Time & Space

Time & Space $15.00 USD Canada $16.50 USD

About the Author

Barbara Southard grew up in Freeport, Long Island. She lived for several years  in Woodstock, New York, then Corvallis, Oregon, before moving to  Huntington where she and her first husband, Ron, raised their six  children. Starting out as a painter and printmaker, her work evolved over the years into combining image with word. Her poetry is a continuum of a lifelong process, where notes are written on scraps of paper whenever and wherever opportunity arises, then crafted into poems. Recently, she’ss expanded her writing to include the short story genre.  Barbara now lives in Miller Place, NY, with her husband, Dan.

Being  honored with the position of Suffolk County Poet Laureate gives her the means to act on her long-held belief that poetry brings people together  and provides opportunities, particularly for those that persist in writing when little encouragement is available. It’s important for artists, whether just beginning or masters of the craft, to know there is a community that cares.

Sample poems:

Time & Space

Unbound the boundaries
time is losing its meaning
causing a certain vertigo,
a blurring of beginnings and endings.

Unspool the tenses of what once was, is, will be.
Adapt to a new paradigm of uncertainties.

An image of a polar bear slides across my computer screen,
a tropical bird, old photos of those supposedly gone yet still here—
a newborn opening her eyes to the world.

Who doesn’t remember childhood seasons, each day
imprinting multiple reflections on our mind’s mirror―?
summers that stretched to the infinite
creating the most important moments of our lives.

Once invisible, I slipped away to another world
and became a tree rooted in a newly configured geography
trapped on a tiny slice of the universe,
my body increasing opacity until I slipped back in ―
the birds never having missed me.

Swimming with the Fish

Lucent pale ghost moving with currents,
the second moon jellyfish passes by as I head for shore,
not wanting to brush by their undersides and feel their stings.

I swim through schools of small electric blues,
their smooth skin feathering my arm
as if to reassure me they mean no harm.

Down below, a field of yellows sway

while far above, astronauts gaze towards earth
as the space station glides across the thermosphere
like a brilliant moving star searching for evidence of life.

In all this vastness, I wonder where the people I’ve loved
have gone,
their presence still felt
mixing somewhere in the universe
at the same instant stars explode.

Hollowed Chamber of My Heart, Speak to Me

I am a pilgrim wandering in your place,
my eyes taking in all you can no longer see.

I take your dreams and make them grow inside me
a streak of silver passing over the sea’s sky in a long lingering glide
the land across the Sound growing distant to my sight
a continuum of burnt gold on the hazy horizon.

I climb until I reach the clouds, threads of mist blowing past,
an illumination of white, trees fading to gray
yet with a glisten of burnt silver moisture on leaves,
their lichened trunks a pillow of soft pearly greens.

I breathe you in.

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opening paragraph to the short story “Brian”€�

Brian lived five houses up the canal from me. First time I saw him, I was rowing my boat up the canal and he was sitting on the edge of the dock.  He was older than me, but in my grade at school because he’d been left  back in first grade. He was sitting absolutely still with the sun  hitting his curly blonde hair, turning it into a halo of white yellow,  staring intently across the canal totally unaware of anything around him, including me. When I got closer, I saw that he was watching a family of mallards swimming along the edge of the bulkhead. I put my oars quietly in the water to slow my boat and watched the duck family  quacking and chirping, swimming up the canal toward the bay: an  iridescent male, a plain brown female and four fuzzy ducklings. .....

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© 2021-2023 Barbara Southard.