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I think of soul as anything’s ultimate meaning which is held within. Soul is the blueprint inside of every created thing telling it what it is and what it can become. When we meet anything at that level, we will respect, protect, and love it.
While calling ourselves intelligent, we’ve lost touch with the natural world. As a result, we’ve lost touch with our own souls. I believe we can’t access our full intelligence and wisdom without some real connection to nature.
The Soul of Nature, Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM
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[with poems by Ted Kooser, Maura High, Mary Oliver]
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Turkey Vultures
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Circling above us, their wing-tips fanned
like fingers, it is as if they are smoothing
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one of those tissue-paper sewing patterns
over the thin blue fabric of the air,
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touching the heavens with leisurely pleasure,
just a word or two called back and forth,
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taking all the time in the world, even though
the sun is low and red in the west, and they
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have fallen behind with the making of shrouds.
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Ted Kooser
from Delights and Shadows, Copper Canyon Press; © 2004
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You’ve seen those vultures, haven’t you, up there in the summer sky? You know you have – soaring in great circles, effortless, never a single flap. How their wings cant upwards, how they tip one wingtip down to begin a spiral, how they splay their primaries to feel the updraft, like fingers reaching to gather it in, or like the blades of great shears ready to snip the endless blue. Shepherds of the dead, preparing our funeral shrouds.
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Is this a Nature poem? A Human Nature poem? A Death poem?
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However you may want to label it, I can’t imagine Ted Kooser writing this poem without spending hours outdoors, on one of his many daily walks, looking up, paying attention to those turkey vultures. Just paying attention until he sees the poetry of their existence.
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Paying attention. Observing. Noticing. That’s the first task. If I were to remind you of all four tasks of the naturalist, would you sit up straight and exclaim, “Hey, but aren’t those the very things that poets do?” Here they are according to my reckoning, the four tasks of the naturalist:
++Pay Attention+–+Ask Questions+–+Make Connections+–+Share
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Naturalists embrace the Earth and everything that fills the Earth in the hope of bringing their companion human beings to join that same embrace. And don’t poets as well, through their noticing and questioning, also hope to connect their fellow beings within our shared existence?
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We Woods
+++Dry-mesic oak-hickory forest on a ridge along the north bank
+++of Bolin Creek, central Orange County, North Carolina
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Yes be a color—nos & maybes,
++++ like drab.
Shrug, like slough-off,
peel, mould & mildew,
winterkill,
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sometimes we surprise ourself
++++ & sprout.
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Tell ourself, this stem this leaf, vine,
++++ oak, spindle, sucker, upstart hickory—
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spring! we lagging over the redbud
(pink the redbud
++++ & green leaf-leaf
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dogwood), &
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troublemaker
honeysuckle: they pull-us-down vines
++++ pale, rampant.
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++++ Yes, we someplaces sick, crack, split,
stump & burl, rootballs what
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gave up hanging in, dragged themself out & fell
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ up.
We woods, anyways: our down-
++++ ++++ leaf & needlefall,
seedhoard, twiggery, sprig windfall,
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they good, the earth approve,
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let us rootway through dirt & stone.
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Maura High
from the forthcoming manuscript Field as Auditorium
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If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. [1 Corinthians 13:1]
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Who will speak in the voice of those whose language is yellow leaves rattling and releasing each fall? Whose sleepy muttering is the squeak of limb upon limb in a winter breeze? Whose whispered promise of love is sweet sap rising in columns every spring? Who, and how, to speak tree?
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My first weeks as an exchange student are still shrouded in fog. I did not hear another person speaking English except for one hour each weekday, English class for the German students in the high school I attended. Gradually, steadily, however, I steeped in vocabulary and grammar – by Christmas I was fully connecting with my host parents and siblings and had become part of the family. Steeping ourselves in the foreign languages that surround us – Maura High instructs us in this by translating the voices of trees into poetry. Ecopoetry.
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One aspect that sets Ecopoetry apart from Nature Poetry, of which it is a distinct subset, is the willingness to listen to and learn languages other than human. Ecopoetry makes audible the voices we might otherwise ignore and walk right past. Ecology is the science of living things in community, whether a subalpine spruce fir community on Kuwohi in the Smokies (formerly Clingman’s Dome) or the community of bacteria, viruses, parasites, and fungi living in your colon. Ecopoetry as well is focused on community, connections, interdependencies.
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In the grand spectrum of diversity of life on this planet, Homo sapiens is a single thin line. For Ecopoetry, the human is not necessarily the locus of all significance and importance. We rampant humans might even be the bad guys. We are woven into the communal whole, our skills and our gifts, our consumption and our neglect, for good and ill, and the continuing strength of our threads depends on the warp and weft of every other living thing, not to mention geology and hydrology and meteorology and . . . well, have I quit preaching and gone to meddling?
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May poetry lift voices that have the power bring us all together as one.
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Sleeping in the Forest
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I thought the earth
remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds. I slept
as never before, a stone
on the riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated
light as moths among the branches
of the perfect trees. All night
I heard the small kingdoms breathing
around me, the insects, and the birds
who do their work in the darkness. All night
I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.
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Mary Oliver
collected in Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver, Penguin Press; © 2017 by NW Orchard LLC
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In the end we will conserve only what we love. We love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught.
Baba Dioum, Senegalese environmentalist
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If you would like to explore this subject further, try The ECOPOETRY Anthology
Ann Fisher-Wirth, Laura-Gray Street, editors; Trinity University Press, Austin TX; © 2013, 2020
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V E R S E and I M A G E 
Wonderful explanation of the difference between nature poetry and Ecopoetry. A great selection of poems, as always. And your description of turkey vultures in flight is itself gorgeous poetry.
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Thanks, Kathie. And this afternoon is a gorgeous one for vulture watching. —B
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I like your four tasks of the naturalist. I think we are born with these tasks. But too often we are deprived of the opportunity and guidance to allow them to take root. Great choice of poems. Thank you.Bill.
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You must be right — just watch 8-year olds running around looking at bugs! —B
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An especially meaningful issue—these poems are gorgeous and profound. I appreciate your frame and definition of ecopoetry also.
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Thanks, Debra. We all need connection, to each other and to the flow of life around us. —B
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[…] voice within us that reaches to connect with nature. (See last week’s poem by Mary Oliver, Sleeping in the Forest, which Kathrine read to open her workshop.) How can I sense the communities and individuals that […]
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