Synkroniciti is honored to welcome North Carolina poet Joanne Durham with two poems that return us to school, a place of possibility shadowed by unspoken rules and expectations. “Seventh Grade, 1963,” a finalist in our Expectations poetry contest, recalls her fascination with classmate Marvin Gibson: his smile, his straight spine:
“but I knew I shouldn’t// drop my pencil by his desk/ for him to pick up, so I might walk to our next class with the first/ Black boy in the school. How did I know?”
Even as the child of progressive parents, Joanne felt the undercurrent of racism in her family and community. She writes with candor about the subtle clues and coded language that cloaked prejudice in respectability. The gentle rhythms and soft alliterations of her verse belie the audacity of her questioning.
“First Week of School” is from a much later era, when Joanne taught school. She introduces Darrell, a fourth-grader already disillusioned with life.
“I see branches splitting/ through Darrell’s chair/ a briar patch of nightmares/ tangled in a thorny maze/ of numbers and letters prickling across/ his path, a forest wound around him/ only breadcrumbs to follow/ and already he knows/ that trail is a trick/ so he sits there splintered.”
Here, fairy-tale imagery becomes immediate and devastating. There is no hero, no charmed escape—only a child’s need that cannot be met, and the quiet recognition that we cannot help anyone without their consent. Joanne’s empathy is unmistakable, yet she refuses easy resolution, leaving us with the stark truth of disconnection.
Together, these poems form a haunting dialogue: one about the silent inheritance of prejudice, the other about the quiet devastation of lost faith. Joanne’s gift lies in rendering these stark truths with gentleness.
Read Joanne’s thoughtful poetry in Synkroniciti’s Expectations issue, Vol. 8, No. 2, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Joanne Durham is a retired educator living on the North Carolina coast, with the ocean as her backyard and muse. She is the author of To Drink from a Wider Bowl, winner of the Sinclair Poetry Prize (Evening Street Press) and the chapbook, On Shifting Shoals (Kelsay). Her latest collection, Chasing Justice, will be published by Shanti Arts this summer.
Awards include the Poetry Society of Louisiana’s poetry prize, the Miriam Chaikin poetry prize, finalist for the Lascaux Poetry Prize, and multiple Pushcart nominations. Her poetry appears in Poetry South, Vox Populi, NC Literary Review, Whale Road Review, and many other journals and anthologies. She teaches poetry workshops online and in person and co-hosts a monthly poetry reading.
She loves poetry because, in the words of poet Erik Campbell, “I have a soul that needs a periodic tuneup.”