This week's Poet of the People is Tamara Miles. Tamara is a dynamo. She hosts workshops, readings, salons, and poetry walks in state parks. As the president of the Poetry Society of South Carolina. She is busy attempting to visit every corner and every county in South Carolina.
Tamara Miles has been teaching English at the college level for over 25 years. Her poetry has been published in a variety of journals and anthologies, and she has a small event chapbook called Earth Gospel. She was the director of the Writing Studio at Orangeburg-Calhoun Technical College for five years. Spirit Plants Radio hosted her radio show called Where the Most Light Falls, which featured poetry and music. She attended the Sewanee Writers Conference in 2016, and a Rivendell Writers Retreat in 2017 as well as several other festivals and conferences. She has been a featured poet for many events, including at O’Bheal in Cork City, Ireland and at a festival in Devon, England.
Townsend’s Rocky Mountain Hare
(an ekphrastic poem)
Drawn on stone, the Audubon pair sit side
by side and stare, alert to the hawk, one’s long ears
hung back, his mate’s up like a question, one tail
harnessed flat to ground, one hooked to sky,
on the whole designed for speed, earnest
as a schoolboy’s raised hand to his teacher’s
hostile eye --- and after school, the mad dash home
in early summer heat --
jackrabbits, half helpless on the wormwood plain,
white throats thick, markings as signal red as a fawn
or a fresh bruise ---
only their feet fly to where they might hide out
in a hollow, but here they are held still as punctuation
marks that halt a rush of thoughts and hush wild words ---
years I spent in flight, the suspected hazard
unresolved on canvas. A harsh world for the ones
who wait, huddled, for their names to be called,
for the brief lifting upward, before silence.
Tommy’s Dream
Tommy grew on rural land,
away from the city’s clatter.
At seventeen, bruised and battered,
stumbling home, he fell half alive
and could go no further.
He went to bones in a row
of blackberry bushes three miles
from his country door. Blackberry
vines covered his body until his skull
and twenty-five other bony pieces
of him were spotted by a neighbor
searching for dark fruit.
I read about in the newspaper.
I remembered the lake house
I rented, for a year in Heflin, Alabama,
where blackberries grew wild
around a spring, and snakes
that must have been there did not bother
me.
My small worries didn’t matter.
The blackberries grew so rich
and fine that year, boldly black,
and at homes all around the south, juicy-full,
our hands that picked them scratched
and bled in scorching heat to find
and claim them for cobbler served
warm with ice cream.
With these hands,
we made our pleasure. We tasted
what was left of Tommy’s dreams,
sadness spooned through the batter.
In a Dream, My Father
A city at night, a carnival
in neon green just across
the water,
welcoming
Ferris wheel, bridge,
a kind of train or sled
pulled by jackaloxes,
and next a cart of fruit
spilling toward me.
I caught a navel orange,
bruised at the top, studied
it and put it back.
A fancy hall, red-painted
walls; I pushed a man
in a wheelchair toward
a door,
and on the other
side people waited in line,
excited to see the show.
I can’t give you everything,
I said, but I can give you
this,
and in his childlike way
he stared, holding tight
to a stuffed animal
I’d won.
Kitty Hawk, 1903
As boys, the bike-shop brothers
flew their kites and clutched
at guiding strings.
They saw the gathering wind
had blind ambitions,
and witnessed, too, a band
of birds climb toward
culled clouds with ease
as if the sky had called
their names.
Then, in the dreams
that come to boys,
the names they heard above
were theirs – Wilbur wrote
of his obsession as disease.
Always, first, a dream is met
with some suspicion, both
within the self and out.
What crafted wings
could bear the two to clouds?
Their parents winked --
others must have laughed
out loud, offered nothing
but derision.
Now, in December,
to the Outer Banks
they came, past the seven
hundredth glide, and for twelve
seconds rose on powered wings
because they were more
brave than proud
and sought true freedom
more than fame.
