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Posts Tagged ‘Ecopoetry’

Chunky Hummer

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , , on October 11, 2024| 7 Comments »

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[with 3 poems by Rae Spencer]
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Innate
 . 
what does a hummingbird know
in its world of nectar and need
 . 
nightly forced to torpor
by the constant urge to feed
through staggering migration
 . 
are its dreams equally desperate?
 . 
does it wake hungry
ill-tempered with beauty
cramped with desire
 . 
suddenly alert to the nature of sugar
aware that satisfaction can only ever be
 . 
illusory
 . 
and what does the hummingbird sense
as it sips the flower’s allure
 . 
does it know of delicate meanings
pitched fever-tight
into its tiny world of furtive speed
 . 
dare I surmise anything?
 . 
maybe nectar is only a meal
sugar an ache that will pass
beauty an accident of form
 . 
and nothing means more than a wing
clasped into the air and released
 . 
effortless
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Rae Spencer
from Alchemy, Kelsay Books, American Fork, UT; © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Hovering to sip sugar water, flicking your tongue into the red plastic flower, then dive bombed by a lance-tipped green blur – this is daily life for a hummingbird in the Eastern US. We only have the one species here, ruby-throated, and they do not play well with others. When it comes to a choice feeder there is no sharing, unlike the scene in the Western US where a cloud of a dozen birds, four or five different species, will jointly keep a feeder sincerely humming.
 . 
These last two weeks of September we have been visited hourly by the chunkiest hummingbird I have ever seen. The sleeker slimmer birds will chase her away but then she’s right back. (She-birds only; all the males have left for Central America by the end of August and these more svelte visitors and chasers have likely already burned fat as they’re migrating through from farther north). I realize hummingbirds have to bulk up each autumn, entering a period of hyperphagia before migration similar to black bears before hibernation, but this bird is a real hunk. She is going to have no problem making the 800 km flight from Florida to Yucatan, a natural miracle for such a tiny creature who, even at twice her normal body weight, still weighs only 6 grams – about the weight of a postcard, or of the well-sharpened pencil you’ll use to write a note to Guatemala to let them know to expect this ruby-throat in a couple of weeks.
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❦
Audubon NC suggests continuing to fill hummingbird feeders until the second week in October. Abundant sugar will not deter the birds from setting out on their southward journey; their migration is triggered by light, or actually its absence, the diminishing length of day. All creatures live by their own internal clock. For some the clock’s ticks are soil temperature, snowmelt, the movement of water through earth; for others alarms are set by earth’s rotation and the stretch of sunlight and shadow.
 . 
And no creature lives in isolation. What if come clocks tick out of rhythm with the others? In the Western US, when broad-tailed hummingbirds arrive from their wintering grounds they depend on spring-blooming glacier lilies for nectar to replenish their exhausted energy. By 2012, however, biologists noted that the lilies were beginning to open seventeen days earlier than they had several decades prior. Some would already be withered before the hummingbirds even arrived. By 2050 the birds may completely miss the span of lily bloom.
 . 
Phenological mismatch is the term for this consequence of global climate change. What if migrating flycatchers miss their fly hatch? What if flowers bloom to no pollinators? Some species seem to benefit from early spring – marmots have a longer season to chow down and birth more marmettes. Some species can adapt to new timings but many can’t, especially as climate clocks accelerate their vagaries and variations. We can’t yet know all the consequences, but we know our children and grandchildren are experiencing a different world from the world in which we grew up.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Belyaev’s Foxes
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When most only wanted their fur
Belyaev wanted their genes
 . 
He selected those he could touch
The ones who ate from his hand
 . 
Exerting curious pressure
On his wild silver stock
 . 
Closed in outdoor cages
To bear Belyaev’s chosen litters
 . 
Where is the gene for submission
For loyalty and bonding?
 . 
Somewhere, it seems
Connected to curly tails
 . 
White stars on the face
Flopped ears and blunt snouts
 . 
Wags and whines and barks
Which compete for favors
 . 
Other than food
So Belyaev’s foxes tamed the men
 . 
With prolonged puppyhood
And after thirty generations
 . 
Heeled happily across their yard
In through the open front door
 . 
Rae Spencer
from Alchemy, Kelsay Books, American Fork, UT; © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Embryology, cosmology, evolution . . . double helices, insect wings, quarks . . . mystery, contemplation, enlightenment: the poems of Alchemy wend their way through an expanding universe of discovery. There is scarcely a field of science or philosophy that Rae Spencer does not embrace in this collection, using language both precise and technical as well as elevated and elevating. This slim coverlet of atmosphere that supports us, this beneficent congregation of creatures within such mild extremes of warmth and moisture and light, how can one walking through such a place not be inspired?
 . 
And once inspired, what enters us to feed our hearts, what strikes a tonal chord within our minds What shall we believe in? What shall we hope for? Nothing is beneath our noticing; nothing is unworthy of praise. Perhaps the best way to receive Rae Spencer’s expansive embrace embodied in her universalistic collection is as, in the poet’s own words, a patchwork philosophy of wonder (Agnost).
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❦
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Rae Spencer is a veterinarian and lives in Virginia, USA. Alchemy is available at Kelsay Books.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Means of Dispersal
When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.
++++++++++++++++++ – Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species
 . 
He spent pages contemplating seeds
How some survived in seawater
Others in the crops of owls
In the feces of locusts
In the stomachs of fish
Frozen in icebergs
Dried in a clump of mud
Between the toes of a partridge
 . 
“In the course of two months,
I picked up in my garden 12 kinds of seeds,
out of the excrement of small birds, and these
seemed perfect…”
 . 
How long in the garden?
Hovering over phials of curiosity
Some rank with the rot of failure
Others yielding green secrets
To the man who struggled to ask
Is there another explanation?
And in the end answered himself
With seed, with barnacles and pigeons
 . 
“…from so simple a beginning
endless forms most beautiful and most
wonderful have been, and are being,
evolved.”
 . 
So Darwin concluded
Without the benefit of Mendel’s peas
Or Watson, Crick, and Franklin’s helices
Without diffusion gels
Sequencers and microchips
Argument is as simple as a garden
Heavy and sweet with fruit
Ripe with answers
 . 
Rae Spencer
from Alchemy, Kelsay Books, American Fork, UT; © 2024
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Speak Tree

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on September 20, 2024| 9 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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❦ ❦ ❦
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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
 . 
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,
 . 
taking all the time in the world, even though
the sun is low and red in the west, and they
 . 
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.
 . 
Is this a Nature poem? A Human Nature poem? A Death poem?
 . 
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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❦ ❦ ❦
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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
 . 
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
 . 
gave up hanging in, dragged themself out & fell
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ up.
We woods, anyways: our down-
++++ ++++ leaf & needlefall,
seedhoard, twiggery, sprig windfall,
 . 
they good, the earth approve,
 . 
let us rootway through dirt & stone.
 . 
Maura High
from the forthcoming manuscript Field as Auditorium
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❦ ❦ ❦
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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?
 . 
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.
 . 
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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❦ ❦ ❦
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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.
 . 
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
 . 
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.
 . 
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.
 . 
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
 . 
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.
 . 
Adrian Rice
from The Chances of Harm, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
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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.
 . 
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.
 . 
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?
 . 
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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❦ ❦ ❦
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30 Doagh Road
 . 
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,
 . 
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
 . 
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
 . 
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,
 . 
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.
 . 
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.
 . 
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.
 . 
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.
 . 
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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❦
 . 
Visit PRESS 53 for books by Adrian Rice including his latest, The Chances of Harm
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 . 
This Letting Go
 . 
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
 . 
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.
 . 
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?
 . 
Adrian Rice
from The Chances of Harm, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
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IMG_0768, tree
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