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Spring. Whatever.

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on May 9, 2025| 2 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Kathryn Kirkpatrick]
 . 
Turbulence
 . 
Of the stomach lifting. Of the weightless
where I was and am again variety.
 . 
Sway and crack, our craft. Slalom
the wind. So much carbon in the currents.
 . 
Of the climate kind. Of the jerk and twack.
Of the hurtling toward. Shake right out
 . 
of our human. As if we might not
settle back into these bodies,
 . 
but land instead in someone else.
Yet the hare far below isn’t empty
 . 
to receive us. Neither is the horse.
They have their own embodied plans.
 . 
We will have to settle beside ourselves
Blurred boundaries and all. Bump,
 . 
rattle, and creak. Our enlightened selves
grasp cokes, play solitaire, read, sleep,
 . 
going on as if what’s happening isn’t.
With more than prayers
 . 
holding us up, we are nonetheless
tossed in the vastness.
 . 
Kathryn Kirkpatrick
from Creature, Jacar Press, Durham NC; © 2025.
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
ah spring spring 
how great is spring! 
and so on 
Bashō (1644-1694)
 . 
Basho has perfectly snared my mood this morning. I am reading Spring haiku at SeasonWords.com: Ah, Winter vanquished!, Ah, new life!, blah, blah, blah. I am not feeling newly lively these days, especially not as the sun so gaily rises. By day I seem to be the rock between two storms, my father and my son, but by 4 AM I have eroded to sand and the bed is far too gritty for sleep. Now this haiku blog offers a prompt for the season and encourages sharing? Here are my Spring lines:
 . 
what to say
when everyone’s “spring, spring” –
toads trilling
 . 
In her book Haiku and Senryu: A Simple Guide for All, Charlotte Digregorio states, Wherever one lives, one experiences changing seasons. The haiku’s brief flash illuminates one specific moment. We read the terse lines and might recognize where we are, but certainly, and more critically, we do know precisely when we are. Perhaps we have never shared the haiku’s circumscribed space, but we do share the time of pollen, the humidity, crisp crackling leaves, the shivers. A moment’s experience broadens into a communal truth.
 . 
In that sense, haiku becomes less an instruction in encountering nature and more an invitation to shared humanity. Besides the experience of changing seasons, the thing we all share is the experience of suffering. A moment’s observation may stand in as a piercing metaphor: Spring’s anticipation, Summer’s lassitude, Autumn’s anxiety, Winter’s dread. And perhaps pricked by that dart of connection upon reading a haiku, we might also share one more thing – joy.
 . 
Just to be fair, I imagine my Spring haiku is not really an indictment of inane people chattering around me. On a dark night after rain, the lonesome trill of an American toad rising from down in the woods is a peace offering. My son and I stood on the deck last night and heard it together. Yes, it was very dark. This morning, light has returned. Again. Oh my. The season rolls on.
 . 
❦
 . 
In 1685, the Japanese astronomer Shibukawa Shunkai adapted the 24 Solar Terms of the Chinese calendar for Japan and created 72 seasons. As we learn at SeasonWords.com, these 72 seasons “offer a poetic journey through the Japanese year in which the land awakens and blooms with life and activity before returning to slumber.” Mark, the site’s curator and naturalist, shares lessons from nature corresponding to the seasons; haiku both ancient and modern that complement the lesson; and craft tips / kigo with a prompt and an invitation. Readers share their haiku and receive commentary.
 . 
Visit https://seasonwords.com/ and subscribe to receive periodic postings in your mailbox!
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Ridge
 . 
1.
One day I found the outline of a deer
in the snow. She’d slept on the old logging road
above our home, curled against the cold.
 . 
Her imprint on a trail I’d walked for
twenty years was intricate and vulnerable
as I now feel since strangers bought this land.
 . 
their cameras
nailed to the trunks of trees
Christ
 . 
2.
At first I waved. New to the neighborhood,
the seemed shy. Hovering at the side
of the road with their harnessed dogs, they walked
 . 
harnessed too, shoulders hunched, eyes averted.
About their money I didn’t then know, or
Appalachian families letting go of land.
 . 
orange flags
festoon the property lines
orioles in snow
 . 
3.
What we had of commons among
hill people here is gone, our hollow hollowed
out, our waves, our lifted heads, our calls across
 . 
casual borders fretted now by registered
mail. “Not authorized.” “Legal action.” They’ve
no bonds to sunder because they’ve no bonds made.
 . 
camera 1
my shetland sheepdog framed
first day of spring
 . 
4.
Surveyed for surveillance, the ridge. But I
can love what I don’t own. I miss the oaks,
their wide-girthed stillness. I miss the mountain’s
 . 
spine. Across family lands and state lines,
through Cherokee and Appalachian time,
the mountains stay. The mountains stay. They stay.
 . 
a taloned sun sets
the red-tailed hawk
needs no human hand
 . 
Kathryn Kirkpatrick
from Creature, Jacar Press, Durham NC; © 2025.
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Creatures – so we are. We seek what all creatures seek, but especially we seek the closeness of other creatures. Kathryn Kirkpatrick is visited by crows and grieves for house wrens dying and for cows separated from their calves. She reveals her creature’s struggle and confusion as she loses her mother. She is not afraid to say that she hesitates to speak of death because every creature must face death but fears to do so. She reveals moments and connections and we readers look about us to discover her light is casting our own shadow. And in the closing section of Creature, Kathryn Kirkpatrick has written the finest collection of dog poems I’ve read in twenty years.
 . 
Creature by Kathryn Kirkpatrick at Jacar Press: HERE.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
On Finding Monarch Caterpillars in September
 . 
And whatever love a parent
feels stealing bread for a starving
child, I have it as I dig by
the flimsy light of my bargain
headlamp, having driven miles for the last
of the chain-store milkweed, which will
feed these ravenous young in their striped
skins, who are no metaphor, who stand for
themselves only, though in my ecological
worry, my long-range fright, I am surely
standing for something as I shovel in the dark.
 . 
Kathryn Kirkpatrick
from Creature, Jacar Press, Durham NC; © 2025.
 . 
In their multi-generational migration pattern, the endangered monarch butterfly bears its fourth generation in September and October. Rather than dying after two to six weeks as the earlier generations do, this generation migrates to warmer climates like California and Mexico, living six to eight months before starting the process again. – K.K.
 . 
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Manipulative Intelligence

Posted in Imagery, poetry, Process Theology, tagged , , , , , , , on May 2, 2025| 6 Comments »

 . 
[with poems from Tar River Poetry by Michael Gaspeny,
Grey Brown, and Sydney Lea]
 . 
Burying the Runt
 . 
Rain so long
the dusty pink bucket
outside the basement brims
and a puny squirrel floats
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ face down.
 . 
I dig a hole in the azalea bed
near the stair well. The ground splits
++++ into a glove
++++ ++++ with root threads for fingers.
++++ ++++ ++++ I trickle
++++ ++++ ++++ the bucket into its palm.
++++ ++++ The runt’s round stare catches the sun.
 . 
I cover the fuzzy ribs. Close the glove. Smooth
++++ the hole. ++++ Bless the soul
++++ ++++ in case
++++ there’s somewhere else.
 . 
Michael Gaspeny
from Tar River Poetry, Volume 64 Number 2, Spring 2025
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Perhaps bedtime reading infiltrates one’s dreams. I selected this particular book imagining it might hold the secret, and then hold that secret out to me in revelation: Where is God? Was I wrong to expect to find God in a book, when pretty much everything else I’ve ever wanted to find was in books? Or if the thing itself is not in a book at least the book is able to make the thing comprehensible, graspable, whole. Oh my, how that word creeps in, whole. I had read this author’s contemplations about becoming one’s complete and perfect self, wholly connected and part of the universe which is God, and now here I am halfway through her book, whose theme is “relational holism.”
 . 
But where am I really? These woods are dark and close. I can’t quite see what is screeching high up amidst the branches, but it sounds like quantum entanglement and Jungian archetypes. Assuming I do wake in the morning, I will recall snatches of dreams about trying to put things together that refuse to fit. Long halls and which of these closed doors is the one I’m meant to open? Being surrounded by people I could swear I should know but who don’t know me.
 . 
The title of this microessay is Manipulative Intelligence, subtitle The Paradox of a Trillion Synapses. Consider me a wholly average representative of my genus and species. I can read without glasses as long as the light is bright, but I can’t see remotely as well at distance as a hawk or as an owl at midnight. I can smell bread baking but the remainder of the world’s vast olfactory tapestry of edibles which is plain as the nose on a bear’s face is inscrutable to me. I can hear a C minor chord sung by a competent quartet but the deer can hear me coming a concert hall away. And I can’t imagine that those huge cetaceans with their massive cerebral cortices are thinking whalethoughts any less profound than my humanthoughts. What does that leave, then, to account for the relentless invasive proliferation of persons, for 9 billion homo sapiens infesting the earth?
 . 
Manipulative intelligence is the inborn gift of fiddling with things. Manual fiddling progresses to building machines capable of even bigger and faster fiddling. If there is one trait that makes humans unique, it is that we have fiddled with, changed, and are continuing to alter our surroundings. Not just for protection or dwelling, bowerbirds and beeswax, but we have manipulated our entire biosphere. The venture capitalists say, “Way to go!” while the rest of us who live on Planet Earth, including the hawks and owls and bears and deer and whales and bowerbirds and bees, say “What the fuck!” But here’s the paradox: besides imagining that our big heads are a fiddling gift, we also contend that our trillion+ synapses have made us the only creatures capable of encountering the Giver. And something about the way our limbic systems interconnect with our frontal lobes has also convinced us that we are God’s favorite.
 . 
Back to my book and my dreams. A hundred more pages of Ilia Delio to go. I promise I’ll make it to the finish line. To God. I will lie back and let Carl Jung sort out my dreams. Meanwhile this morning has presented a rare couple of hours with absolutely no prescribed fiddlings. Sitting on the porch while the house wren lets everyone in earshot know he has a nest and a mate here, while the beech and maple deepen the shade across the deck slats minute by minute, while I hold my notebook on my lap but don’t get another line written beyond Trillion Synapses, I’m thinking. Empty thoughts with no script or outline and no polysyllabic labels. Non-fiddling thoughts. I think Ilia is right. God is not out there. God is in here.
 . 
❦
 . 
The Not-Yet God: Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, and the Relational Whole by Ilia Delio, O.S.F. Orbis Books, Maryknoll NY. © 2023
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Family Plot
 . 
Once on a cruise,
my mother spent the week
not letting my father find her.
 . 
Behind a book,
hunkered in a deck chair,
she would see him coming
 . 
and dash starboard
then dash again if need be.
She thought him ridiculous
 . 
disco dancing at 70,
his shorts and tube socks.
Why couldn’t he just read?
 . 
His second wife
insisted on his cremation
and I imagined my father
 . 
dancing into flames.
Now my mother
rolls alone under
 . 
the grass and plastic flowers
of a double plot, bought
too soon.
 . 
She draws the soil
up under her chin
but still does not miss him.
 . 
She wonders what will happen
to the space beside her.
She would not mind
 . 
if someone else moved in,
perhaps someone sensible,
someone who reads.
 . 
Grey Brown
from Tar River Poetry, Volume 64 Number 2, Spring 2025
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
I treasure my memories of Tar River Poetry founding editor Peter Makuck. I met him first and formally through rejection letters, as kind as any, and later an occasional acceptance, O Frabjous Day! Later yet we met in person a few times at statewide poetry meetings. Bit by bit we discovered many more things in common – Ohio and Kent State, Bogue Banks, birding – and also shared more poetry with each other. I featured a poem by Peter during my tenure as Poet in Residence at the NC Zoo. Several times a year he would send me a poem he’d discovered that he thought I’d appreciate. And of course I was reading everything Peter published.
 . 
Peter Makuck was a truly generous and warm person. And creative, and insightful, and true. I am thankful to Advisory Editor Luke Whisnant for furthering the work Peter began at Tar River Poetry, and I am very grateful to the newest Editors, Charmaine Cadeau and Helena Feder, for Volume 64 Number 2. And here’s a shout out to everyone else whose name appears inside the front cover:
Advisory Board: Chris Abani, Alice Allan, Stephanie Bolster, Jane Hirshfield, Brandon Krieg, Dorianne Laux, Amit Majmudar, Matthew Buckley Smith
Interns: Onyx Bradley, Rebecca Donaldson, Paige Osché (hey Onyx, I’m the one who took that photo of you presenting at the NC Museum of Art in 2023 and sent to John Hoppenthaler)
 . 
Peter Makuck, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at East Carolina University, died in 2023 at the age of 83.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Jeremiad
 . 
I should say it aloud, Don’t listen to me, one more old man
++ rebuking the younger
as old people will, a man half ashamed to be partway
++ launched into unspoken rant
just now by the sound – of all things on earth – of a nearby
++ pileated woodpecker
in awakening hardwoods behind the house, a sound that
++ occasions my own yen to squawk
at some innocent I see only in mind, Take out those Air Pods
++ or whatever they’re called
and hear this beat, pure percussion, granted, no music
++ beyond its simple tock
but somehow entailing a tune because, as Keats, though
++ himself no more than a stripling,
so rightly noted, Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard /
++ Are sweeter,
and true enough, that red-crowned bird offers up its song
++ without singing,
song of those hardwoods soon to burst into their million
++ shades of green,
of the ducklike calls from the pondside wood frogs, of
++ actual ducks, and so on and on.
Listen! I shout in silence, that tock contriving for us the
++ springtime dream
we’ll wake from, sadly, and into which so many have never
++ fallen, really,
and can’t, what with shells and mortars raking the world and
++ lethal airplanes aloft –
not like the two fabulous peregrine falcons racing this morning
++ majestically
across our lawn: no, not like bombers and drones that mob
++ the sky like bees –
no, not like bees that wills warm here soon, as the
++ woodpecker’s unheard strains declare
while I rebuke some unknown someone, and the soundless,
++ song may in fact scold me,
a man, judgmental, self-centered, who dares, in the midst of
++ all this abundance, to suffer
his thirst for more and looks around for even more, on the
++ verge of tears,
thrusting up his springtime lust as some old-fashioned
++ cartoon beggar
might hold up his cup – which may mean the man has
++ simply been wrong in this censure here
of the one or ones he’s conjured and cursed, and might have
++ done better with fingers in ears.
 . 
Sydney Lea
from Tar River Poetry, Volume 64 Number 2, Spring 2025
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
IMG_0768, tree
 . 

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What Claims Us – Poems for the Earth

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , on April 25, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Golden Ragwort, Packera aurea

 . 
[poems by Charles Simic, Sylvia Plath, Katharine Spadaro, 
Rosanna Warren – selected and shared by 
Sharon Sharp, Kitsey Burns, Brad Strahan, Bill Griffin]
❦
photographs in today’s post are from the banks of Dutchman Creek,
Elkin NC, within a 2 meter diameter circle, taken on April 16, 2025
❦
Stone
 . 
Go inside a stone.
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.
 . 
From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.
 . 
I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all:
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill-
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.
 . 
Charles Simic
from Selected Poems 1963-1983, George Braziller, New York; © 1990
 . 
Charles Simic’s Stone delights me because I’ve been a rockhound since childhood. This poem celebrates the mysterious, silent presence I’m aware of when holding stones, turning them in my hands, and wondering about the part of Earth’s – and even the cosmos’s – history each one represents. I keep stones as reminders of my own history, and clear scenes from various places emerge anew as I cradle these inanimate yet vibrant objects tying me to the natural world. I take Stone as an invitation to savor what is interior, silent, often overlooked, and unique in all aspects of nature.
 . 
I keep a wrinkled, often-read copy of Stone posted near some of my collected treasures, including the tektite that inspired my own poem, which follows. – Sharon Sharp
 . 
❦
 . 
Tektite
 . 
From my necklace chain dangles a shiny,
pocked, black-glass exclamation point,
minus the dot, full of chemical clues
about celestial origins and a likely
ancient collision: a comet or an
asteroid smashing into Earth.
Upon impact, melted shards
catapulted back into the
outer atmosphere, then
descended, cooling.
The hard rain that
pelted hundreds
of miles still
mesmerizes
dreamers.
 . 
Sharon A. Sharp
from Pinesong, North Carolina Poetry Society; © 2018
 . 

Snakewort (Liverwort), Conocephalum salebrosum

 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Beekeeper’s Daughter
 . 
A garden of mouthings. Purple, scarlet-speckled, black
The great corollas dilate, peeling back their silks.
Their musk encroaches, circle after circle,
A well of scents almost too dense to breathe in.
Hieratical in your frock coat, maestro of the bees,
You move among the many-breasted hives,
 . 
My heart under your foot, sister of a stone.
 . 
Trumpet-throats open to the beaks of birds.
The Golden Rain Tree drips its powders down.
In these little boudoirs streaked with orange and red
The anthers nod their heads, potent as kings
To father dynasties. The air is rich.
Here is a queenship no mother can contest—
 . 
A fruit that’s death to taste: dark flesh, dark parings.
 . 
In burrows narrow as a finger, solitary bees
Keep house among the grasses. Kneeling down
I set my eye to a hole-mouth and meet an eye
Round, green, disconsolate as a tear.
Father, bridegroom, in this Easter egg
Under the coronal of sugar roses
 . 
The queen bee marries the winter of your year.
 . 
Sylvia Plath
from The Kenyon Review, Autumn 1960 • Vol. XXII No. 4
 . 
I sat down this morning to read some Sylvia Plath poetry. I read The Bell Jar for the first time a few years ago, while at my Dad’s deathbed. You would think it would have been a poor choice for that time in my life, but truly I loved the book, so beautifully written. So my Earth Day selection from Plath is The Beekeeper’s Daughter. Bees are the ultimate example of community working together for good. This piece is very sensual and dark, in a way too. For me it is a reminder that light and darkness, life and death are an irrevocable part of the human experience. While we may be in a time of darkness and existential dread about the future of our earth, it is imperative now more than ever, that we seek community to sustain us.
 . 
Thank you, Bill, for these lovely poems you send each week. It brightens my week immensely when I am able to take the time to read them. – Kitsey Burns
 . 

Star Chickweed, Stellaria pubera

 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Day of the Funeral
 . 
Are you ready? they say, preparing to go. The search
how to say, how to feel, becomes a groping for jackets,
a finding of shoes. I look for a place to tie up my hair
and there is the cabinet, forever there.
Its mirrored backing can barely be seen
behind gold-speckled teacups, presents child-made,
crystal marching away to the past. Kneeling on carpet
I join in this scene and serious features
echo and float amongst
gilt generations of gently washed china.
An accordion of hands is fixing my hair.
Has anyone ever been ready?
 . 
Katherine Spadaro
from Visions International, Vol. 109
 . 
I often think of how much we have buried or pushed nature aside but she is there waiting and will sooner or later reclaim it all from us, our brief, brief dominion.
 . 
For earth day I thought of the subtext of this little poem from the past (mine). –  Bradley Strahan
 . 
❦
 . 
Ghosts
 . 
In a lost corner of childhood
where marshland sleeps
beneath concrete,
the tide of evening
still climbs the forest wall.
 . 
Across the pond,
now drained and lawned,
the path looks westward
through the red receding flood of day.
 . 
There June is always a memory of redwings
singing with a chorus of frogs,
and in dank basements ghost cattails grow
through the temporary habitations of man.
 . 
Bradley Strahan
 . 

Rattlesnake Fern, Botrypus virginianus

 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Cormorant
    for Eunice
 . 
Up through the buttercup meadow the children lead
their father. Behind them, gloom
of spruce and fir, thicket through which they pried
into the golden ruckus of the field, toward home:
 . 
this rented house where I wait for their return
and believe the scene eternal. They have been out
studying the economy of the sea. The trudged to earn
sand-dollars, crab claws, whelk shells, the huge debt
 . 
repaid in smithereens along the shore:
ocean, old blowhard, wheezing in the give
and take, gulls grieving the shattered store.
It is your death I can’t believe,
 . 
last night, inland, away from us, beyond
these drawling compensations for the moon.
If there’s an exchange for you, some kind of bond,
it’s past negotiation. You died alone.
 . 
Across my desk wash memories of ways
I’ve tried to hold you: that poem of years ago
starring you in your mater dolorosa phase;
or my Sunday picnic sketch in which the show
 . 
is stolen by your poised, patrician foot
above whose nakedness the party floats.
No one can hold you now. The point is moot.
I see you standing, marshalling your boats
 . 
of gravy, chutney, cranberry, at your vast
harboring Thanksgiving table, fork held aloft
while you survey the victualling of your coast.
We children surged around you, and you laughed.
 . 
Downstairs the screen door slams, and slams me back
into the present, which you do not share.
Our children tumble in, they shake the pack
of sea-treasures out on table, floor, and chair.
 . 
But now we tune our clamor to your quiet.
The deacon spruces keep the darkest note
though hawkweed tease us with it saffron riot.
There are some wrecks from which no loose planks float,
 . 
nothing the sea gives back. I walked alone
on the beach this morning, watching a cormorant
skid, thudding, into water. It dove down
into that shuddering darkness where we can’t
 . 
breathe. Impossibly long. Nothing to see.
Nothing but troughs and swells
over and over hollowing out the sea.
And, beyond the cove, the channel bells.
 . 
Rosanna Warren
from Poems for a Small Planet: Contemporary American Nature Poetry, Middlebury College Press, University Press of New England; A Breadloaf Anthology © 1993.
 . 
In the Afterword to Small Planet, Robert Pack writes, “When the primary models for beauty and creativeness no longer are grounded in nature, we will already have evolved into another kind of species. . . . Without the sense of beauty that derives from an awareness of others, from the realization that we are merely creatures in an evolving world that we share with other creatures, a prior world on which our fabricated cultural world depends, the capacity for taking delight in our surroundings will wither away. Even before the planet becomes inhospitable to the human species, we will have died in spirit.” 
 . 
One thing we inevitably share with every other creature is our mortality. Turning our backs and refusing to see death, or chasing promises to extend our lives at all costs, are simply among the many ways that we also choose to ignore and overlook life. Lichen stone and bee, ghost cattail and cormorant, I will sit down at your wake and invite you to mine. Until that day, let us live together. – Bill Griffin
 . 

Sensitive Fern, Onoclea sensibilis

 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Doughton Park Tree 2016-05-08a
 . 
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