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Posts Tagged ‘Ecopoetry’

Time’s Line

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on October 10, 2025| 3 Comments »

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[with 2 poems by Catherine Carter]
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Earth says
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I am your mother as the horse
is mother to the louse, endlessly
intricate interlocking systems
which the blissfully sucking louse
cannot imagine and never must,
which it sums up
in some louse-sign for God
a quiver of hairs of the thorax,
a shimmer of inarticulate
gratitude for satiation and for
preservation of self, self, self.
I am sick of it, mother
with eight billion toddlers
not counting my beautiful beetles,
a horse plagued with lice, and yet.
I am your mother as you are mother
to the mosquito which hovers
over your arm as you write,
mote of thirsty gold quivering
with desperation to the boom
of great rivers in blue tunnels
and pipes just below the soft leather
scrim of skin, endless life
you’ll never miss and won’t let her have,
enough for a thousand generations.
If she tries to drink you will want
to swat her flat, and she must try,
for her unborn young, for her life. And maybe
eventually, weary of swatting,
worn down by importunity,
unwilling compassion, fear
of the insect apocalypse blossoming
all around you like the mushroom
cloud, you will incline your head. Fall
still. Let her drink her fill
and float away, a dandelion spore
on the summer air, in the hot flash
of May morning light.
 , 
Catherine W. Carter
from By Stone and Needle, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge LA; © 2025; winner of the L. E. Phillabaum Poetry Award for 2025
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Imagine a straight line. It’s Geometry’s simplest one-dimensional structure. It’s the shortest distance from here to there. It’s a diagram of my life on earth. Maybe my life seems bumpy and ridden with twists but no, it starts at my beginning, forges straight through, and ends at my ending. My timeline. Beyond that it becomes someone else’s line, “me” in their memories.
 , 
It’s no accident that we all use the word timeline. (Instead of timepolygon or timecube?) Time’s line, even though it wields only one dimension, is all the vessel I have to contain my life. In fact, there is one single point on that line that holds the entirety of my awareness. I’ll label that point now. Every part of the line to the left is the extent of what has already been now and is now no more. Label it past. Everything to the right consists of nows yet to come. As I write this, several nows have just slipped by me.
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How many? How many nows have I filled up (wasted?) with staring across the room wondering what to write next? Do next? Think next? Be? I shudder to even attempt an answer to that, because in exactly the same way Geometry tells us that the line is continuous, no gaps, an infinity between each point, time is also a continuum. No missing pieces. No quanta. I could fit an infinity of nows between any two nows I choose.
 , 
That adds up to a helluva lot of timeline spent worrying about my son. An infinity imagining the conversations we could have had that would have set us right, the conversations we could have tomorrow that would correct our course, revising those conversations, projecting out to the right the results of our conversations or absences thereof. Not to mention replaying out to the left the segments of line I’ll label regret.
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Until now. I return home late and my son is waiting up. He tells me he’s come to a turning point. We hug. How many nows does that fill? How many is infinity? Hey Time, just for a moment, please stop now.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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When you know a witch’s true name
 , 
she has to do what you ask. If she tries
to refuse, her name lets you tighten the wire
on marrow-fears she’s spent forever
trying to hide, secret shames which sicken
her so she’d almost rather strangle than share:
the reason she wraps herself in that caul
of hexes, chainsaws, shielding spells.
This makes witches cautious.
Except something in them, in us
all, wants to hear someone say
our names with recognition, no matter
what comes after. Curled round
our glint of treasure, our shimmer
of power, we’re gongs hung
to tremble to our one true name
or one true question, the one we’ve awaited
forever, whose answer is our whole lives,
the one almost no one is interested
enough to ask. It’s why I’d come
if you summoned me up, despite.
If you knew the right question,
I would tell you anything.
 , 
Catherine W. Carter
from By Stone and Needle, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge LA; © 2025; winner of the L. E. Phillabaum Poetry Award for 2025
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❦ ❦ ❦
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I’m just / what comes next when everything touches everything.
 , 
Is By Stone and Needle a book of charms and spells? Are its lines sigils and hexes that, in the hands of the seeker, reveal arcane wisdom? Is it the words of Myth and Magic, Nature and Earth that we have feared to hear and at the same time longed for?
 , 
Catherine Carter’s language is afraid of nothing. It breaks down every door. It wrenches meaning from syllables that never before dared to be said so close together. Earth, though I tremble to admit it, I guess I’ve suspected you may well be tempted to swat us like a mosquito (although I’ve always known you love your beetles). And Love, I do believe you are out there hoping to strike the gong of our true names. I am still traveling the journey of these pages. By stone and needle I trust I will find my way. And at the end find myself.
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❦
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Catherine Carter’s By Stone and Needle is available from LSU PRESS. 
These poems are dense, delicious, scary, enlightening. I will feature two more poems from the collection at next weeks posting (October 17, 2025).
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❦ ❦ ❦
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The concepts of the line as unbroken continuum, the inseparable connection we make between that line and the set of all real numbers it compasses, and our human perception of time as an unbroken line are developed in a small book my wife Linda studied in college fifty years ago and which we discovered cleaning out bookcases this month:
Number – The Language of Science, Tobias Dantzig, Fourth Edition, Revised and Augmented. Doubleday Anchor Edition © 1956.
One cover blurb states, “This is beyond doubt the most interesting book on the evolution of mathematics which has ever fallen into my hands.” Albert Einstein
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2016-10-17a Doughton Park Tree
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Spring. Whatever.

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on May 9, 2025| 2 Comments »

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[with 3 poems by Kathryn Kirkpatrick]
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Turbulence
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Of the stomach lifting. Of the weightless
where I was and am again variety.
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Sway and crack, our craft. Slalom
the wind. So much carbon in the currents.
 . 
Of the climate kind. Of the jerk and twack.
Of the hurtling toward. Shake right out
 . 
of our human. As if we might not
settle back into these bodies,
 . 
but land instead in someone else.
Yet the hare far below isn’t empty
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to receive us. Neither is the horse.
They have their own embodied plans.
 . 
We will have to settle beside ourselves
Blurred boundaries and all. Bump,
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rattle, and creak. Our enlightened selves
grasp cokes, play solitaire, read, sleep,
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going on as if what’s happening isn’t.
With more than prayers
 . 
holding us up, we are nonetheless
tossed in the vastness.
 . 
Kathryn Kirkpatrick
from Creature, Jacar Press, Durham NC; © 2025.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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ah spring spring 
how great is spring! 
and so on 
Bashō (1644-1694)
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Basho has perfectly snared my mood this morning. I am reading Spring haiku at SeasonWords.com: Ah, Winter vanquished!, Ah, new life!, blah, blah, blah. I am not feeling newly lively these days, especially not as the sun so gaily rises. By day I seem to be the rock between two storms, my father and my son, but by 4 AM I have eroded to sand and the bed is far too gritty for sleep. Now this haiku blog offers a prompt for the season and encourages sharing? Here are my Spring lines:
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what to say
when everyone’s “spring, spring” –
toads trilling
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In her book Haiku and Senryu: A Simple Guide for All, Charlotte Digregorio states, Wherever one lives, one experiences changing seasons. The haiku’s brief flash illuminates one specific moment. We read the terse lines and might recognize where we are, but certainly, and more critically, we do know precisely when we are. Perhaps we have never shared the haiku’s circumscribed space, but we do share the time of pollen, the humidity, crisp crackling leaves, the shivers. A moment’s experience broadens into a communal truth.
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In that sense, haiku becomes less an instruction in encountering nature and more an invitation to shared humanity. Besides the experience of changing seasons, the thing we all share is the experience of suffering. A moment’s observation may stand in as a piercing metaphor: Spring’s anticipation, Summer’s lassitude, Autumn’s anxiety, Winter’s dread. And perhaps pricked by that dart of connection upon reading a haiku, we might also share one more thing – joy.
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Just to be fair, I imagine my Spring haiku is not really an indictment of inane people chattering around me. On a dark night after rain, the lonesome trill of an American toad rising from down in the woods is a peace offering. My son and I stood on the deck last night and heard it together. Yes, it was very dark. This morning, light has returned. Again. Oh my. The season rolls on.
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❦
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In 1685, the Japanese astronomer Shibukawa Shunkai adapted the 24 Solar Terms of the Chinese calendar for Japan and created 72 seasons. As we learn at SeasonWords.com, these 72 seasons “offer a poetic journey through the Japanese year in which the land awakens and blooms with life and activity before returning to slumber.” Mark, the site’s curator and naturalist, shares lessons from nature corresponding to the seasons; haiku both ancient and modern that complement the lesson; and craft tips / kigo with a prompt and an invitation. Readers share their haiku and receive commentary.
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Visit https://seasonwords.com/ and subscribe to receive periodic postings in your mailbox!
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The Ridge
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1.
One day I found the outline of a deer
in the snow. She’d slept on the old logging road
above our home, curled against the cold.
 . 
Her imprint on a trail I’d walked for
twenty years was intricate and vulnerable
as I now feel since strangers bought this land.
 . 
their cameras
nailed to the trunks of trees
Christ
 . 
2.
At first I waved. New to the neighborhood,
the seemed shy. Hovering at the side
of the road with their harnessed dogs, they walked
 . 
harnessed too, shoulders hunched, eyes averted.
About their money I didn’t then know, or
Appalachian families letting go of land.
 . 
orange flags
festoon the property lines
orioles in snow
 . 
3.
What we had of commons among
hill people here is gone, our hollow hollowed
out, our waves, our lifted heads, our calls across
 . 
casual borders fretted now by registered
mail. “Not authorized.” “Legal action.” They’ve
no bonds to sunder because they’ve no bonds made.
 . 
camera 1
my shetland sheepdog framed
first day of spring
 . 
4.
Surveyed for surveillance, the ridge. But I
can love what I don’t own. I miss the oaks,
their wide-girthed stillness. I miss the mountain’s
 . 
spine. Across family lands and state lines,
through Cherokee and Appalachian time,
the mountains stay. The mountains stay. They stay.
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a taloned sun sets
the red-tailed hawk
needs no human hand
 . 
Kathryn Kirkpatrick
from Creature, Jacar Press, Durham NC; © 2025.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Creatures – so we are. We seek what all creatures seek, but especially we seek the closeness of other creatures. Kathryn Kirkpatrick is visited by crows and grieves for house wrens dying and for cows separated from their calves. She reveals her creature’s struggle and confusion as she loses her mother. She is not afraid to say that she hesitates to speak of death because every creature must face death but fears to do so. She reveals moments and connections and we readers look about us to discover her light is casting our own shadow. And in the closing section of Creature, Kathryn Kirkpatrick has written the finest collection of dog poems I’ve read in twenty years.
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Creature by Kathryn Kirkpatrick at Jacar Press: HERE.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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On Finding Monarch Caterpillars in September
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And whatever love a parent
feels stealing bread for a starving
child, I have it as I dig by
the flimsy light of my bargain
headlamp, having driven miles for the last
of the chain-store milkweed, which will
feed these ravenous young in their striped
skins, who are no metaphor, who stand for
themselves only, though in my ecological
worry, my long-range fright, I am surely
standing for something as I shovel in the dark.
 . 
Kathryn Kirkpatrick
from Creature, Jacar Press, Durham NC; © 2025.
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In their multi-generational migration pattern, the endangered monarch butterfly bears its fourth generation in September and October. Rather than dying after two to six weeks as the earlier generations do, this generation migrates to warmer climates like California and Mexico, living six to eight months before starting the process again. – K.K.
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Ridges and Ruins – Poems for the Earth

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 29, 2025| 5 Comments »

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[poems selected by and written by the students
of West Carteret High School, Morehead City, North Carolina, USA]
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Earlier this month I asked Jessi Waugh, teacher/scientist/poet and instructor in Earth and Environmental Science, if she would like to have her high school students contribute Poems for the Earth. Jessi replied Yes! and then this:
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Several days before the poem-writing lesson, I gave my students the assignment to post an EcoPoem to a class discussion. They could post any poem or song lyrics related to nature. In this discussion format, students are able to see each other’s posts and like or comment. Few interacted, but they did see each other’s poems as I scrolled through the class submissions.
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This assignment saw some of the expected favorites: Robert Frost, Shel Silverstein, Dr. Seuss. It also saw poems obviously chosen by a Google Search for “ecopoem example,” as I knew it would. But I got unexpected and delightful responses as well, such as:
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Stick your leaves back on
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My mother planted you the day I was born.
I grew with you.
I remember trying to stick your leaves back on in autumn;
I was scared of you changing.
Yet as time passed, my attempts stood no chance.
The cruel seasons ripped apart your branches.
The cruel season ripped me apart, too.
You looked so unrecognizable by the time winter ended,
I didn’t even wanna be near you.
My mother made me blow out a candle for you every year.
She hasn’t lit one in 1…2…3… I lost count.
I grew without you.
You stood tall, but I only kept changing.
I was scared of changing.
I’m 16 now.
A storm ripped you from the earth.
I’m trying to stick your leaves back on.
I wish you could do the same to me.
 . 
Emily M
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❦
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The Rose that Grew from Concrete
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Did you hear about the rose that grew
from a crack in the concrete?
Proving nature’s law is wrong it
learned to walk without having feet.
Funny it seems, but by keeping its dreams,
it learned to breathe fresh air.
Long live the rose that grew from concrete
when no one else ever cared.
 . 
Tupac Shakur
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Before they wrote a poem, Jessi gave her students this assignment: “Analyze the connections between the biosphere and other Earth systems (geosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere).” She took them to the back soccer field at their school, which is surrounded on three sides by forest and powerline land. She had cut 2′ x 2′ pieces of an old tarp for them to sit on, and once they were outdoors she handed them a clipboard along with the assignment log sheet and told them to sit facing the forest and far enough apart so they couldn’t distract each other.
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When we first got out there, many students sat in the middle of the field or facing away from the forest, and I came around to encourage them to sit near the wild areas and turn towards them. Most did. Others were not comfortable and chose to stand or remain near the middle of the field, especially girls wary of jumping spiders.
 . 
Students documented the abiotic and biotic factors in the ecosystem, reinforcing those terms, and created a food web with the 10 organisms they observed. These were concepts from class (trophic level, energy flow, limiting factors) put into practice. They then answered a series of questions about interactions between ecosystem components and biodiversity, and then crafted their poems, all while outside.
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Before taking them outside that day, I read the students one of my own poems, Dunation, but didn’t tell them it was mine. I told them to listen for the repetition of sounds and them suggested they repeat sounds in their poems as an easy literary device.
 . 
It was a beautiful day, perfect for sitting in the back field for an hour. We saw at least 20 species between all the different insects, herbaceous perennials, trees, and birds. Likely closer to 50. In general, students were quiet and reflective and did a great job of observing the ecosystem.  – Jessi Waugh
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❦ ❦ ❦
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selected student poems . . .
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The Great Outdoors
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When I step outside to the great outdoors
I see nothing but change, out of our culture nothing
stays the same
not the trees, not the grass, not the very ground you stand on
everything around us is just waiting on its moment
 . 
When I step outside to the great outdoors
I notice change is inevitable but nothing to fear
everything changes even just saying
“the last time I was here”
or the time and age you got, like the sound
of the creek, of the animals above, or even the things
that all of us take for granted like a mother’s love
 . 
Everything changes
please don’t be afraid
be glad you have what you have
and enjoy the change
 . 
Kevin Hunter, Student at West Carteret High School
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❦
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In the Back Soccer Field 
 . 
With all these limiting beige walls I’m stuck with
for over 5 hours a day, it feels
refreshing to see the leaves, feel the breeze
crunch the brittle soil like the wandering ant
I make my pilgrimage
toward NATURE
 . 
My eyes are stimulated by something that isn’t
a screen but the echoes of human
development still make their unpleasant sounds
nature is something that can’t be replicated
truly by plastic or plaster models or
the dull green of money, as nature is
VIBRANT and cannot be comprehended by man
no matter what
 . 
Kyndall Griffin, Student at West Carteret High School
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❦
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Life Cycle
 . 
Green
Life abounds
Sunlight kisses leaves
Insects buzz, a symphony of life
Grass
 . 
Tiny world
Hidden, teeming
spiders spin, frogs leap
nature’s dance, a vibrant scene
Balance
 . 
Stillness
Whispers softly
Decomposers working
Life to death, death into life
Cycle
 . 
Jazireyah Johnson, Student at West Carteret High School
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
and another favorite selected by Jessi’s students . . .
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rises the moon
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Days seem sometimes as if they’ll never end
Sun digs its heels to taunt you
But after sunlit days, one thing stays the same
Rises the moon
 . 
Days fade into a watercolour blur
Memories swim and haunt you
But look into the lake, shimmering like smoke
Rises the moon
 . 
Oh-oh, close your weary eyes
I promise you that soon the autumn comes
To darken fading summer skies
 . 
Breathe, breathe, breathe
Days pull you down just like a sinking ship
Floating is getting harder
But tread the water, child, and know that meanwhile
Rises the moon
 . 
Days pull you up just like a daffodil
Uprooted from its garden
They’ll tell you what you owe, but know even so
Rises the moon
 . 
You’ll be visited by sleep
I promise you that soon the autumn comes
To steal away each dream you keep
Breathe, breathe, breathe
 . 
lyrics and music by Liana Flores
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Dunation
 . 
The sorrows they pile heart-high
head-high, sky-high like peaks
of primary dunes against winter-white
an accumulation of minutia
a hummock too precipitous to persist
Spring’s avalanche comes
grains slip-slide down dune slipfaces
so suddenly, the sound akin to arctic ice breaking
tern eggs crackling, oak limbs fracturing
in furious full-February gales
Hearts, heads, skies on fire
here comes March’s awakening
dunes crash-topple into manageable talus
Here we come
tip-toeing across the tops
paper children tumbling
over ridges and ruins
 . 
Jessi Waugh, Earth and Environmental Science Teacher, West Carteret High School
 . 
The main reaction from students to this project was appreciation for the time sitting outdoors, and they enjoy the social aspect of posting “favorite’ ecopoems on our class discussions. As much as I’d like to turn it into a week of poetry discussions, that would be terribly off-topic for my science class, and I used it primarily as a way to reflect on the connections between earth’s “spheres” (atmo, hydro, litho, geo) and how they interact in ecosystems. In general, I notice that students are disillusioned with politics and technology. They, like all students I’ve taught, enjoy hands-on experience and labs. I think poetry and teens could mix well in many places. – Jessi Waugh
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❦ ❦ ❦
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West Carteret High School is in Morehead City, North Carolina, in the southeastern USA. It is a public 9-12th grade high school, with about 1100 students. Approximately 40% of students are economically disadvantaged. Jessi Waugh teaches Earth and Environmental Science, since 2000 a required course for graduation. She also teaches Biology and Marine Science as needed, and has been a teacher for 12 years. Her students are all 9th & 10th grade, ages 14-16. The poems submitted are from both the honors and standard classes. She holds a Master’s in Teaching Secondary Science and an undergraduate Biology degree. I like teaching this course and age group; it’s my niche.
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IMG_0345
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