Poetry on the Photography of Mark Wyatt

All photos by Mark Wyatt / All poetry by Neal Dachstadter

Chant of the Wooded Hall

Chlorophyll concordant eaves
Soaring ceiling, verdant leaves
Torah spell my secret sees
Worded oracle of trees

Beneath a thing be found intent
Unsheathing singing, sound and scent
Growing shoots a task of me
Sowing beauty, cast on Thee.

Song Before a Glowing Sun

Dillon Beach Buzzard

Above the dune, below the sky
Before a glowing sun I fly
Forging contrast, blurring naught
Gorgeous not deterred; uncaught.

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San Francisco Strings

San Francisco 2014

Recalling notes of olden writ
Need I votes no not one whit
On a sidewalk, music free
Undistracted clarity

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Note of Authenticity

Paris 1980

In the future, we shall toast
To the stature, spirit, ghost
Of authentic, as the youth
Schizophrenic not, in truth

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Mark Wyatt has been photographer to the unfamous since around 1980, diverting occasionally from the human to the natural. He posts his photographs to mwwyatt.wordpress.com, usually one or two a week. Each image is uncropped and processed only to the extent that most faithfully reproduces what the camera saw and how the camera saw it at the moment that the shutter was tripped. In the end, each hopes to be a simple but memorable snapshot of our world that the viewer will enjoy seeing again and doesn’t easily tire of.’

Neal Dachstadter is a poet living in Tennessee.  His work has been printed in Decanto Poetry Magazine (UK), Western Viewpoints and Poetic Images: the Great American West (Woodinville, Washington), Society of Classical Poets Journal 2015 (Mt Hope, New York), Rocky Point Times (Puerto Peñasco, Mexico) and The Lyric (Jericho, Vermont).  A member of the Demosthenian Literary Society at the University of Georgia, he deployed to Hawija, then wrote on Lookout Mountain, continuing with Delta Kappa Epsilon International.  Berkeley, Ann Arbor, and Athens encouraged him as a writer.  In 2015 he wrote in Arizona at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument five miles north of Mexico.