The Sunday Challenge ~ Featuring Mary Ann Potter

Mary Ann is certainly no stranger to the imaginary garden, in fact she is one of our very own toads!  I'm sure we have all admired her unique photographic talent when visiting her blog, From the Starcatcher, and thought how great it would be to write to such an image.  You may have read the little note I left for Mary Ann, after her recent interview on RT, promising that I would be knocking on her door shortly to ask permission to feature her work for the Sunday Challenge.

For those who are not familiar with this Indie poet and photographer, she answers the query: Who Am I?

Artist. Photographer. Writer. Reader. Dreamer. Farmer.

Mary Ann Potter, Windy Hollow Farm, Oxford, NC

To get here you have to drive through Stem

and go just a little way past Shoofly.

Really.

Mary Ann often uses her photos as inspiration, or visual realization of her own writing.

This poem was written about an abandoned house, much like the one in the photograph, that called back a memory of her grandmother's old house in Michigan.

Old Houses in Summer

They speak eloquently, these old places:

Gram's had a cottonwood tree,

bright white blooms against the sky

now ghostly in memory,

stairs worn smooth by footsteps

     we deemed endless

now hushed by time.

Wood frames creak in the wind,

absently musing to multiplied flowers,

ancestral blooms planted long ago.

Stand on the porch and look over me.

Look beyond me, a trespasser

who sees one bright tiger lily

     against peeling paint,

pink mimosa blossoms on a long-neglected

     tree,

and magnolias opening their

     white breasts to the sun.

Mary Ann is particularly drawn to old and abandoned homes, and has made several photographic studies of lighthouses, seeming to capture the haunting presence of historic events and human consciousness now fading into the past.

Mary Ann Potter

Mary Ann has generously offered these beautiful photos for our poetic inspiration.  If you add an image to your post, please acknowledge the name of the artist.  


Please note that you may not select another photograph more to your liking directly from Mary Ann's blog or Flickr stream without first asking her permission.  

The Sunday Challenge is posted on Saturday at noon CST to allow extra time for the creative process, so please do not link up old work which kind of fits the image.  Members will only respond to poetry written specifically for this prompt: this is in the spirit of our Real Toads project to create opportunities for poets to be newly inspired.