.
[ poems by Connie Green, Kari Gunter-Seymour,
Jenny Bates, Annie Woodford, Paul Jones]
.
Song at Daybreak
.
Behind the mountains this morning
a soft curtain of pink, dawn dipping
into her palette, my soul the recipient
of her artistry, this small moment
that would not have occurred
had I not wakened early, wandered
sleep-deprived into the kitchen
and turned my face toward the ridges-
.
those ridges that daily wait for me
to look up, to accept, if only
for a minute, the gift they offer
and have offered since the forces
of nature, the work of time pushed
them from plain to towering majesty,
our common stardust knitting mountain,
kitchen, aging woman into song notes that lift
and drift, the finite urging toward the infinite.
.
Connie Jordan Green
selected by Kari Gunter-Seymour. First appeared in Women Speak, Volume Eleven (Sheila Na Gig Editions 2025)
.
This gorgeous Song at Daybreak by Connie Green reminds me that there is so much splendor and joy to be had if we let ourselves be still long enough to truly embrace all that the earth (and sky) has to offer, and that aging too is a gift, because it means we have been given so many more opportunities to stand in awe and wonder of it all. — Kari Gunter-Seymour
.
❀
.
Ten Miles North of Lore City, Guernsey County, Ohio
.
Oh, Salt Fork, I’ve come to hide
inside your autumn, walk
beneath the cathedral of your branches
become a meditative painting,
a Cézanne—your impressions
.
revealed in planes of pigment,
the slow study of light,
pin oak and American beech awash
in swaths of topaz and carnelian,
the lake a reverie of reflections.
.
The universe is out of whack, tremulous
in the pathos of floods, wildfires and drought.
Here, red squirrels wax comedic,
all bark, tuck and tumble, a white-tailed
snorting at their antics.
.
Tangy pockets of mugwort
and mountain mint intoxicate my airways
weak-knee me into giggles.
Chickadees hip-hop branch to thicket,
their black caps adorably gangsta.
.
Above, an osprey chirps its tea-kettle whistle,
ascends, thrusts, disappears,
returns, as if parleying ancestral maps
stored inside the lace of its bones.
Cricket songs stitch the afternoon.
.
I don’t know how long your trails can hold
such abundance, your fervor of tints and textures
winding their way to my insides, transcendent
as a psalm, the rhythm of your balms and breezes
rumoring their promise of peace.
.
Kari Gunter-Seymour
First appeared in The Nature of Our Times (Paloma Press 2025)
.
Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to submit a poem I love by poet Connie Green and one of my own as well, in honor of Earth Day. KG-S
.
✿
.
Connie Jordan Green lives on a farm in East Tennessee where she writes and gardens. She has published award-winning novels for young people, newspaper columns, poetry chapbooks and collections, most recently Nameless as the Minnows, Madville Publishing. Her poetry has been nominated for Pushcart Awards. She frequently teaches writing workshops.
.
Kari Gunter-Seymour is the immediate past Poet Laureate of Ohio and author of three award-winning poetry collections, including Dirt Songs (EastOver Press, 2024) winner of the 2025 IPPY Bronze, NYC Big Book and Feathered Quill Awards. Her newest collection, What Teethes Within is forthcoming from University Press of Kentucky, August 2026. Her work has been featured in a variety of publications including the American Book Review, Poem-a-Day, World Literature Today and The New York Times.
.
❀ ✿ ✾ ❁
.
.
Virga
.
Every raindrop panics me now
long before it arrives
I feel like an old Dog who hides
in the bathroom sniffing grey skies
.
I go out walking anyway make
myself brave but I don’t really don’t want
it to rain
I want fear to evaporate like a virga
line I want to become a cloud dropped
full of reflection and affection
when I listen to rain I hear echoes
of your voice not in my ears anymore
asking under any circumstance
will you want to make love again?
.
Jenny Bates
selected by Paul Jones
.
✾
.
Love Poem for the Appalachian Rainforest
.
The trees as rib cage, as sea-
bare branches tapping each other,
signing furiously the word
.
for wind. Temperate rainforest
filled with broken trees,
bracken tinder. I pray
.
for damp weather, fog, snow-
a proper frozen sojourn
among High Country clouds
.
plumping moss & lichen.
To keep fire at bay.
Needle and loam, trees breathing
.
wet breath against each other,
heavy enough to float, to form
their own ecology of hope.
.
Annie Woodford
selected by Paul Jones
.
✾
.
In the Cards
.
Outside of Beaverdam, an old lady told the cards.
As close to a crone as the mountain side could grasp,
could hold there, cling-rooted and knotty as laurel.
.
She was sour on life by now, hers, which had been hard,
and the mountain itself. “It must change,” she rasped.
Fingering the whirling figure, she hissed, “This is the World.”
.
“It’s in the past. Better that the dancer held a sword.”
The next up, the seemingly indifferent Four of Cups.
“Ignoring the gifts and threats of the sky and earth. Peril.
.
That’s where we are now. In danger, but not acting. Bored
with it all. Not doing what we need to do.” She gasped,
“No not this! I would rather be telling the Devil,”
.
as if she already had seen, but dare not disregard,
the next card, the future told by the Tower. The last.
“The end that comes to us all both good and evil.”
.
Soon the storms came as they had never come before.
She and her house were washed away. Among the lost.
She saw but was not saved. Not found. Except her skull.
.
Paul Jones
.
Thanks for combining Poetry Month and Earth Day (all month long). These three poems are from the award winning anthology, Had I a Dove: Appalachian Poets on the Helene Flood, edited by Hilda Downer (Redhawk Publications 2025). Each of these poem connects human awareness and in some cases human agency in the face of the experience of the flood and what followed. The whole of the anthology is rich with the appreciation of nature during and due to climate based disaster. Besides the three poems attached, Virga by Jenny Bates, Love Poem for the Appalachian Rainforest by Annie Woodford, and In the Cards by me, the anthology holds many treasures. — Paul Jones
.
.
❀ ✿ ✾ ❁
.
We do not live in a Nuclear Age or an Information Age. We do not live in a Post-Industrial Age, a Post-Cold War Age, or a Post-Modern Age. We do not live in an Age of Anxiety or even a New Age. We live in an Age of Flowering Plants and an Age of Beetles.
– Sue Hubbell, from Broadsides from the Other Orders
.
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.
.
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.
.
We will share one or two posts each week, multiple posts during the week of Earth Day, and we will keep sharing into May and beyond if you continue to respond!
.
Feel free to invite others to send their favorite Earth Day poems. Perhaps some day we will be able to say we live in the Age of Connection.
.
❁
.
Thank you for visiting Verse and Image: If you would like to receive an email each time a post appears, please SUBSCRIBE to Verse and Image using the button on the Home Page.
.
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
.
❀ ✿ ✾ ❁
.
.
V E R S E and I M A G E 
Thanks Les. Witness to the pain and the joy. ---B