From a Long Line of Trees
When I hear those words, I recall my father’s story still resounding through the ages. My father, when he cradled a most precious baby, spoke of a gentle old carpenter from Nazareth, who had fashioned a manger from the same stock that I came from—strong acacia wood planed smooth until soft enough for the king of kings. When the carpenter was done, he cried out with great pride to his wife, Mary, Bring me our son. It is finished. It is finished… It is finished!
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John C. Mannone is the contributing editor to ADRpoetry and has poems in The Windhover, North Dakota Quarterly, Poetry South, Baltimore Review, and others. He won the Impressions of Appalachia Creative Arts Contest in poetry (2020), the Carol Oen Memorial Fiction Prize (2020), and the Joy Margrave Award (2015, 2017) for creative nonfiction. He was awarded a Jean Ritchie Fellowship (2017) in Appalachian literature and served as the celebrity judge for the National Federation of State Poetry Societies (2018). His full-length collections are Disabled Monsters (Linnet’s Wings Press, 2015), Flux Lines: The Intersection of Science, Love, and Poetry (Linnet’s Wings Press, 2021), Sacred Flute (Iris Press, 2022), and Song of the Mountains (Middle Creek Publishing, 2023). He also edits poetry for Abyss & Apex, Silver Blade, and Liquid Imagination. A retired physics professor, John lives in Knoxville, Tennessee.
http://jcmannone.wordpress.com
https://www.facebook.com/jcmannone/
Editor’s Comment and Image Credit: An acacia tree in a Kenyon sunset [wallpaperflare] and silhouettes of crosses [pngwing] are combined for spiritual symbolic effects.