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[poems by Veiga Simões, Barbara Conrad, Mary Oliver, Camille Dungy –
selected and shared by Christina Baumis, David Radavich,
Scott Owens, Bill Griffin]
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Ao Viandante
(To the Person Who Passes Through This Place)
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You that pass and raise your arm to me
before you hurt me, look at me well.
I am the heat of your home in the cold winter nights.
I am the friendly shade that you find
when walking under the August sun
And my fruits are appetizing freshness
That satisfy your thirst on the way.
I am the friendly beam of your house, the board of your table
the bed in which you rest and the wood of your boat.
I am handle of your hoe, the door of your dwelling
the wood of your cradle and of your own coffin.
I am the bread of goodness and the flower of beauty.
You that pass, look at me well and do no harm.
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Veiga Simões
a tree with a poem on sign beneath it, located in Lisbon, Portugal.
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This poem brings into stark view how we use and harm trees in a final plea from the tree; “You pass, look at me well and do no harm.” The poem certainly made me ponder the consideration of a grove of trees and what they give of themselves for us and our community over generations from their community. As a nature lover who enjoys walks under and among trees, trees had my gratitude already, yet this poem enhanced it even more. The poem is written almost a caveat, testimonial, or witness statement from the specific tree in Lisbon. The article in which this appeared had a nice side note about the relationship between tree canopies and crime rates, too. – Christina Baumis
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Evergreen trees are like nature’s high rises; their community intermingles to sustain ecosystems as well as us. Posted on the California Urban Forests Councils’ Facebook Page (published on January 21, 2024) from their Haiku contest 2024.
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The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: ‘What good is it?’ If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. … To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering. – Aldo Leopold
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Blue in Winter, Blame the Moon
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+++ after a New York Times article on biological rhythms,
+++ peppered with phrases from the dining section
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Blue in winter, blame the moon, say the scientists
for anyone living dark in the northern latitudes.
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Overeating, sleeping in fits, activity cycles
shifted—even for mutant hamsters and fruit flies.
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We trudge through cabbage season, tongue tingling
at the thought of gumbo and Sazerac, more laissez-faire
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than the fusty French. Earth spins and the moon
thumps inside our cells. Trillions of clocks, ticking, ticking.
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The universe feels it. Some cataclysm must have caused
our nights to topple like this, seasons spliced
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like a butchered hog. We’re a mélange of earth crust
and asteroid dust—yes, that asteroid,
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ejected into space, continuing as moon, tilting
primordial earth. We are orbs of something
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we can’t quite claim. A recipe for stardust.
Chickpeas coming home to roost.
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Barbara Conrad
from There Is a Field, Future Cycle; © 2018
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I have long been a fan of Barbara Conrad’s poetry, admiring her commitment to social justice causes. This poem is remarkable for its yoking of the cosmic and the everyday, with climate change radiating in the nexus between galactic forces and routine human activities like eating and sleeping. Plus lots of colorful imagery you can feel and taste. The final line is a trenchant joke but also brings the interplanetary down to earth, namely to our dinner tables. Delicious! – David Radavich
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In the New Year
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Ice is on the move—
broken off and floating freely
toward South Georgia Island
with a force to wipe out
indigenous life
and redirect our planet.
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Those of us far away
see mostly waters rising,
rising, claiming
sand and beach houses
and boats of the wealthy
along lapping shores.
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Carving of life
by the power of tides.
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So we arrive at
another year: uprisings,
more ire in politics,
love reduced to islands
under siege,
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we move inward
to protect ourselves—
bold nesting terns
or astronauts
in deepest space.
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David Radavich
from Snapdragon
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All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land. – Aldo Leopold
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Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
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Mary Oliver
from Dream Work, Atlantic Monthly Press; © 1986.
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One of my favorite poems ever by one of my favorite poets ever. Wild Geese simply reminds me of my place in the intricate web of existence, in the universal community. – Scott Owens
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Wild and Precious
In Memoriam, Mary Oliver, 1/17/19
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Seen at a distance this time of year
when trees are silhouettes
against a white sky
every shadow, I think,
must be a bird I’d like to identify,
waxwings, falcon, the largest of them
surely a beautiful hawk waiting
to chase a careless squirrel
across the yard and twice
around the trunk of the pecan tree,
rising on perfectly banked wings
so close it could almost reach out
and grasp the tuft of tail fur
dancing behind.
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Often it turns out to be mistletoe,
nest, mere leftover leaves,
but even these speak
of life that was,
that will soon enough return,
and that thankfully always is.
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Mary Oliver, the woman I’ve introduced
to more than 40 years of new students
as one of our greatest living poets,
died today,
but in view of trees, and birds,
and winter skies, and everything
that can be expressed in leaves,
it is impossible to think of her
as ever going away.
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Scott Owens
from Prepositional, Redhawk Publications; © 2022
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A philosopher has called this imponderable essence the numenon of material things. It stands in contradistinction to phenomenon, which is ponderable and predictable, even to the tossing and turning of the remotest star. The grouse is the numenon of the north woods, the blue jay of the hickory groves, the whisky-jack of the muskegs, the piñonero of the juniper foothills. – Aldo Leopold
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Trophic Cascade
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After the reintroduction of gray wolves
to Yellowstone and, as anticipated, their culling
of deer, trees grew beyond the deer stunt
of the mid century. In their up reach
songbirds nested, who scattered
seed for underbrush, and in that cover
warrened snowshoe hare. Weasel and water shrew
returned, also vole, and came soon hawk
and falcon, bald eagle, kestrel, and with them
hawk shadow, falcon shadow. Eagle shade
and kestrel shade haunted newly-berried
runnels where mule deer no longer rummaged, cautious
as they were, now, of being surprised by wolves. Berries
brought bear, while undergrowth and willows, growing
now right down to the river, brought beavers,
who dam. Muskrats came to the dams, and tadpoles.
Came, too, the night song of the fathers
of tadpoles. With water striders, the dark
gray American dipper bobbed in fresh pools
of the river, and fish stayed, and the bear, who
fished, also culled deer fawns and to their kill scraps
came vulture and coyote, long gone in the region
until now, and their scat scattered seed, and more
trees, brush, and berries grew up along the river
that had run straight and so flooded but thus dammed,
compelled to meander, is less prone to overrun. Don’t
you tell me this is not the same as my story. All this
life born from one hungry animal, this whole,
new landscape, the course of the river changed,
I know this. I reintroduced myself to myself, this time
a mother. After which, nothing was ever the same.
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Camille T. Dungy
from Trophic Cascade, Wesleyan University Press. August 16, 2021 at Poems.com
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Yesterday walking beside Elkin Creek, Linda and I remarked that Wood Anemone and Star Chickweed like to grow together. Each white bloom points to its friend and neighbor. Why? Just the right balance of sun and shade for them both? Enough nourishment in the leaf mould but not too much? Are their tiny hands clasped beneath the surface in a group hug of mycorrhizal fungus?
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I remind myself that the connections and community are so much vaster than I can even imagine. And I recall this final quotation by Aldo Leopold:
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. . . Modern natural history deals only incidentally with the identity of plants and animals, and only incidentally with their habits and behaviors. It deals principally with their relations to each other, their relations to the soil and water in which they grow, and their relations to the human beings who sing about “my Country” but see little or nothing of its inner workings. – Aldo Leopold
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[all quotations are from A Sand County Almanac, Oxford University Press. © 1989]
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