What Claims Us – Poems for the Earth | V E R S E and I M A G E

What Claims Us – Poems for the Earth

April 25, 2025 by GriffinPoetry

Golden Ragwort, Packera aurea

[poems by Charles Simic, Sylvia Plath, Katharine Spadaro,

Rosanna Warren – selected and shared by

Sharon Sharp, Kitsey Burns, Brad Strahan, Bill Griffin]

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photographs in today’s post are from the banks of Dutchman Creek,

Elkin NC, within a 2 meter diameter circle, taken on April 16, 2025

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Stone

Go inside a stone.

That would be my way.

Let somebody else become a dove

Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth.

I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:

No one knows how to answer it.

Yet within, it must be cool and quiet

Even though a cow steps on it full weight,

Even though a child throws it in a river;

The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed

To the river bottom

Where the fishes come to knock on it

And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out

When two stones are rubbed,

So perhaps it is not dark inside after all:

Perhaps there is a moon shining

From somewhere, as though behind a hill-

Just enough light to make out

The strange writings, the star-charts

On the inner walls.

Charles Simic

Charles Simic’s Stone delights me because I’ve been a rockhound since childhood. This poem celebrates the mysterious, silent presence I’m aware of when holding stones, turning them in my hands, and wondering about the part of Earth’s – and even the cosmos’s – history each one represents. I keep stones as reminders of my own history, and clear scenes from various places emerge anew as I cradle these inanimate yet vibrant objects tying me to the natural world. I take Stone as an invitation to savor what is interior, silent, often overlooked, and unique in all aspects of nature.

I keep a wrinkled, often-read copy of Stone posted near some of my collected treasures, including the tektite that inspired my own poem, which follows. – Sharon Sharp

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Tektite

From my necklace chain dangles a shiny,

pocked, black-glass exclamation point,

minus the dot, full of chemical clues

about celestial origins and a likely

ancient collision: a comet or an

asteroid smashing into Earth.

Upon impact, melted shards

catapulted back into the

outer atmosphere, then

descended, cooling.

The hard rain that

pelted hundreds

of miles still

mesmerizes

dreamers.

Sharon A. Sharp

Snakewort (Liverwort), Conocephalum salebrosum

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The Beekeeper’s Daughter

A garden of mouthings. Purple, scarlet-speckled, black

The great corollas dilate, peeling back their silks.

Their musk encroaches, circle after circle,

A well of scents almost too dense to breathe in.

Hieratical in your frock coat, maestro of the bees,

You move among the many-breasted hives,

My heart under your foot, sister of a stone.

Trumpet-throats open to the beaks of birds.

The Golden Rain Tree drips its powders down.

In these little boudoirs streaked with orange and red

The anthers nod their heads, potent as kings

To father dynasties. The air is rich.

Here is a queenship no mother can contest—

A fruit that’s death to taste: dark flesh, dark parings.

In burrows narrow as a finger, solitary bees

Keep house among the grasses. Kneeling down

I set my eye to a hole-mouth and meet an eye

Round, green, disconsolate as a tear.

Father, bridegroom, in this Easter egg

Under the coronal of sugar roses

The queen bee marries the winter of your year.

Sylvia Plath

from The Kenyon Review, Autumn 1960 • Vol. XXII No. 4

I sat down this morning to read some Sylvia Plath poetry. I read The Bell Jar for the first time a few years ago, while at my Dad’s deathbed. You would think it would have been a poor choice for that time in my life, but truly I loved the book, so beautifully written. So my Earth Day selection from Plath is The Beekeeper’s Daughter. Bees are the ultimate example of community working together for good. This piece is very sensual and dark, in a way too. For me it is a reminder that light and darkness, life and death are an irrevocable part of the human experience. While we may be in a time of darkness and existential dread about the future of our earth, it is imperative now more than ever, that we seek community to sustain us.

Thank you, Bill, for these lovely poems you send each week. It brightens my week immensely when I am able to take the time to read them. – Kitsey Burns

Star Chickweed, Stellaria pubera

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The Day of the Funeral

Are you ready? they say, preparing to go. The search

how to say, how to feel, becomes a groping for jackets,

a finding of shoes. I look for a place to tie up my hair

and there is the cabinet, forever there.

Its mirrored backing can barely be seen

behind gold-speckled teacups, presents child-made,

crystal marching away to the past. Kneeling on carpet

I join in this scene and serious features

echo and float amongst

gilt generations of gently washed china.

An accordion of hands is fixing my hair.

Has anyone ever been ready?

Katherine Spadaro

from Visions International, Vol. 109

I often think of how much we have buried or pushed nature aside but she is there waiting and will sooner or later reclaim it all from us, our brief, brief dominion.

For earth day I thought of the subtext of this little poem from the past (mine). – Bradley Strahan

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Ghosts

In a lost corner of childhood

where marshland sleeps

beneath concrete,

the tide of evening

still climbs the forest wall.

Across the pond,

now drained and lawned,

the path looks westward

through the red receding flood of day.

There June is always a memory of redwings

singing with a chorus of frogs,

and in dank basements ghost cattails grow

through the temporary habitations of man.

Bradley Strahan

Rattlesnake Fern, Botrypus virginianus

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The Cormorant

for Eunice

Up through the buttercup meadow the children lead

their father. Behind them, gloom

of spruce and fir, thicket through which they pried

into the golden ruckus of the field, toward home:

this rented house where I wait for their return

and believe the scene eternal. They have been out

studying the economy of the sea. The trudged to earn

sand-dollars, crab claws, whelk shells, the huge debt

repaid in smithereens along the shore:

ocean, old blowhard, wheezing in the give

and take, gulls grieving the shattered store.

It is your death I can’t believe,

last night, inland, away from us, beyond

these drawling compensations for the moon.

If there’s an exchange for you, some kind of bond,

it’s past negotiation. You died alone.

Across my desk wash memories of ways

I’ve tried to hold you: that poem of years ago

starring you in your mater dolorosa phase;

or my Sunday picnic sketch in which the show

is stolen by your poised, patrician foot

above whose nakedness the party floats.

No one can hold you now. The point is moot.

I see you standing, marshalling your boats

of gravy, chutney, cranberry, at your vast

harboring Thanksgiving table, fork held aloft

while you survey the victualling of your coast.

We children surged around you, and you laughed.

Downstairs the screen door slams, and slams me back

into the present, which you do not share.

Our children tumble in, they shake the pack

of sea-treasures out on table, floor, and chair.

But now we tune our clamor to your quiet.

The deacon spruces keep the darkest note

though hawkweed tease us with it saffron riot.

There are some wrecks from which no loose planks float,

nothing the sea gives back. I walked alone

on the beach this morning, watching a cormorant

skid, thudding, into water. It dove down

into that shuddering darkness where we can’t

breathe. Impossibly long. Nothing to see.

Nothing but troughs and swells

over and over hollowing out the sea.

And, beyond the cove, the channel bells.

Rosanna Warren

In the Afterword to Small Planet, Robert Pack writes, “When the primary models for beauty and creativeness no longer are grounded in nature, we will already have evolved into another kind of species. . . . Without the sense of beauty that derives from an awareness of others, from the realization that we are merely creatures in an evolving world that we share with other creatures, a prior world on which our fabricated cultural world depends, the capacity for taking delight in our surroundings will wither away. Even before the planet becomes inhospitable to the human species, we will have died in spirit.”

One thing we inevitably share with every other creature is our mortality. Turning our backs and refusing to see death, or chasing promises to extend our lives at all costs, are simply among the many ways that we also choose to ignore and overlook life. Lichen stone and bee, ghost cattail and cormorant, I will sit down at your wake and invite you to mine. Until that day, let us live together. – Bill Griffin