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Archive for the ‘Ecopoetry’ Category

Poetry and Earth – Love, and

Posted in Ecopoetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on April 10, 2026| 3 Comments »

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[ poems by Connie Green, Kari Gunter-Seymour, 
Jenny Bates, Annie Woodford, Paul Jones]
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Song at Daybreak 
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Behind the mountains this morning
a soft curtain of pink, dawn dipping
into her palette, my soul the recipient
of her artistry, this small moment
that would not have occurred
had I not wakened early, wandered
sleep-deprived into the kitchen
and turned my face toward the ridges-
 . 
those ridges that daily wait for me
to look up, to accept, if only
for a minute, the gift they offer
and have offered since the forces
of nature, the work of time pushed
them from plain to towering majesty,
our common stardust knitting mountain,
kitchen, aging woman into song notes that lift
and drift, the finite urging toward the infinite.
 . 
Connie Jordan Green
selected by Kari Gunter-Seymour. First appeared in Women Speak, Volume Eleven (Sheila Na Gig Editions 2025)
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This gorgeous Song at Daybreak by Connie Green reminds me that there is so much splendor and joy to be had if we let ourselves be still long enough to truly embrace all that the earth (and sky) has to offer, and that aging too is a gift, because it means we have been given so many more opportunities to stand in awe and wonder of it all.  — Kari Gunter-Seymour
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❀
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Ten Miles North of Lore City, Guernsey County, Ohio
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Oh, Salt Fork, I’ve come to hide
inside your autumn, walk
beneath the cathedral of your branches
become a meditative painting,
a Cézanne—your impressions
 . 
revealed in planes of pigment,
the slow study of light,
pin oak and American beech awash
in swaths of topaz and carnelian,
the lake a reverie of reflections.
 . 
The universe is out of whack, tremulous
in the pathos of floods, wildfires and drought.
Here, red squirrels wax comedic,
all bark, tuck and tumble, a white-tailed
snorting at their antics.
 . 
Tangy pockets of mugwort
and mountain mint intoxicate my airways
weak-knee me into giggles.
Chickadees hip-hop branch to thicket,
their black caps adorably gangsta.
   . 
Above, an osprey chirps its tea-kettle whistle,
ascends, thrusts,  disappears,
returns, as if parleying ancestral maps
stored inside the lace of its bones.
Cricket songs stitch the afternoon.
 . 
I don’t know how long your trails can hold
such abundance, your fervor of tints and textures
winding their way to my insides, transcendent
as a psalm, the rhythm of your balms and breezes
rumoring their promise of peace.
 . 
Kari Gunter-Seymour
First appeared in The Nature of Our Times (Paloma Press 2025)
 . 
Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to submit a poem I love by poet Connie Green and one of my own as well, in honor of Earth Day. KG-S
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✿
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Connie Jordan Green lives on a farm in East Tennessee where she writes and gardens. She has published award-winning novels for young people, newspaper columns, poetry chapbooks and collections, most recently Nameless as the Minnows, Madville Publishing. Her poetry has been nominated for Pushcart Awards. She frequently teaches writing workshops.
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Kari Gunter-Seymour is the immediate past Poet Laureate of Ohio and author of three award-winning poetry collections, including Dirt Songs (EastOver Press, 2024) winner of the 2025 IPPY Bronze, NYC Big Book and Feathered Quill Awards. Her newest collection, What Teethes Within is forthcoming from University Press of Kentucky, August 2026. Her work has been featured in a variety of publications including the American Book Review, Poem-a-Day, World Literature Today and The New York Times.
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❀ ✿ ✾ ❁
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Virga
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Every raindrop panics me now
long before it arrives
I feel like an old Dog who hides
in the bathroom sniffing grey skies
 . 
I go out walking anyway make
myself brave but I don’t really don’t want
it to rain
I want fear to evaporate like a virga
line I want to become a cloud dropped
full of reflection and affection
when I listen to rain I hear echoes
of your voice not in my ears anymore
asking under any circumstance
will you want to make love again?
 . 
Jenny Bates
selected by Paul Jones
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✾
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Love Poem for the Appalachian Rainforest 
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The trees as rib cage, as sea-
bare branches tapping each other,
signing furiously the word
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for wind. Temperate rainforest
filled with broken trees,
bracken tinder. I pray
 . 
for damp weather, fog, snow-
a proper frozen sojourn
among High Country clouds
 . 
plumping moss & lichen.
To keep fire at bay.
Needle and loam, trees breathing
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wet breath against each other,
heavy enough to float, to form
their own ecology of hope.
 . 
Annie Woodford
selected by Paul Jones
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✾
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In the Cards
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Outside of Beaverdam, an old lady told the cards.
As close to a crone as the mountain side could grasp,
could hold there, cling-rooted and knotty as laurel.
 . 
She was sour on life by now, hers, which had been hard,
and the mountain itself. “It must change,” she rasped.
Fingering the whirling figure, she hissed, “This is the World.”
 . 
“It’s in the past. Better that the dancer held a sword.”
The next up, the seemingly indifferent Four of Cups.
“Ignoring the gifts and threats of the sky and earth. Peril.
 . 
That’s where we are now. In danger, but not acting. Bored
with it all. Not doing what we need to do.” She gasped,
“No not this! I would rather be telling the Devil,”
 . 
as if she already had seen, but dare not disregard,
the next card, the future told by the Tower. The last.
“The end that comes to us all both good and evil.”
 . 
Soon the storms came as they had never come before.
She and her house were washed away. Among the lost.
She saw but was not saved. Not found. Except her skull.
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Paul Jones
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Thanks for combining Poetry Month and Earth Day (all month long). These three poems are from the award winning anthology, Had I a Dove: Appalachian Poets on the Helene Flood, edited by Hilda Downer (Redhawk Publications 2025). Each of these poem connects human awareness and in some cases human agency in the face of the experience of the flood and what followed. The whole of the anthology is rich with the appreciation of nature during and due to climate based disaster. Besides the three poems attached, Virga by Jenny Bates, Love Poem for the Appalachian Rainforest by Annie Woodford, and In the Cards by me, the anthology holds many treasures. — Paul Jones
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❀ ✿ ✾ ❁
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We do not live in a Nuclear Age or an Information Age. We do not live in a Post-Industrial Age, a Post-Cold War Age, or a Post-Modern Age. We do not live in an Age of Anxiety or even a New Age. We live in an Age of Flowering Plants and an Age of Beetles. 
– Sue Hubbell, from Broadsides from the Other Orders
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Thank you for celebrating the month of April with International Earth Day (April 22) and National Poetry Month. Readers have selected poems that connect us to our planet and each other. If you have a poem that has rooted you to the earth and spread your branches into bright sky, please share! It can be a poem by your favorite writer, living or dead, a poem of your own, or both.
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Send a your poem(s) in the body of the email or as .DOC or .RTF to:
ecopoetry@griffinpoetry.com 
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Please include your comments or reaction to the poem. And publication acknowledgments if previously published.
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We will share one or two posts each week, multiple posts during the week of Earth Day, and we will keep sharing into May and beyond if you continue to respond!
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Feel free to invite others to send their favorite Earth Day poems. Perhaps some day we will be able to say we live in the Age of Connection.
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❁
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Thank you for visiting Verse and Image: If you would like to receive an email each time a post appears, please SUBSCRIBE to Verse and Image using the button on the Home Page.
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If you have a hard time finding the SUBSCRIBE button on this WordPress site, you can send me your email address and I will add you to the subscriber list. Send your request to
 . 
COMMENTS@GRIFFINPOETRY.COM
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Thanks again for joining the conversation.
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— Bill
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❀ ✿ ✾ ❁
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Doughton Park Tree, 2022-05-17B
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CALL FOR POEMS FOR EARTH DAY

Posted in Ecopoetry, tagged , , , on April 2, 2026| 2 Comments »

CALL FOR POEMS FOR EARTH DAY 2026
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We do not live in a Nuclear Age or an Information Age. We do not live in a Post-Industrial Age, a Post-Cold War Age, or a Post-Modern Age. We do not live in an Age of Anxiety or even a New Age. We live in an Age of Flowering Plants and an Age of Beetles. 
– Sue Hubbell, from Broadsides from the Other Orders
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Yesterday (April 1, 2026) Teresa Litschke interviewed me in preparation for the Great Trails State celebration in North Carolina this fall. One thing she asked me was, “Why do you think the activities of your local trails organization are important for your community?”
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I’ve been thinking about that question ever since. Why take a walk? Why look at a flower or listen for a bird? Why spend a minute outdoors? I don’t know if my answer in the interview was profound or true, and I don’t know if I can even begin to answer the question for you, either. Perhaps the most important thing is that we each ask the question of ourselves. Do I feel connected? To other people in my community? To the fragrance of spring and the bite of winter? To the sun rising and the rain falling? To the flowering plants and the beetles that are the most abundant inhabitants of my planet?
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Each time I lead a naturalist hike, I remind all the participants that they are the naturalists during the time we’re together. If you are paying attention to the earth, you are flexing your naturalist muscles. And of course paying attention is at the heart of creating a poem. Earth Day . . . Poetry Month . . . natural companions.
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I would love to post dozens of poems for Earth Day this year throughout the month of April. We will continue to post poems as long as you send them.
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Please send me one! 
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And please include your comments or reactions to the poem! Does it enlarge your sense of connection to the earth and the universe?
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Send a single poem in the body of the email or as .DOC or .RTF to:
ecopoetry@griffinpoetry.com 
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BONUS: if you send me one poem by an author other than yourself, I invite you to send me a second poem by you. Please let me know where the poems have been published.
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And feel free to invite others to send their favorite Earth Day poems.
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Perhaps some day we will be able to say we live in the Age of Connection.
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— Bill
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 Without Words – Mary Oliver

Posted in Ecopoetry, tagged , , , , , on March 6, 2026| 5 Comments »

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[ 2 poems from Little Alleluias ]
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❀    ❀    ❀
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Flare
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1.
 . 
Welcome to the silly, comforting poem.
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It is not the sunrise,
which is a red rinse,
which is flaring all over the eastern sky;
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it is not the rain falling out of the purse of God;
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it is not the blue helmet of the sky afterward,
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or the trees, or the beetle burrowing into the earth;
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it is not the mockingbird who, in his own cadence,
will go on sizzling and clapping
from the branches of the catalpa that are thick with blossoms,
that are billowing and shining,
that are shaking the world.
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8.
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The poem is not the world.
It isn’t even the first page of the world.
 . 
But the poem wants to flower, like a flower.
It knows that much.
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It wants to open itself,
like the door of a little temple,
so that you might step inside and be cooled and refreshed,
and less yourself than part of everything.
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12.
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When loneliness comes stalking, go into the fields, consider
the orderliness of the world. Notice
something you have never noticed before,
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like the tambourine sound of the snow-cricket
whose pale green body is no longer than your thumb.
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Stare hard at the hummingbird, in the summer rain,
shaking the water-sparks from its wings.
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Let grief be your sister, she will whether or no.
Rise up from the stump of sorrow, and be green also,
like the diligent leaves.
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Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away.
Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.
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In the glare of your mind, be modest.
And beholden to what is tactile, and thrilling.
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Live with the beetle, and the wind.
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This is the dark bread of the poem.
This is the dark and nourishing bread of the poem.
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Mary Oliver
from Little Alleluias, Grand Central Publishing, New York & Boston; © 2025 by NW Orchard LLC
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❀    ❀    ❀
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Mockingbird
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Always there is something worth saying
about glory, about gratitude.
But I went walking a long time across the dunes
and in all that time spoke not a single word,
nor wrote one down, nor even thought anything at all
at the window of my heart.
 . 
Speechless the snowy tissue of clouds passed over, and more came,
and speechless they passed also.
The beach plums hung on the hillsides, their branches
heavy with blossoms; yet not one of them said a word.
 . 
And nothing there anyway knew, don’t we know, what a word is,
or could parse down from the general liquidity of feeling
to the spasm and bull’s eye of the moment, or the logic,
or the instance,
trimming the fingernails of happiness, entering the house
of rhetoric.
 . 
And yet there was one there eloquent enough,
all this time,
and not quietly but in a rhapsody of reply, though with
an absence of reason, of querulous pestering. The mockingbird
was making of himself
an orchestra, a choir, a dozen flutes,
 . 
a tambourine, an outpost of perfect and exact observation,
all afternoon rapping and whistling
on the athlete’s lung-ful of leafy air. You could not
imagine a steadier talker, hunched deep in a tree,
then floating forth decorative and boisterous and mirthful,
all eye and fluttering feathers. You could not imagine
a sweeter prayer.
Mary Oliver
from Little Alleluias, Grand Central Publishing, New York & Boston; © 2025 by NW Orchard LLC
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❀    ❀    ❀    ❀    ❀
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We want to catch the mouse in our kitchen. The one who has nibbled a neat hole in the foil around a granola bar and carved its own delicate sculpture as if one of us had taken a single clean bite. The one who leaves a scatter of dark afterthoughts every place we have overlooked a crumb. We want to catch it so we can quit thinking about nibbles and droppings, but we want to catch it alive.
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We want to catch it alive so we don’t have to worry that some evening while playing Scrabble at the kitchen table we will hear death’s sudden and irreversible snap. Alive so we don’t have to open the cupboard under the sink in the morning to a stiff shadow still sleek with gray fur and curled tail. Alive because it is another warm body and we ourselves are guilty of tempting it indoors with warmth and crackers and maybe the sunflower seeds falling from the feeder outside the window.
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But the mouse is smarter than we are. On the first morning we find the live-trap open on its side and empty. Did the mouse panic in its dark enclosure and throw itself against the sides until it tumbled? Or did its mouse companion flip it from outside? The second evening, with tape holding the trap to the shelf, we hear scramble, slide, click as the trapdoor closes. Next morning I carefully carry the trap to the edge of the woods, release the little closure, but it is empty of mouse. All the peanut butter is still present and fragrant but I find incisor marks on the backside of the trap. The mouse has followed its nose to the bait but triggered the trap without entering.
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This morning the trap is taped against the cupboard wall, no way to gnaw it from the back, and its door has snapped shut. I hold the trap’s little cover tight and carry it to the woods. It feels warm. Heavier than an empty trap. I release the door – no mouse. And no peanut butter. Mouse has figured out how to re-open the door even after it shuts and seals.
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Perhaps I will simply place a mouse-sized portion of peanut butter in the cupboard under the sink every night and find a mouse proof box for the granola bars. Maybe that would be smarter.
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❀    ❀    ❀
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In the introduction to Little Alleluias by Mary Oliver, poet Natalie Diaz writes this: It isn’t so crazy to believe that this knowledgeable world imagined us itself, from its own values of life. We young human beings learn from this ancestor how to bloom into our existence, in constellation with and alongside the nonhuman beings of the world. Of consequence to one another.
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In Mary Oliver’s poetry all things live together in consequence to one another: bird and flower, ocean and cloud, woe and joy. She sometimes referred to her poems as “little alleluias” and to herself as poet thus: “I am a woman nearly sixty years old, and glory is my work.” When I have gone too many weeks without reading Mary Oliver, I discover that my carapace has become brittle and dull. I find myself holding sorrow and self-pity close within instead of releasing myself into the sorrow and beauty that is the world. I might even find myself tempted to kill the mouse in my kitchen cupboard. Not today.
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Little Alleluias, collected poetry and prose, gathers poems and essays from the last years of Mary Oliver’s life into a newly released collection. Mary Oliver was born in Ohio in 1935 and died in 2019. Through her life as poet and teacher she won innumerable awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for American Primitive, her fourth book. Little Alleluias is available vailable from Grand Central Publishing.
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Other poems by Mary Oliver featured at Verse and Image:
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❀    ❀    ❀    ❀    ❀
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Thank you for visiting Verse and Image:
. . . . . every Friday I present one or two poems I’ve read this week that particularly speak to me;
. . . . . every Saturday I present one or two poems submitted by YOU, my readers.
 . 
If you would like to offer a poem for consideration, either by a favorite author or your own work, please view these GUIDELINES for Saturday Readers Share:
 . 
 . 
If you would like to receive an email each time a post appears, please SUBSCRIBE to Verse and Image using the button on the Home Page.
 . 
If you have a hard time finding the SUBSCRIBE button on this WordPress site, you can send me your email address and I will add you to the subscriber list. Send your request to
 . 
COMMENTS@GRIFFINPOETRY.COM
 . 
Thanks again for joining the conversation.
 . 
– Bill
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