it’s not like New York, where they’re everywhere. (Rabbits, deer and groundhogs are far more plentiful; it’s just a different ecosystem. And I might have seen a badger once.) But this is the first stray cat I’ve seen since I arrived a year and half ago.
Hey, if you want to order a copy of the anthology, you can find it right here.
Strange skies.
The setting sun turned last night’s twilight storm clouds first to stained tobacco and then to vague violet. It was weird.
It’s a windy, rainswept morning in Roanoke, Virginia.
So how about a poem about a windy, rainswept morning?
“This Windy Morning,” by Eric Robert Nolan
The gales cry,
their sounds rise,
so strangely like
the wailing of children.
The gales
have ripped a rift in purgatory.
Along the low hill’s haze
and indistinct palette of grays,
the thinning slate shapes
are either columns of rain,
or a quorum of waifish wraiths.
Condemned but inculpable
are those little figures —
long ago natives maybe — in an ironic,
insufficient sacrament:
this obscuring rain’s
parody of baptism.
If that faultless chorus
should never see heaven,
they will ever be wind without end
their lamentations ever
shrill within rare
arriving spring downpours.
Always will the squall
imprison their calls.
You and I should refrain
any temptation to breach
these palisades of rain —
lest we be greeted by each
iron-colored countenance:
the sorrowing slim nickel
of an infant’s visage,
little boys’ graying faces,
the silvering eyes of the girls.
© 2017 Eric Robert Nolan
Photo credit: By Rodrigo Paredes from Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina (Raindrops on the window) [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons
It’s pumpkin season in Roanoke, Virginia.
October 2018.
