Tag Archives: Roanoke

Strange skies.

The setting sun turned last night’s twilight storm clouds first to stained tobacco and then to vague violet.  It was weird.

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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

 

Rodrigo Paredes

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.

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I would like to see my creative work get a little more grounded.

I still realize that my habit of photographing the ground at my feet will seem weird to a lot of people.  But sometimes the patterns that you can find there are interesting — especially when confined within the contours of a viewfinder.

Besides, half the fun is finding battle environments where I would have loved to deploy my “G.I. Joes” when I was nine.  Oh, to be a boy again.

 

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Roanoke, Virginia, September 2018

Vicinity of the intersection of Campbell Avenue and Jefferson Street.

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Red Clay Diaries.

Although I suppose Roanoke’s characteristic iron-rich dirt looks more tan than red today.  It still was a canvas for some of nature’s eye-catching patterns.

Man oh man, I would have loved to play on that Jurassic-looking soil with my toy dinosaurs when I was six years old.

 

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Roanoke, Virginia (Southwest), August 2018.

Seen from Towers Shopping Center.

 

The green and sweeping fields of Southwest Virginia

At the threshold of a summer thunderstorm. August 2018.

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Roanoke,Virginia, July 2018 (4)

Church Avenue between the Circuit Court and the Texas Tavern.  The impressive church that you see (this town has a lot of them) is Greene Memorial United Methodist Church.

 

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Roanoke,Virginia, July 2018 (3)

Salem Avenue and Campbell Avenue, just south of the railroad downtown.

 

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