Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Ecopoetry’ Category

Embrace

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on February 23, 2024| 11 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Joanie McLean]
 . 
Here Is What’s Left
 . 
Summer wanes as usual
the Rudbeckia succumbs
to mildew and wilt
the figs fall
under the weight
of sucking junebugs
the pond is muddy
scummed over and still
even the birds are quiet
their calls diminished
 . 
Looking out
at the brittle grass
in the crickety field
I see scraps and tatters
of old assumptions
of unearned grace
being dragged away
with the season’s remnants:
a semblance of security here
a shadow of normalcy there
pieces of convenience
disjointed shapes
of good times
all crumbling
as they go
leaving a light breeze
to stir the stillness
amidst the nodding
muhly grass plumes
 . 
So then
here is what’s left
the grass
the breeze
the slipping light
the emptiness
whose touch is so gentle
the kindness of it all
 . 
Joanie McLean
from Like Wind into Air, Redhawk Publications, Hickory, NC. © 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Yesterday I took Dad and Mom to visit a senior living facility. After the tour we stayed for lunch, Dad and Mom seated at a table with two of the residents, Pat and Ken. Mary Ellen and I watched from a distance as Dad introduced himself and made conversation, charming, just charming. He and Mom seemed to be enjoying themselves. When we got home, I asked Dad for his impressions. “The place is nicely decorated, looks like it’s been painted. The lunch was good.” But when I asked if there were any negatives, he surprised me – “The people were all really old.”
 . 
Perhaps every ninety-seven year old man lives in a universe of constricted perspective. Just breathing, minute by minute, may exhaust all of his empathic resources; every event of the moment becomes wholly self-referential. Nevertheless I will grant Dad this: when he says, “They were all worse off than I am,” maybe it is true that none have retained their social skills like he has.
 . 
What about the seventy-one year old man? What is the insurmountable impediment inherent in becoming me-in-relationship with another? I watch myself constantly calculating how I will respond, or reflecting (regretting) how I have responded. I begin to see the other as the obstacle, the hurdle I must leap to become the actual me.
 . 
Since my Beloved is for me and I for my Beloved, who will be able to separate and extinguish two fires so enkindled? It would amount to labor in vain, for the two fires have become one.  .  . Teresa of Avila
 . 
And yet this is still me as observer and not as participant. Me watching and not being. Even if all others were to acquiesce and I in sidestepping could imagine my way forward now open and free and unhindered, I would still be tethered to me-in-relationship with myself. I am standing in my own way. I live by formulations and ruminations. I imagine it is the others who prescribe their expectations of me, but really I am the prescriber. I am the one who builds these enclosures.
 . 
Mystics and sages of all traditions speak of the inner fire, the divine spark hidden in our very cells and in all that lives. This flame of love is the pure presence of God.  .  . Paula D’Arcy
 . 
Do I spy a chink in the wall? The clamor of the world is not going to hush on my account, but perhaps I can press my eye up to the barrier and discern a little light. Not another book of philosophy or science, not a lambast of revelation or a self-created masterpiece – just a small warm flame. For even just a moment, let it burn. Let it burn me. Let it burn in me. May I glimpse me-in-relationship with all.
 . 
Becoming fire means saying yes to life by the very way we live.  .  . Christine Valters Paintner
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Still With the Light
 . 
First Sunday
after the first full moon
after the Spring Equinox
Easter morning for some
here on this particular land mass
so often a lovely day
at this latitude so often
a sort of gentleness
a willingness to smile
conveyed in the watery
green light that shimmers
and steps across
church lawns
and across my yard
where bluebirds jump
from the fence wire
into the broomsedge
and flutter back up
with crickets in their bills.
 . 
There is something else
shifting like clouds
below a horizon
insinuating just beyond
these Easter lawns –
something that would
come near now
if I let it
would bend this light
differently
would spurn
this morning’s naive smile.
 . 
So I stand
as still as I can
with the light
the breeze shifting
the shadows
the bluebirds
dropping and rising
dropping and rising
that’s all
just this holy light
just for now.
 . 
Joanie McLean
from Like Wind into Air, Redhawk Publications, Hickory, NC. © 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
I am jealous of these poems. No, not jealousy with its sour tang of spite. I desire these poems. I long for them; I long to walk where they walk; I long to lie down in their grass. May I not also please hear the cuckoo and the woodcock, sense the coyote just down the path, know the secret of every color and flavor of light?
 . 
Like Wind into Air by Joanie McLean sustains the beautiful image and promise of that title throughout its pages. Everything enters into everything, every season lives its truth, every life swirls and connects to every other: all-in-relationship-to-all. The poet gently dissolves every barrier between the reader and her world. In the grass in the slough in the stand of pines / life and death are fully accountable / part of a bargain –
 . 
May I be as emptied and as filled as these poems? May I enter the poems’ world? And as I embrace their world may I not escape my own world but embrace it as well? This is the point of the poetry; this is the point of love.
 . 
❦
 . 
Joanie McLean’s Like Wind into Air at Redhawk Publications HERE
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
In Late February
 . 
there is always
a wind in the woods
a basso continuo hum,
 . 
the fugue the chorus frogs
play toccata against,
the sound memory makes
 . 
when it wakes and rises
up through the earth
towards sleeping roots.
 . 
The field has forgotten
about summer and bees
and lightning.
 . 
But the trees,
whose roots are deepest,
are remembering something
 . 
and the frogs,
whose sleep is the lightest,
are dying to hear it.
 . 
Of course February
would sing like this
whether I heard it or not.
 . 
But again this year
I am here in the field,
at the edge of the woods.
 . 
Joanie McLean
from Like Wind into Air, Redhawk Publications, Hickory, NC. © 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
 . 
 . 
2020-11-03a Doughton Park Tree
 . 

Read Full Post »

Foreshadowing

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on December 29, 2023| 9 Comments »

 . 
[with poems from The Ecopoetry Anthology by
Gary Snyder, Evie Shockley, Adrienne Rich]
 . 
For the Children
 . 
The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up as we all
go down.
 . 
In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.
 . 
To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:
 . 
stay together
learn the flowers
go light
 . 
Gary Snyder
from The Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street; Trinity University Press, San Antonio, TX; © 2013
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
In the cook tent behind the Big Top, the carnies are eating breakfast together. One rowdy slurps coffee with the spoon handle jutting up from his cup. His buddy hollers, “You’ll put your eye out!” but he just ignores the danger and goes right on drinking.
 . 
Young Toby Tyler and I just gape, he at the jostling men and me, age eight, at the black & white TV. Both of us are convinced it’s going to happen any minute, spoon into eyeball. No matter what happens during the rest of that movie, we keep watching the guy with the doomed eye.
 . 
Sixty years of foreboding later and I still can’t tell you much else about the film (wasn’t there a chimp?), but it doesn’t take much for me to still feel that gut tug of imminent blinding: the teaspoon of Damocles. “Putting your eye out” was one of the more graphic horrifics that dogged my childhood. When it became the tagline for “A Christmas Story,” I couldn’t laugh with quite the same gusto as my wife. As readers we’re admonished to be vigilant for foreshadowing; as writers we’re taught to incorporate it; as kids we’re just scared into behaving ourselves.
 . 
Turns out the rowdy never even poked his eye. It wasn’t foreshadowing at all, just a one off Disney gag. Can you even call something foreshadowing if it never connects to the unwritten future, if there isn’t some aftshadowing of destiny that confirms the prophesy? Am I trying to tell myself to quit worrying so much about a future that may never arrive? Standing in the TSA line at the airport – oh no, do I have a weapon in my pocket, nail file of Damocles? Dad speeding toward his 95th birthday with driver’s license in his pocket, gleam in his eye, and in his ignition the key of Damocles. What could possibly go wrong?
 . 
Alas, I’m afraid that eight-year old kid already had thinking about, planning for, and worrying about the future inscribed deep in his psyche. In the fable about ants and grasshoppers it never even occurred to him to identify with anyone but the ant. Here I am now, all grown up, carefully rinsing the teaspoon and putting it in the washer. But what the hell: gimme another cuppa coffee!
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
notes for the early journey
+++ for j.v.k.
 . 
somewhere along the way you will need to lean
over a bluff’s edge   drop you shoes and keep moving   use
the feel of greening grass under your feet as a guide   if a
rainbow confuses you   which end   go the third
way   on the mountain you’ll remember   climb on
up to where the aspens tremble   you will be alone   these
high winds can knife some lungs to gasping rags   but for you
 . 
there’s nothing to worry about   breathe   sniff the air like
a bloodhound and head the opposite way   find the
place where the land dissolves into sand   keep walking   when
that sand becomes sea   speak a bridge into being
I know you can do it   your father’s son ain’t
heard of can’t   follow the song   don’t stop until you’re south
of sorrow and all yo can smell is jasmine   I never
once stumbled on such a place   hard to say if a brown child
is the last four hundred years has had such
a luscious dream   day or night   but this is your mother’s
lullaby   I know she meant you to sleep sweet
 . 
Evie Shockley
from The Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street; Trinity University Press, San Antonio, TX; © 2013
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
At Christmas we celebrate the past and resolve to be worthy of the present – to give life to the divine presence within our own hearts. At New Year’s we look to the future. In recent years that gaze forward has generally been accompanied by a soto voce “Oh, shit.” Yeah, pretty bleak outlook for 2024: politics, race, climate, war. Party’s over.
 . 
This is the best time to open a book of poetry. Not to escape to some idealized past but to connect to another human being who is also muttering, but who hasn’t yet given up hope. And this is especially the time I open my Ecopoetry Anthology, all hefty 0.9 kg of it. I’ve read many definitions of ecopoetry (as differentiated from nature poetry), some of them requiring thousands of words,  but here’s my personal take: poems that observe the world as it is, life and geology and physics without rose-colored glasses; poems that put is in our place in the world, in the literal and figurative connotation of that phrase, no holds barred, no punches pulled; poems that, even in the face of reality, still hold onto hope that we creatures might understand, appreciate, and love every particle of it.
 . 
And each other. Love each other. This is the best time to read a poem, connect with the poet, and connect with every other reader of that poem. Past, present, and future. What the hell: gimme some love and hope!
 . 
❦
 . 
More information on The Ecopoetry Anthology, and where to order,  HERE
 . 
. .
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
What Kind of Times Are These
 . 
There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.
 . 
I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t
+++ be fooled,
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.
 . 
I won’t tell yo where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light –
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.
 . 
And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.
 . 
Adrienne Rich
from The Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street; Trinity University Press, San Antonio, TX; © 2013
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
IMG_0768, tree
 . 

Read Full Post »

Small Voices

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , on November 10, 2023| 8 Comments »

 . 
[With poetry by Joy Harjo and Wendell Berry]
 . 
For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet
 . 
Put down that bag of potato chips, that white bread, that bottle of pop.
 . 
Turn off that cellphone, computer, and remote control.
 . 
Open the door, then close it behind you.
 . 
Take a breath offered by friendly winds. They travel the earth gathering essences of plants to clean.
 . 
Give it back with gratitude.
 . 
If you sing it will give your spirit lift to fly to the stars’ ears and back.
 . 
Acknowledge this earth who has cared for you since you were a dream planting itself precisely within your parents’ desire.
 . 
Let your moccasin feet take you to the encampment of the guardians who have known you before time, who will be there after time. They sit before the fire that has been there without time.
 . 
Let the earth stabilize your postcolonial insecure jitters.
 . 
Be respectful of the small insects, birds and animal people who accompany you.
Ask their forgiveness for the harm we humans have brought down upon them.
 . 
Don’t worry.
The heart knows the way though there may be high-rises, interstates, checkpoints, armed soldiers, massacres, wars, and those who will despise you because they despise themselves.
 . 
The journey might take you a few hours, a day, a year, a few years, a hundred, a thousand or even more.
 . 
Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the thieves of time.
 . 
Do not hold regrets.
 . 
When you find your way to the circle, to the fire kept burning by the keepers of your soul, you will be welcomed.
 . 
You must clean yourself with cedar, sage, or other healing plant.
 . 
Cut the ties you have to failure and shame.
 . 
Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction.
 . 
Ask for forgiveness.
 . 
Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor.
 . 
Call your spirit back. It may be caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse.
 . 
You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return.
 . 
Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.
 . 
Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It may return in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be happy to be found after being lost for so long.
 . 
Your spirit will need to sleep awhile after it is bathed and given clean clothes.
 . 
Now you can have a party. Invite everyone you know who loves and supports you. Keep room for those who have no place else to go.
 . 
Make a giveaway, and remember, keep the speeches short.
 . 
Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way through the dark.
 . 
Joy Harjo
from Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings by Joy Harjo. Copyright © 2015 by Joy Harjo.
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
[Great Smoky Mountains National Park bids Bill farewell during the last moments of the Tremont Writers’ Conference:]
 . 
Goodbye, Love. Thanks for dropping by. This is your last chance to slurp up the prompts you were thinking you might be handed while you’re here. Your last opportunity to be inspired. Which means what, exactly? Inspire, breathe in, be filled with spirit. But did you think I’d tip you up like a funnel and just pour right down? Think back to that little exercise in your application and cull one word – community. This is something I know all about, I the Queen of Connections, I the web of interactions, whether in a gram of soil beneath your feet or spanning the entire watershed of this Middle Prong that flows past you right now – community.
 . 
I’m more than willing to speak. I live to show myself to you. Take a closer look at my image in that postcard and read the fine print: International Biosphere Reserve. But did you notice how small those letters are compared to the beech and oak overtowering? The subtext is, you don’t have to be such a geek about it. Oh sure, learn my names, my histories, my ecologies, but please, for at least one moment, forget about words on paper, Human Person, and just look around you.
 . 
Right around you – seven faces peering back (eight, if you count Jeremy arriving with the coffee delivery). What have you found here, and what will you keep? It’s more than friendship, it’s more than a shared task and a common goal. It’s connection. Don’t drop it. Don’t lose it. And what I’m really saying is . . . See you later!
 . 
 . 
❦
 . 
More than a week has passed and I’m straining hard to hear the Middle Prong. Where has that connection flown? What was the sound of that beckoning? Have I traveled too far beyond its reach, too many highway miles, too many turnings within?
 . 
Here I am surrounded by books and papers, electronics and plastics, literally surrounded: Amelia says, “Your office is a big mess, Pappy.” Surrounded and cumbered by the “should’s” and “got to’s” that no doubt fill your world as well. First phone calls of the day: a change in tomorrow’s doctor appointments for Mom and Dad; on hold and digital assistant waiting for their financial manager; negotiating the week’s schedule. If only the tinnitus I constantly live with sounded more like wind in the pines and rushing water.
 . 
But right now a female cardinal is craning to reach the suet feeder I’ve hidden in the center of the holly outside my window. In an hour, Linda and I will take our first walk together on a new little sprig of MST I helped work on this month. I am rich in these connections and many more. I grieve for those who don’t experience community. Who walk past the little purple flower sprouted through the concrete and never see it. Who feel mostly alienation and suspicion for the human beings around them, much less the non-bipedal creatures. Who cut themselves off from the voice of wind that wants to fill them and let them breathe deep. Philosophers and poets write heavy volumes about the sickness in our human spirits when we separate ourselves from the earth. What is our reply?
 . 
Perhaps this Voice is saying, “C’mon, little Man. You know some folks who need to hear me. Spin a few connections!” See you later. See you now!
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
 . 
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
anymore. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
 . 
Wendell Berry
Copyright © 1971, 1972, 1973 by Wendell Berry. Excerpted from The Country of Marriage. Reprinted in THE SUN June, 2014
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Today’s poems were offered as direction for meditation while visiting our “secret spots” during several days at Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont. Any program at Tremont always includes space for quiet reflection while outdoors in nature, whether your secret spot is halfway up the Lumber Ridge Trail or a big smooth rock beside the Little River.
 . 
Joy Harjo (born 1951) was appointed the new United States poet laureate in 2019. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1951, Harjo is a member of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation. She is the author of several books of poetry, including An American Sunrise, (W. W. Norton, 2019), and Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (W. W. Norton, 2015). She is a current Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
 . 
Wendell Berry (born 1934) is an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and a recipient of The National Humanities Medal, along with many other awards and honors. On January 28, 2015, he became the first living writer to be inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
 .  . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Doughton Park Tree -- 5/1/2021

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »