.
I want to realize brotherhood or identity not merely with the beings called human, but I want to realize identity with all life, even with such things as crawl upon earth. –Mohandas K. Gandhi
.
[poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Clint Bowman,
Boris Pasternak, Forrest Gander —
shared by Paul Karnowski, Jenny Bates, Nancy Barnett, Bill Griffin]
.
Pied Beauty
.
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985)
.
I like how Hopkins celebrates the beauty he finds in the particularities of both the natural and man-made world. When we take the time to appreciate the odd, the offbeat, and the unusual, we find the unity in our diversity. – Paul Karnowski
.
❦
.
Just Asking
.
Mother, please.
.
When you don your dazzling gown
full of shock and awe,
do you mean to turn your back
on those who need your love?
.
CHURNING CLOUDS
LIGHTNING STRIKES
SURGING TIDES
BUCKLING ROADS
FLOODED FIELDS
SWIRLING WINDS
FIERY WOODS
TOPPLED TREES
.
Mother, please.
.
Wear instead your comfy robe,
embrace us in the arms of days
that serve to soothe
our beaten, battered selves.
.
gurgling brooks
cotton clouds
gentle winds
lapping waves
tiny flowers
sprouting bulbs
sparkling sands
twinkling stars
.
Mother, please.
.
Paul Karnowski
The Nature of Our Times, January 2025
.
❦
.
The cockroach and the birds were both here long before we were. Both could get along very well without us, although it is perhaps significant that of the two the cockroach would miss us more. — Joseph Wood Krutch, from The Twelve Seasons, 1949.
.
.
❦ ❦ ❦
.
If Lost
.
Look around,
establish your bearings.
.
Take note
of the scratched hemlock
where the trail
turns south.
.
Don’t rely
on wive’s tales
or the growing patterns
of moss.
.
Notice nature
warn itself
of your intrusion-
that warbler
isn’t singing to you,
it’s alerting the bear
around the bend.
.
Know your way out,
so you can tell
someone lost one day-
.
go downhill
if disarrayed,
act like water-
don’t be afraid.
.
Clint Bowman
from If Lost, Loblolly Press, Asheville, NC 2024.
.
Clint to me is one of the purest writer’s of becoming one of nature’s family. His sense of community within his everyday surroundings initiates the reader into private and wider relationships gracefully. He has enriched my own connectivity with the Earth as if you are taking a hike alongside him, bringing attention to coexistence among each other and fellow creatures. – Jenny Bates
.
❦
.
A few thoughts on archery
.
to
.
the calf born yesterday shivering in the field with
no shelter and no more notice by the ground that
.
it lays on
.
sacred bloody yard art that may grow up anyway
to become someone’s afternoon meal.
.
So
.
I’m a bit skeptical today, for what I see is a
beautiful stream of calf music, a flowing of life
that lives in accordance with itself and its world.
.
Not
.
for my altering to interfere.
.
You
.
may think me a nut on one of those trees
up there in your everywhere, that’s ok.
I’m wounded just like you.
.
I’ll
.
continue to be like Artemis with a quiver
full of soul arrows, my life a bow aiming at you
because there is nothing that you have not been –
.
me too.
.
Jenny Bates
from ESSENTIAL, Redhawk Publications, 2023.
.
.
❦ ❦ ❦
.
We cannot live without the earth or apart from it, and something is shriveled in a man’s heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men. –Marjory Kinnan Rawlings
❦ ❦ ❦
. March
from “The poems of Yurii Zhivago”
.
The sun is hotter than the top ledge in a steam bath;
The ravine, crazed, is rampaging below.
Spring-that corn-fed, husky milkmaid-
Is busy at her chores with never a letup.
.
The snow is wasting (pernicious anemia-
See those branching veinlets of impotent blue?)
Yet in the cowbarn life is burbling, steaming,
And the tines of pitchforks simply glow with health.
.
These days-these days, and these nights also!
With eavesdrop thrumming its tattoos at noon,
With icicles (cachectic!) hanging onto gables,
And with the chattering of rills that never sleep!
.
All doors are flung open-in stable and in cowbarn;
Pigeons peck at oats fallen in the snow;
And the culprit of all this and its life-begetter-
The pile of manure-is pungent with ozone.
.
Boris Pasternak
.
Was recently rereading my copy of Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. At the end of the novel he includes a series of poems by “Yurri Zhivago.” If you are familiar with the novel or movie you know that Zhivago was a physician whose true calling was poetry. Hmmm? The flyleaf says “In 1932, an autobiographical poem, Spectorsky, gave rise to violent accusations of ‘anti-socialability.’” Doctor Zhivago is the first original work published by Pasternak after twenty-five years of silence. It was rejected for publication in the USSR, but the manuscript was smuggled to Italy and was first published there in 1957. Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958, an event that enraged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which forced him to decline the prize. In 1989, Pasternak’s son Yevgeny finally accepted the award on his father’s behalf. Doctor Zhivago has been part of the main Russian school curriculum since 2003. I wonder if it is still in the Russian curriculum? It’s the kind of book our governor would ban. – Nancy Barnett
.
.
❦ ❦ ❦
.
The same life force that grows an oak from an acorn, a mountain from the earth’s molten core, a stream from the spring’s thaw, a child from an egg and sperm, an idea from the mind of a human being is present in all things, all thoughts and all experiences. There is no place where God is not. –Joan Borysenko, from Pocketful of Miracles.
.
❦ ❦ ❦
.
[Now the Joshua trees are withering]
.
Now the Joshua trees are withering
in the drought—“not to recover
in our lifetimes”—and the desert below them
is spalling, unstitching itself. Now
itself is spalling. Incrementally
making itself unavailable to us. Unavailable
to use. Our rapacious use. And though
the rocks buzz
with energy, pulsating in tune
with the earth’s vibrations, their drone
is beyond what we hear. So
the ground truth is a constant
revision. Who can read
across the vertiginous stanza
breaks? And what
possible explanation is there
for our wrong turning, but our insistent
repetition of the wrong turning?
.
Forrest Gander
from MOJAVE GHOST, New Directions Publishing Corp. © 2023, 2024
.
When I look clear through the bright blooming azaleas of spring and past the green and gold of leaf and pollen that engulf us, I fear I see our world blighted and degraded: combustion and microplastics, willful ignorance and the blight of hate. It becomes easy for me to imagine that our span on this planet (we humans, that is) is finite and reaching its finale. Still the energy of this glorious space can’t help but revive me, rocks’ buzz and ground’s vibration, blossoming and winging. Wherever it can find the least niche, no matter how hostile, life abounds. Hundreds of meters beneath antarctic ice, thousands of meters into the darkest ocean – life. For life slipping away I will mourn and remember; all life that remains I will revere and celebrate. And I will do what I can to hold and preserve it. – Bill Griffin
.
.
❦ ❦ ❦
.
.
V E R S E and I M A G E 
I love that -- waking under snow only happened to me in the Boy Scouts. ---B