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[with 3 poems from The Ecopoetry Anthology]
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First Verse
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I admit the world remains almost beautiful.
The dung beetles snap on their iridescent jackets
despite the canine holiness of the Vatican
and, despite the great predatory surge of industry,
two human hands still mate like butterflies
when buttoning a shirt.
++++++++++++++++ Some mornings
I take myself away from the television
and go outside where the only news comes
as fresh air folding over the houses.
And I feel glad for an hour in which race
and power and all the momentum of history
add up to nothing
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As if from all the mad grinding
in my brain, a single blue lily had grown –
my skull open like a lake. I can hear
an insect sawing itself into what must be
a kind of speech.
++++++++++++ I know there is little
mercy to be found among us, that we have
already agreed to go down fighting, but
I should be more amazed: look
at the blood and guess who’s holding
the knives. Shouldn’t we be more
amazed? Doesn’t the view
just blister your eyes?
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To have come this long way, to stand
on two legs, to be ++ not tarantulas
or chimpanzees ++ but soldiers of our own
dim-witted enslavement. To utterly miss the door
to the enchanted palace. To see myself
coined into a stutter. To allow the money
to brand us ++ and the believers
to blindfold our lives.
+++++++++++++++ In the name
of what? If that old book was true
the first verse would say ++ Embrace
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the world. ++ Be friendly. ++ The forests
are glad you breathe.
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I see now
The Earth itself does have a face.
If it could say I ++ it would
plead with the universe, the way
dinosaurs once growled
at the stars.
++++++++ It’s like
the road behind us is stolen
completely ++ so the future can
never arrive. So, look at this: look
what we’ve done. With all
we knew.
With all we knew
that we knew.
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Tim Seibles
from The Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher Wirth and Laura-Gray Street; Trinity University Press, San Antonio, TX; © 2020
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I bend to pinch off a few stems as I walk down the drive beside the school. What is this tiny blossom? Four petals no bigger than a sliver of fingernail, lavender, pointed and neat. Whorl of slender leaves. Poking up through asphalt where it hugs the brick wall. I finger the hand lens in my pocket.
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By the time I reach the ball field where the middle schoolers are at recess, I’ve gathered a mini-bouquet of the usual suspects: blue violets, henbit, deadnettle, bittercress. Their teacher turns them over to me and I lay out the plan, an hour and a half of Science Friday. Each takes their little paper cup and we spread out. The neglected. The overlooked. The beautiful in their own tiny tiny way – these are our quarry.
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Sure, most folks would say we’re gathering weeds, and in a minute we’ll discuss that word, “weed,” something growing where it isn’t wanted. For now we scour the waste places, along the storage shed and storm fence, within the winter-brown kudzu invading from the ditch. Their cups fill up with yellow, pink, lavender, blue. After half an hour we sit down at the picnic tables behind the school; I pass around magnifying glasses and ask them to draw a tiny tiny flower as large as they can make it. And they do!
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Are these kids listening while I talk about taxonomy and plant families, about native versus introduced, about flower anatomy of the little mints and asters we’ve discovered? Whether they are or not, I’m pretty confident that there will be days in the future when they look down at their feet and notice something they never paid attention to before.
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It becomes a habit, this paying attention. I can’t not see them now. These tiny tiny flowers are not in my lawn – they are my lawn. OK, sometimes I pull up the mock strawberry and the bittercress when they crowd my “flowers,” and I do dig dandelions out of the front walk, but I’ll not curse them for their tenacity. Instead, I’ll do my best not to make them feel unwanted. I’ll resist the impulse to call them weeds.
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Here’s what you’d discover in the mini-bouquet from our paper cups:
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Henbit +++++ Lamia amplexicaule
Deadnettle +++++ Lamia purpurea
Creeping Charlie +++++ Glechoma hederacea
Common Blue Violet +++++ Viola sororia
American Field Pansy +++++ Viola bicolor
Common Dandelion +++++ Taraxacum officinale
Common Groundsel +++++ Senecio vulgaris
Hairy Bittercress +++++ Cardamine hirsuta
Smallflower Fumewort +++++ Corydalis micantha
Yellow Fumewort +++++ Corydalis flavula
Cut-leaved Crane’s-bill +++++ Geranium dissectum
Early Buttercup +++++ Ranunculus fascicularis
Mock Strawberry +++++ Potentilla indica
Common Chickweed +++++ Stellaria media
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And my tiny tiny lavender blossom, the one you wouldn’t even notice for a flower within its handful of green if you hadn’t knelt before it?
Field Madder +++++ Sherardia arvensis
A member of the same family as my all time favorite plant genus, Coffea.
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Scilla
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Not I, you idiot, not self, but we, we – waves
of sky blue like
a critique of heaven: why
do you treasure your voice
when to be one thing
is to be next to nothing?
Why do you look up? To hear
an echo like the voice
of god? You are all the same to us,
solitary, standing above us, planning
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your silly lives: you go
where you ware sent, like all things,
where the wind plants you,
one or another of you forever
looking down and seeing some image
of water, and hearing what? Waves,
and over waves, birds singing.
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Louise Glück
from The Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher Wirth and Laura-Gray Street; Trinity University Press, San Antonio, TX; © 2020
Scilla, in English also called Squill, is a genus of bulb-forming lily-like flowers that spread in a carpet of blossoms.
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The Lilies Break Open Over the Dark Water
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Inside
+ that mud-hive, that gas sponge,
+ + that reeking
+ + + leaf yard, that rippling
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dream-bowl, the leeches’
+ flecked and swirling
+ + broth of life, as rich
+ + + as Babylon,
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the fists crack
+ open and the wands
+ + of the lilies
+ + + quicken, they rise
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like pale poles
+ with their wrapped beaks of lace;
+ + one day
+ + + they tear the surface,
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the next they break open
+ over the dark water.
+ + And there you are,
+ + + on the shore,
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fitful and thoughtful, trying
+ to attach them to an idea –
+ + some news of your own life.
+ + + But the lilies
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are slippery and wild – they are
+ devoid of meaning, they are
+ + simply doing,
+ + + from the deepest
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spurs of their being,
+ what they are impelled to do
+ + every summer.
+ + + And so, dear sorrow, are you.
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Mary Oliver
from The Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher Wirth and Laura-Gray Street; Trinity University Press, San Antonio, TX; © 2020
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Tim Seibles (b. 1955) has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts; he teaches at Old Dominion University and in the Stonecoast MFA program, and leads workshops for the Cave Canem Foundation. First Verse appears in Buffalo Head Solos.
Louise Glück (1943-2023) received the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris (1993), in which Scilla appears and won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature. She served as US Poet Laureate 2003-2004.
Mary Oliver (1935-2019) received the Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive (1984) and the National Book Award for New and Selected Poems (1992), in which The Lilies Break Open Over the Dark Water appears.
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More about Trinity University Press and The Ecopoetry Anthology HERE
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V E R S E and I M A G E 
Very true. And not that she ignores the grief and woe of living but somehow makes all of life a…