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Chunky Hummer

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, Imagery, tagged Alchemy, Bill Griffin, Ecopoetry, imagery, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, poetry, Rae Spencer, Southern writing on October 11, 2024| 7 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Rae Spencer]

Innate

what does a hummingbird know

in its world of nectar and need

nightly forced to torpor

by the constant urge to feed

through staggering migration

are its dreams equally desperate?

does it wake hungry

ill-tempered with beauty

cramped with desire

suddenly alert to the nature of sugar

aware that satisfaction can only ever be

illusory

and what does the hummingbird sense

as it sips the flower’s allure

does it know of delicate meanings

pitched fever-tight

into its tiny world of furtive speed

dare I surmise anything?

maybe nectar is only a meal

sugar an ache that will pass

beauty an accident of form

and nothing means more than a wing

clasped into the air and released

effortless

Rae Spencer

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Hovering to sip sugar water, flicking your tongue into the red plastic flower, then dive bombed by a lance-tipped green blur – this is daily life for a hummingbird in the Eastern US. We only have the one species here, ruby-throated, and they do not play well with others. When it comes to a choice feeder there is no sharing, unlike the scene in the Western US where a cloud of a dozen birds, four or five different species, will jointly keep a feeder sincerely humming.

These last two weeks of September we have been visited hourly by the chunkiest hummingbird I have ever seen. The sleeker slimmer birds will chase her away but then she’s right back. (She-birds only; all the males have left for Central America by the end of August and these more svelte visitors and chasers have likely already burned fat as they’re migrating through from farther north). I realize hummingbirds have to bulk up each autumn, entering a period of hyperphagia before migration similar to black bears before hibernation, but this bird is a real hunk. She is going to have no problem making the 800 km flight from Florida to Yucatan, a natural miracle for such a tiny creature who, even at twice her normal body weight, still weighs only 6 grams – about the weight of a postcard, or of the well-sharpened pencil you’ll use to write a note to Guatemala to let them know to expect this ruby-throat in a couple of weeks.

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Audubon NC suggests continuing to fill hummingbird feeders until the second week in October. Abundant sugar will not deter the birds from setting out on their southward journey; their migration is triggered by light, or actually its absence, the diminishing length of day. All creatures live by their own internal clock. For some the clock’s ticks are soil temperature, snowmelt, the movement of water through earth; for others alarms are set by earth’s rotation and the stretch of sunlight and shadow.

And no creature lives in isolation. What if come clocks tick out of rhythm with the others? In the Western US, when broad-tailed hummingbirds arrive from their wintering grounds they depend on spring-blooming glacier lilies for nectar to replenish their exhausted energy. By 2012, however, biologists noted that the lilies were beginning to open seventeen days earlier than they had several decades prior. Some would already be withered before the hummingbirds even arrived. By 2050 the birds may completely miss the span of lily bloom.

Phenological mismatch is the term for this consequence of global climate change. What if migrating flycatchers miss their fly hatch? What if flowers bloom to no pollinators? Some species seem to benefit from early spring – marmots have a longer season to chow down and birth more marmettes. Some species can adapt to new timings but many can’t, especially as climate clocks accelerate their vagaries and variations. We can’t yet know all the consequences, but we know our children and grandchildren are experiencing a different world from the world in which we grew up.

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Belyaev’s Foxes

When most only wanted their fur

Belyaev wanted their genes

He selected those he could touch

The ones who ate from his hand

Exerting curious pressure

On his wild silver stock

Closed in outdoor cages

To bear Belyaev’s chosen litters

Where is the gene for submission

For loyalty and bonding?

Somewhere, it seems

Connected to curly tails

White stars on the face

Flopped ears and blunt snouts

Wags and whines and barks

Which compete for favors

Other than food

So Belyaev’s foxes tamed the men

With prolonged puppyhood

And after thirty generations

Heeled happily across their yard

In through the open front door

Rae Spencer

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Embryology, cosmology, evolution . . . double helices, insect wings, quarks . . . mystery, contemplation, enlightenment: the poems of Alchemy wend their way through an expanding universe of discovery. There is scarcely a field of science or philosophy that Rae Spencer does not embrace in this collection, using language both precise and technical as well as elevated and elevating. This slim coverlet of atmosphere that supports us, this beneficent congregation of creatures within such mild extremes of warmth and moisture and light, how can one walking through such a place not be inspired?

And once inspired, what enters us to feed our hearts, what strikes a tonal chord within our minds What shall we believe in? What shall we hope for? Nothing is beneath our noticing; nothing is unworthy of praise. Perhaps the best way to receive Rae Spencer’s expansive embrace embodied in her universalistic collection is as, in the poet’s own words, a patchwork philosophy of wonder (Agnost).

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Rae Spencer is a veterinarian and lives in Virginia, USA. Alchemy is available at Kelsay Books.

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Means of Dispersal

When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.

++++++++++++++++++ – Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species

He spent pages contemplating seeds

How some survived in seawater

Others in the crops of owls

In the feces of locusts

In the stomachs of fish

Frozen in icebergs

Dried in a clump of mud

Between the toes of a partridge

“In the course of two months,

I picked up in my garden 12 kinds of seeds,

out of the excrement of small birds, and these

seemed perfect…”

How long in the garden?

Hovering over phials of curiosity

Some rank with the rot of failure

Others yielding green secrets

To the man who struggled to ask

Is there another explanation?

And in the end answered himself

With seed, with barnacles and pigeons

“…from so simple a beginning

endless forms most beautiful and most

wonderful have been, and are being,

evolved.”

So Darwin concluded

Without the benefit of Mendel’s peas

Or Watson, Crick, and Franklin’s helices

Without diffusion gels

Sequencers and microchips

Argument is as simple as a garden

Heavy and sweet with fruit

Ripe with answers

Rae Spencer

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Augury

Posted in ecology, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged An Augury of Birds, Bill Griffin, birds, Clayton Joe Young, imagery, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Redh, Redhawk Publications, Scott Owens on May 17, 2024| 9 Comments »

“Black Vulture” – Clayton Joe Young – http://www.joeyoungphoto.com

[poems by Scott Owens, photos by Clayton Joe Young]

Buzzard

Always

when you look up

at white clouds, blue sky,

you see

that hyphen of a bird,

not flying but floating,

silently

keeping two worlds

you imagine apart, together,

connecting

earth to sky,

life to death.

Closer,

we see the hunched neck,

bald head, vulture stoop

as something that gives us

chills.

Scott Owens

from An Augury of Birds, forthcoming from Redhawk Publications; poems by Scott Owens, photography by Clayton Joe Young

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The naturalist Robert Lynd is quoted as saying, “In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence.” How often do we actually pause and participate in silence? Become part of it? Sunday afternoon Linda and I had hiked a couple of miles along the Mountains-to-Sea Trail when we came face to face with friends we hadn’t seen since before COVID. They were hiking in from the opposite direction but our destination was the same: the Forest Bathing trail along Grassy Creek.

We continued on together. We outpaced noisier hikers; they turned back and left us in solitude. The thrum of voices at the winery and of pickups on Route 21 receded. We stopped – a gentle murmur of water flowing over the new beaver dam. Stopped again – breezes swishing through fresh Joe Pye Weed along the creek. As the trail led us up and away from the water, we left the laurel and holly and entered a glade of slender young tuliptree still recovering from logging. Our friend stopped us once more. She had taken off her sandals to feel the earth. Late afternoon sunlight streamed slant among the saplings and we were part of the silence. A vireo sang. She raised her arms and said, “This is what I came here for.”

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If we create silence, within us and around us, air and earth will magnify the silence with beauty. Birds will complete the silence with wing whirr and song. Here’s an invitation to silence, offered to us in the poems and photographs of An Augury of Birds. Scott Owens and Clayton Joe Young reward our held breath and contemplative approach with their avian celebration. They make these feathered creatures our companions – individual, distinctive, ripe with purpose. And Augury is such an apt title. Wasn’t Rachel Carson’s prophecy of a silent spring the spark that ignited our current fire of conservation and environmentalism? Noticing birds is a gateway to noticing the universe. Lift the latch, enter these pages, become part of these lives – If you close your eyes / you can hear the cosmos opening.

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“Northern Mockingbird” – Clayton Joe Young – http://www.joeyoungphoto.com

All There Is to Say

If it happens that you find yourself

at the front of a room full of people

listening to all you have to say

about what you think you know

and suddenly you hear

from an open window

you hadn’t even noticed was open

the voice of a mockingbird

as clear as the voice of God

singing in every language at once

you owe it to yourself

and all with the possibility of hearing

to stop in the almost silence

and say out loud, Listen

Scott Owens

from An Augury of Birds, forthcoming from Redhawk Publications; poems by Scott Owens, photography by Clayton Joe Young

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Hiwassee

Long fingers of catalpa trees,

Green globes of apples

Hang low over Licklog Road.

White crowns of Queen Anne’s lace,

Orange umbels of butterfly weed

Fill a field where flycatchers

Dart from limb to grass

and back, consuming

Whatever rises. Swallows

Carve endless angles across

The tops of weeds let go.

Brown headed cowbirds

Follow white-faced cows

Near a lake surrounded

By mountains in a place

Where everyone waves

And everyone remembers

What it means to live.

Scott Owens

from An Augury of Birds, forthcoming from Redhawk Publications; poems by Scott Owens, photography by Clayton Joe Young

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An Augury of Birds will be published by Redhawk Press in 2024. Check HERE for ordering information.

Scott Owens enlarges the community of creativity. He is professor of Poetry at Lenoir Rhyne University, former editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review and Southern Poetry Review, and he owns and operates Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse and Gallery where he coordinates innumerable readings and open mics, including POETRY HICKORY.

Clayton Joe Young is the Director and Senior Professor for the Photographic Technology Program at Catawba Valley Community College in Hickory, NC. He has won numerous awards for his photography and has published several books, including other collaborations with Scott Owens and with poet Tim Peeler, featuring rural North Carolina, especially Catawba County.

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“Chickadee” – Clayton Joe Young – http://www.joeyoungphoto.com

All the Meaningful Noise

How can you be on this earth

and not close your eyes on occasion

and listen to leaves give voice to wind,

hear the laugh of crow,

annunciation of blue jay,

moan of mourning dove,

all the meaningful noise

of another spring day?

Behind the finishing plant

just off the run-down road

between failing furniture towns,

a field is bursting with purple flowers.

If you close your eyes

you can hear the cosmos opening.

Scott Owens

from An Augury of Birds, forthcoming from Redhawk Publications; poems by Scott Owens, photography by Clayton Joe Young

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Earth Day – Afterword

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, Imagery, tagged Bill Griffin, Bradley Samore, Earth Day, Earth Day 2024, ecology, Ecopoetry, imagery, Jennifer Atkinson, Linda Pastan, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, poetry, Ursula K. LeGuin, W. S. Merwin on April 26, 2024| 8 Comments »

April 26, 2024

In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence.

++++++ Robert Lynd (1879-1949) – naturalist

To see a wren in a bush, call it a wren and go on walking is to have seen nothing. To see a bird and stop, watch, feel, forget yourself for a moment, to be in the bushy shadows, maybe then feel wren – that is to have joined in a larger moment with the world.

++++++ Gary Snyder

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

++++++ Chinese proverb

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November

It is an old drama

this disappearance of the leaves,

this seeming death

of the landscape.

In a later scene,

or earlier,

the trees like gnarled magicians

produce handkerchiefs

of leaves

out of empty branches.

And we watch.

We are like children

at this spectacle

of leaves,

as if one day we too

will open the wooden doors

of our coffins

and come out smiling

and bowing

all over again.

Linda Pastan (1932-2023)

Shared by Bradley Samore, Plano TX, who writes:

This poem by Linda Pastan reminds me of our hushed wonder toward the non-human and our tendency to imagine ourselves in relation to what we see. Perhaps there is no objective way to view something as each species, each person, has their own limitations and reference point. Like Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall”, Pastan makes the connection between the leaves falling and our own human death but also hints at the possibility/impossibility of our rebirth, another budding.

++++++ Bradley

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Revelation

Nothing compares to exploring the land

++++++ but what of becoming part of it

to sit so still that lizards

++++++ mate by my sandaled feet

to kneel at the grave where from shadows

++++++ a fox approaches unafraid

to lie on the grass as daylight fades

++++++ and birds feather the branches above

Bradley Samore

first appeared in Hoot

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The charm which Henry [David Thoreau] uses for bird and frog and mink, is patience. They will not come to him, or show him aright, until he becomes a log among logs, sitting still for hours in the same place; then they come around him and to him, and show themselves at home.

++++++ Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his journal, May 11, 1858.

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

++++++ Emily Dickinson

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Kinship

Rootless and restless and

warmblooded, we

blaze in the flare that

blinds us to that slow,

tall, fraternal fire of life

as strong

now as in the seedling

two centuries ago.

Ursula K LeGuin

https://thedewdrop.org/2022/03/26/ursula-le-guin-kinship/

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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)

More than at any other time, we feel the strangeness of birds when we stop and pick up a feather in our path. There is nothing on Earth to compare it to; there is no material like it, no form, nothing that functions quite the same way.

++++++ Bruce Brooks, from On the Wing

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Landscape with Jeffers and the Connecticut River

Oat stalks hang their oat-heavy heads.

Panic grass shakes in the wind

off a goldfinch’s wing. Cause,

++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ effect, and cause.

Drone, like the bee, of goldenrod and aster,

tool of the stick-tight and cockleburr,

I park and wade into high riverside grasses.

A dog gnaws on a box turtle, a spider rides

a floating log, straining the air of its midges and leafbits.

A fisherman lazy as late summer current,

++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ casts, reels, and casts.

It occurs to me I am alive, which is to say

I won’t be soon. Robinson Jeffers

from Carmel Point, in “an unbroken field of poppy and lupin”

ashamed of us all (of himself ), took solace in time,

in salt, water, and rock, in knowing

all things human “will ebb, and all/

++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ Their works dissolve.”

Me, too. And I’m not always so patient. I’ve caught myself

wishing our spoiler species gone, just swept away,

returned to rust and compost for more deserving earthly forms.

Meanwhile, flint arrowheads turn up among the plastic

picnic sporks, the glacial crags and bottom silt.

Hawks roost across the river on the now defunct

++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ nuclear power plant cooling tower,

flotsam left at the human high water mark.

Like mussel shells, like driftwood or seedpod,

like the current’s corrugations in the sand.

Here, on this side, a woodchuck sits up, lustrous,

fat on her chestnut haunches, (she thinks herself

queen of her narrow realm) and munches

++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ the fisherman’s crust.

Who wouldn’t smile? Who doesn’t pity—and love—

the woodchuck not only despite but for her like-human smugness?

How can I not through her intercession forgive

++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ for now a few things human.

Jennifer Atkinson

https://poems.com/poem/landscape-with-jeffers-and-the-connecticut-river/

Jennifer Atkinson writes in Poems.com:

But how do we live with our knowledge and the emotional cloud of fear, guilt, anger, grief, and helplessness, a cloud that surrounds us, each of us alone, and all of us together? That cloud has become intrinsic to my ecopoetical work. Burdened with the beauty and loss and malicious awfulness ahead, weighted with the anxiety that hits whenever a winter day dawns without frost on the ground or another ‘unprecedented’ downpour rings in the gutter, how do I live?

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The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

++++++ Henry David Thoreau

We lose our souls if we lose the experience of the forest, the butterflies, the song of the birds, if we can’t see the stars at night.

++++++ Thomas Berry

It is the ancient wisdom of birds that battles are best fought with song.

++++++Richard Nelson

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Rain Light

All day the stars watch from long ago

my mother said I am going now

when you are alone you will be all right

whether or not you know you will know

look at the old house in the dawn rain

all the flowers are forms of water

the sun reminds them through a white cloud

touches the patchwork spread on the hill

the washed colors of the afterlife

that lived there long before you were born

see how they wake without a question

even though the whole world is burning.

W.S. Merwin (1927-2019)

https://thedewdrop.org/2022/01/08/w-s-merwin-rain-light/

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My favorite weather is bird-chirping weather.

++++++ Terri Guillemets

You can observe a lot by just watching.

++++++ Yogi Berra

Look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time. Then your time on earth will be filled with glory.

++++++ Betty Smith, from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

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Special thanks throughout these Earth Day celebrations to my hiking buddy and nature guide Mike Barnett, who has let me into the wilderness and won’t let me leave. Most of the quotations included in these sections are compiled in Mike’s Medicine Bag, which he carries with him into every new adventure

And EXTRA SPECIAL THANKS to my companion in the universe, Linda, who allows the cosmos to flow through her pen onto paper. She has given permission for me to use a few of her drawings throughout these Earth Day celebrations.

++++++ Bill