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Earth Day Prelude – Four

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Christina Baumis, David Radavich, Earth Day 2024, Earth Day Every Day, ecology, Ecopoetry, Jane Hirshfield, Katherine Mansfield, nature photography, nature poetry, Patricia Hooper on April 21, 2024| 5 Comments »

April 21, 2024

For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;

The flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land;

The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.

Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

++++++ Song of Solomon 2:11-13

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I Open the Window

What I wanted

wasn’t to let in the wetness.

That can be mopped.

Nor the cold.

There are blankets.

What I wanted was

the siren, the thunder, the neighbor,

the fireworks, the dog’s bark.

Which of them didn’t matter?

Yes, this world is perfect,

all things as they are.

But I wanted

not to be

the one sleeping soundly, on a soft pillow,

clean sheets untroubled,

dreaming there still might be time,

while this everywhere crying

Jane Hirshfield

Shared by Debra Kaufman, Mebane, NC, who writes:

I love the subtlety in every poem by Jane Hirsfield. In her new, profound collection, The Asking, every poem is a kind of inquiry that allows readers to join her in generously observing the world and all its beings. She is never assuming, she investigates even the smallest of gestures or creatures, to stay open each day to possibilities, while still acknowledging the darkness.

++++++ Debra

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. . . the road is found in the persistent walking of it . . .

++++++ Jane Hirshfield

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.

++++++ Edward Abbey

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Fall Changes

I left those three crows

the last corn in my garden,

and not one thanked me.

++++++ *

Bright August sunlight

but just north of the woodpile

a November wind.

++++++ *

September begins

with a vee of geese flying

and two fat, slow frogs.

++++++ *

All night fallen leaves

pile up under the maples—

old thoughts, cast away.

++++++ *

A ragged black glove

high in the oak’s bare branches

flies away, cawing.

++++++ *

Through the leafless hedge

a neighbor I’ve never met

waves from her window.

Patricia Hooper

Shared by David Radavich, Charlotte NC, who writes:

I greatly admire, Patricia Hooper; Fall Changes is from her book Wild Persistence. I love the quiet interactions in this poem between the human and the non-human natural worlds – so comfortable and easy, so assumed. The haiku portraits are subtly varied yet intimately linked, and the mere contemplation of trees and birds and frogs leads the witnesses to greet each other in friendly neighborliness even though they are strangers. This is a gentle masterpiece of evocative scene-painting.

The other poem is called New Emigrants from my book The Countries We Live In (Main Street Rag, 2012). This is a more incisive critique of climate change and human greed.

++++++ David

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New Emigrants

These maples have lived

here all their lives,

turned colors by the season,

offered shade, been

neighborly

on the edge of the city.

Who would have thought,

after all this time,

air could become

the enemy?

Earth has allied itself

with terrorists

who decry

the wickedness of weeds.

Water streams in

under cover of drought,

fire climbs

out with its fierce

fingers.

Now some are asking

whether it might be better

for the old limbs

to give place

to homes and people

and their saving chemicals.

Already I see wise ones

taking their leaves

north to where ice melts

into soft angels.

David Radavich, Charlotte, NC

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i thank You God for most this amazing

day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes.

++++++ e.e.cummings

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Voices of the Air

But then there comes that moment rare

When, for no cause that I can find,

The little voices of the air

Sound above all the sea and wind.

The sea and wind do then obey

And sighing, sighing double notes

Of double basses, content to play

A droning chord for the little throats—

The little throats that sing and rise

Up into the light with lovely ease

And a kind of magical, sweet surprise

To hear and know themselves for these—

For these little voices: the bee, the fly,

The leaf that taps, the pod that breaks,

The breeze on the grass-tops bending by,

The shrill quick sound that the insect makes.

Katherine Mansfield

Shared by Tina Baumis, Goose Creek, SC, who writes:

Ms. Mansfield enlarged the smallest of movements and voices in a Georgia O’Keefe style, drawing us into the captivating moments she observed when drowning out the sea and wind. We too, can relate to the drone of the bigger sounds in our day to day lives and rediscover wonder, peace, and joy of nature when we allow ourselves time to immerse into nature’s voices. “The leaf that taps, the pod that breaks, The breeze on the grass-tops bending by,” are lines that speak to me.

I took a walk in the woods

and came out taller than the trees.++++++ Henry David Thoreau

This quotation elevates your spirits inspiring you to go outdoors to appreciate the magic we often overlook during our full days. Recharge. Serenity.

The California Urban Forest Council holds an annual haiku themed contest. I was fortunate to have my haiku listed on their Facebook pages. On February 17th, 2024, my haiku was posted. An attempt to evoke feelings as Mr. Thoreau’s quote.

++++++ Tina

positivity

gather under canopy

mood swings lift with breeze

Christina (Tina) Baumis

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We cannot be truly ourselves in any adequate manner without all our companion beings throughout the earth.

++++++ Thomas Berry

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Finally, the southwestern US is home to several species of scolecophidian blindsnakes in the genera Rena and Leptotyphlops. These are tiny and have undifferentiated body scales, meaning that all scale rows around the entire body (including the underside) are the same width. They are iridescent and extremely difficult to count, which has given rise to one of my all-time favorite quotes from a scientific paper: “We castigate the ancient lineage that begat Liotyphlops, for it is obviously the worst designed snake from which to obtain systematic data” (Dixon & Kofron 1983).

https://brill.com/view/journals/amre/4/2/article-p241_12.xml?language=en&body=contentSummary-44180

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To celebrate EARTH DAY 2024 we are featuring seven posts of poems submitted by readers – poems by William Blake to Walt Whitman, Robinson Jeffers to A.R.Ammons to Linda Pastan, and by a number of contemporary poets. Check in every day or two – connect to the earth and to each other!

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Earth Day Prelude – Three

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, tagged Bill Griffin, David Dixon, Earth Day 2024, Earth Day Every Day, ecology, Ecopoetry, Hannah Fries, Jenny Bates, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, William Blake on April 19, 2024| 5 Comments »

April 19, 2024

…the path to heaven

doesn’t lie down in flat miles.

It’s in the imagination

with which you perceive

this world

and the gestures

with which you honor it.

++++++ Mary Oliver

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Insects with Long Childhoods

June bug, stag beetle, cicada –

three, seven, thirteen years as larvae

feasting underground in the gentle

rot of roots and castoffs, gone generations,

only a few weeks in the light

sharp as the blades of consciousness, incessant

buzz, cosmic background of loss

threaded through late summer’s throbbing

days, lush nights, a brevity so full

it must feel like th eternity they came from.

I have a child who asks a question

of the air’s every hum. He has not learned grief.

Sky, he says, and shovels soil into his mouth,

let’s it drip out mud.

Hannah Fries

from ECOTHEO Review, 3/2024

Shared by Lynda Rush Myers, Durham NC, who writes:

The poet, Hannah Fries, reminds me of Pattiann Rogers: scientific, technical, yet capturing the dense brevity of her subjects’ lives. The turn of the poem came as a touching surprise. Every parent can relate. A child’s word and actions capture his reality. The mother enjoys the unforgettable moment, knowing her son will learn grief all too soon.

++++++ Lynda

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There is only one subject: what it feels like to be alive. Nothing is irrelevant. Nothing is typical.

++++++ Richard Rodriquez, in American Scholar, Spring 2002

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.

++++++ Rachel Carson (1907-1964)

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The Fly

Little fly,

Thy summer’s play

My thoughtless hand

Has brush’d away.

Am not I

A fly like thee?

Or art not thou

A man like me?

For I dance,

And drink, & sing

Till some blind hand

Shall brush my wing.

If thought is life

And strength and breath,

And the want

Of thought is death,

Then am I

A happy fly,

If I live

Or if I die.

William Blake (1757 – 1827)

from Songs of Experience; in the public domain.

Shared by Paul Karnowski, Asheville NC, who writes:

I like the connection Blake makes between the narrator and the “trivial” fly. Humans too easily dismiss the rest of the natural world because we have the ability to “think.” But it’s the countless thoughtless acts of blind hands – from other humans – that bring about our demise. Life and death connects us all – from the greatest thinker to the lowliest fly.

++++++ Paul

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Am I leading the life that my soul, / Mortal or not, wants me to lead is a question / That seems at least as meaningful as the question / Am I leading the life I want to live.

++++++ Carl Dennis, A Chance for the Soul from Practical Gods

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If I Fell

Crow knows me.

Can see the difference

between me and another.

Gave me a feather

I keep

in case I need to fly.

I know Crow

from Blackbird

and Raven

yet wonder

what Crow

would want

to keep

from me.

Perhaps a token

of my essence

in case Crow needs

to dream of flying.

David Dixon

Poetry In Plain Sight 2024, NC Poetry Society

Shared by Jenny Bates, Germanton, NC, who writes:

Life is a process of waking up from a long and ancient sleep of the soul. David Dixon embodies this whether he means to or not in his poetry. This poem I chose to send, If I Fell, has also been chosen for 2024 Poetry in Plain Sight through the NC Poetry Society.

As far as my own poem, it is a plea, a prayer that each of us has to fill up the emptiness inside us in different ways…even the Earth. My poem, Conceived and Born is from my Pushcart nominated book, ESSENTIAL.

++++++ Jenny

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Conceived and Born

There’s no suckling here

as though we were

going to get some anyway

The sanctity of Earth is a fast.

The holy presence of prayer a fast.

We are born of a mother that is not

dependent on us.

She is a planet — and a small, fragile

one at that.

Jenny Bates, Germanton NC

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And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. I would not change it.

++++++ William Shakespeare, As You Like It

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Earth Day Prelude – One

Posted in Ecopoetry, Photography, tagged Earth Day 2024, Earth Day Every Day, Ecopoetry, Maura High, nature poetry, Paul Jones, poetry on April 15, 2024| 4 Comments »

April 15, 2024

In the end we will conserve only what we love.

+++ We love only what we understand.

++++++ We will understand only what we are taught.

+++++++++ Baba Dioum, Senegalese environmentalist

Everyone enjoys the smell of earth after rain. No one wants to cough every breath.

Everyone thirsts for a drink of cool water. No one wants to sicken from drinking it.

Everyone needs bread. No one wants to go hungry.

On April 22, 2024 every human being will wake up on the only planet where humans can live (well, not counting a handful of folks waking up on the International Space Station). Seems like cause enough to celebrate! To be honest, though, the threat of what we have lost and are losing so often seems much greater than the joy of what we have saved and are preserving.

How far have we come since the first Earth Day in 1970? It was just eight years earlier that Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, the wake up call to industrial pollution and the poisoning of the earth. In 1970 there was no Environmental Protection Agency, no Occupational Health and Safety Administration, no Clean Air Act or Clean Water Act. When we protested air and water pollution, we had little inkling of the even greater threat; we couldn’t imagine needing an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Twenty million Americans marched, demonstrated, and celebrated that first Earth Day. Ten percent of the nation’s population. I was a junior in high school photographing our events for the year book: carrying a coffin through the parking lot to signify the dying planet. Earth Day is now celebrated in 193 countries; one billion people are expected to commemorate Earth Day 2024. That still leaves some eight billion to get on board. Legislation and politics won’t take us there. In the end we will conserve only what we love.

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I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back. .

+++++++++ Alice Walker, The Color Purple

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The Field Index

Abandoned field, Orange County, North Carolina

Asters: lesser stars in these constellations, for the native bees, late-summer smatterings of a color I might call blue, blue petals and fireworks along the margins of the track, and

broomsedge, bluestems: stooped in the fall and shimmering, shivering in the wind, spinning out seed, bird fodder, tangled (insert here) into brambles, blackberries, this year’s, last year’s canes knotting and weaving, and

crabgrass: crabby claw and crab leg of a herb: edges into the wilding mint and onion grass, the tall stands of raggedy, wing-stemmed (my favorite) crownbeard gone to seed, where I am with my small dog, and

dogwood: not here yet, but it will come; also redbud (q.v.) and holly; the birds will bring it, in their guts, its white bracts and inconspicuous flowers, its small understory leaves will open and turn into the sunlight, before the canopy leafs out and shades

exotics: migrants, stowaways and hitchhikers, too much at home; see invasives, stiff-stemmed privet with its small dark leaves, and the clustered graceful arcs of autumn olive, honeysuckle vines, dead stiltgrass flopped into heaps, good for nothing except time

ferns: rise and unfurl like our letter f, old as fossils, here before letters and fiddles and bows and Michaux and his acrostics, first and last green under the trees, with

ghost plants: the ancestors, clusters rising from damp, unsunned patches of leaves along the margins of wood; also: smatterings of green-and-gold, the droop-headed goldenrod

honeysuckle: announcing itself in scent on the wind and winding up and around the living and the dead: colors coral (see natives), creamy white curling to yellow (see exotics)

invasives, see exotics; index of vexed and vicious cycles; see also, kill

jaywalkers: I, alive, among others, on and off the old farm road, on pirate paths, seed-spreader, compacting soil, alarming insects and deer, stealing berries and sprigs and twigs and clumps of lichen or moss, colored leaves, I

kill: by ice and drought, sapsuckers, larvae, blight, competition, succession (it happens, why do I grieve?), deer rub and browse, humans; see jaywalkers

loblolly pine: its spiny cones and bundles of three long needles green, or fallen and draped in the shrubberies; aka oldfield pine, straight up, above all, old-meadow native homesteader in the lobby-lolly soil of this wide floodplain

milkweed: var. swamp milkweed, its pink inflorescence and faint scent, drawing monarchs among butterflies and pollinators, queen of weeds, fecund, its large brittle-dry pods burst and spewing cloudy seed over the bewilding meadow

natives: as in, before our time here, before this language and its metaphors and usages, before people, and which we watch with sorrow as they fall back and dwindle, are cut down; see exotics, see

oaks, passim, and Osage orange, spiny along the branch bank, its large green nobble-skinned fruit fallen in the path and long grass, bitter, slow to blacken and rot, unscavenged by all but small seed-eaters

persimmon (native), privet (not; see exotics): one, provender for all comers, all creatures, i.e., small bell-shaped flowers, small sweet ripe fruits; the other just minding its own business, i.e., to thrive

Queen Anne’s lace: umbels and fine-cut leaves, branching stems, aka wild carrot and medicine, queen unknown and from elsewhere, and the lace medallions for her bodice and gown, for her headdress, her cuff, all scattered to the people (winged and crawling insects), self-seeding

red cedar: modest, upright, native, pioneer in this process of succession, spindle of evergreen and scent rolled between the fingers (here I am again, breaking the rule of no taking and leaving of souvenirs); and redbud: see understory, flights of pink-purple blossom in the spring woods, pleiades, announcing light and wings again, after all that

stiltgrass: Japanese, Microstegium vimineum, in summer blithe, feathery and green under the trees over creeper and grass, but poor food, tick haven (see exotics; see also jaywalkers); and sweetgum: all over this old field, native and opportunistic, prolific and prodigal, Liquidambar of the spiny round seedhead and star-shaped, lobed leaves, their margins calling to mind (my mind) calligraphy or the gestures of dance, delight of form that is mutable and has prickly edges, deliquescence, decadence, a nuisance, really

tulip tree: tulipifera, the saplings standing here and there, innocuous, like any other small tree, but give them time, they’ll rise; the yellow-and-pale green petals of their flowers say in English “tulip,” the Tutelo-Saponi name lost, yellow-green the heartwood, yellow the leaves in fall, and early to fall

understory: native holly and redbud and dogwood, parsimonious and irregular in habit, sparse fruit, sparse flower; now also autumn olive, privet, and exotic forbs and grasses, the introduced and naturalized, myself and dog under the canopy

vines: Virginia creeper, close-to-ground native; grape vine, gangly fox grape, looping and loping up branch and stem, dbh often equal to small trees; poison ivy, not the inconspicuous three-leaved forb of the northlands, but (learn this, human) rampant, thick-stemmed, hairy vine, stuck fast to the trunks of trees

winged elm: small tree of delicate, dry stem, and long, corky flanges along its branches; old (to my eye) before it’s old, strange (to my eye); unknowable why those wings

x: Xanthium through Xyris in Radford’s Manual, as in chicory and the yellow-eyed grass; also, a sign for canceling and for marking you are here, this is the place, this, my mark, my thumbprint

yellow poplar: see tulip tree and weep

zigzag: of silk in the web of the orb-weaving spider, homespun look-at-me and distraction, quirk among zoologies of abandoned gardens and meadows; zee, zed, the end of bee flights and alphabets

Maura High

https://www.terrain.org/2023/poetry/maura-high/

Notes:

Acrostic: Med. Lat. acrostichis, from Gk. akrostikhis, from akros“at the end, outermost” (from PIE root *ak– “be sharp, rise (out) to a point, pierce”) + stikhos “line of verse,” literally “row, line,” from PIE root *steigh- “to stride, step, rise” [Online Etymological Dictionary]. The Christmas fern’s botanical name is Plystichum acrostichoides (Michaux) Schott.

André Michaux (1746 –1802), French botanist, author of Flora Boreali-Americana (1803; “The Flora of North America”), made at least five visits to North Carolina.

Loblolly: Pinus taeda, From Wikipedia: The word “loblolly” is a combination of “lob,” referring to the thick, heavy bubbling of cooking porridge, and “lolly,” an old British dialect word for broth, soup, or any other food boiled in a pot. In the southern United States, the word is used to mean “a mudhole; a mire,” a sense derived from an allusion to the consistency of porridge. The pine is generally found in lowlands and swampy areas.

Manual of the Vascular Flora of the Carolinas, by Albert E. Radford, Harry E. Ahles, and C. Ritchie Bell (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968). Commonly known as Radford.

Pleiades, Gk., perhaps literally “constellation of doves” from a shortened form of peleiades, plural of peleias“dove” (from PIE root *pel-“dark-colored, gray”) [Online Etymological Dictionary].

Shared by Paul Jones, Chapel Hill NC, who writes:

Maura High knows her field from A to Z. She sings individual songs of the particularity of the place so clearly and precisely that we learn and love the place as she does. Field Index is an ideal field guide to place and the places of nature that compose this quilted lively patch of our earth.

Every day as I walk my own favorite patch of the planet, Merritt’s Pasture and Morgan Creek, I keep Field Index in mind as a guide that shows how to attend to this world and to prepare for the next.

+++++++ Paul

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On an Okra Flower

A pollinating wasp sliding

from white lip to purple darkness,

the shadow-heart so deep inside,

the plant, itself, tall African

in the kitchen garden’s last row,

speaks of passage and endurance,

those far too common abstractions,

made real here in the summer heat.

Let it lead us, serve as a guide,

tell how each struggle leads to bliss

and what to bless when we decide

to see the past and present blend

into what we need to know

– a mind aware or in a trance? –

what to keep close, what to shun

made real hear in the summer heat.

What song can a wasp sing gliding

the flower’s dark throat? A long kiss

like winged tongues tangled deep inside –

a blind passion, an obsession.

I hear it as a prayer now,

music for the world’s whirling dance.

Sound, sight and scent. An orison

made real here in the summer heat

Paul Jones

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A man’s feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.

++++++++ George Santayana

To celebrate EARTH DAY 2024 we are featuring seven posts of poems submitted by readers – poems by William Blake to Walt Whitman, Robinson Jeffers to A.R.Ammons to Linda Pastan, and a number of contemporary poets. Check in every day or two – connect to the earth and to each other!