Poetry by KB Ballentine

KB Ballentine, winner of Poetry Society of Tennessee’s 2025 Best of the Fest and Writer’s Digest November 2024 PAD Chapbook Challenge, has nine collections of poetry, the most recent All the Way Through (Shelia-Na-Gig 2024). Her work also appears in numerous anthologies including: Women Speak: Volume Ten, Writing the Land: Wanderings II, Art of Chestnut Review: Volume One, and The Strategic Poet. Learn more at kbballentine.com.

The Gloaming

In that quiet moment
when sun meets earth
or water, last burn
streaking the sky—

that moment
at the horizon
when moon skims
higher and higher—

these are the times
I notice swallows
wheeling the hickories,
the barred owl, hidden,
hooting who cooks for you to his mate,

when the last bit
of gold dazzles
the ridges and splashes
them with warmth.

What power
stillness has –
to hold us
close to ourselves,
to the world
happening
all around us.

Back to the Beginning
A duplex after Jericho Brown

I wanted to shout but you whispered goodbye,
a long slide from where we began.

We began with a look, an easy slide
from a hummingbird’s buzz to a cicada chorus.

Cicadas chorused the hummingbird’s buzz
where static foretold the coming storm.

Coming storms static-ed the air,
sparks of madness and desire howling after.

Howling with desire and sparks of madness,
we soared and we trembled when sun turned to moon.

The sun soared, moon turning and trembling,
spiraling into a meteoric flame.

A meteor’s flame spirals into the ground—
I am the whisper you wanted to shout.