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Posts Tagged ‘Ecopoetry’

Speak Tree

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on September 20, 2024| 7 Comments »

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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
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[with poems by Ted Kooser, Maura High, Mary Oliver]
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Turkey Vultures
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Circling above us, their wing-tips fanned
like fingers, it is as if they are smoothing
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one of those tissue-paper sewing patterns
over the thin blue fabric of the air,
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touching the heavens with leisurely pleasure,
just a word or two called back and forth,
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taking all the time in the world, even though
the sun is low and red in the west, and they
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have fallen behind with the making of shrouds.
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Ted Kooser
from Delights and Shadows, Copper Canyon Press; © 2004
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❦ ❦ ❦
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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.
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Is this a Nature poem? A Human Nature poem? A Death poem?
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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.
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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
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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?
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We Woods
+++Dry-mesic oak-hickory forest on a ridge along the north bank
+++of Bolin Creek, central Orange County, North Carolina
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Yes be a color—nos & maybes,
++++ like drab.
Shrug, like slough-off,
peel, mould & mildew,
winterkill,
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sometimes we surprise ourself
++++ & sprout.
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Tell ourself, this stem this leaf, vine,
++++ oak, spindle, sucker, upstart hickory—
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spring! we lagging over the redbud
(pink the redbud
++++ & green leaf-leaf
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dogwood), &
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troublemaker
honeysuckle: they pull-us-down vines
++++ pale, rampant.
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++++ Yes, we someplaces sick, crack, split,
stump & burl, rootballs what
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gave up hanging in, dragged themself out & fell
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ up.
We woods, anyways: our down-
++++ ++++ leaf & needlefall,
seedhoard, twiggery, sprig windfall,
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they good, the earth approve,
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let us rootway through dirt & stone.
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Maura High
from the forthcoming manuscript Field as Auditorium
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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]
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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?
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May poetry lift voices that have the power bring us all together as one.
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Sleeping in the Forest
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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.
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Mary Oliver
collected in Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver, Penguin Press; © 2017 by NW Orchard LLC
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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
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If you would like to explore this subject further, try The ECOPOETRY Anthology
Ann Fisher-Wirth, Laura-Gray Street, editors; Trinity University Press, Austin TX; © 2013, 2020
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Doughton Park Tree 2020-09-08b

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Noticing

Posted in Ecopoetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , on September 13, 2024| 2 Comments »

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[with 3 poems by Adrian Rice]
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Yard Work
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The neighbour and I.
We joke across the avenue aisle
about the onset of porch time.
While praising the advent
of all that it means, we
comradely lament the yard work
that has to be tholed.
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As if we are somehow
equals in the seasonable labour.
As if I could shake a spade
at her miraculous endeavours,
her skilled green-fingered-ness,
her laudable efforts to keep
her garden, and shrubbery, pristine.
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It’s almost is if we are fellow poets,
fast farmers of verses.
As if one of us isn’t slacking
in what it takes to carry
the living thing forward,
not lacking in showing
the proper respect
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for the copious rose,
the sculpted shrub,
the blade of grass,
the whole blooming lot.
As if one of us isn’t lazily inattentive,
undeserving of the true line
that is the all of spring.
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Adrian Rice
from The Chances of Harm, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2024
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Every walk is preparation for the next. The past few weeks I’ve been preparing to share naturalist skills with poets on a walk through the woods. Poets! I’ve led fourth graders and trail maintainers and garden clubbers, but this is daunting. The organizer sent out a notice referring to the afternoon as an “Ecopoetry Walk.” What is such a thing? Will we be reciting Robinson Jeffers and Jane Mead as we struggle not to trip over tree roots? Perhaps not, but on the other hand I ought to consider holding up the ecopoetry moniker.
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Ecopoetry is not synonymous with Nature Poetry. Perhaps Ecopoetry can be best summed up in three lines by Wendell Berry:
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.
How do you make a place sacred? You don’t. You can’t. Its sacredness already resides within it, this little patch of dirt ribboned with mycelia and protists, springtails and worms busy making their lives and becoming someone else’s lives. Roots down and stems up and a tiny native bee stops by to test the flower for sweetness. Life has already brought sacred into being within this drab, insignificant patch.
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And the stone that slowly disaggregates, the minerals it offers up to become incorporated into cellulose, chitin, bone; the light from a nearby star that filters through; the carbon turned organic, the oxygen exhaled as generous gift – all sacred. All worthy of veneration. Ecopoetry is kneeling in respect, recognizing the holy, bearing witness to the filaments of love that extend and stretch and bind everything together. Love binds us to everything and everything to us.
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Turning away, withholding love, even just simply not noticing, these are desecration. Ecopoetry bears witness also of our sins. Maybe we didn’t know. Maybe we never stopped to think. Maybe we let ourselves become so disconnected that we no longer see beyond our own orbits and really believe that everything revolves around our personal center. How have we come to this place?
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Let’s take a walk. Smells like autumn. Someone beyond this patch of woods is baling hay. A little less humid than last week. Tears of joy or ragweed? It’s too easy to pass beech-drops and pinesap blooming now so close to the earth, so let’s slow down. Red and green, the partridgeberry is already decorating for Christmas. One tuliptree leaf has fallen and flares lemon curling brown. All the usual September changes. There’s nothing really special here. Nothing except for everything.
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30 Doagh Road
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She’s my grandmother, or she may be yours,
sitting in her small living room by a real fire,
sanctifying her evening corner of the fireplace.
In shot is the old black-and-white TV
standing stalk on thin brassy legs,
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as much a part of the family as anyone else.
In her aproned lap she holds her knitting.
She grows colourful garments from a ball of yarn,
her hands kiting above unspooling wool-skeins.
Those busy needles of ancestral love
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are clicking with effortless expertise
while she stages a smile for the camera.
Over the tiled mantelpiece, such as it is,
a family of ducks are forever in flight,
rising toward the moon of a plain white clock
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cheap kind you’d see in local schoolrooms.
The chimney breast is lavishly papered,
dressed up in a floral flourish, unlike
the workaday plainness of the other walls.
On the mantelpiece there’s Scottie dog delph,
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Grandchildren’s gift-knacks, small-framed pics,
another clock, a fancy one, polished and centred,
shaped like the Cavehill overlooking the house.
It tells the time, again, time that she is
religiously the last person to idly ignore.
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O photographic proof of an old-fashioned
faith in the possibility of family!
O stitcher of seconds of unwasted time
into useful coverings to clothe the given clan!
Take these thanks for your example to that boy; this man.
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Adrian Rice
from The Chances of Harm, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Lately I’ve taken to describing myself as a “full time” naturalist. All this really signifies is that I can’t walk across the yard without noticing the bugs and naming the weeds. It also reveals which books and apps occupy most of my attention. No paycheck is involved for the full time naturalist, except that when one pays attention, attention pays one back with interest.
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It is obvious, reading The Chances of Harm by Adrian Rice, that he is a full time poet. No particle of life escapes his pondering gaze. He chides himself as “slacker” in Yard Work but feet-up-on-the-porch time is clearly a fertile spawning ground for poetry. Everything, in fact, becomes poetry when Adrian lays eyes and mind and heart on it. When I first opened this book, I imagined bringing those two words closer together until a blinding arc leaps between “Irish” and “Poet.” But it is not blinding. It is full and bright, the light Adrian brings, and suddenly I am seeing all the things around me in their true colours.
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This world and all it holds, everything is worthy of the poet’s noticing. And I, the reader of poetry, am drawn into the poet’s embrace. Thank you, Adrian, for welcoming me to stroll through your neighbourhood and put my feet up on your porch rail. Thank you for opening the voices of things and places and people so they can share their stories. Next time I pause along my favorite trail to kneel and touch the stem of tiny lobelia peering from the shadows – pubescent? glabrous? – may it and all existence spreading out from it tell me the rest of its story, its poetry.
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❦
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Visit PRESS 53 for books by Adrian Rice including his latest, The Chances of Harm
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This Letting Go
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Why wouldn’t we invest
them with such significance?
This letting go of leaves
from the avenue trees
which feels like the deaths
of so many people,
each struggling to hang on
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until the very last breath;
all of them subject
to each sudden
mood swing
of wind that sends
showers of them
wending to the ground
every time it lifts.
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But we come and go,
they seem to say,
we come and go,
and at least we’re not alone
like so many of you –
just look at us lushing
the dainty driveways
 . 
with our leafy selves!
And if we hadn’t have fallen,
how long, in this world,
in your world,
do you think we could’ve
happily hung on?
How long?
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Adrian Rice
from The Chances of Harm, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2024
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IMG_0768, tree
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Unseen Life

Posted in Ecopoetry, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 6, 2024| 14 Comments »

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[with 3 poems by Catherine Carter]
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Good morning, unseen
John-John was back from college and told Moses that 99 percent of
the matter in the universe is invisible to the human eye. Ever since,
Moses made sure to greet what he could not see.
        –“A Good Story,” Sherman Alexie,
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
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Good morning, bacteria
breeding in my coiled gut,
your endless collective of many
the true core of my one. Good
morning, yeasts fermenting
diligently away at all my crevices
and folds, and magnetic field
of gravity which grounds me so close
to this home planet, your pull connecting
the water in this flesh with the drag
of the moon beneath these feet.
Good morning, hairs of fungi
connecting tree to tree and all
earth to all other earth. Good morning,
trails of mouse urine
through the multifarious paths
of grass, which to the vision
of the hovering sparrow hawk glow
ultraviolet, forming arrows
which point the way to the door
of the soft grass-lined burrow.
Good morning, possum crushed
by the roadside, visible but
from which most eyes flick away,
your unseen atoms already
disaggregating to take on fresh
lives as fly larva, carrion beetle, silver
flash beneath the flight pinion
fo the black buzzard, the death-
devourer. Good morning, unmet eyes
of Maria, whose home is this
intersection’s northeast corner;
good morning, ongoing anguish
of the lumbar vertebra fractured
in the stockroom job where she
broke and was fired for breaking;
good morning, urgent grip
of the bowels she must walk
a mile to relieve from this corner
where she stands with her sign
hoping for change that won’t come.
And good morning, unrecorded
conference called in a corner suite,
which even now is about to close
the shelter where tonight she hopes to sleep.
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Catherine Carter
from Good Morning, Unseen, Jacar Press, Durham NC; © 2023
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Not secret. Not hidden. Neither cloaked nor covert, simply not seen. These are the glimpses of my mother’s life I am getting since she died. No tremors from within locked strongboxes, no heart attacks delivered by anonymous post – simply the small bright fragments of her unseen life. The bits not dependent on her being Mom to me.
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I’m paying more attention to the glimpses because I don’t have Mom beside me on the couch any more, although she was never one to draw attention to herself anyway. Here they come, all these versions of my mother through the years, fragmentary visions arriving in photos I’ve glanced at in the past but never really examined. Here she is on her bike, smiling, maybe ten years old; here’s that very same smile again at another age, at every age. What confidence, what honesty! So open. A real person smiling at me.
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Today I’ve found her college annuals – do universities still publish such things? Do people still save them for 75 years? Here’s Mom with the other officers of her Freshman class, 1946, and she the President. I never knew! As a Junior her she is at the centerfold – with a dozen friends – from their listing in Who’s Who in American Universities. The two women beside her remained her friends for life, names even I recall her mentioning. Such a full, rich world Mom inhabited. So many worlds.
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In a few weeks we’ll hold Mom’s memorial service and I’ll no doubt hear even more stories of her unseen life. Already Linda’s youngest sister has told us how she loved Miss Cookie as her Kindergarten teacher. Linda and I were already away at college; the only glimpse I had of Mom’s teaching life was when she brought the gerbils and ducklings home from her classroom for holidays. I wish I’d had the curiosity and imagination to follow her around her world for a few days. But no – she was just our Mom.
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Grief is the empty place beside me on the couch that becomes the empty place inside. I try to fill it with memories, all those moments I’ve known and seen, but they aren’t nearly enough. Where to find more? Show me everything I missed before so I can try harder to open my eyes. Show me every bright fragment. Good morning, Unseen.
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This Stone
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This stone is a particular stone,
mica-flecked lichen-splotched quartz-
veined hunk of granite hunched
by the side of the road where I climb the cove.
It has a history; it has been places.
It knew the molten earth-heart
and the grind of the glacier.
It gouged grooves in the flesh
of this world as gravity dragged it down.
It crushed small plants in its path,
and offered a matrix to lichen,
coolness to soil in the heat of the day,
shelter to mushrooms, midges, mice.
This one particular manifestation
of all that rockness,
created in fire, is still
joining in creation,
participating in being. It has known
billions of mornings; this one
is new. Though it will not answer,
I nod to it as I pass, and, if no one
human is there to hear, I speak:
good morning, you one
rock exactly like no
other. Here we are again,
short life and long one
brushing past each other beside
this road of crushed and broken
stone. Good morning,
spirit of earth, on this one morning
here on earth’s stony flesh.
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Catherine Carter
from Good Morning, Unseen, Jacar Press, Durham NC; © 2023
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Beyond perception as well as beneath notice, these are the unseen in Catherine Carter’s Good Morning, Unseen. The bacteria in our gut upon which our lives and health depend. The homeless woman who might once have thought she could depend on the lives around her. Noticing the ignored and overlooked and essential: Catherine’s piercing images and mind frothing metaphors bring all into stark relief. These poems are revelation.
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How did I miss that? Why am I only now first seeing? Unseen is the dirt that bears me up, unseen is sunlight fusing itself into wood. Glad may be the cat in coyote country but Magic is one man opening the door to one small apartment as refuge. It’s all around us, always has been. The first commandment is “pay attention.” Forgive us for how often we have sinned.
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Catherine Carter’s Good Morning, Unseen is available from Jacar Press.
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The unseen says
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from the magnolia I wave to you through the wind,
my dark leaves quivering in the glitter of winter
sun, though I knew you would not see.
As the dog I rest my chin on our bed,
tell you it’s safe to wake, as you shudder with the fear
and despair you clutch so close.
Under your feet as the dirt I bear you up;
as the air without which you cannot live
two hundred seconds, I lift your rigs again, again,
seven hundred million times, never wearying
until you do. As the sunlight I fuse myself
into wood, bursting forth again in flame;
as the rain I show you safe passage, falling,
seeping, leaping through my selves the clouds and the sea.
As you breathe, as you drink as you stretch cramped hands
to my electric coil, toast me in the bread, you ask
whether I’m even here, or forget to ask.
Refugee on the long road, back bent
with the treasures you lug, the fears you haul:
lay down the weighted silver, your grandparents;
plate and grief, let home evaporate behind you,
unbind the albatross corpse festering your neck.
Set it all down. Be free of it,
and take my hand in yours. With a second hand,
and a third, I pipe for you now:
just for a moment, dance.
 . 
Catherine Carter
from Good Morning, Unseen, Jacar Press, Durham NC; © 2023
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