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Ridges and Ruins – Poems for the Earth

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Earth Day, Earth Day 2025, Earth Day Every Day, ecology, Ecopoetry, imagery, Jessi Waugh, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing, West Carteret High School on April 29, 2025| 5 Comments »

[poems selected by and written by the students

of West Carteret High School, Morehead City, North Carolina, USA]

Earlier this month I asked Jessi Waugh, teacher/scientist/poet and instructor in Earth and Environmental Science, if she would like to have her high school students contribute Poems for the Earth. Jessi replied Yes! and then this:

Several days before the poem-writing lesson, I gave my students the assignment to post an EcoPoem to a class discussion. They could post any poem or song lyrics related to nature. In this discussion format, students are able to see each other’s posts and like or comment. Few interacted, but they did see each other’s poems as I scrolled through the class submissions.

This assignment saw some of the expected favorites: Robert Frost, Shel Silverstein, Dr. Seuss. It also saw poems obviously chosen by a Google Search for “ecopoem example,” as I knew it would. But I got unexpected and delightful responses as well, such as:

Stick your leaves back on

My mother planted you the day I was born.

I grew with you.

I remember trying to stick your leaves back on in autumn;

I was scared of you changing.

Yet as time passed, my attempts stood no chance.

The cruel seasons ripped apart your branches.

The cruel season ripped me apart, too.

You looked so unrecognizable by the time winter ended,

I didn’t even wanna be near you.

My mother made me blow out a candle for you every year.

She hasn’t lit one in 1…2…3… I lost count.

I grew without you.

You stood tall, but I only kept changing.

I was scared of changing.

I’m 16 now.

A storm ripped you from the earth.

I’m trying to stick your leaves back on.

I wish you could do the same to me.

Emily M

published March 27, 2024 at https://redroompoetry.org/student-poems/stick-your-leaves-back-on/

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The Rose that Grew from Concrete

Did you hear about the rose that grew

from a crack in the concrete?

Proving nature’s law is wrong it

learned to walk without having feet.

Funny it seems, but by keeping its dreams,

it learned to breathe fresh air.

Long live the rose that grew from concrete

when no one else ever cared.

Tupac Shakur

from the book by the same title; more at https://www.commonlit.org/en/texts/the-rose-that-grew-from-concrete

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Before they wrote a poem, Jessi gave her students this assignment: “Analyze the connections between the biosphere and other Earth systems (geosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere).” She took them to the back soccer field at their school, which is surrounded on three sides by forest and powerline land. She had cut 2′ x 2′ pieces of an old tarp for them to sit on, and once they were outdoors she handed them a clipboard along with the assignment log sheet and told them to sit facing the forest and far enough apart so they couldn’t distract each other.

When we first got out there, many students sat in the middle of the field or facing away from the forest, and I came around to encourage them to sit near the wild areas and turn towards them. Most did. Others were not comfortable and chose to stand or remain near the middle of the field, especially girls wary of jumping spiders.

Students documented the abiotic and biotic factors in the ecosystem, reinforcing those terms, and created a food web with the 10 organisms they observed. These were concepts from class (trophic level, energy flow, limiting factors) put into practice. They then answered a series of questions about interactions between ecosystem components and biodiversity, and then crafted their poems, all while outside.

Before taking them outside that day, I read the students one of my own poems, Dunation, but didn’t tell them it was mine. I told them to listen for the repetition of sounds and them suggested they repeat sounds in their poems as an easy literary device.

It was a beautiful day, perfect for sitting in the back field for an hour. We saw at least 20 species between all the different insects, herbaceous perennials, trees, and birds. Likely closer to 50. In general, students were quiet and reflective and did a great job of observing the ecosystem. – Jessi Waugh

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selected student poems . . .

The Great Outdoors

When I step outside to the great outdoors

I see nothing but change, out of our culture nothing

stays the same

not the trees, not the grass, not the very ground you stand on

everything around us is just waiting on its moment

When I step outside to the great outdoors

I notice change is inevitable but nothing to fear

everything changes even just saying

“the last time I was here”

or the time and age you got, like the sound

of the creek, of the animals above, or even the things

that all of us take for granted like a mother’s love

Everything changes

please don’t be afraid

be glad you have what you have

and enjoy the change

Kevin Hunter, Student at West Carteret High School

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In the Back Soccer Field

With all these limiting beige walls I’m stuck with

for over 5 hours a day, it feels

refreshing to see the leaves, feel the breeze

crunch the brittle soil like the wandering ant

I make my pilgrimage

toward NATURE

My eyes are stimulated by something that isn’t

a screen but the echoes of human

development still make their unpleasant sounds

nature is something that can’t be replicated

truly by plastic or plaster models or

the dull green of money, as nature is

VIBRANT and cannot be comprehended by man

no matter what

Kyndall Griffin, Student at West Carteret High School

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Life Cycle

Green

Life abounds

Sunlight kisses leaves

Insects buzz, a symphony of life

Grass

Tiny world

Hidden, teeming

spiders spin, frogs leap

nature’s dance, a vibrant scene

Balance

Stillness

Whispers softly

Decomposers working

Life to death, death into life

Cycle

Jazireyah Johnson, Student at West Carteret High School

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and another favorite selected by Jessi’s students . . .

rises the moon

Days seem sometimes as if they’ll never end

Sun digs its heels to taunt you

But after sunlit days, one thing stays the same

Rises the moon

Days fade into a watercolour blur

Memories swim and haunt you

But look into the lake, shimmering like smoke

Rises the moon

Oh-oh, close your weary eyes

I promise you that soon the autumn comes

To darken fading summer skies

Breathe, breathe, breathe

Days pull you down just like a sinking ship

Floating is getting harder

But tread the water, child, and know that meanwhile

Rises the moon

Days pull you up just like a daffodil

Uprooted from its garden

They’ll tell you what you owe, but know even so

Rises the moon

You’ll be visited by sleep

I promise you that soon the autumn comes

To steal away each dream you keep

Breathe, breathe, breathe

lyrics and music by Liana Flores

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xddn3kJhhY

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Dunation

The sorrows they pile heart-high

head-high, sky-high like peaks

of primary dunes against winter-white

an accumulation of minutia

a hummock too precipitous to persist

Spring’s avalanche comes

grains slip-slide down dune slipfaces

so suddenly, the sound akin to arctic ice breaking

tern eggs crackling, oak limbs fracturing

in furious full-February gales

Hearts, heads, skies on fire

here comes March’s awakening

dunes crash-topple into manageable talus

Here we come

tip-toeing across the tops

paper children tumbling

over ridges and ruins

Jessi Waugh, Earth and Environmental Science Teacher, West Carteret High School

The main reaction from students to this project was appreciation for the time sitting outdoors, and they enjoy the social aspect of posting “favorite’ ecopoems on our class discussions. As much as I’d like to turn it into a week of poetry discussions, that would be terribly off-topic for my science class, and I used it primarily as a way to reflect on the connections between earth’s “spheres” (atmo, hydro, litho, geo) and how they interact in ecosystems. In general, I notice that students are disillusioned with politics and technology. They, like all students I’ve taught, enjoy hands-on experience and labs. I think poetry and teens could mix well in many places. – Jessi Waugh

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West Carteret High School is in Morehead City, North Carolina, in the southeastern USA. It is a public 9-12th grade high school, with about 1100 students. Approximately 40% of students are economically disadvantaged. Jessi Waugh teaches Earth and Environmental Science, since 2000 a required course for graduation. She also teaches Biology and Marine Science as needed, and has been a teacher for 12 years. Her students are all 9th & 10th grade, ages 14-16. The poems submitted are from both the honors and standard classes. She holds a Master’s in Teaching Secondary Science and an undergraduate Biology degree. I like teaching this course and age group; it’s my niche.

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Earth Day 2025 – Poems for the Earth

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Earth Day, ecology, Ecopoetry, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry on April 22, 2025| 5 Comments »

[poems by Veiga Simões, Barbara Conrad, Mary Oliver, Camille Dungy –

selected and shared by Christina Baumis, David Radavich,

Scott Owens, Bill Griffin]

Ao Viandante

(To the Person Who Passes Through This Place)

You that pass and raise your arm to me

before you hurt me, look at me well.

I am the heat of your home in the cold winter nights.

I am the friendly shade that you find

when walking under the August sun

And my fruits are appetizing freshness

That satisfy your thirst on the way.

I am the friendly beam of your house, the board of your table

the bed in which you rest and the wood of your boat.

I am handle of your hoe, the door of your dwelling

the wood of your cradle and of your own coffin.

I am the bread of goodness and the flower of beauty.

You that pass, look at me well and do no harm.

Veiga Simões

a tree with a poem on sign beneath it, located in Lisbon, Portugal.

https://www.kruckeberg.org/a-tree-poem/

This poem brings into stark view how we use and harm trees in a final plea from the tree; “You pass, look at me well and do no harm.” The poem certainly made me ponder the consideration of a grove of trees and what they give of themselves for us and our community over generations from their community. As a nature lover who enjoys walks under and among trees, trees had my gratitude already, yet this poem enhanced it even more. The poem is written almost a caveat, testimonial, or witness statement from the specific tree in Lisbon. The article in which this appeared had a nice side note about the relationship between tree canopies and crime rates, too. – Christina Baumis

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Evergreen trees are like nature’s high rises; their community intermingles to sustain ecosystems as well as us. Posted on the California Urban Forests Councils’ Facebook Page (published on January 21, 2024) from their Haiku contest 2024.

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The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: ‘What good is it?’ If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. … To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering. – Aldo Leopold

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Blue in Winter, Blame the Moon

+++ after a New York Times article on biological rhythms,

+++ peppered with phrases from the dining section

Blue in winter, blame the moon, say the scientists

for anyone living dark in the northern latitudes.

Overeating, sleeping in fits, activity cycles

shifted—even for mutant hamsters and fruit flies.

We trudge through cabbage season, tongue tingling

at the thought of gumbo and Sazerac, more laissez-faire

than the fusty French. Earth spins and the moon

thumps inside our cells. Trillions of clocks, ticking, ticking.

The universe feels it. Some cataclysm must have caused

our nights to topple like this, seasons spliced

like a butchered hog. We’re a mélange of earth crust

and asteroid dust—yes, that asteroid,

ejected into space, continuing as moon, tilting

primordial earth. We are orbs of something

we can’t quite claim. A recipe for stardust.

Chickpeas coming home to roost.

Barbara Conrad

I have long been a fan of Barbara Conrad’s poetry, admiring her commitment to social justice causes. This poem is remarkable for its yoking of the cosmic and the everyday, with climate change radiating in the nexus between galactic forces and routine human activities like eating and sleeping. Plus lots of colorful imagery you can feel and taste. The final line is a trenchant joke but also brings the interplanetary down to earth, namely to our dinner tables. Delicious! – David Radavich

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In the New Year

Ice is on the move—

broken off and floating freely

toward South Georgia Island

with a force to wipe out

indigenous life

and redirect our planet.

Those of us far away

see mostly waters rising,

rising, claiming

sand and beach houses

and boats of the wealthy

along lapping shores.

Carving of life

by the power of tides.

So we arrive at

another year: uprisings,

more ire in politics,

love reduced to islands

under siege,

we move inward

to protect ourselves—

bold nesting terns

or astronauts

in deepest space.

David Radavich

from Snapdragon

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All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land. – Aldo Leopold

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Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Mary Oliver

One of my favorite poems ever by one of my favorite poets ever. Wild Geese simply reminds me of my place in the intricate web of existence, in the universal community. – Scott Owens

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Wild and Precious

In Memoriam, Mary Oliver, 1/17/19

Seen at a distance this time of year

when trees are silhouettes

against a white sky

every shadow, I think,

must be a bird I’d like to identify,

waxwings, falcon, the largest of them

surely a beautiful hawk waiting

to chase a careless squirrel

across the yard and twice

around the trunk of the pecan tree,

rising on perfectly banked wings

so close it could almost reach out

and grasp the tuft of tail fur

dancing behind.

Often it turns out to be mistletoe,

nest, mere leftover leaves,

but even these speak

of life that was,

that will soon enough return,

and that thankfully always is.

Mary Oliver, the woman I’ve introduced

to more than 40 years of new students

as one of our greatest living poets,

died today,

but in view of trees, and birds,

and winter skies, and everything

that can be expressed in leaves,

it is impossible to think of her

as ever going away.

Scott Owens

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A philosopher has called this imponderable essence the numenon of material things. It stands in contradistinction to phenomenon, which is ponderable and predictable, even to the tossing and turning of the remotest star. The grouse is the numenon of the north woods, the blue jay of the hickory groves, the whisky-jack of the muskegs, the piñonero of the juniper foothills. – Aldo Leopold

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Trophic Cascade

After the reintroduction of gray wolves

to Yellowstone and, as anticipated, their culling

of deer, trees grew beyond the deer stunt

of the mid century. In their up reach

songbirds nested, who scattered

seed for underbrush, and in that cover

warrened snowshoe hare. Weasel and water shrew

returned, also vole, and came soon hawk

and falcon, bald eagle, kestrel, and with them

hawk shadow, falcon shadow. Eagle shade

and kestrel shade haunted newly-berried

runnels where mule deer no longer rummaged, cautious

as they were, now, of being surprised by wolves. Berries

brought bear, while undergrowth and willows, growing

now right down to the river, brought beavers,

who dam. Muskrats came to the dams, and tadpoles.

Came, too, the night song of the fathers

of tadpoles. With water striders, the dark

gray American dipper bobbed in fresh pools

of the river, and fish stayed, and the bear, who

fished, also culled deer fawns and to their kill scraps

came vulture and coyote, long gone in the region

until now, and their scat scattered seed, and more

trees, brush, and berries grew up along the river

that had run straight and so flooded but thus dammed,

compelled to meander, is less prone to overrun. Don’t

you tell me this is not the same as my story. All this

life born from one hungry animal, this whole,

new landscape, the course of the river changed,

I know this. I reintroduced myself to myself, this time

a mother. After which, nothing was ever the same.

Camille T. Dungy

from Trophic Cascade, Wesleyan University Press. August 16, 2021 at Poems.com

Yesterday walking beside Elkin Creek, Linda and I remarked that Wood Anemone and Star Chickweed like to grow together. Each white bloom points to its friend and neighbor. Why? Just the right balance of sun and shade for them both? Enough nourishment in the leaf mould but not too much? Are their tiny hands clasped beneath the surface in a group hug of mycorrhizal fungus?

I remind myself that the connections and community are so much vaster than I can even imagine. And I recall this final quotation by Aldo Leopold:

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. . . Modern natural history deals only incidentally with the identity of plants and animals, and only incidentally with their habits and behaviors. It deals principally with their relations to each other, their relations to the soil and water in which they grow, and their relations to the human beings who sing about “my Country” but see little or nothing of its inner workings. – Aldo Leopold

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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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