Tom Poland

1 week ago | whosonthemove.com | Tom Poland |Cheryl Cooper

By Tom Poland Back roads took me past pecan groves and cotton fields and eventually to Charlane Woodlands, Chuck and Rose Lane Leavell's home/tree farm. That evening Chuck and I were to attend an event at Capricorn Records (Mercer Music At Capricorn). Chuck came in from working trees wearing work clothes: shorts, T-shirt, and boots. He went to clean up for the Capricorn event and came out in a black crew neck T, black pants, black jacket, and gold Adidas-Gucci shoes.

2 weeks ago | whosonthemove.com | Tom Poland |Cheryl Cooper

By Tom Poland I wish we had. I traded letters with a writer who lived alone in the remote reaches of Alaska, the Land of the Midnight Sun. Poet laureate of Alaska, his letters and a slender volume of essays described a beautifully harsh landscape. Solitude is yours whether you want it or not and each day is briefer and darker until, finally, darkness swallows you. His nearest neighbor lived 60 miles distant. He had a wife but she bolted. The cold.

2 weeks ago | postandcourier.com | Tom Poland

Roads tell stories. I’ve come across the “Mule Kick That Killed Eight People” in Edgefield County. I’ve seen stores fall to arsonists along Highway 378. I’ve seen homes go dark and swallowed by vines, and I’ve seen wheelchair ramps go up as the years roll by. I’ve glimpsed ghost bridges when winter lays the land bare. The old Hard Labor Creek Bridge, an apparition, vanishes come summer. Another revelation exposes sights, clearcutting.

2 weeks ago | scpress.org | Tom Poland |Emmy Ribero

Long did Grandad’s fiddle hang on my mother’s living room wall. I could never walk by it without wondering … “What’s its story?”Best I recall, my mother didn’t know its provenance, that fancy word for something’s origin. My mother, in a pleasant sense, lived in the past. She talked often of her family and upbringing in a remote part of Georgia. Well, remote back in the 1930s before men dammed rivers and paved roads and sliced up the land and the world came calling to buy lots.

2 weeks ago | open.substack.com | Tom Poland

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