Byron Herbert Reece - His Poems and Their Setting in North Georgia

Best Viewed LARGE on Black: bighugelabs.com/onblack.php?id=3728270985&size=large&...

 

I'm starting a new set of pictures today. I hope that this will be an ongoing series. The plan is to pair each picture in the set with a poem by our best known local poet, Byron Herbert Reece, who lived and wrote in the Choestoe area of Union County, Georgia, less than 20 miles from my home. The name Choestoe - pronounced "Chowee Stowee" is a Cherokee Indian word usually translated as "the place of the Dancing Rabbits." (I doubt that I will be patient or fortunate enough to actually get a shot of any rabbits dancing - I'm not sure my new camera even does videos!)

 

At any rate, I've started the set with a few pictures that I took this past Saturday at the Byron Herbert Reece Farm and Heritage Center. If you click on the set to the right you can learn more about the poet and the efforts to preserve his legacy.

 

_________________________________________________________________

Poem # 1:

 

ELBOWS ON THE SKY

 

If man might lean his elbows on the sky

As farmers lean their weight upon a wall

To look upon their ample fields that lie

Heavy with harvest in the yellow Fall

Then he might dicker with close-fisted fate,

Himself decide what to reject or keep

Before he comes at length beyond the gate

Where he may choose not anything but sleep.

 

Yet if he leaned but once upon a star

And saw his earth, and himself a fugitive,

As long as breath could keep life's door ajar

He would be happy but to breathe and live,

With little care for what he shall be when

Of death's gray waste he is a citizen.

 

from Ballad of the Bones and Other Poems 1945

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byron_Herbert_Reese

Done