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What We Need – Poems for the Earth

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, Imagery, tagged Bill Griffin, Earth Day, ecology, Ecopoetry, imagery, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, poetry on April 18, 2025| 3 Comments »

Like a great poet, Nature knows how to produce the greatest effects with the most limited means. – Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)

[poems by Wendell Berry, Gerard Manley Hopkins,

Chapman Hood Frazier, Maria Rouphail, Charles Carr –

shared by Les Brown, Joyce Brown, Joan Barasovska, Bill Griffin]

What We Need is Here

Geese appear high over us,

pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,

as in love or sleep, holds

them to their way, clear

in the ancient faith: what we need

is here. And we pray, not

for new earth or heaven, but to be

quiet in heart, and in eye,

clear. What we need is here.

Wendell Berry

The Poetry Foundation

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When I read What We Need is Here, Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese came to mind. And this poem gives us permission to accept what is here because it is ingrained in our very being as is the flight of geese overhead. Nature can provide all we need. Not explicit, but implicit, in the poem, nature can only provide all we need if we respect and protect it. – Les Brown

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God’s Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985)

Selected and shared by Joyce Brown

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Surviving the Six Worlds

for David Sanipass

In the sixth world of the Mi’k maq

you walk as if in water

fluid, changing and final.

Each world a hybrid you move through,

a blink, bend and flutter

where the roots are

and in each power, a sigh or shadow

at the edges of things

that live beyond you

in their hush and whisper.

Water becomes land

and land, air.

The golden frog in the dead pool,

the black bear

and, in your long dream, a word

becomes a crow’s call you wake from

that erodes into this life and back again.

Learn where to walk and where not to,

listen to the wind as if it too might

become you. Discover in your feet

where each path leads. Look,

a redwing blackbird

settles on the birch branch

and, in its croak, you glide

in a slow melt and shine,

a transparency

as solid as stone

but in a flash, gone.

Smell the lilac in the wind

and feel how your foot will ache

before finding its step, this your ?

signature into a white world

where you decay

green and back again.

Chapman Hood Frasier

from The Lost Books of the Bestiary, V Press LC, February 2023.

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I hope you love birds, too. It is economical. It saves going to Heaven. – Emily Dickinson

Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a song bird will come. – Chinese proverb

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I Buried a Little Bird Today

in the backyard

behind the old beech.

What sort of bird I cannot say,

or its age or where in its body

it suffered the fatal flaw.

I only held in one hand

its beating wings, the closed claw

and gaping beak,

its shuddering feathered head.

And when it stopped, I dug a hole

and to the beech I said,

Be kind, be kind.

Maria Rouphail

from This small house, this big sky (Redhawk Publications, 2025)

My connection to this poem is as the bird itself. At its dying moments it lies loved and protected in kind hands, as I hope to be. We cannot know, as the speaker cannot know about the bird, what our “fatal flaw” will be. Trust in my loved ones and in a loving God connect me to the little bird buried with compassion under the beech. – Joan Barasovska

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I was a girl, shy and secretive

If I just ran fast enough – I was the fastest one –

I knew I could take off, fly, I mean, not sprout wings

or turn into a bird or angel but, as in a recurring dream,

leave the broken sidewalk below, float above the kids

I played with, higher, above the giant sycamore. Higher.

God was sorry I felt so bad.

Joan Barasovska

from The Power of the Feminine I: Poems from the Feminine Perspective; ThreshPress Midwest (volume 002, 2024)

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Appalachian Come Inside

Morning ends

like a last bite

of apple,

fifty degrees

but who’s counting,

January and coffee

strong enough to hold

my own turns sixty-one,

I would click my heels

if not for their knees.

A tall hickory pitches

a bird at the sky,

noon is a high fly ball,

The New River is quiet

applause,

the air so clean it splashes

the city from my face

and I want to say thank you

but the sun is already

an arm of you’re welcome

around my shoulder.

Charles Carr

from Autumn Sky Poetry, January 29, 2018.

Today when I walk outdoors I hope I remember to invite that arm around my shoulder. I confess I need it. – Bill Griffin

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If we can believe that we are loved just as we are and that everything else is equally loved, we unveil a cosmic reality that is life-giving and a Christ-like reality that affirms the goodness of all creation. — Barbara Holmes

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Abundant Life – Poems for the Earth

Posted in Imagery on April 16, 2025| 8 Comments »

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

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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

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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.

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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

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A few thoughts on archery

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.

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.

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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

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. 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

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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.

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[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

Poetry Daily Feature Date February 2, 2025

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

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Wonder & Sorrow – Poems for the Earth

Posted in Imagery on April 11, 2025| 2 Comments »

[with poems by Sherod Santos, William Matthews, and Robert Pack]

The Dairy Cows of Maria Cristina Cortes

Although they may be

the most mothering of all the animals,

the ones with the gentlest

complaint, the ones whose milk

has left on our tongues

the knowledge that life can be simple

and good, still,

in their pendulous,

earth bound, solitary ways, the remind me

of nothing quite so much

as those people we become after

the houselights rise

on a movie that find us wiping back

a tear. And since

sadness, however

privately borne, secreted however far inside,

is a thing that finally

weighs us down, they are also

the ones most likely

in the end to inherit the earth; so wherever

they go, wandering

the mud lanes out

from the dairy, or wading into grasses

at a pond’s edge, they

move the way a slow-forming storm

cloud moves, gathering

within it a heaviness drawn from deep

in the soil,

a heaviness it will

return there. And yet a cow jumped over

the moon, we’re told, and

what in the world has ever been

more filled with light

than a glass of milk placed by the bed

of a child still struggling

from a nightmare?

But whatever it is we say about the cow,

it’s the face we love,

a face that in spite of what we do

with our fences and barbs

and electrically charged cattle prods

shines equally on us

as on the grasses

of the world, and shines in a way that makes

us feel forgiven after all

for forgetting we, too are animals – base-

born, landlocked, spattered

with mud, and filled with an ancient cow-

sorrow and -wonder.

Sherod Santos

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At three separate stops along the trail this week, I’ve heard them. I wonder, were they already singing here before I knew to recognize their song or call their name? Three sweet slurred prefatory notes released into a tumbling trill – Louisiana Waterthrush. These migratory wood warblers who return from Belize every spring, usually denizens of Smoky ridges beside flash mountain streams, yet here they are nesting along this languid often silt-heavy Elkin Creek. Such a wonder!

No less the Goldfinches by twos and fours now doffing their winter flannel for summer blazers. And Robins in the front yard cocking their heads to watch for a telltale squiggle of worm – this week they are lifting into the song branches to out-compete their neighbor in melody and lilt. But how many years has it been since winter days after rain brought a hundred Robins darkening the neighbor lawn; how long since Goldfinches arrived at the thistle seed by the tens and twenties? How much is Earth losing, and how fast? What is this feeling when something you love disappears so gradually that you fail to notice until it’s too late to grab it back?

We imagine Earth lost all her dinosaurs in a flash when asteroid Chicxulub struck the Yucatan. After the global burning and after the many long winters, however, extinctions continued more gradually. The last large dinosaur species held on for at least ten thousand years [not counting the Theropod dinosaurs, whose direct descendants are currently doffing winter flannel and spearing worms]. How quickly are Earth’s species currently disappearing? Easy for us, apparently, to ignore what we’re losing. Easy to imagine we can always grab it back.

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Names

Ten kinds of wolf are gone and twelve of rat

and not a single insect species.

Three sorts of skink are history and two

of minnow, two of pupfish, ten of owl.

Seventeen kinds of rail are out of here

and five of finch. It comforts us to think

the dinosaurs bought their farms all at once,

but they died at a rate of one species

per thousand years. Life in a faster lane

erased the speckled dace, the thicktail chub,

two kinds of thrush and six of wren, the heath

hen and Ash Meadows killfish. There are four

kinds of sucker not born any minute

anymore. The Christmas Island musk shrew

is defunct. Some places molt and peel so fast

it’s a wonder they have any name:

the Chatham Island bellbird flew the coop

as did the Chatham Island fernbird, the

Lord How Island Fantail and the Lord Howe

Island blackbird. The Utah Lake sculpin

Arizona jaguar and Puerto

Rican caviomorph, the Vegas Valley

leopard frog and New Caledonian lorikeet?

They’ve hit the road for which there is no name

a mouth surrounds so well as it did theirs.

The sea mink’s crossed the bar and the great auk’s

ground time here was brief. Four forms the macaw

took are canceled checks. Sad Adam fills his lungs

with haunted air, and so does angry Eve:

they meant no name they made up for farewell.

They were just a couple starting out,

a place they could afford, a few laughs,

no champagne but a bottle of rosé.

In fact Adam and Eve are not their names.

William Matthews

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Some things we know we will lose – our first love, our parents, our youth, even our life. Still, it’s hard. Expecting to lose something does not make it easier. But to lose what we always imagined would continue on long beyond ourselves? How much harder it is to lose coast lines, forests, birdsong. Saddest of all not to notice the loss or even admit it is possible. Bigbrain, you are the ultimate propagator, covering the Earth; you are the ultimate consumer, eating the Earth. But you with your massive cranium and metaphorical heart are capable of wonder, Earth-inspired love; you are capable of sorrow. Are you capable of sharing this planet?

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It Would Have Been Enough

If only daffodils had caught the light,

++++++++that would have been enough,

++++ and if to add variety,

++++++++just crocuses and tulips

++++ splashed their colors in the dawn,

++++++++ that, too, would have sufficed;

++++ and if just sparrows, common sparrows,

not white-throated, dusky-evening, golden-crowned,

++++ had tilted on a limber bough

amid the silver smooth and silver rough

++++ and twined their whistlings in the leaves,

++++++++ that would have been enough.

To add variety, it would have been enough

++++++++if only chickadees,

++++the plain gray junco, and the nuthatch

also frequented the maple tree and played

++++++++ upon a puff of wind,

and, certainly, it would have been sufficient

++++ if, beside the steady maple,

for the sake of contrast in the hazy rain,

++++ a clump of gleaming birches swayed.

It would have been sufficient for variety

++++++++ without the tamaracks,

++++without the pines, without the firs,

without the hemlocks harboring the wind;

++++++++ it would have been enough

to have the chipmunk pausing on his log

++++++++ without the browsing deer

who, one by one by one, their white tails flashing,

++++ leap across the minnow stream.

++++++++ We didn’t need that much

++++ to want to make ourselves at home

++++++++ and building our dwelling here –

just light upon the lake would have sufficed to see,

++++++++ just changing light at evening

on a birch clump or a single maple tree.

++++ For us to make ourselves at home,

++++++++ it would have been enough

if only we had said, “This is enough,”

++++++++ and for variety,

it would have been sufficient if we said

++++++++ “This surely will suffice,”

and when dawn brushed its shadows in the apple tree,

++++++++ if we had only said

how bountiful those shaded circles are,

++++++++ how silently they pull

++++ themselves together toward the stem,

that bounty would have seemed more bountiful.

++++ And even now, if I should say,

“How bountiful,” then just one daffodil,

++++ a single daffodil unfolding

++++++++ in a yellow vase

upon a maple table in the breeding sun,

++++++++ would be enough

++++ and seem abundant far beyond

what was sufficient to desire, except

++++ for one brown, ordinary sparrow

++++++++ on my windowsill,

which I cannot resist including in this light,

++++ and maybe one wide row of cedars,

winding up the valley to the misted hill.

Robert Pack

[Dayenu is a song traditionally sung during the telling of the story of Exodus at the Passover seder. The song’s stanzas list a series of kindnesses God performed for the Jewish people during and after the Exodus and concludes each with the word dayenu — “it would have been enough.”]

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These poems by Sherod Santos, William Matthews, and Robert Pack are collected in Poems for a Small Planet: Contemporary American Nature Poetry, Middlebury College Press, University Press of New England; A Breadloaf Anthology © 1993.

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Between 1978 and 1980, geophysicists Glen Penfield and Antonio Camargo (working for Mexican petroleum company Pemex) collected data from the Yucatan Peninsula suggesting a huge asteroid impact crater. When they presented their findings at the Society of Exploration Geophysicists conference of 1981, most of the world’s experts on impact craters, the Cretaceous-Paleogene iridium layer, and dinosaur mass extinction were attending a different conference in Snowbird, Utah. For years Penfield’s conclusions were overlooked, ignored, or frankly dismissed and scoffed at. When he later chose to label the 66 million year old crater for the small nearby village of Chicxulub Pueblo, Penfield was heard to say that part of his motivation for choosing the name was “to give the academics and NASA naysayers a challenging time pronouncing it.”

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