Jamail Center for Legal Research
Tarlton Law Library

Point Mountain

On Point Mountain's crest
stars turn snow
into 10,000 prisms. 

Below, serpentine valleys, 
sheltered from radio signals 
carrying disasters.

In the sterile cold
distanced from events, 
I see all I need to know. 

South Side Bridge

Bridge girder splits moon, 
snow sprinkled on coal mounds,
lamp light falshes off barge waves, 

Years goals unmet,
new plans indistinct 
the present is enough. 
But when the earth leans 
toward the sun, 
apple blossoms cover river walk.

Joseph Caldwell is an attorney in Charleston, West Virginia. He received his B.A. degree from West Virginia University in 1969, his law degree from the University of Florida in 1974 and was admitted to the West Virginia bar in 1974. He was born in 1947 at Charleston, West Virginia.

Caldwell's poetry chapbook, Sabbatical on Winifrede Hollow was published in 1993 by Trillium Press (a second edition was published in 1998). In 1992 he won a writer's fellowship from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts. Caldwell's poems also appear in Wild Sweet Notes: Fifty Years of West Virginia Poetry 1950-1999 (Publishers Place, 2000)(Barbara Smith & and Kirk Judd eds.)