Facing Shenandoah Avenue. 2026.
The building was originally constructed at the start of the 20th Century as office space for Norfolk & Western Railroad.
Tag Archives: Virginia
Intersection of Shenandoah Avenue and North Jefferson Street in Roanoke, Virginia, 2026
The building on the corner is 8 North Jefferson Street.
North Jefferson Street in Roanoke, VA, 2026
Looking south.
Throwback Thursday: the debut of Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns,” 1986
That’s right — the legendary tome saw its 40th anniversary last month. (I’ve always had the habit of referring to its graphic novel format, but of course it was initially published as a four-issue limited series.)
Forty years — I can’t wrap my mind around that.
For a little perspective, imagine being a young person in 1986 and discovering The Dark Knight Returns for the first time. (I myself was introduced to it a few years down the line, but still.) Now picture an older comics fan in 1986 trying to interest you in a title that was published 40 years prior.
THAT COMIC WOULD HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED IN 1946 — a year after the conclusion of World War II. It would have to be a title like Tintin or the Mark Trail comic strip.
Damn, we’re old.
“A February Walk Short Poem,” by Eric Robert Nolan
Three score blackbirds alight a winter tree,
soundless on the leafless limbs in quiet company.
In lines of silent, sable flames, they ignite to spy
me with curiosity and six score eyes.
(c) Eric Robert Nolan 2026
Photo credit: Donald F. Mott, 2021
Nolan vs. The Bird Bullies!
Avian altercation! A chirpity-chirpity ruckus erupted at my fifth floor windowsill this morning … two sparrows were biting and plucking at a third. The aggressors had darker head coloring; the victim’s was lighter — I’m guessing this means it was either a female or a juvenile?
I tapped the glass pretty hard, and the bad birds took off. Then this beleaguered bird-twerp hung out for a minute and actually looked at me as if in acknowledgment. (Yeah, the picture quality is cruddy, but you can see the little fluff-nugget looking at me.)
I started searching my memory for a bird-themed superhero I could then proclaim myself to be … but both Marvel’s “Falcon” and Michael Keaton’s “Birdman” (2014) seemed fairly lame. My girlfriend, who is ever more cultured than I am, invoked Walt Whitman instead:
“I sound my barbaric ‘YAWP’ over the roofs of the world!!!”
North Jefferson Street in Roanoke, Virginia, looking south, 1951
The original source for this photo is the National Archives; I found it via the cool people at Virginia Life Stories.
“Her Smile Was Silver Jupiter”
It was a mad and spinning world in which you met her, but she was a mad and spinning girl — so brightly and resolutely burning that she herself was celestial. There was starshine bottled up in her heart, solar winds charged the particles of her thoughts, ions in the atmosphere ignited her impulses. Her willful joy was her own burning sun.
When she was sly, her eyes were hasty comets. Her passion amassed from Saturnal storms. Her smile was silver Jupiter– you wanted to repose over its white sands, beside the stained and rose-metal lakes of smoldering, darkening copper.
Between the spaces of her words, chasms of cosmos would occasionally open. You could stare into those depths for indifferent and measureless distances of light years — the sublime nightmare-nothingness that Providence had made, the Forever-of-Empty-Dark. But before you could be afraid, her own gravity drew you in.
And you were glad. That such loveliness could exist in a single soul was reassurance. (The Forever-of-Empty-Dark wasn’t entirely empty, after all.) And you were grateful — grateful for her rejoinders, for the taste of her mouth on your own, for her girlish laugh, for the way that she regularly lighted a murky Earth with the moonbeams of her quiet kindnesses.
She was unstoppable. Ultraviolet rode the coronal shades of her irises, and flared in her contemplation. She blazed. Magnetic radiation murmured in her poetry. You loved her for her uniqueness in a universe of cold space, for the way that she burned and turned and burned and turned without ever slowing or expiring. When her light fell across you, you could almost believe that you, too, were spinning and illuminated. You loved her enough for the illusion alone.
You loved her more for her gravity that drew you in and held you, and for her arms that did the same.
— “Her Smile Was Silver Jupiter,” by Eric Robert Nolan
Throwback Thursday: a Pre-gray Nolan.
This was … ten years ago, I believe.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 