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By RAHN ADAMS

It’s one of those paintings / of someone not in it / — the art of imagining / what’s not from what’s there.

Is it the longboards leaning / against the deck railing, / leaving us to imagine / the surfer boys of summer elsewhere?

Or is it the sand fence / standing at the edge of the strand, / its slats splayed / and bleached in the wet, salty air?

Maybe it’s the pier house itself, / its windows looking down / on what’s going on in the dunes / away from our stares.

Or maybe it’s the clouds / rolling in from the west / to ruin our carefree day, / as if the weather were ever truly fair.

By RAHN ADAMS

The worst part of getting old / isn’t the brokenness / of our bodies or minds; / it’s those bonds that break one by one.

Roxanna knew she was dying, / and she wanted this — / no, not death — / a laid-back image of herself taking life easy.

Ain’t nothing easy about it, / you know, from start to finish; / it’s a struggle / to find distractions from the hardest truth.

Roxanna had seen an image / of a girl playing on the beach, / and she hoped that vision / of herself would calm our fears.

We could see her sitting there / at ease and in no pain, / and imagine her again / when our promises remained unbroken.

It’s better to look west / to the Blue Ridge — / toward the sun setting / behind Table Rock and Hawksbill —

Than to look straight down / upon the bloody ground / of the old courthouse square / in my first and last hometown.

Rising sun or high noon, / death still looks the same; / its hideous grimace should sicken / even the strongest of men.

As for the gray soldier / standing watch for invaders, / or the horde of witnesses exalting / the commodore’s daring deed,

Seeing the fisheyed stare / of a dead man or boy — / whether on a cross or a board — / should be no source of pride or joy.

They see it as win-win — / as either an ungodly outrage / or a damn diversion; / either way works.

The apparent intent, of course, / is that we get used to it / and tune it out / so that we don’t explode —

And not just our heads; / it’s also our hearts / and our very souls / that suffer from their lies and greed.

You know, don’t you, / that the opposing side has already won / just by nudging us / into paying heed.

No matter how ignorant / their words may be, / they win because we can’t ignore / their egregious deeds.

By RAHN ADAMS

You’re so Boone. / You prob’ly think this poem is about you. / You are so Boone.

Above the BeansTalk, / I look past the Baptists and Methodists / to a green valley beyond.

Dark clouds gather; / but like continents, they drift apart / (like our conversations).

It takes time — / more than one big cup of good coffee — / to get the big picture.

Red sky at night? / That just means the storm will come / before dawn’s delight.

By RAHN ADAMS

Of all the places / on this earth, / I pick Kipahulu Park / on this Mother’s Day.

An hour there / compares to an eon / of bliss elsewhere, / said one lucky man.

Facing the point, / one can see the glow / and feel the heat / of its sacred flame.

It’s a place of rest, / where souls gather / to tell us farewell / and bid us adieux.

With the sky so high / and the sea so blue, / I cannot deny / my devotion to you.

By RAHN ADAMS

Like bones in the desert, / shells of all shapes and sizes — / lightning whelks, moon snails and sand dollars — / litter the beach strand after stormy weather.

They are easy pickings / after any storm off the Brunswick coast, / but especially following hurricanes / like Hazel in ’52, Hugo in ’89, Fran in ’96, Floyd in ’99.

I was there for Hugo / and years later for Fran as well, / needing a long ladder after them both / to hop down from the top of the dunes to the hard sand below.

Seashells were everywhere — / layers of them lying with their kind, / as if Zeus and Hera had decided / to run a rummage sale of Poseidon’s gifts from the sea.

If I had come across cockles / arranged to say “86 47” or the like, / I wouldn’t have been surprised; / I would have guessed that God’s own fool had just taken a hike.

* * *

Confused? Read 1 Corinthians 3:18-20.

By RAHN ADAMS

MORGANTON, N.C. (April 30, 2026) — On Sunday morning when church bells were ringing in the Salem community, Timberley and I found ourselves smack dab in the middle of an intense kind of excitement for the first time. No, not a snake-handling revival meeting. A swarm of honey bees.

They were our own relatively gentle Carniolan bees, not vicious Africanized mutants, though that meant we also had a financial interest in how and, more precisely, where this buzzing whirlwind of Apis mellifera wound up. We were standing in our own beeyard near the little house on the hill, and we saw the swarm alight high in a tree at the edge of our property. But we didn’t know how long they’d stay there or where they’d go when they inevitably left.

That was the setup for the lesson in beekeeping — and in life — that we would learn over the next 30 hours, from the time we saw thousands of our bees boil out of their hive and fly in ever-widening and higher loops around us to their temporary resting place in that tree until we watched them suddenly break their cluster the following afternoon and noisily fly due west far, far away.

Continue reading What My Honey and I Learned By Losing Our ‘First’ Swarm

“Good fences make good neighbors,” / wrote that famous old codger / whose farm produced little more than poesy.

What did that grandiloquent gomer know — / with his square head — / and the little horse he rode in on, too?

We need to build some bridges, / is what he should have said, / to get us together or away from one another.

Mending fences isn’t very sexy, / not like building a big ballroom / or a supersized arch that signifies nothing.

But a good bridge is everything — / posts planted firmly in the earth, / holding high a strip of possibility / way, way up in the everlasting sky.

By RAHN ADAMS

“Onward, Christian soldiers, / marching as to war…” / What kind of song is that? / A battle hymn? God, of what republic?

Then there’s “Jesus loves me, / this I know…” / Did the Great Physician trade in / his healing hands for an M1 carbine?

It’s so confusing these days — / good people worshiping / Baal and his golden bone spurs, / breaking commandments,

Especially the first one / about having no other gods, / because he’s a jealous god, right? / Just fuck around and find out.

Dropping bombs on Sunday / is how we do business now, boss. / It’s still about shock and awe, / and it’s about, uh, just cause.