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Posts Tagged ‘Bill Griffin’

Long Enough

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 7, 2025| 6 Comments »

 . .
[with 4 poems by Emilie Lygren]
 . .
Ritual
 . .
In each new place I look at the leaves.
 . .
Some are gray and withered, others gold or green.
 . .
The round spots of fungi, insect holes, split lines along veins all say:
 . .
I have been here long enough for here to change me.
 . .
May I stay half as long.
 . .
❦
 . .
You Find Hope When
 . .
You find hope when you remember that
your best friend was elected Prom Queen.
 . .
We were shocked.
She was not popular or plastic or a cheerleader,
like prom queens in the movies always were.
 . .
She was kind to everyone.
 . .
When things feel bleak, remember the people out there
who thought that mattered.
 . .
Emilie Lygren
from What We Were Born For, Blue Light Press / 1st World Publishing, Fairfield IA; © 2021
 . .
❦ ❦ ❦
 . .
Something here beside the river is dragging. Something is slowing me down, clenching me inside, holding my skull between two fists. What is this cud of anger I’m chewing, chewing? I tug it loose when it snags on last summer’s dry aster or catches on a shard of quartz. I refuse to let go because it’s mine and I deserve to have it.
 . .
As I walk its banks, the river notices that I have stopped noticing it but the river doesn’t comment. The river refuses to tell me whether I’m good enough or why I’m not. I can’t convince it to admit that it’s really all those others hurting me and not me hurting them. The river has plenty to carry without taking on another load of trash. Stuff, big and little, just wants to tag along with the river. Silt enjoys the life of swirls and eddies, leaves love to dance. Stones tune up and provide the music. The river invites their company and moves along.
 . .
Is time passing here? The movement of water, always movement, and yet there is always always more water. Time must have passed, because I find I have misplaced whatever it was that was dragging me, I mean, whatever I was dragging. The music hasn’t stopped and there is singing. Suddenly I notice that what I really want is to join the river. And I find I have.
 . .
 . .
❦ ❦ ❦
 . .
River, competence
 . .
Rocks once ripped
from mountainsides,
broken branches of trees,
leaf or tuft of grass.
 . .
Swept up by
constant working currents,
blue undersides of streams,
mud unstuck from banks,
wed to clear movement.
 . .
Ripple pool and wave
reduce rough edges into roundness,
sand sticks into gleaming bare swords,
hold stones until their shapes converge.
 . .
Stay here long enough
and the parts of you, too,
that have been broken
will be made smooth
 . .
Emilie Lygren
from What We Were Born For, Blue Light Press / 1st World Publishing, Fairfield IA; © 2021
 . .
❦ ❦ ❦
 . .
Emilie Lygren’s poems are not all quiet. Some rage against tyrants. Some spit and hiss at what the ocean spits up, the trash we have crammed down its throat. Some push back hard against cruelty and prejudice, anything that willfully splits and cleaves.
 . .
But all of Emilie Lygren’s poems quiet me. When I am disgusted by things people do and say and think; when it hurts me that the people I love are hurting and are hurting me; when I despair that we human beings will never learn kindness; when I can’t see any hope for our future as a species or for all the species we destroy –
 . .
When all this noise and rage and torment shake me like a maple leaf, then Emilie Lygren’s poems return with their voice of understanding. We all feel these things. We all need something better. Listen, just listen. The earth is still here for you. Join it, the earth and all it embraces. Find its place in you and rediscover your place on the earth. Every day, if only for a moment – quiet.
 . .
❦
 . .
Emilie Lygren is a poet and outdoor educator in California. What We Were Born For is the winner of the 2021 Blue Light Book Award from Blue Light Press / 1st World Publishing and can be purchased at Bookshop.org.
 . .
Read an additional poem by Emilie Lygren, Erosion, HERE:
 . .
❦
 . .
All of today’s photos are by Jonathan Saul Griffin, © 2022
 . .
 . .
❦ ❦ ❦
 . .
Meditation
 . .
Sitting near the window.
I watched a fly stammering
against the glass,
trying to break free
and transcend the
transparent boundary
it could not comprehend.
 . .
As I cupped my hands around the fly
then let it out the open door,
I wished that we could trade places –
 . .
that someone would gently remove me
from the invisible walls
I have pressed myself up against,
offer an opening I am too small to see.
 . .
After sitting longer,
I start to think that maybe I am all parts of the story –
 . .
the trembling fly,
the gently cupped hands,
the clear glass window,
the necessary air outside.
 . .
Emilie Lygren
from What We Were Born For, Blue Light Press / 1st World Publishing, Fairfield IA; © 2021
 . .
❦ ❦ ❦
 . .
 . .

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The Long Result of Time

Posted in Ecopoetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , on February 28, 2025| 8 Comments »

 . 
[with poetry by Mary Oliver and Tennyson]
 . 
On Winter’s Margin
 . 
On winter’s margin, see the small birds now
With half-forged memories come flocking home
To gardens famous for their charity.
The green globe’s broken; vines like tangled veins
Hang at the entrance to the silent wood.
 . 
With half a loaf, I am the prince of crumbs;
By time snow’s down, the birds amassed will sing
Like children for their sire to walk aborad!
But what I love, is the gray stubborn hawk
Who floats alone beyond the frozen vines;
And what I dream of are the patient deer
Who stand on legs like reeds and drink the wind; –
 . 
They are what saves the world: who choose to grow
Thin to a starting point beyond this squalor.
 . 
Mary Oliver
from Devotions, the Selected Poems of Mary Oliver, Penguin Press © 2017; originally collected in No Voyage and Other Poems, Houghton Mifflin © 1965
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of . . . phenological mismatch.
 . 
Ah, Alfred Tennyson, better you had continued to tramp the heath and weald of old Locksley Hall and turned away from your infatuations with the inconstant and unreachable Amy. Look here! Amidst the brittle stems of last summer’s arboreal plumage and almost buried beneath autumn’s comforter, an eyelet of green! Gently peel aside the brown leavings of solemn beech and discover: seven pale lilac petals and their swarm of stamens. February 18 and Hepatica has begun to bloom!
 . 
So I hope we’ll be greeted tomorrow, February 22, on our first naturalist walk of the season. Now and every three weeks through April we will tally the progression of blooming along the Elkin Creek Nature Trail. Native wildflowers, these spring ephemerals make their living here beneath the beech / oak canopy. Hepatica, Trout Lily, Bloodroot, Foamflower, they will quickly extend their leaves into the sun before its light can be obscured by budbreak among the overarching trees. Phenological escape – the urgent days of photosynthesis before the canopy closes. These low growing herbs must earn most of their entire year’s salary in just two or three weeks.
 . 
How do they know? What triggers the perennials to leaf and bloom; what swells and opens the leaf buds overhead? What is the key to understanding their phenology (def. – the study of cyclical biological phenomena)? Warming. Soil temperature and air temperature. But some plants are more sensitive to temperature changes and the warming of planet earth than others. In North America, deciduous trees are the most sensitive to warming trends that determine when they will break bud and unfurl leaves. Beech, oak, maple they leaf out earlier as average temperatures increase; Hepatica may not, and so the window of sunlight opportunity shortens.
 . 
This is just one example of phenological mismatch. Imagine how it might affect interconnected species that gradually diverge, out of synch. Will Hepatica have time to turn photons into the sugars it must store for the next long darkness? Will its pollinators and its seed dispersers still thrive in the altered forest? What will our spring walks look like in ten years? in twenty? Alfred Tennyson, I’m afraid there are days I share your melancholy.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
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
from Devotions, the Selected Poems of Mary Oliver, Penguin Press © 2017; originally collected in Dream Work, Grove/Atlantic Inc. © 1986.
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
A week after our group walked the trail I am still happy for what the forest shared with us. Yes, one Trout Lily had stretched and curved its petals to open a small yellow flower. Yes, one Hepatica, among the many other slumbering liver-lobed leaves, presented the cold morning after freezing night with a single pale lilac bloom. We knelt closer for its even more remarkable surprise: beneath the blossom nodded two more, sepals already empty of petals and gone to seed. The spring ephemerals know their business and their name. They make more of themselves and fill the world whether we are watching or not.
 . 
I have been watching these flowers but not nearly long enough nor often enough. Nevertheless one remembers – color and scent may spark a flicker of joy into a life that threatens to cloak each day with darkness. On our walk, beside a particular beech tree no different from the hundreds around us, I recall the first time I ever discovered Hepatica blooming in our woods. That year it was the only one I found and I returned to it day after day until it faded. Now here it is again, the very plant. Its leaves are pocked and burnt orange from their long winter’s work. If it has buds, they are still hiding. As yet no new spring foliage. But I will be back to share this brief season with it. Perhaps we will bloom together.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Spring
 . 
Somewhere
++ a black bear
++ ++ has just risen from sleep
++ ++ ++ and is staring
 . 
down the mountain.
++ All night
++ ++ in the brisk and shallow restlessness
++ ++ ++ of early spring
 . 
I think of her,
++ her four black fists
++ ++ flicking the gravel,
++ ++ ++ her tongue
 . 
like a red fire
++ touching the grass,
++ ++ the cold water.
++ ++ There is only one question;
 . 
how to love this world.
++ I think of her
++ ++ rising
++ ++ ++ like a black and leafy ledge
 . 
to sharpen her claws against
++ the silence
++ ++ of the trees.
++ ++ ++ Whatever else
 . 
my life is
++ with its poems
++ ++ and its music
++ ++ ++ and its glass cities,
 . 
it is also this dazzling darkness
++ coming
++ ++ down the mountain,
++ ++ ++ breathing and tasting;
 . 
all day I think of her –
++ her white teeth,
++ ++ her wordlessness,
++ ++ ++ her perfect love.
 . 
Mary Oliver
from Devotions, the Selected Poems of Mary Oliver, Penguin Press © 2017; originally collected in House of Light, Beacon Press © 1990.
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Here in closing a few lush stanzas from the overpowering lyric Locksley Hall by Alfred Lord Tennyson:
 . 
Here about the beach I wander’d, nourishing a youth sublime
With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time;
 . 
When the centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed;
When I clung to all the present for the promise that it closed:
 . 
When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see;
Saw the Vision of the world and all the wonder that would be.—
 . 
In the Spring a fuller crimson comes upon the robin’s breast;
In the Spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest;
 . 
In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish’d dove;
In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.
 . 
Read Locksley Hall in its entirety at The Poetry Foundation
Purchase Mary Oliver’s Devotions at Penguin/Random House
Cutting edge phenological research at Nature.com
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
2019-02-09 Doughton Park Tree
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Cut Flowers

Posted in family, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , on February 21, 2025| 4 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Gail Peck]
 . 
Prayer
 . 
Please let me see
 . 
the cow’s big eyes
the goldenrod
 . 
the coffee in my cup
turning color with cream
 . 
all that painters have made
stone sculpture in a field
 . 
family photographs
old letters
 . 
poems and stories
that funny looking bug
 . 
I can’t catch
how to read the clouds
 . 
if there’s a bee in the flower
I lean to
 . 
color of fruit
sheen of silk
 . 
what time it is
my bright painted toes
 . 
label on the wine bottle
I like to study
 . 
how full to pour my glass
word and words and words
 . 
and faces of those I love
yes   mostly those
 . 
Gail Peck
from In the Shadow of Beauty, Finishing Line Press, Georgetown KY; © 2025
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The question is not what you look at, but what you see.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ — Henry David Thoreau
 . 
Toward the end I took over the ritual, but when had it begun? I had never paid much attention to the cut flowers in the vase on the dining room table until I became complicit in their procurement. When Dad relinquished driving . . . correction, when we made Dad give up driving at age 96, it fell to one of us to take him to Trader Joe’s every week for flowers. Mom came along with us as long as she was physically able – was she choosing the flowers she liked or the ones Dad wanted her to choose?
 . 
When it became too much to shepherd two elders on walkers and still push a shopping cart, it became just Dad doing the choosing. Same variety every week, pink or mauve Alstroemeria, Peruvian Lily – I truly think Mom would have been equally happy with anything from TJ’s lush bank of bouquets, but these in particular held their petals longer, according to Dad. Most blooms would last until next week’s shopping, and even then Dad would order us to separate out any stems that still seemed fresh. Thrifty. A good provider. The manager in charge. My Dad. The flowers were one last affirmation of his life-long identity.
 . 
What do we see when we look at another person’s life? We are adrift in the ocean of “Why did she do that?” and “Why does he act that way?” Rocked by chop and foam, no safe or simple way to dive deep, a fathomless conversation. We observe from arm’s length how the one we love reacts, their judgements and choices, but the water is opaque; what impulse impels the rudder? Did Dad keep flowers on the table to make Mom happy, or did he do it to feel happy about being seen to be making Mom happy?
 . 
During the last months Mom lived I brought her flowers from my own gardens. First Lenten Rose (Hellebore) and Redbud branches, then Daffodils and Narcissus that kept blooming for a solid month. As the weather warmed I shared Beebalm and Anise Hyssop my son-in-law had started for me in his greenhouse, then the cavalcade of Asters, Black-Eyed Susans giving way to Marigolds and Zinnias, the first year I’d planted such. I think I brought them every week to make Mom happy, a last chance for a final gift just from me. But I think I was also incredulous that my lackadaisical gardening could produce such bounty – I was showing off.
 . 
I would place a few long stems in a fluted vase on the tiny kitchen table where Mom read the comics each morning; another small vase beside her accustomed seat on the couch; finally all vases came to rest beside her bed where she spent most of her final weeks. It never failed. She would, with effort, turn her head and spy my offering. Then she would look at me and smile.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Leaving
 . 
Once you are left
you are always left
a clock ticking backwards
 . 
You tried to crawl out the window
when your father packed his suitcase
and were pulled back
You opened the door
and ran after the car until breathless
 . 
Why does the sound of a train whistle
not make you sad when one
took your mother away for months
 . 
Perhaps because your grandmother
played The Lonesome Railroad Blues
on her harmonica and the dog danced
 . 
The calendar nailed to the wall
turned one month over another
until winter was gone
 . 
Daffodils bloomed    the dogwood
reopened Christ’s wounds
 . 
Curious girl who gathered flowers
from fields and pulled petals
from daisies – he loves me, he . . .
 . 
Gail Peck
from In the Shadow of Beauty, Finishing Line Press, Georgetown KY; © 2025
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Your family, like mine, has stories you break out at every gathering, dust off, polish up, and share good as new. I’m sure Dad is glad we finally quit telling the one about him breaking a full bottle of ketchup at the diner in Parkersburg, West Virginia when we were teenagers. Then again there are probably any number of stories that deserve more retellings than they get. Stories make us a family. What will happen to the stories that no one keeps alive?
 . 
Gail Peck’s In the Shadow of Beauty tells stories that make a family. The stories are cut flowers and lace, and they are rancid wounds and meanness. The people we want to love can hurt us the most. The people we want to hold onto forever will all leave us in time. We seek meaning by revisiting and reliving the turning points as well as the ho-hum trivial passages that have somehow hooked themselves into our memory. For most people, we will never truly grasp their intent or purpose, but when we’re brave enough to re-experience how they have affected us, we might discover our own purpose.
 . 
Gail often uses photographs of her family, which capture a single moment without judgement or commentary, to rekindle events to which she then applies the art of poetic commentary and judgement. This book is their lives as well as hers. At one point Gail admits she does not know where the ashes of her sister are scattered but she still wants hers to mingle with them. She reveals her bonds with her mother as a many-faceted jewel, some faces bright crystal but others tarnished. And Gail inspires me to keep visiting, keep remembering, keep looking and never be satisfied that I have seen all there is to see in my own stories and my family’s. As she confesses in Arranging Flowers:
I can’t cut a flower without thinking of her,
and I may go again to place some
on her grave, but I’ll have no desire
to continue. Once you sever the stems
you know to make the most of it,
and isn’t that why we love them,
their beauty, the petals that will fall.
 . 
❦
 . 
In the Shadow of Beauty, poems by Gail Peck, is available from Finishing Line Press HERE
Enjoy poems from an earlier book by Gail Peck, The Braided Light, at last week’s issue of VERSE & IMAGE
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Past Tense
 . 
How quickly it passes
from is to was
 . 
from has to had –
as quick as a bird
 . 
flies from a windowsill –
you hear its song
 . 
but no longer see it.
They’d slit her gown
 . 
up the back
to spread beneath her.
 . 
Small, embroidered roses
at the top with beads
 . 
in each center.
The eyes don’t totally close
 . 
near the end
and once the hands cooled
 . 
we knew
and I know almost no Bible verses
 . 
but it came to me
when they removed the body
And the peace of God, which surpasses
all understanding
 . 
for she was a godly woman,
my mother.
 . 
Dress her in pink
with the white lace blouse
 . 
for she loved white –
white of the lily, white of the clouds.
 . 
Gail Peck
from In the Shadow of Beauty, Finishing Line Press, Georgetown KY; © 2025
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Doughton Park Tree 2020-03-07

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