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Posts Tagged ‘Ecopoetry’

What Would You Leave Out? – Mary Oliver

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 13, 2026| 3 Comments »

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[ 2 poems from Little Alleluias ]
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But tell me, if you would praise the world, what is it you would leave out?
Mary Oliver, Black Snake
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Crows
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In Japan, in Seattle, in Indonesia—there they were—
each one loud and hungry,
crossing a field, or sitting
above the traffic, or dropping
 … 
to the lawn of some temple to sun itself
or walk about on strong legs,
like a landlord. I think
they don’t envy anyone or anything—
 … 
not the tiger, not the emperor,
not even the philosopher.
Why should they?
The wind is their friend, the least tree is home.
 … 
Nor is melody, they have discovered, necessary.
Nor have the delicate palates;
without hesitation they will eat
anything you can think of—
 … 
corn, mice, old hamburgers—
swallowing with such hollering and gusto
no one can tell whether it’s a brag
or a prayer of deepest thanks. At sunrise, when I walk out,
 … 
I see them in trees, or on ledges of buildings,
as cheerful as saints, or thieves of the small job
who have been, one more night, successful—
and like all successes, it turns my thoughts to myself.
 … 
Should I have led a more simple life?
Have my ambitions been worthy?
Has the wind, for years, been talking to me as well?
Somewhere, among all my thoughts, there is a narrow path.
 … 
It’s attractive, but who could follow it?
Slowly the full morning
draws over us its mysterious and lovely equation.
Then, in the branches poling from their dark center,
 … 
ever more flexible and bright,
sparks from the sun are bursting and melting on the birds’ wings
as, indifferent and comfortable,
they lounge, they squabble in the vast, rose-colored light.
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Mary Oliver
from Little Alleluias, Grand Central Publishing, New York & Boston; © 2025 by NW Orchard LLC
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Gravel
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6.
 … 
It is the nature of stone
to be satisfied.
It is the nature of water
to want to be somewhere else.
 … 
Everywhere we look:
the sweet guttural swill of the water
tumbling.
Everywhere we look:
the stone, basking in the sun,
 … 
or offering itself
to the golden lichen.
 … 
It is our nature not only to see
that the world is beautiful
 … 
but to stand in the dark, under the stars,
or at noon, in the rainfall of light,
 … 
frenzied,
wringing our hands,
 … 
half-mad, saying over and over:
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what does it mean, that the world is beautiful—
what does it mean?
 … 
the child asks this,
and the determined, laboring adult asks this—
 … 
both the carpenter and scholar ask this,
and the fisherman and the teacher;
 … 
both the rich and the poor ask this
(maybe the poor more than the rich)
 … 
and the old and the very old, not yet having figured it out,
ask this
desperately
 … 
standing beside the golden-coated field rock,
or the tumbling water,
or under the stars—
 … 
what does it mean?
what does it mean?
 … 
8.
 … 
Listen, I don’t think we’re going to rise
in gauze and halos.
Maybe as grass, and slowly.
Maybe as the long-leaved, beautiful grass
 … 
I have known, and you have known—
or the pine trees—
or the dark rocks of the zigzag creek
hastening along—
 … 
or the silver rain—
 … 
or the hummingbird.
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10.
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This is the poem of goodbye.
And this is the poem of don’t know.
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My hands touch the lilies
then withdraw;
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my hands touch the blue iris
then withdraw;
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and I say, not easily but carefully—
the words round in the mouth, crisp on the tongue—
 … 
dirt, mud, stars, water—
I know you as if you were myself.
How could I be afraid?
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Mary Oliver
from Little Alleluias, Grand Central Publishing, New York & Boston; © 2025 by NW Orchard LLC
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The deep guttural imperative, that croak of authority – some afternoons we hear Raven down by the Yadkin River, some days lingering in the grove around the abandoned furniture plant. He, or she perhaps for they certainly know but I don’t, always sounds single. Alone. Perhaps a companion is nearby nodding, “Yes! Tell it!” but never is there any boisterous chorus. Life is a very serious thing for Raven.
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Not so much for Crow. Jostling jokers. Bullies at times, they certainly don’t ever seem willing to share a tree with Owl or Hawk. Or Raven, apparently. This morning I heard Raven’s gravelly baritone right above the porch. I looked up through the screen and watched him raise his powerful beak again and declare. But there on another branch just a meter away perched Crow, matching Raven’s every croak with three tenor caws. Which cawing called in a fellow crow to circle above them both. Intimidating the big guy? For several minutes they battled with their call-and-response fugue, then they all flew off in different directions. A minute later I heard Raven in the cove a quarter mile away.
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What meditation on my own life might Raven or Crow inspire? I admire both of these intelligent Corvids but which, if either, shall I emulate? This morning, after Raven’s departure, Linda and I are picking apart last night’s exhausting choral rehearsal. Our director, Lance, has selected John Rutter’s Requiem for May’s concert by our little ensemble, and some singers are not particularly overjoyed about the Latin pronunciation or the challenging rhythms, harmonies, and counterpoint of the score. We are struggling to come together. I’ll just confess – we ain’t there yet with this music. But during last night’s repetition and mistakes and measure-by-measure struggle, there also arose a few moments when a beautiful spirit of blessing surrounded our gathering. This morning Linda and I conclude that this is no music that a single voice can carry. In its great complexity, even because of that complexity, the whole tapestry can only come into being when each part, each voice, weaves itself into relationship with every other.
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In the introduction to Small Alleluias by Mary Oliver, poet Natalie Diaz writes this: What can any of us make of our momentary intimate lives in such an immense world, with equally immense unknowns, mysteries as great as death or the whale, as deep as love or the ocean, as sad and beautiful as a jellyfish torn and glistening in a small fortress of shore rock? This world in which we are of consequence, shaped as violently and tenderly as we also shape it. Marked by and marking. Though we might not always, or ever, know what it means, we can’t deny: the earth, the earth is beautiful. How lucky to be in it.
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Little Alleluias, collected poetry and prose, gathers poems and essays from the last years of Mary Oliver’s life into a newly released collection. Mary Oliver was born in Ohio in 1935 and died in 2019. Through her life as poet and teacher she won innumerable awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for American Primitive, her fourth book. Little Alleluias is available from Grand Central Publishing.
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Enjoy poetry by Mary Oliver which has appeared in previous editions of Verse and Image, including just last week:
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Raven crop 02

RAVEN, by Linda French Griffin, from SNAKE DEN RIDGE, A BESTIARY

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Thank you for visiting Verse and Image:
. . . . . every Friday I present one or two poems I’ve read this week that particularly speak to me;
. . . . . every Saturday I present one or two poems submitted by YOU, my readers.
 … 
If you would like to offer a poem for consideration, either by a favorite author or your own work, please view these GUIDELINES for Saturday Readers Share:
 … 
 … 
If you would like to receive an email each time a post appears, please SUBSCRIBE to Verse and Image using the button on the Home Page.
 … 
If you have a hard time finding the SUBSCRIBE button on this WordPress site, you can send me your email address and I will add you to the subscriber list. Send your request to
 … 
COMMENTS@GRIFFINPOETRY.COM
 … 
Thanks again for joining the conversation.
 … 
– Bill
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Doughton Park Tree 2021-03-23
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Buoyed Minutes – Arthur Sze

Posted in Ecopoetry, tagged , , , , , , on February 20, 2026| 4 Comments »

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[ 2 poems by Arthur Sze ]
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Architectures of Emptiness
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4
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Mark the shadows of aspen leaves
rippling on grass; beneath a veil
of white bark, aspens have a photosynthetic
layer that absorbs sunlight
 . 
through winter; a magpie sails
across a yard, flutters wing feathers,
and, landing on spruce, squawks—
it speaks to you; thin-leaf alder
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shoots rising out of the ditch speak;
you stand in Tree pose: inhale,
exhale, inhale, exhale: water
is to emptiness as sun is to language;
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you sluice into the infinite tangle
of beginnings and ends: cottonwood
seeds swirl in the air; a wild
apricot blooms by the ditch; suddenly
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each aspen leaf on a tree is a word,
the movement of leaves their syntax:
burns    diamond light  diffuse   it
so   we    green   green,
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diamond   light   burns   so we
diffuse   it   into   greening— 
suddenly you parse the leaves,
and they are speaking to you now:
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Arthur Sze
from Into the Hush, Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend WA; © 2025
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Farolitos
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We pour sand into brown lunch bags, then place
a votive candle
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inside each; at night, lined along the driveway,
the flickering lights
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form a spirit way, but what spirit? what way?
we grieve, yearn, joy,
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pinpoints in a greater darkness, and spy sunlight
brighten craters
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on a half-lit moon; in this life, you may try, try
to light a match, fail,
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fail again and again; yet, letting go, you strike
a tip one more time
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when it bursts into flame—          now the flames
are lights in bags again,
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and we glimpse the willow tips clutch at a lunar
promise of spring.
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Arthur Sze
from Into the Hush, Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend WA; © 2025
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Yogis call these buoyed minutes / the moment of the universe, and who knows . . . 
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Who knows? Knowing has been the false hare speeding in front of me, dragging my greyhound brain around and around this crazy dog track of a life. Learn another thing, cinch it down into the sack of knowing with all those others. Linda’s disgust is apparent: “You know everything.” Well, I know I don’t, but that’s not because I wouldn’t like to. . . . if spruce, aspen, and a golden rain tree / converse, like mycelium, through roots? Ooh, I would like to know that.
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Meanwhile, in the buoyed minutes of not knowing, the universe is trying to speak. Perhaps I do know that I will not get far with parsing the language of rustling leaves while perched at my desk with graph paper and pen. I remember riding in the car with my mother when I was six, suddenly realizing I couldn’t NOT read the signs as they passed. So hungry is the hound brain for something to know. But Time, being a line and therefore composed of an infinite number of points between each moment A and moment B, cannot be filled with knowing. What remains unfilled, the emptiness – is that the domain of despair? of wisdom? of grief? of joy?
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Arthur Sze is the twenty-fifth Poet Laureate of the United States, appointed in 2025. He was born in New York City in 1950 and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife poet Carol Moldaw. Into the Hush, his twelfth book of poetry, travels the geography of tropics and desert, seaside and riverside. It also travels the geography of memory, contemplation, suffering, and redemption. When the buzz of molecule and distant star, the thrash of tempest and desecration, the murmur of guilt and doubt, when all of these have stilled we enter into the hush.
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Into the Hush from Copper Canyon Press.
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Thank you for visiting Verse and Image:
. . . . . every Friday I present one or two poems I’ve read this week that particularly speak to me;
. . . . . every Saturday I present one or two poems submitted by YOU, my readers.
 . 
If you would like to offer a poem for consideration, either by a favorite author or your own work, please view these GUIDELINES for Saturday Readers Share:
 . 
 . 
If you would like to receive an email each time a post appears, please SUBSCRIBE to Verse and Image using the button on the Home Page.
 . 
If you have a hard time finding the SUBSCRIBE button on this WordPress site, you can send me your email address and I will add you to the subscriber list. Send your request to
 . 
COMMENTS@GRIFFINPOETRY.COM
 . 
Thanks again for joining the conversation.
 . 
– Bill
 . 
 . 

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Creation and Desecration — Liza Wolff-Francis

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, tagged , , , , , , , on February 13, 2026| 3 Comments »

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[ 3 poems by Liza Wolff-Francis ]
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The land before we came
 . 
i.
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My friend Shelly gets a text
from a woman she’s dating
down south with a picture
of a bullfrog the size of my
hand, caught in a bucket.
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Its circle ear, a tympanum,
its habitat, the sound of a waltz,
its body, green camouflage.
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As a teenager, I wore combat boots,
though never camouflage.
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Camouflage for people is military wardrobe.
Parts of Atlanta were like battlefields,
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people fist fighting about race, others
hobbling along asking for spare change.
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To walk through those streets, I needed
combat boots, to run, to kick, to escape,
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but, as part of the natural world,
I don’t camouflage well into city.
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I could make a list of all the ways
people get by
and all the things to change.
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The bullfrog doesn’t live well on asphalted land.
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We are meant to be in connection with each other,
where no one is spare.
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ii.
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I imagine the land before we came.
Acres of thicket, trees and bramble.
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Humans measure all of this by acreage,
kilometers, miles, rather than
the jump reach of a bullfrog,
rather than the size of its tympanum
and whether it is larger than the eye.
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Wheelchair in Sand
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Even in this cool air,
a woman in a magenta
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bathing suit, unable
to stand alone, is held,
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at the edge of ocean,
by a man her height.
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Water billows and turns.
He stands her up as if
 . 
he plans to stand her up
over and over again.
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Ocean pulls her into tide,
swallows her with mouth
 . 
of whale. Her legs dangle
like bait, she is steady
 . 
in his arms and I think
he must be a man with
 . 
the heart of a whale. A young
woman yells Hold on Mama,
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runs for the chair, drags
its robot wheels through
 . 
beach and saltwater until
it’s behind her and they push
 . 
against swelling ocean
and sinking sand.
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❀    ❀    ❀
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Atlantic City’s Great Black-Backed Gulls
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Each one like an animal
++++ you could spoon or cradle if they wouldn’t fly away.
They stand facing the wind, lined up
++++ away from the ocean.
 . 
Even people who’ve never seen the ocean, I think,
must know its waves, like a rhythm of Earth
that water must know even without knowing,
 . 
just as grass knows sun,
like desert cactus know rain.
 . 
It’s different just beyond the gulls.
 . 
Shiny baubles and buildings,
casinos and their flashing lights,
siren sounds, bell-clanging promises,
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oohs, and ahhhs.
 . 
Perfume brings back my grandmother.
A gasoline smell reminds me of riding
on a boat on a Georgia lake.
 . 
I could never know a casino in my body
in the same way as I know
how thirst is quenched with water.
 . 
If there were a hurricane here, like
the one headed toward Florida,
I would sense it in my muscles,
 . 
my legs, my head, the heaviness
heaving my body into the menace.
I know that feeling, knew it once,
 . 
don’t think it every completely left me.
Shape of storm pushes at all of nature—
and I feel it within me,
 . 
like Earth feels it’s coming.
 . 
I learn it at every threat of destruction.
 . 
Liza Wolff-Francis
from 48 Hours Down the Shore, Kelsay Books, American Fork UT; © 2024
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Three writer friends escaping the grinding dailies for a few days together: on the one side ocean, mystery and seduction, infinite expanse of watery planet; on the other side greed and tinsel and different seductions, the exploited and the exploiting. Liza Wolff-Francis’s poems can be arms spreading wide cymbals of glass before they clash and shatter, or arms that lift again the creature in its brokenness and wish for healing. During 48 hours down the shore, as one says in New Jersey, Liza celebrates love and kindness and the dignity of surf and sea-creature. Never, though, does she overlook the struggle all around us, of person and of planet. She describes herself as ecopoet. I feel in these poems not only the ecology of our threatened and suffering earth, but also the social ecology, cultural ecology, human ecology so twisted and strained, so threatened and threatening that it is easy to become overwhelmed.
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What to do when overwhelmed? My reptilian hindbrain is more likely to retreat than lash out. Close your eyes, close your ears and ignore the impending destruction. Or do lash out – hurt someone before they can hurt you. Or look there – a man is introducing his crippled lover to the surf. Listen – gulls are laughing with you as much as at you, and the waves’ approach and retreat murmur . . . you belong here. Small acts will save our planet, a million small acts of love, a billion. A poem is just such a small act of invitation. You are invited to advance rather than retreat. To embrace rather than to strike. Each act of love declares we are not giving up.
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Liza Wolff-Francis is the 8th Poet Laureate of Carrboro, North Carolina, USA. She teaches creative writing workshops, has written plays and reviews, and whatever is happening around the world or down the street, she never looks away. 48 Hours Down the Shore is available from Kelsay Books. More about Liza at http://www.lizawolff.com.
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 . 
Thank you for visiting Verse and Image:
. . . . . every Friday I present one or two poems I’ve read this week that particularly speak to me;
. . . . . every Saturday I present one or two poems submitted by YOU, my readers.
 . 
If you would like to offer a poem for consideration, either by a favorite author or your own work, please view these GUIDELINES for Saturday Readers Share:
 . 
 . 
If you would like to receive an email each time a post appears, please SUBSCRIBE to Verse and Image using the button on the Home Page.
 . 
If you have a hard time finding the SUBSCRIBE button on this WordPress site, you can send me your email address and I will add you to the subscriber list. Send your request to
 . 
COMMENTS@GRIFFINPOETRY.COM
 . 
Thanks again for joining the conversation.
 . 
– Bill
 . 
Doughton Park Tree 2021-10-23
 . 

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