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Posts Tagged ‘Ecopoetry’

Embrace

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on February 23, 2024| 11 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Joanie McLean]
 . 
Here Is What’s Left
 . 
Summer wanes as usual
the Rudbeckia succumbs
to mildew and wilt
the figs fall
under the weight
of sucking junebugs
the pond is muddy
scummed over and still
even the birds are quiet
their calls diminished
 . 
Looking out
at the brittle grass
in the crickety field
I see scraps and tatters
of old assumptions
of unearned grace
being dragged away
with the season’s remnants:
a semblance of security here
a shadow of normalcy there
pieces of convenience
disjointed shapes
of good times
all crumbling
as they go
leaving a light breeze
to stir the stillness
amidst the nodding
muhly grass plumes
 . 
So then
here is what’s left
the grass
the breeze
the slipping light
the emptiness
whose touch is so gentle
the kindness of it all
 . 
Joanie McLean
from Like Wind into Air, Redhawk Publications, Hickory, NC. © 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Yesterday I took Dad and Mom to visit a senior living facility. After the tour we stayed for lunch, Dad and Mom seated at a table with two of the residents, Pat and Ken. Mary Ellen and I watched from a distance as Dad introduced himself and made conversation, charming, just charming. He and Mom seemed to be enjoying themselves. When we got home, I asked Dad for his impressions. “The place is nicely decorated, looks like it’s been painted. The lunch was good.” But when I asked if there were any negatives, he surprised me – “The people were all really old.”
 . 
Perhaps every ninety-seven year old man lives in a universe of constricted perspective. Just breathing, minute by minute, may exhaust all of his empathic resources; every event of the moment becomes wholly self-referential. Nevertheless I will grant Dad this: when he says, “They were all worse off than I am,” maybe it is true that none have retained their social skills like he has.
 . 
What about the seventy-one year old man? What is the insurmountable impediment inherent in becoming me-in-relationship with another? I watch myself constantly calculating how I will respond, or reflecting (regretting) how I have responded. I begin to see the other as the obstacle, the hurdle I must leap to become the actual me.
 . 
Since my Beloved is for me and I for my Beloved, who will be able to separate and extinguish two fires so enkindled? It would amount to labor in vain, for the two fires have become one.  .  . Teresa of Avila
 . 
And yet this is still me as observer and not as participant. Me watching and not being. Even if all others were to acquiesce and I in sidestepping could imagine my way forward now open and free and unhindered, I would still be tethered to me-in-relationship with myself. I am standing in my own way. I live by formulations and ruminations. I imagine it is the others who prescribe their expectations of me, but really I am the prescriber. I am the one who builds these enclosures.
 . 
Mystics and sages of all traditions speak of the inner fire, the divine spark hidden in our very cells and in all that lives. This flame of love is the pure presence of God.  .  . Paula D’Arcy
 . 
Do I spy a chink in the wall? The clamor of the world is not going to hush on my account, but perhaps I can press my eye up to the barrier and discern a little light. Not another book of philosophy or science, not a lambast of revelation or a self-created masterpiece – just a small warm flame. For even just a moment, let it burn. Let it burn me. Let it burn in me. May I glimpse me-in-relationship with all.
 . 
Becoming fire means saying yes to life by the very way we live.  .  . Christine Valters Paintner
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Still With the Light
 . 
First Sunday
after the first full moon
after the Spring Equinox
Easter morning for some
here on this particular land mass
so often a lovely day
at this latitude so often
a sort of gentleness
a willingness to smile
conveyed in the watery
green light that shimmers
and steps across
church lawns
and across my yard
where bluebirds jump
from the fence wire
into the broomsedge
and flutter back up
with crickets in their bills.
 . 
There is something else
shifting like clouds
below a horizon
insinuating just beyond
these Easter lawns –
something that would
come near now
if I let it
would bend this light
differently
would spurn
this morning’s naive smile.
 . 
So I stand
as still as I can
with the light
the breeze shifting
the shadows
the bluebirds
dropping and rising
dropping and rising
that’s all
just this holy light
just for now.
 . 
Joanie McLean
from Like Wind into Air, Redhawk Publications, Hickory, NC. © 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
I am jealous of these poems. No, not jealousy with its sour tang of spite. I desire these poems. I long for them; I long to walk where they walk; I long to lie down in their grass. May I not also please hear the cuckoo and the woodcock, sense the coyote just down the path, know the secret of every color and flavor of light?
 . 
Like Wind into Air by Joanie McLean sustains the beautiful image and promise of that title throughout its pages. Everything enters into everything, every season lives its truth, every life swirls and connects to every other: all-in-relationship-to-all. The poet gently dissolves every barrier between the reader and her world. In the grass in the slough in the stand of pines / life and death are fully accountable / part of a bargain –
 . 
May I be as emptied and as filled as these poems? May I enter the poems’ world? And as I embrace their world may I not escape my own world but embrace it as well? This is the point of the poetry; this is the point of love.
 . 
❦
 . 
Joanie McLean’s Like Wind into Air at Redhawk Publications HERE
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
In Late February
 . 
there is always
a wind in the woods
a basso continuo hum,
 . 
the fugue the chorus frogs
play toccata against,
the sound memory makes
 . 
when it wakes and rises
up through the earth
towards sleeping roots.
 . 
The field has forgotten
about summer and bees
and lightning.
 . 
But the trees,
whose roots are deepest,
are remembering something
 . 
and the frogs,
whose sleep is the lightest,
are dying to hear it.
 . 
Of course February
would sing like this
whether I heard it or not.
 . 
But again this year
I am here in the field,
at the edge of the woods.
 . 
Joanie McLean
from Like Wind into Air, Redhawk Publications, Hickory, NC. © 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
 . 
 . 
2020-11-03a Doughton Park Tree
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Foreshadowing

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on December 29, 2023| 9 Comments »

 . 
[with poems from The Ecopoetry Anthology by
Gary Snyder, Evie Shockley, Adrienne Rich]
 . 
For the Children
 . 
The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up as we all
go down.
 . 
In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.
 . 
To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:
 . 
stay together
learn the flowers
go light
 . 
Gary Snyder
from The Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street; Trinity University Press, San Antonio, TX; © 2013
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
In the cook tent behind the Big Top, the carnies are eating breakfast together. One rowdy slurps coffee with the spoon handle jutting up from his cup. His buddy hollers, “You’ll put your eye out!” but he just ignores the danger and goes right on drinking.
 . 
Young Toby Tyler and I just gape, he at the jostling men and me, age eight, at the black & white TV. Both of us are convinced it’s going to happen any minute, spoon into eyeball. No matter what happens during the rest of that movie, we keep watching the guy with the doomed eye.
 . 
Sixty years of foreboding later and I still can’t tell you much else about the film (wasn’t there a chimp?), but it doesn’t take much for me to still feel that gut tug of imminent blinding: the teaspoon of Damocles. “Putting your eye out” was one of the more graphic horrifics that dogged my childhood. When it became the tagline for “A Christmas Story,” I couldn’t laugh with quite the same gusto as my wife. As readers we’re admonished to be vigilant for foreshadowing; as writers we’re taught to incorporate it; as kids we’re just scared into behaving ourselves.
 . 
Turns out the rowdy never even poked his eye. It wasn’t foreshadowing at all, just a one off Disney gag. Can you even call something foreshadowing if it never connects to the unwritten future, if there isn’t some aftshadowing of destiny that confirms the prophesy? Am I trying to tell myself to quit worrying so much about a future that may never arrive? Standing in the TSA line at the airport – oh no, do I have a weapon in my pocket, nail file of Damocles? Dad speeding toward his 95th birthday with driver’s license in his pocket, gleam in his eye, and in his ignition the key of Damocles. What could possibly go wrong?
 . 
Alas, I’m afraid that eight-year old kid already had thinking about, planning for, and worrying about the future inscribed deep in his psyche. In the fable about ants and grasshoppers it never even occurred to him to identify with anyone but the ant. Here I am now, all grown up, carefully rinsing the teaspoon and putting it in the washer. But what the hell: gimme another cuppa coffee!
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
notes for the early journey
+++ for j.v.k.
 . 
somewhere along the way you will need to lean
over a bluff’s edge   drop you shoes and keep moving   use
the feel of greening grass under your feet as a guide   if a
rainbow confuses you   which end   go the third
way   on the mountain you’ll remember   climb on
up to where the aspens tremble   you will be alone   these
high winds can knife some lungs to gasping rags   but for you
 . 
there’s nothing to worry about   breathe   sniff the air like
a bloodhound and head the opposite way   find the
place where the land dissolves into sand   keep walking   when
that sand becomes sea   speak a bridge into being
I know you can do it   your father’s son ain’t
heard of can’t   follow the song   don’t stop until you’re south
of sorrow and all yo can smell is jasmine   I never
once stumbled on such a place   hard to say if a brown child
is the last four hundred years has had such
a luscious dream   day or night   but this is your mother’s
lullaby   I know she meant you to sleep sweet
 . 
Evie Shockley
from The Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street; Trinity University Press, San Antonio, TX; © 2013
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
At Christmas we celebrate the past and resolve to be worthy of the present – to give life to the divine presence within our own hearts. At New Year’s we look to the future. In recent years that gaze forward has generally been accompanied by a soto voce “Oh, shit.” Yeah, pretty bleak outlook for 2024: politics, race, climate, war. Party’s over.
 . 
This is the best time to open a book of poetry. Not to escape to some idealized past but to connect to another human being who is also muttering, but who hasn’t yet given up hope. And this is especially the time I open my Ecopoetry Anthology, all hefty 0.9 kg of it. I’ve read many definitions of ecopoetry (as differentiated from nature poetry), some of them requiring thousands of words,  but here’s my personal take: poems that observe the world as it is, life and geology and physics without rose-colored glasses; poems that put is in our place in the world, in the literal and figurative connotation of that phrase, no holds barred, no punches pulled; poems that, even in the face of reality, still hold onto hope that we creatures might understand, appreciate, and love every particle of it.
 . 
And each other. Love each other. This is the best time to read a poem, connect with the poet, and connect with every other reader of that poem. Past, present, and future. What the hell: gimme some love and hope!
 . 
❦
 . 
More information on The Ecopoetry Anthology, and where to order,  HERE
 . 
. .
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
What Kind of Times Are These
 . 
There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.
 . 
I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t
+++ be fooled,
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.
 . 
I won’t tell yo where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light –
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.
 . 
And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.
 . 
Adrienne Rich
from The Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street; Trinity University Press, San Antonio, TX; © 2013
 . 
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
IMG_0768, tree
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Water Dreams

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , on September 1, 2023| 10 Comments »

 . 
[ with 3 poems by Jack Coulehan]
 . 
Darwin’s Prayer
++++ He saw Darwin on his knees, and there
++++ was no difference between prayer and
++++ pulling a worm from the grass.
++++++++ Roger McDonald, Mr. Darwin’s Shooter
 . 
Bright bunches
of gardenias
bloom in November,
 . 
the loam at their feet
moistened by dew
and spongy with debris.
 . 
As I fill my container
with handfuls of earth
alive with these
 . 
marvelous worms,
perfected in being
by the wisdom
 . 
of randomness,
I’m astonished
by gratitude.
 . 
from The Talking Cure: New and Selected Poems. Plain View Press, Austin TX, © 2020
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Last night the storm whispered its secrets into my dreams. A long dryness, a vain hoping. This morning the drought has ended and flood warnings will as well in an hour or so. Linda and I head to the E&A rail trail beside Elkin Creek to laugh and point at the heights reached by frothy current. To breathe in the hot seethe and funk of saturated forest. To celebrate.
 . 
The sadness of the creek slams us, stops us, stills us. Its churning water is the color of pumpkin soup; Spike the Heron does not stalk here; the rattle of Kingfisher is silent, fled. Oh yes, we generally get muddy after a downpour, but never this bad. Miles from here, north of Carter Falls, the dry weeks have parched and cracked 500 acres of tobacco field. No riparian buffer, no catchment pond, not one single fuck does the tobacco farmer give for all of us downstream: when rain eventually returns it can’t slow itself, can’t soak the earth. It has no choice but to sluice foaming into the creek carrying inch-acres of red clay with it.
 . 
❦
 . 
The poems in Jack Coulehan’s The Talking Cure are expansive; they span the human experience and human influence. Many of his poems have arisen from his decades as teacher, physician, healer; the lines are populated by his patients and their struggles. So often these lines also reflect his own struggle, both to heal and be healed. Other poems explore his family through the generations. Others reflect his deep relationship with literary figures that formed him and with teachers who informed him.
 . 
In all of these poems I sense a web of connection. As humans we must all struggle to discover our purpose in being. In this struggle each of us is touched by the people we allow to approach us, to close in, to climb over the wall. And each of us touches others and touches the earth: the human experience and the human influence.
 . 
I selected these three poems in particular for their focused peering into that influence, and also for their universality. Jack Coulehan is a humanist, a person who believes that human beings have it within their power to improve the lives of other people whom they are willing to touch. So often, so easily and thoughtlessly, so many of us focus only on our power to dominate, to harm. We easily destroy the earth itself without even noticing. Let us stop and think. Let us feel. Let us touch and allow ourselves to be touched. Perhaps each of our individual lives can enlarge its span. The power of many begins with the power of one.
 . 
We are all downstream from someone, and all upstream.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Cherry Orchard
++++ If a great many remedies
++++ are suggested for some disease,
++++ it means the disease is incurable.
++++++++ Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard
 . 
The end of the century
has come upon us
without a sign of release
or the beginning of justice.
We’re selling the orchard
to pay our debts
and reminiscing about
love’s excitements,
life’s mistakes. I suspect
a century ago the hearts
of the people sitting here
were just as generous,
intense, and cruel as ours.
 . 
A miniature flower
thrives in the moisture
and dust of a broken
pavement – this is the gist
of the matter. We want
so strongly to believe
the flower will spread
everywhere. How quickly
it dies! If the disease
had a cure, we would not need
so many remedies.
 . 
Jack Coulehan
from The Talking Cure: New and Selected Poems. Plain View Press, Austin TX, © 2020
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Garden of Endurance
++++ Cassia grandis, Costa Rica
 . 
Cassia fruit covers the forest floor,
a blanket of black sausage stinking
in the heat as it decomposes,
a mote in the eye of permanence.
 . 
Built for grinding by gigantic teeth,
Cassia’s fibrous case condemns its seeds
to suffering, with neither mastodon
nor megatherium alive to free them
 . 
and distribute their undigested life
in mounds of shit. Its glory left behind
by climate, tooth, and claw, Cassia
endures by the grace of rodents
 . 
that gnaw its weakest fibers
and let a few fertile seeds escape
before they rot. Anachronistic
fruit, your survival – sweet tickle
 . 
of a breeze, illusion of peace,
diminishment that overcomes
extinction – is an inheritance
for my kind, too. A hopeful omen.
 . 
Jack Coulehan
from The Talking Cure: New and Selected Poems. Plain View Press, Austin TX, © 2020
 . 
For additional poems by Jack Coulehan, see last week’s post, Plow Straight, from August 25, 2023.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Join me in celebrating the release of my newest poetry collection, How We All Fly, from The Orchard Street Press.
 . 
Poet Patricia Hooper comments: “Through close observations of the physical world, these clear, direct poems yield insights into the corresponding life of the spirit.” And Rebecca Baggett says this: “Throughout these poems, but particularly toward the collection’s end, How We All Fly leads the reader up and onward, infusing even inevitable losses with tenderness, trust, and hope.”
. 
You may sample the opening poem from the collection here:
Thank you for your support, both of the writing you discover here and of the literary arts!
 . 
You may purchase a copy of How We All Fly directly from me by mailing a check for $15 (postage included) to this address:
++++++ 131 Bon Aire Rd.
++++++ Elkin, NC 28621
Please make your check payable to Bill Griffin.
 . 
If you would prefer to pay via PayPal, please contact me for transaction details at:
++++++ comments@griffinpoetry.com
 . 
 . 
[Patricia Hooper is author of Wild Persistence, University of Tampa Press. Rebecca Baggett’s most recent book is The Woman Who Lives Without Money, Regal House Publishing.]
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
IMG_0880, tree
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