Tag Archives: Roanoke

Roanoke, Virginia, November 2018 (3)

The Wall Street here has a different feel to it than the Wall Street in New York.

20181108_100036

20181108_100219

20181108_100238

20181108_100331

20181108_100414

20181108_100514

20181108_100526

20181108_100556

20181108_100625

20181108_100831

 

Roanoke, Virginia, November 2018 (2)

It’s a sleepy Southern city, but it’s nonetheless easy to love — especially on an encroaching Autumn morning.

 

20181108_093649

20181108_095502

20181108_094827

20181108_094845

20181108_094820

Roanoke, Virginia, November 2018

20181108_085628

20181108_090738

20181108_090903

20181108_085611

20181108_091148

20181108_091115

20181108_091515

20181108_091524

 

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.

 

20181022_175954

Strange skies.

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

20181011_185329

20181011_185315

20181011_185337

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.

20181004_155625

20181004_155635

20181004_155649

 

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.

 

20180915_112023

20180915_112034

20180915_112208

20180915_112234

20180915_112259

20180915_112319

20180915_112446

Roanoke, Virginia, September 2018

Vicinity of the intersection of Campbell Avenue and Jefferson Street.

20180906_173456

20180906_173522

20180906_173540

20180906_173603

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.

 

20180814_172605

20180814_172614

20180814_172621