In these pandemic times, we take our entertainment where we can find it. It was a lovely break from my stay-at-home routine to spend time at the Villa Appalachia winery on Saturday. Not only did Jim Sharkey sing Wagon Wheel, but the wine was exquisite, the cheese plate delicious, the sun shone the whole time […]
Left, right Left, right We’re marching in file to the edge of a cliff Left, right Left, right It’s an artificial construct to widen the gulf between either or But the innocents are the cause we rise to stand for The conscience is the drum worthy to follow the beat of Right, wrong Right, wrong […]
_____________Wordless Wednesday
1. Heart and earth are the same word with the letters mixed around, which makes me wonder if the earth is the heart chakra of our galaxy. 2. I wrote THIS poem while waiting to get my haircut after 4 months because they had no magazines to (touch) read at the hairdresser’s shop. 3. Last […]
The last few weeks of my brother’s lives played out like the conclusion of a dramatic Hollywood script, a plot with a twist. The road trip they took, two weeks before the first death, became the beginning of a larger journey, the one in which they would both leave this world. I have decided to […]
Every town is a microcosm of the whole world. If we stay where we are and invest in our own community, the whole world eventually comes to us. – From Homegrown, the 2005 essay that I read on the air at WVTF Public Radio in 2005 The man in the photo, carrying the Confederate flag, […]
It’s all bumper cars hitting and running and the same old merry-go-round we can’t get off It’s all about the photo-op the selfie, the selfie smoke and mirror fun house and the dizzy spin of news I’m wearing a bandana now like Def Leppard in the 1980s when Michael Jackson told us bad was good […]
– The following first appeared in The Floyd Press on June 18, 2020. The below includes and expanded selection of photos. To the background sounds of crickets, cicadas and kayaks splashing into the river, poets from Norfolk, Williamsburg and Richmond exchanged their original work with Floyd poets at the 5th Annual Little River Poetry Festival, […]
1. We made up a new game called Mafia Monopoly. 2. These shady characters (pictured above) have something up their sleeve. 3. Every time I see watermelon I think of my late brothers Jim and Dan, who visited here just before they died a month apart, and I snapped a picture of Jim eating […]
The following commentary appeared in The Roanoke Times on June 15, 2020 – By Colleen Redman, a poet and writer from Floyd County. Who are the smiling people who posed at lynchings from the end of slavery to the 1960s? They are still here. Where are the churches that went as congregations to watch the […]
Coral Kendall (aka Cheeky), a Radford University student/poet/painter was the youngest reader at The Little River Poetry Festival this weekend. …I want to know what I feel like / what happens to my thighs that jiggle like the butterfly effect / that sends a tsunami that wipes out China / tell me at that moment […]
The 5th Annual Little River Poetry Festival (at On the Water in Floyd) was my first event since the pandemic sent us all home to our rooms. It was the smallest turnout yet but that made for a deeper sharing and enough were committed to coming that it turned out to be a wonderful success. […]
