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Posts Tagged ‘Gary Snyder’

Poetry and Earth – Prayer

Posted in Ecopoetry, tagged , , , , , on April 15, 2026| Leave a Comment »

 . 
[ poems by Gary Snyder, Diana Dinverno, Terry Bornhorst Blackhawk, 
Gina M. Streaty, Elizabeth H. Lara, Fred Chappell ]
 . 
Prayer For The Great Family
 . 
Gratitude to Mother Earth, sailing through night and day—
  and to her soil: rich, rare, and sweet
      in our minds so be it
 . 
Gratitude to Plants, the sun-facing light-changing leaf
  and fine root-hairs; standing still through wind
  and rain; their dance is in the flowing spiral grain
      in our minds so be it
 . 
Gratitude to Air, bearing the soaring Swift and the silent
  Owl at dawn. Breath of our song
  clear spirit breeze
      in our minds so be it
 . 
Gratitude to Wild Beings, our brothers, teaching secrets,
  freedoms, and ways, who share with us their milk;
  self-complete, brave, and aware
      in our minds so be it
 . 
Gratitude to Water: clouds, lakes, rivers, glaciers;
  holding or releasing; streaming through all
  our bodies salty seas
      in our minds so be it
 . 
Gratitude to the Sun: blinding pulsing light through
  trunks of trees, through mists, warming caves where
  bears and snakes sleep—he who wakes us—
      in our minds so be it
 . 
Gratitude to the Great Sky
  who holds billions of stars—and goes yet beyond that—
  beyond all powers, and thoughts
  and yet is within us—
  Grandfather Space.
  The Mind is his Wife.
 . 
      so be it.
 . 
Gary Snyder (after a Mohawk prayer)
from EARTH PRAYERS, edited by Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon
selected by Bill Griffin
 . 
✾
 . 
I am excited to see so many wood anemone blooming this April. A galaxy where I noticed only a few lonely stars last year. Joyful in the discovery, excited to share – let those feelings speak their name, Gratitude. And let gratitude grow into the love that inspires to me to hold all living things safe and sacred, this great family of life with which I share our planet.
— Bill
 . 
 . 
❀ ✿ ✾ ❁ ❀
 . 
We Visit the Tomales Point Trailhead 
as Congress Continues to Threaten the Sale of Federal Land 
 . 
My daughters and I park beneath a canopy of old trees,
a windbreak when this land was a working dairy ranch.
Beyond the once-whitewashed barn, bunkhouses,
and sheds, the trail leads us onto sand
winding through lemon-hued lupines
so tall they sway above our heads.
 . 
We ooh and aah at the vast exuberance—
California poppies, thistles with lush purple fringe,
and, after a gentle climb, we look west,
 catch sight
of the Pacific’s immense blue, its rippled light,
a spectacular cinematic sky. To the east,
gold and green meadows rise.
 . 
We walk across the peninsula’s clavicle,
its tender ridge dips into hollows,
monarchs flutter, tend to blooms.
 . 
I follow the lift of my girl’s arm
pointing to the summer-saturated hills.
Grazing tule elk, once thought extinct,
somehow still here, keep their distance,
raise their massive heads.
 . 
A Cooper’s Hawk circles the grassland.
Far below, birds we can’t identify glide
in formation just beyond the ocean’s reach.
Trills and whistles fill the scented air—
faintly honeysuckle, intoxicating, wild.
 . 
My younger daughter notices tiny orange petals—
scarlet pimpernel clings to the path’s edge, firmly rooted,
part of the shoreline’s crown.
 . 
As the land bends, we pause
high above a cove, a stretch of surf-ruffled beach
dotted with rock—scan for sea-lions, listen
for their barks before we move on—
the bluff too fragile to descend.
 . 
Diana Dinverno
 . 

[photo by Diana Dinverno]

 . 
✿
 . 
In the Spring of 2025, my daughters and I visited the Point Reyes National Shoreline and walked the Tomales Point Trail, owned and managed on our behalf by the U.S. government. It is one of the most wondrous and beauty-filled places I’ve seen. Leading up to the visit, we’d heard reports of proposals in the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” to sell 2-3 million acres of public lands—and authorize the sale of many more. It was heartbreaking to think this public place, available to anyone to explore, could be sold to the highest private bidder for its stunning ocean views. Due to immense public opposition, the provisions were removed from the bill, but in the face of continued pressure by some members of Congress and our current Administration’s quiet dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service, our National Parks, with their still-wild places, remain at risk. 
 . 
Although I’ve spent most of my life in the Midwest, I currently live in Texas, trying to learn the names of trees, flowers, and birds. 
— Diana
 . 
❀ ✿ ✾ ❁ ❀
 . 
Calling the Owl
Audubon Christmas Bird Count, 
Oakland County, MI, 1995
 . 
This time the owl eludes us
where we stand, trying to call him in
with his own voice
 . 
which we’ve captured on tape
to release to the predawn woods.
Press a button. The air flutters,
rushing from our black box
 . 
what is hidden from us—
 . 
wing-like quaverings—
 . 
soft bursts of song.
If light mutes him, shadows offer hope,
and we listen so intently into them
the snowy meadow
suddenly seems wider, brighter
with news from beyond its perimeter.
Don’t lift, I almost pray,
 . 
don’t disappear.
Day will break soon enough.
Let us hear your faint vibrato and absorb
what is invisible, wild and nearly gone.
Mist thickens the silence, promises
patience, echo, sound not sight.
I will let that fluty tremolo find,
fill me, give voice
to emptiness. I hold my breath to sustain
the long vowel of night.
 . 
Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk
first appeared in Yankee (Jean Burden, editor); collected in body & field (Michigan State U. Press, 1999) and the chapbook of bird poems,  The Whisk & Whir of Wings (Ridegway Press, 2015). Margaret Gibson included it in Waking Up to the Earth: Connecticut Poets in a Time of Global Climate Crisis (Grayson Books, 2021), an anthology she produced as CT Poet Laureate.
 . 
✿
 . 
This is one of my earlier poems, written from my love of birds and birding — a love that Jan Booth introduced to me early in our friendship which goes back over 55 years (!) to our days as first-year teachers in Detroit.
— Terry
 . 
❀ ✿ ✾ ❁ ❀
 . 
M. Wright Fishing at Lake Jordan
(3/27/05)
 . 
I sit, wait,
watch him
cast his long line—
orange cork breaks water,
shatters oak trees. Mirror images
shift, shimmy, merge in symmetrical circles
in water, murky gray
like the slate-blue sky that slumps to meet it.
 . 
A red-tailed hawk sprawls on evening air,
hovers overhead, its wings slice
fast-approaching night.
A crappie, jerked to the surface,
fights against the line,
treads gelatinous green moss
with its silver head
before breaking free
I pray like Jonah.
Pray for two fish to feed the multitude.
 . 
To the evensong of crickets,
twilight weeps a misty rain
for me embraced by cold
as the man in gray dungarees
becomes his own shadow,
a tree like willow oaks coddling him,
head lowered, shoulders
descending with darkness.
 . 
As the pale green bucket
rings out emptiness,
minnows are turned loose.
A spring moon clings to sky,
reels me into myself…
 . 
Gina M. Streaty
 . 
✾
 . 
I drafted this poem several years ago during a fishing outing with a friend. He tried to catch fish; I sat at a picnic table penning poems for hours. Nature always quickens my spirit. I am more connected to the natural world than I am people. Truth. Nature with its vibrant colors, textures, scents, sounds/music, secrets, mysteries, motion, moods, and magic is spectacular. It captivates me. My bucket list lengthens with each new nature screensaver on my computer. We are blessed to have earth’s infinite exquisiteness and the innumerable ways nature inspires, consoles, protects, heals, sustains, and forgives us. How can God not be the creator? Earth is our Eden, a spectacular, invaluable gift to us. We certainly don’t deserve it, but earth deserves our protection, our love, and bare minimum, our respect.
 . 
My poet friend Lenard D. Moore told me about your call for Earth Day themed poems. He and I share an intense love for the natural world and poetry.
— Gina
 . 
 , 
❀ ✿ ✾ ❁ ❀
 . 
Part-Way Down the Mountain Path
 . 
Late morning, the air clings
despite the sheltering trees.
High-stepping over weeds
and scattered gravel, we come to
a hollow rotting log, so long fallen
the soil has packed itself
against one side, a sort of ledge,
and there, a hen with three chicks.
Mama hen hops onto the ledge,
pirouettes slowly on scaly yellow
legs to watch her chicks scramble
and bumble and hop and
slide back and get up again.
She clucks and struts, goes
back around to the low side
of the log, hops over once more,
waits while her chicks
try out the game. We watch
for a long time – over and over
she jumps / waits / circles back –
until chickafterchickafterchick
they follow her over that log.
 . 
Elizabeth H. Lara
Silver Springs, Maryland
 . 
✿
 . 
I wrote this very plain and simple poem while at our farm in the mountains of San Cristobal, Dominican Republic.
— Liz
 . 
❀ ✿ ✾ ❁ ❀
 . 
A Prayer for the Mountains
 . 
Let these peaks have happened
 . 
The hawk-haunted knobs and hollers,
The blind coves dense as meditation,
The white rock-face, the laurel hells,
The terraced pasture ridge
With its broom sedge combed back by wind:
Let these have taken place, let them be place.
 . 
And where Harmon Fork piles unrushing
Against its tabled stones, let the gray trout
Idle below, its dim plectrum a shadow
That marks the stone’s clear shadow.
 . 
In the slow glade where sunlight comes through
In circlets and moves from leaf to fallen leaf
Like a tribe of shining bees,
Let the milk-flecked fawn lie unseen, unseing.
 . 
Let me lie there too
And share the sleep
Of the cool ground’s mildest children.
 . 
Fred Chappell
from Spring Garden, © 1995 by Fred Chappell, Lousiana State University Press.
selected by Bill Griffin
 . 
 . 
❀ ✿ ✾ ❁ ❀
 . 
The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.
– Rachel Carson (1907-1964)
 . 
Thank you for celebrating the month of April with International Earth Day (April 22) and National Poetry Month. Readers have selected poems that connect us to our planet and each other. If you have a poem that has rooted you to the earth and spread your branches into bright sky, please share! It can be a poem by your favorite writer, living or dead, a poem of your own, or both. We will continue sharing Earth poems as long as you send them.
 . 
Send a your poem(s) in the body of the email or as .DOC or .RTF to:
ecopoetry@griffinpoetry.com 
 . 
Please include your comments or reaction to the poem. And publication acknowledgments if previously published.
 . 
Feel free to invite others to send their favorite Earth Day poems. Please refer them to this link for instructions: EARTH DAY EVERY DAY. Perhaps some day we will be able to say we live in the Age of Connection.
 . 
❁
 . 
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 . 
If you have a hard time finding the SUBSCRIBE button on this WordPress site, you can send me your email address and I will add you to the subscriber list. Send your request to
 . 
COMMENTS@GRIFFINPOETRY.COM
 . 
Thanks again for joining the conversation.
 . 
— Bill
 . 
❀ ✿ ✾ ❁ ❀
 . 
2020-09-08b 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
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
IMG_0768, tree
 . 

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Earth Day — April 22, 2021

Posted in Art, Imagery, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 22, 2021| 5 Comments »

[poems by Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, Rose Fyleman, David Radavich]

an offering from Craig Kittner . . .

Piute Creek
– Gary Snyder –

One granite ridge
A tree, would be enough
Or even a rock, a small creek,
A bark shred in a pool.
Hill beyond hill, folded and twisted
Tough trees crammed
In thin stone fractures
A huge moon on it all, is too much.
The mind wanders. A million
Summers, night air still and the rocks
Warm. Sky over endless mountains.
All the junk that goes with being human
Drops away, hard rock wavers
Even the heavy present seems to fail
This bubble of a heart.
Words and books
Like a small creek off a high ledge
Gone in the dry air.

A clear, attentive mind
Has no meaning but that
Which sees is truly seen.
No one loves rock, yet we are here.
Night chills. A flick
In the moonlight
Slips into Juniper shadow:
Back there unseen
Cold proud eyes
Of Cougar or Coyote
Watch me rise and go.

“Piute Creek” by Gary Snyder from Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems. Copyright © 2009 by Gary Snyder

.     .     .     .     .     .     .

an offering from Alana Dagenhart . . .

The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, 1836

Poet, will you put the parts back together? The seed, the roots, the petals that have been thrashed and trampled? The bits that once meshed and fit now distracted and ignored? The air we can’t taste, the sunlight we can’t breathe, the stone beneath our feet, the water in our hair? Who will put us back together and put us into the places where we belong, all together?

Several friends have offered poems that speak to them about our Earth and which offer to gather us all in together to celebrate Earth Day! I’m posting their offerings April 21, 22, and 23. What do you see? What do you hear? What do you notice? What do you feel?

.     .     .     .     .     .     .

an offering from both Lynda Rush-Myers and Kitsey Burns Harrison . . .

The Peace of Wild Things
– Wendell Berry –

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

“The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry, from Collected Poems (North Point Press), © 1985

.     .     .     .     .     .     .

an offering from Kitsey Burns Harrison . . .

Mice
– Rose Fyleman –

I think mice
are rather nice;
Their tails are long,
their faces small;
They haven’t any
chins at all.
Their ears are pink,
their teeth are white,
They run about
the house at night;
They nibble things
they shouldn’t touch,
and, no one seems
to like them much,
but, I think mice
are rather nice.

“Mice” by Rose Fyleman (1887-1957)

.     .     .     .     .     .     .

 

Roundleaf Yellow Violet; Viola rotundifolia; Mountains-to-Sea Trail above Brinegar Cabin

an offering from David Radavich, his poem . . .

Enough

Rare is better:
The price soars
when you lack
what you need.

A poem carries
everything
in your pocket
like a mind.

Love can be
stored in a cell
whose DNA
heartens life.

Music is soul
saving, the simplest
math and finding
one solution.

O earth that is
rare and good,
sing to the unclean
with your seas.

“Enough” by David Radavich, originally appeared in Iodine Poetry Journal

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[original artwork by Linda French Griffin (c) 2021]

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