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to get all 3 of Barbara Southard’s books, Remember (2008),
Time & Space (2020),
and Long Island Poems (2022),
choose “3 different books” in dropdown menu
prices include shipping within US,
anywhere else,
email first: mankh(a)allbook-books.com
Long Island Poems by Barbara Southard
86 pages, 6x9” paperback
introduction
Many readers and poets feel a tingle of excitement when coming across writings about places they have visited, or closer to home, towns near where they live, or closest, where they live. Reading the poem can elicit the recognition of familiarity or the aha-moment of seeing for the first time what’s been right in front of you all along.
Yet because the rhythm and the sounds these poems make is as much a part of the poem as the words, I suggest you read some aloud to yourself, to someone else, to a tree.
Long Island Poems immerses the reader in a delicate blend of fog, water, food, people, houses, birds, fish, traffic, and more, transporting the reader to the everyday pulses of place, buoyed with Barbara Southard’s eye and heart for detail.
The Dutch name for the island was 't Lange Eylandt, yet I would be remiss if not mentioning that Native Peoples have inhabited the lands and fed off of the waters and forests for 12,000 and probably more years before that; and many of those Peoples are still here, finding new-old ways to not simply survive but thrive. All of us, as her poem “Trees” reminds,with “roots seeking / the same sustenance in sandy soil.”
If you visit the places in the book or the actual places, and open your consciousness to the past ― along with good thoughts for the future ― you will experience another version of the abundance of present moments featured in these poems reflecting the lands and waters, and those who experience them.
~ Mankh (Walter E. Harris III), Allbook Books
Backstory of the Poem “Days” from the poetry collection Long Island Poems by Barbara Southard
Rip Current
Fire Island
It carries you out like a small piece
of flotsam, land receding as if trapped
on the back platform of a fast freight train
abandoned far from the roar of breaking
waves, as alone as you’ve ever been, left
to float in rolling swells, seabirds catching
air currents far above mocking your ineptitude.
You are a small mouse in a marsh, struggling
to reach the safety of a blade of grass,
expanse from water to land unreachable—
yet you make your way back to shore, sea
whispering in your ear float swim float
until one last wave takes you in, your feet
kissing the sandy bottom.
Inlet
Mount Sinai Harbor Inlet
It’s the daily push, pull—flow of tide.
Green ribbons of seaweed, shimmering
comb jellies, crabs and fish coursing
into outer reaches of the marsh
in an urgent surge of flood tide
seeping its way through small channels,
dips in the land—
pushing boundaries until walled in by higher ground.
Slack water brings a sense of stillness
until the turn of the tide draws water back to the Sound
in a turbulent race through the narrow neck of the inlet,
carrying along aquatics who seek open water,
others too torpid to fight its surge.
Sea birds swoop in, feed off the moving banquet
there for the taking.
Mussels click and sigh in the mud.
Who Are You?
Wading River
Outside for a walk in the snowy cold darkening
woods, a hoot owl’s call echoes through the trees
every twenty seconds or so. I can measure
my steps and pause to hear its hoo hoo hoo.
Flashes of movement streak between the ghost
trunks of trees, flare of white, yet no sound, as if
the deer are playing hide-and-seek with me,
taunting me with the question—
What are you doing here in the coming darkness,
interrupting our time to graze and play?
The hoot owl continues to sing its song.
Blue washes down, smothering the lavender horizon,
shapes in the woods losing their form. The owl calls
I know who I am, who are you?
about the author
Long Island Poems is Barbara Southard’s third book of poetry. Previous collections include Time & Space and Remember. She taught poetry for nine years at the Walt Whitman Birthplace and has served on the Board of the Long Island Poetry Collective for many years. While serving as Suffolk County Poet Laureate from 2019 to 2021 during the covid pandemic, she helped facilitate Zoom poetry workshops along with members of the LIPC. Her recent poems reflect the love she has for the neighborhoods, woods and the many bays, inlets and waterways of Long Island. She lives in Miller Place, NY.
© 2022-2023 Barbara Southard.
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