“I don’t believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure.” – Wendell Berry

Kentucky native, Rosemarie Wurth-Grice is a retired National Board Certified Teacher and founding member of the Not Dead Poets Society. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in Kentucky Monthly, Kudzu, and the Journal of Kentucky Studies. Her chapbook, Darkness Called Us Home, is forthcoming in 2025 by Finishing Line Press.

She joins us via Zoom from her home.

Welcome to the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey. Rosemarie, what poems will you be sharing with us today?

On Returning Home

What can I tell you?
The Scottish landscape changes
with the rain and sun and mist
Clouds gather
in white and grey melancholy moods

filling the taller than this Kentucky sky

The names of villages
are not easy on the tongue
like the landscape, vowels and consonants
wind through mist and merge
in unfamiliar realms

On the River Clyde, gulls cackle
like crones drunk on too much ale
“A pint is never enough!” one shouts
and cackles again while grey feathers
float to the cobblestone below.

Come, sit with me by the window

We’ll watch the rabbits fat and round,
gather on the old Abbey grounds
and wander into the monk’s graveyard
to quietly nibble the velvet green moss
on Brother Ignatius’ grave

Beyond the graves

The waters of Loch Ness are cold and black
stained from rain-washed peat
rolling off mountains separated an ice age ago
Both Scottish Highlands and Appalachians
exist here in slip fault fashion

and genetic memory swims deep

---
Seasons Mean Nothing

Now that I’m old, my head is full with the humming of cicadas
those constant companions regardless the season

Now while I sit in the shadow of a great swaying mimosa
that fell in a storm when I was fifteen

Now while I walk through summer’s blackberry brambles
your horses gallop past me in the fresh fallen snow

Now that they’ve gone, father, brother, and lover
I listen for their voices
In grief, they say, voices are the first to go

The cicadas keep filling my head with phantom summers
The mimosa has not grown back but continues to sway

The horses are gone but still run in the pasture
I read your poem just yesterday.

---
An October Pantoum of Sorts

On this hill of loneliness, a solitary bee is sleeping
curled upon a flower stalk beneath a star mad sky
Shall we sing to the hive tonight Your keeper has died?
Hold your breath awhile, for it’s breathing that gives us away

Curled upon a flower stalk beneath a star mad sky
can we weigh the universe in the cup of our hands?
Hold your breath awhile, for it’s breathing that gives us away
Listen to the tremble of a million leaves

Can we weigh the universe in the cup of our hands?
The Earth whisperer is a forest of a single dying tree
Listen to the tremble of a million leaves
Comet dust illuminating the birthing of a world

The Earth whisperer is a forest of a single dying tree
a lone quaking aspen, Pando in Latin, I spread
comet dust. Illuminating the birthing of a world
on this hill of loneliness, a solitary bee is sleeping

You've been listening to the poems of Rosemarie Wurth-Grice on the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey.