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Posts Tagged ‘ecology’

Speak Tree

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, tagged Bill Griffin, ecology, Ecopoetry, imagery, Maura High, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Arboretum, NC Poets, poetry on September 20, 2024| 9 Comments »

I think of soul as anything’s ultimate meaning which is held within. Soul is the blueprint inside of every created thing telling it what it is and what it can become. When we meet anything at that level, we will respect, protect, and love it.

While calling ourselves intelligent, we’ve lost touch with the natural world. As a result, we’ve lost touch with our own souls. I believe we can’t access our full intelligence and wisdom without some real connection to nature.

The Soul of Nature, Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM

[with poems by Ted Kooser, Maura High, Mary Oliver]

❦ ❦ ❦

Turkey Vultures

Circling above us, their wing-tips fanned

like fingers, it is as if they are smoothing

one of those tissue-paper sewing patterns

over the thin blue fabric of the air,

touching the heavens with leisurely pleasure,

just a word or two called back and forth,

taking all the time in the world, even though

the sun is low and red in the west, and they

have fallen behind with the making of shrouds.

Ted Kooser

❦ ❦ ❦

You’ve seen those vultures, haven’t you, up there in the summer sky? You know you have – soaring in great circles, effortless, never a single flap. How their wings cant upwards, how they tip one wingtip down to begin a spiral, how they splay their primaries to feel the updraft, like fingers reaching to gather it in, or like the blades of great shears ready to snip the endless blue. Shepherds of the dead, preparing our funeral shrouds.

Is this a Nature poem? A Human Nature poem? A Death poem?

However you may want to label it, I can’t imagine Ted Kooser writing this poem without spending hours outdoors, on one of his many daily walks, looking up, paying attention to those turkey vultures. Just paying attention until he sees the poetry of their existence.

Paying attention. Observing. Noticing. That’s the first task. If I were to remind you of all four tasks of the naturalist, would you sit up straight and exclaim, “Hey, but aren’t those the very things that poets do?” Here they are according to my reckoning, the four tasks of the naturalist:

++Pay Attention+–+Ask Questions+–+Make Connections+–+Share

Naturalists embrace the Earth and everything that fills the Earth in the hope of bringing their companion human beings to join that same embrace. And don’t poets as well, through their noticing and questioning, also hope to connect their fellow beings within our shared existence?

❦ ❦ ❦

We Woods

+++Dry-mesic oak-hickory forest on a ridge along the north bank

+++of Bolin Creek, central Orange County, North Carolina

Yes be a color—nos & maybes,

++++ like drab.

Shrug, like slough-off,

peel, mould & mildew,

winterkill,

sometimes we surprise ourself

++++ & sprout.

Tell ourself, this stem this leaf, vine,

++++ oak, spindle, sucker, upstart hickory—

spring! we lagging over the redbud

(pink the redbud

++++ & green leaf-leaf

dogwood), &

troublemaker

honeysuckle: they pull-us-down vines

++++ pale, rampant.

++++ Yes, we someplaces sick, crack, split,

stump & burl, rootballs what

gave up hanging in, dragged themself out & fell

++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ up.

We woods, anyways: our down-

++++ ++++ leaf & needlefall,

seedhoard, twiggery, sprig windfall,

they good, the earth approve,

let us rootway through dirt & stone.

Maura High

from the forthcoming manuscript Field as Auditorium

❦ ❦ ❦

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. [1 Corinthians 13:1]

Who will speak in the voice of those whose language is yellow leaves rattling and releasing each fall? Whose sleepy muttering is the squeak of limb upon limb in a winter breeze? Whose whispered promise of love is sweet sap rising in columns every spring? Who, and how, to speak tree?

My first weeks as an exchange student are still shrouded in fog. I did not hear another person speaking English except for one hour each weekday, English class for the German students in the high school I attended. Gradually, steadily, however, I steeped in vocabulary and grammar – by Christmas I was fully connecting with my host parents and siblings and had become part of the family. Steeping ourselves in the foreign languages that surround us – Maura High instructs us in this by translating the voices of trees into poetry. Ecopoetry.

One aspect that sets Ecopoetry apart from Nature Poetry, of which it is a distinct subset, is the willingness to listen to and learn languages other than human. Ecopoetry makes audible the voices we might otherwise ignore and walk right past. Ecology is the science of living things in community, whether a subalpine spruce fir community on Kuwohi in the Smokies (formerly Clingman’s Dome) or the community of bacteria, viruses, parasites, and fungi living in your colon. Ecopoetry as well is focused on community, connections, interdependencies.

In the grand spectrum of diversity of life on this planet, Homo sapiens is a single thin line. For Ecopoetry, the human is not necessarily the locus of all significance and importance. We rampant humans might even be the bad guys. We are woven into the communal whole, our skills and our gifts, our consumption and our neglect, for good and ill, and the continuing strength of our threads depends on the warp and weft of every other living thing, not to mention geology and hydrology and meteorology and . . . well, have I quit preaching and gone to meddling?

May poetry lift voices that have the power bring us all together as one.

❦ ❦ ❦

Sleeping in the Forest

I thought the earth

remembered me, she

took me back so tenderly, arranging

her dark skirts, her pockets

full of lichens and seeds. I slept

as never before, a stone

on the riverbed, nothing

between me and the white fire of the stars

but my thoughts, and they floated

light as moths among the branches

of the perfect trees. All night

I heard the small kingdoms breathing

around me, the insects, and the birds

who do their work in the darkness. All night

I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling

with a luminous doom. By morning

I had vanished at least a dozen times

into something better.

Mary Oliver

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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

❦

If you would like to explore this subject further, try The ECOPOETRY Anthology

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Earth Day – Afterword

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, Imagery, tagged Bill Griffin, Bradley Samore, Earth Day, Earth Day 2024, ecology, Ecopoetry, imagery, Jennifer Atkinson, Linda Pastan, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, poetry, Ursula K. LeGuin, W. S. Merwin on April 26, 2024| 8 Comments »

April 26, 2024

In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence.

++++++ Robert Lynd (1879-1949) – naturalist

To see a wren in a bush, call it a wren and go on walking is to have seen nothing. To see a bird and stop, watch, feel, forget yourself for a moment, to be in the bushy shadows, maybe then feel wren – that is to have joined in a larger moment with the world.

++++++ Gary Snyder

Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a song bird will come.

++++++ Chinese proverb

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November

It is an old drama

this disappearance of the leaves,

this seeming death

of the landscape.

In a later scene,

or earlier,

the trees like gnarled magicians

produce handkerchiefs

of leaves

out of empty branches.

And we watch.

We are like children

at this spectacle

of leaves,

as if one day we too

will open the wooden doors

of our coffins

and come out smiling

and bowing

all over again.

Linda Pastan (1932-2023)

Shared by Bradley Samore, Plano TX, who writes:

This poem by Linda Pastan reminds me of our hushed wonder toward the non-human and our tendency to imagine ourselves in relation to what we see. Perhaps there is no objective way to view something as each species, each person, has their own limitations and reference point. Like Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall”, Pastan makes the connection between the leaves falling and our own human death but also hints at the possibility/impossibility of our rebirth, another budding.

++++++ Bradley

❦

Revelation

Nothing compares to exploring the land

++++++ but what of becoming part of it

to sit so still that lizards

++++++ mate by my sandaled feet

to kneel at the grave where from shadows

++++++ a fox approaches unafraid

to lie on the grass as daylight fades

++++++ and birds feather the branches above

Bradley Samore

first appeared in Hoot

❦ ❦ ❦

The charm which Henry [David Thoreau] uses for bird and frog and mink, is patience. They will not come to him, or show him aright, until he becomes a log among logs, sitting still for hours in the same place; then they come around him and to him, and show themselves at home.

++++++ Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his journal, May 11, 1858.

I hope you love birds, too. It is economical. It saves going to Heaven.

++++++ Emily Dickinson

❦ ❦ ❦

Kinship

Rootless and restless and

warmblooded, we

blaze in the flare that

blinds us to that slow,

tall, fraternal fire of life

as strong

now as in the seedling

two centuries ago.

Ursula K LeGuin

https://thedewdrop.org/2022/03/26/ursula-le-guin-kinship/

❦ ❦ ❦

The cockroach and the birds were both here long before we were. Both could get along very well without us, although it is perhaps significant that of the two the cockroach would miss us more.

++++++ Joseph Wood Krutch, from The Twelve Seasons (1949)

More than at any other time, we feel the strangeness of birds when we stop and pick up a feather in our path. There is nothing on Earth to compare it to; there is no material like it, no form, nothing that functions quite the same way.

++++++ Bruce Brooks, from On the Wing

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Landscape with Jeffers and the Connecticut River

Oat stalks hang their oat-heavy heads.

Panic grass shakes in the wind

off a goldfinch’s wing. Cause,

++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ effect, and cause.

Drone, like the bee, of goldenrod and aster,

tool of the stick-tight and cockleburr,

I park and wade into high riverside grasses.

A dog gnaws on a box turtle, a spider rides

a floating log, straining the air of its midges and leafbits.

A fisherman lazy as late summer current,

++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ casts, reels, and casts.

It occurs to me I am alive, which is to say

I won’t be soon. Robinson Jeffers

from Carmel Point, in “an unbroken field of poppy and lupin”

ashamed of us all (of himself ), took solace in time,

in salt, water, and rock, in knowing

all things human “will ebb, and all/

++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ Their works dissolve.”

Me, too. And I’m not always so patient. I’ve caught myself

wishing our spoiler species gone, just swept away,

returned to rust and compost for more deserving earthly forms.

Meanwhile, flint arrowheads turn up among the plastic

picnic sporks, the glacial crags and bottom silt.

Hawks roost across the river on the now defunct

++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ nuclear power plant cooling tower,

flotsam left at the human high water mark.

Like mussel shells, like driftwood or seedpod,

like the current’s corrugations in the sand.

Here, on this side, a woodchuck sits up, lustrous,

fat on her chestnut haunches, (she thinks herself

queen of her narrow realm) and munches

++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ the fisherman’s crust.

Who wouldn’t smile? Who doesn’t pity—and love—

the woodchuck not only despite but for her like-human smugness?

How can I not through her intercession forgive

++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ for now a few things human.

Jennifer Atkinson

https://poems.com/poem/landscape-with-jeffers-and-the-connecticut-river/

Jennifer Atkinson writes in Poems.com:

But how do we live with our knowledge and the emotional cloud of fear, guilt, anger, grief, and helplessness, a cloud that surrounds us, each of us alone, and all of us together? That cloud has become intrinsic to my ecopoetical work. Burdened with the beauty and loss and malicious awfulness ahead, weighted with the anxiety that hits whenever a winter day dawns without frost on the ground or another ‘unprecedented’ downpour rings in the gutter, how do I live?

❦ ❦ ❦

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

++++++ Henry David Thoreau

We lose our souls if we lose the experience of the forest, the butterflies, the song of the birds, if we can’t see the stars at night.

++++++ Thomas Berry

It is the ancient wisdom of birds that battles are best fought with song.

++++++Richard Nelson

❦ ❦ ❦

Rain Light

All day the stars watch from long ago

my mother said I am going now

when you are alone you will be all right

whether or not you know you will know

look at the old house in the dawn rain

all the flowers are forms of water

the sun reminds them through a white cloud

touches the patchwork spread on the hill

the washed colors of the afterlife

that lived there long before you were born

see how they wake without a question

even though the whole world is burning.

W.S. Merwin (1927-2019)

https://thedewdrop.org/2022/01/08/w-s-merwin-rain-light/

❦ ❦ ❦

My favorite weather is bird-chirping weather.

++++++ Terri Guillemets

You can observe a lot by just watching.

++++++ Yogi Berra

Look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time. Then your time on earth will be filled with glory.

++++++ Betty Smith, from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

❦ ❦ ❦

Special thanks throughout these Earth Day celebrations to my hiking buddy and nature guide Mike Barnett, who has let me into the wilderness and won’t let me leave. Most of the quotations included in these sections are compiled in Mike’s Medicine Bag, which he carries with him into every new adventure

And EXTRA SPECIAL THANKS to my companion in the universe, Linda, who allows the cosmos to flow through her pen onto paper. She has given permission for me to use a few of her drawings throughout these Earth Day celebrations.

++++++ Bill

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EARTH DAY EVERY DAY

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, Imagery, tagged Bill Griffin, Daniela Danz, Earth Day 2024, Earth Day Every Day, ecology, Ecopoetry, Gus Speth, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, poetry, Sam Love, William Blake on April 24, 2024| 2 Comments »

April 24, 2024

Our true home lies outside, deep in the wilderness of forest and mountain, river and desert and sea, the source of our being and the destiny of our great meandering blundering dreaming journey through time. Like Odysseus in his wanderings, we are homeward bound whether we know it or not.

++++++ Edward Abbey

Wilderness has drawn humans closer to God throughout history. Why should we, in the twentieth century, believe this is suddenly no longer true? Long after the Exodus, in a time of recurring apostasy, Hosea spoke of God wishing to ‘allure’ the people back into the wilderness yet again — this time to the parched hills beyond Jericho. There, wrote the prophet, God would ‘speak tenderly’ to them.

++++++ David Douglas

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

++++++ John Muir

❦ ❦ ❦

[Come wilderness into our homes]

Come wilderness into our homes

break the windows come

with your roots and your worms

spread yourself over our wishes

our waste-sorting systems our prostheses

and outstanding payments

cover us with your rustling greenery

and your spores cover us that we may

become green: green and reverent

green and manifest green and replaceable

come weather with your storms

and sweep the slates off the roofs come

with snow and hail smash

through the collective sleep

we are all enjoying in our beds

our worn rationalizations come ice

and form glaciers over the shadow banks

and our drive for liquidity

come through the cracks under the doors

you desert with your sands fill

our desolation up until it forms into a solid mass

rise up over the search-and-rescue teams

and our growth compulsion trickle into

the control panels of the missiles

and the missile defense systems into

the think tanks and the hearts of internet trolls

just leave the hedgehogs with their

snuffling so that it may calm us

come rising sea levels

up over our shorelines both the developed

and the undeveloped the homey

lowland areas wash

jellyfish into our soup bowls

and ramshorn snails into our hair

as we swim in each other’s direction panicked

with our yearning for one another

because almost nothing is left because it’s all gone

and thoroughly soaked through with regrets

finger-pointing and tranquilizers

come earthquakes shatter the apartments

which we built on the foundations

of how we always did everything

come tremors fill the mine shafts

the end of work and

the literature of redemption bury anger

and affection and all manner of added values

swallow up the memories come tremors

hurry so that the bedrock covers us

so we are covered with water desert weather

and over everything that which covers all the wilderness

Daniela Danz

Translated from the German by Monika Cassel

[Komm Wildnis in unsere Häuser] from the journal POETRY,December 2023

https://poems.com/poem/come-wilderness-into-our-homes/

Shared by Bill Griffin, Elkin NC, who writes:

To the ancient mind, wilderness was dangerous, something to be feared and held at bay even while mysterious and fascinating. In recent times, as we’ve come to consider ourselves ‘modern’, wilderness has been conquered – we control it, we rule it, we exploit and use wilderness. Indigenous voices tell us we are one with the wild and can only be fully ourselves when we know and respect wildness. Romantic voices long to return to Eden and live in harmony with wilderness. The voices of mystics and spiritual seekers remind us that wildness is in us and part of us, that all things are one and that we have cut off a vital part of ourselves when we separate ourselves from the wild.

This poem by Daniela Danz brings us full circle to our 21st century shuddering realization – wild nature is back and beyond our control. For a few centuries we’ve kept wilderness at arm’s length, just outside the widening circle of our campfires, but now the seas rise and the storms mount. All of our consumption economies and gods of growth and development will not keep us safe. In the literal sense, wilderness comes into our homes, welcome or not. In the metaphorical sense, perhaps it is not too late indeed to invite it in, ‘come’. Perhaps we are on the threshold of a new age in which we admit our part in wild nature and its part in us. Or perhaps we shall be covered.

++++++ Bill

❦

My own poem, Spent, begins with fatalism and regret but discovers, I hope, some communion with wild nature to end on a note of connection. – Bill

Spent

Coreopsis spent, limp rays curling,

curdled disk and one lone fly like aster’s

dry winged seed perched on delusion

that the head still holds some promise:

I turn away from everything sere

and brown – where else would I turn

this sullen afternoon? until

she calls me to join her, leaf strewn trail

beside Grassy Creek where it sings

to itself oblivious, two soft pairs

of footfalls among fern and shadow,

partridge berry makes its own warm light

and ground cedar runs rings around us:

I crouch before a cranefly orchid, determined

buds dainty as dewclaws still unopened

mid-July (and absent basal winter leaves

pocked olive but upturn them for satin

underleaf maroon), yet while she reminds me

about co-evolution, blossoms that couple

with their pollinators, I can’t stop seeing

that useless fly, bulging maroon ommatidia,

wings’ blush iridescence, proboscis needle

dripping one sour jewel spent, until

for just this moment the world opens itself

around us and I open to its secrets, kingfisher

rattle from another planet, fecund dank

of moss and fungus, every vireo our familiar,

swelling benediction breeze that gossips

among beech and laurel and promises

always, always something new.

Bill Griffin

finalist for the James Applewhite Poetry Prize of North Carolina Literary Review, 2023

https://nclr.ecu.edu/issues/nclr-winter-online-2024/ page 48

❦ ❦ ❦

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.

++++++ R. Buckminster Fuller

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

++++++ Thomas Berry

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The Tyger

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand, dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? what dread grasp

Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,

And water’d heaven with their tears,

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

William Blake (1757-1827)

https://poets.org/poem/tyger ; this poem is in the public domain

Shared by Les Brown, Troutman NC, who writes:

I love Blake’s Tyger not only because of its incredible poetic craft and rhythm, but for its recognition of the beauty and duality of the tiger as a creature of strength and beauty but also an instrument involved in the balance of nature.

++++++ Les

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The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves,

The brilliant moon and all the milky sky,

And all that famous harmony of leaves,

Has blotted out man’s image and his cry.

++++++ William Butler Yeats

It seems clear, as I’ve argued, that the humanities can be broadened enough to make the connection [with science] in three ways. First, escape the bubble in which the unaided human sensory world remains unnecessarily trapped. Second, sink roots by connecting the deep history of genetic evolution to the history of cultural evolution. And third, diminish the extreme anthropocentrism that hobbles the bulk of humanistic endeavors.

++++++ Edward O. Wilson, The Origins of Creativity (2017)

❦ ❦ ❦

Bread and Roses

When the big sea has stopped rising

and the maps we’re through revising

and I can think of storms as friends,

I’ll go down to the beach again.

I’ll stand still there in that bright surf

and sing a song to this dear Earth.

I’ll sing for climate change to end.

I’ll sing tears for where we have been.

I’ll sing to things that we have learned –

the fossils we should not have burned

releasing the power of former suns,

bringing losses that cannot be undone.

Sad losses the children will inherit.

Species gone without much credit,

thanks to the piles of money earned

and all the corners left unturned.

I’ll sing to anger rising still.

Our leaders let firms do their will.

The people did assert control

but not before the barons stole.

Our job is now to make the best,

finding purpose in what is left.

It is a joy to live to fight

and on that beach to fly two kites.

Gus Speth

Shared by Sam Love, New Bern NC, who writes:

I love the lyrical nature of this poem using the “songs” as a way to tie assaults on our planet’s web together. Also the transition from songs for the abuses to singing “to anger rising still”. A call to action. And here is one of my poems that is more literal with the theme of Earth Day and all things being connected.

++++++ Sam

❦

The Web

No one is alone

We are all part

of life’s web

In each breath we inhale

remnants of star dust

and exhale nourishment

for the Earth’s plants

Each action we take

to support our bloated

lifestyle tugs on a strand

of the planet’s web

To understand our impact

visualize a spider’s web where

pulling on one strand

alters the whole

Sam Love

Shared by Gus Speth, South Carolina, who writes:

The following poem by Sam Love is lovely but cautionary. It reminds us that we humans are part of an interconnected web of life here on Earth and part also of the journey of the universe. And gently it says we should act like it.

++++++ Gus

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We need the tonic of wilderness… the silence, the cold and solitude… to be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor… pasturing freely where we never wander.

++++++ Henry David Thoreau

Wildness made man but man cannot make wildness. He can only spare it.

++++++ David Brower

Wilderness is two things — fact and feeling. It is a fund of knowledge and a spring of influence. It is the ultimate source of health — terrestrial and human.

++++++ Benton MacKaye, the man who planned and conceived the Appalachian Trail

Any creative deed at the human level is a continuation of the creativity of the universe.

++++++ Thomas Berry

Life is a chemical system able to replicate itself through autocatalysis and to make mistakes that gradually increase the efficiency of autocatalysis.

++++++ National Geographic, Jan. ‘03

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And EXTRA SPECIAL THANKS to my companion in the universe, Linda French Griffin, who allows the cosmos to flow through her pen onto paper. She has given permission for me to use a few of her drawings throughout these Earth Day celebrations.

++++++ Bill .