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Earth Day Prelude – Three

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, tagged Bill Griffin, David Dixon, Earth Day 2024, Earth Day Every Day, ecology, Ecopoetry, Hannah Fries, Jenny Bates, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, William Blake on April 19, 2024| 5 Comments »

April 19, 2024

…the path to heaven

doesn’t lie down in flat miles.

It’s in the imagination

with which you perceive

this world

and the gestures

with which you honor it.

++++++ Mary Oliver

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Insects with Long Childhoods

June bug, stag beetle, cicada –

three, seven, thirteen years as larvae

feasting underground in the gentle

rot of roots and castoffs, gone generations,

only a few weeks in the light

sharp as the blades of consciousness, incessant

buzz, cosmic background of loss

threaded through late summer’s throbbing

days, lush nights, a brevity so full

it must feel like th eternity they came from.

I have a child who asks a question

of the air’s every hum. He has not learned grief.

Sky, he says, and shovels soil into his mouth,

let’s it drip out mud.

Hannah Fries

from ECOTHEO Review, 3/2024

Shared by Lynda Rush Myers, Durham NC, who writes:

The poet, Hannah Fries, reminds me of Pattiann Rogers: scientific, technical, yet capturing the dense brevity of her subjects’ lives. The turn of the poem came as a touching surprise. Every parent can relate. A child’s word and actions capture his reality. The mother enjoys the unforgettable moment, knowing her son will learn grief all too soon.

++++++ Lynda

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There is only one subject: what it feels like to be alive. Nothing is irrelevant. Nothing is typical.

++++++ Richard Rodriquez, in American Scholar, Spring 2002

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.

++++++ Rachel Carson (1907-1964)

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The Fly

Little fly,

Thy summer’s play

My thoughtless hand

Has brush’d away.

Am not I

A fly like thee?

Or art not thou

A man like me?

For I dance,

And drink, & sing

Till some blind hand

Shall brush my wing.

If thought is life

And strength and breath,

And the want

Of thought is death,

Then am I

A happy fly,

If I live

Or if I die.

William Blake (1757 – 1827)

from Songs of Experience; in the public domain.

Shared by Paul Karnowski, Asheville NC, who writes:

I like the connection Blake makes between the narrator and the “trivial” fly. Humans too easily dismiss the rest of the natural world because we have the ability to “think.” But it’s the countless thoughtless acts of blind hands – from other humans – that bring about our demise. Life and death connects us all – from the greatest thinker to the lowliest fly.

++++++ Paul

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Am I leading the life that my soul, / Mortal or not, wants me to lead is a question / That seems at least as meaningful as the question / Am I leading the life I want to live.

++++++ Carl Dennis, A Chance for the Soul from Practical Gods

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If I Fell

Crow knows me.

Can see the difference

between me and another.

Gave me a feather

I keep

in case I need to fly.

I know Crow

from Blackbird

and Raven

yet wonder

what Crow

would want

to keep

from me.

Perhaps a token

of my essence

in case Crow needs

to dream of flying.

David Dixon

Poetry In Plain Sight 2024, NC Poetry Society

Shared by Jenny Bates, Germanton, NC, who writes:

Life is a process of waking up from a long and ancient sleep of the soul. David Dixon embodies this whether he means to or not in his poetry. This poem I chose to send, If I Fell, has also been chosen for 2024 Poetry in Plain Sight through the NC Poetry Society.

As far as my own poem, it is a plea, a prayer that each of us has to fill up the emptiness inside us in different ways…even the Earth. My poem, Conceived and Born is from my Pushcart nominated book, ESSENTIAL.

++++++ Jenny

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Conceived and Born

There’s no suckling here

as though we were

going to get some anyway

The sanctity of Earth is a fast.

The holy presence of prayer a fast.

We are born of a mother that is not

dependent on us.

She is a planet — and a small, fragile

one at that.

Jenny Bates, Germanton NC

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And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. I would not change it.

++++++ William Shakespeare, As You Like It

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To celebrate EARTH DAY 2024 we are featuring seven posts of poems submitted by readers – poems by William Blake to Walt Whitman, Robinson Jeffers to A.R.Ammons to Linda Pastan, and by a number of contemporary poets. Check in every day or two – connect to the earth and to each other!

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Old Sam Peabody

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Essential, imagery, Jenny Bates, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing on February 9, 2024| 14 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Jenny Bates]

Essential

Trees are a gathering of circles.

If I touch this tree

say your name,

Light from the moon, the stars

will burn inside it.

Frost kindles its leaves to flame,

Spills them on to yellowing grass.

Unchanged.

From prehistoric times the ages

are inconsolable, so they turn.

Mantle shadows by truly seeing them.

I tell you this as I touch the tree,

circle this tree, say your name.

The tree and its golden mean listen

without an ear to hear.

As you wear yourself out

with a single essential thought.

Give.

Jenny Bates

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Ah, February – enter the season of Romance! Naturalists will mark its approach with sightings of large red heart-shaped boxes lining the entrance to Food Lion. Outdoors we notice that, yes indeed, that gray squirrel robbing the feeder looks nicely plump: she will deliver her puplets in a high leafy nest on Saint V’s Day. Wood frogs and peepers, surprise!, have already begun to sing their amorous invitations to amplexus. Owls have a jump on the festivities, already nesting, while there is a general restiveness and revving among the yard birds.

For Linda and me, the end of winter and first blood flow of Spring are marked by a plaintive two note whistle issuing from the rhododendron. There it is again! A rising minor third, clear and bright, the introduction to a joyful motet, the Oh My! of Oh my Canada, Canada, Canada. The White-Throated Sparrow is tuning up.

Why do birds sing? All winter the white-throat has minded his own business, hopping in the litter beneath the feeders or posing quite sage in the azalea. Now he sings his first couple of notes, but within a few weeks he will have flown far from here to breed in Maine or Michigan or the infinite boreal forests of Canada. Why sing now? Obviously his whistling can’t be to establish a territory in our back yard. And it defies imagination to think he’d hope to attract a mate here in North Carolina and keep her by his side all the way to Quebec. Today’s song, to judge from the snippets and fragments he’s practicing, sounds like he’s just warming up tor the big date.

Here’s how I see him – my little White-Throated Sparrow is Jeremy Brett in My Fair Lady, walking down the street where she lives. He’s passed this way before, but today the pavement simply refuses to stay beneath his feet. Days lengthen and love fills his breast until it is impossible any longer to resist – it must overflow in song. And so although the street where she really lives is 1,000 miles from here, White Throat graces Linda and me here in the NC foothills with his opening aria of Romance. Ah, February!

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* The song of the White-Throated Sparrow (Zonotrichia albicollia) comprises a couplet of long clear ascending whistles followed by three more rapid triplets, and can also be recalled by the mnemonic, Old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody.

** On the Street Where You Live, 1956, Lerner & Lowe, from the musical My Fair Lady starring Audrey Hepburn & Rex Harrison, with Jeremy Brett as Freddy singing: “I have often walked down this street before / but the pavement always stayed beneath my feet before. / All at once am I several stories high, / knowing I’m on the street where you live . . . .”

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Red and Green

where the surface of one thing meets the surface of another . . .

— William Bridges

You were twisting and turning

leaping and swerving a flame

on each foot, on a field so green

so green – so gorgeously

green, the earth’s addiction.

And you, warrior Fox as you fought

you fought off the mysterious foe, rattled like

a shaman losing part of his soul.

You danced between spirit and spirit and matter

danced all parts of your body a spontaneous me!

When you finally stopped puffing

from chaos, from chaos and glee you flowed

a rhythm of stillness – so still

you stood as if in meditation

and mantra on what you created.

Jenny Bates

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I have never met Jenny Bates but I imagine a visit to her home in the woods. Afternoon sun through west-facing panes is captured by glass in the colors of earth, sky, pasture, summer asters. We don’t remain indoors but take our mugs of oswego tea with local honey out beneath the pines. Dusk creeps in and we allow it to fill us with its silence. Creatures creep closer as well, wild but curious. If we were to threaten them, they would flee or turn and slash, but we and they simply remark each other’s presence and respect our distance. They go about their crepuscular business and grant us leave to be part of their universe. Being part of. Communion. Creating wholeness. The highest call and at once the most confounding task of the rational being.

This is also a visit to Jenny’s poetry in the woods. The universe Jenny Bates creates through words is one of deep acceptance and communion. Essential, from Redhawk Publications, continues her series of books which create a sort of natural theology. The You whom Jenny addresses in so many of her poems – is it God? A spirit familiar? A ghostly memory? Or is it the fox who stares cautiously from the edge of night? You might be a source of answers but more often is simply one with whom to share the questions. In this universe, there is no supernatural, only the fundamental reality that we are all one. One, that is, if we are able to open ourselves that much.

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Visit Redhawk Publications and purchase Essentials HERE

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Be Bold

I said to the Woodpecker

as I lifted it off the ground

cradled it for a half an hour, this

second Woodpecker to break its neck.

I’m no angel I said to him, though I’ve

been called it many times

a few drops of Be Bold I tell myself

when there is a need, but sometimes

those drops don’t soak in and I’m left

buckling to my knees.

The body will be gone by morning

and sure enough it was, yet still I

struggle How can one keep up with

death stare it in the face? Or program our

unconscious to react in certain ways?

Sweet smelling or dour unpleasant odors

are all we instinctively know, and here,

I’m not too Bold.

I placed the bird on one big leaf, hearing

another drum away

laid his head on dry curled grass

a pine bough for a wreath

both of us changed and changing

the pattern of our resonance.

Jenny Bates

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But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? This morning I discover Romeo Sparrow perched in the Silverbell. He turns to gaze fondly at Juliet, perched one branch higher. Perhaps they have booked adjoining seats for the flight to their Canada!!

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Earth Day – Wild

Posted in Ecopoetry, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, ecology, Ecopoetry, Galway Kinnell, imagery, Jenny Bates, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, poetry, Sandra Dreis, Southern writing, Ursula K. LeGuin on April 21, 2023| 10 Comments »

[with poems by Ursula K. LeGuin, Sandra Dreis,
Jenny Bates, Galway Kinnell]

After a recent post which featured poems from the journal ecotone, Bradley Strahan commented, “Thanks. We need constantly to be reminded of how much we are dependent and damaging.” It made me think: it must be no coincidence that Poetry Month and Earth Day are both in April. This is the month of convergences, when we are truly grateful that the last frost is past and beastly summer has not yet smothered us. We watch new shoots erupt and bloom, but we worry that some will arrive too early and get nipped, and that blossoms and pollinators may emerge out of sync. We’re grateful for the songs of neotropical migrants, but we notice their diminished numbers and worry about desecrated wintering grounds and fragmented breeding grounds. We head out for a hike or a bird count and find the woodlots leveled, the streams silted up, and new homes and trailers in every cornfield.

We are surrounded by the reality of relentless human impact on the planet. We are living smack dab in the middle of the Anthropocene epoch.

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
+++++++ William Carlos Williams, from Asphodel, That Greeny Flower

Poetry is able to speak the news we need to hear for Earth Day. Poetry may crystallize a truth we can grab and hold on to when bad news threatens to overwhelm us. Poetry may grab us by the lapels and jerk us to our feet when our motivation has drained away. Poetry may shed light on despair and offer some path into hope.

❦

Thank you to the readers of these pages
who have responded to my call for poems this Earth Day.
Watch for new posts on April 21, April 22, and April 23.

All photographs were taken April 11-17, 2023,
along the Elkin & Allegheny Nature Trail,
part of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail in North Carolina, USA.

Earth Day 2023 art by Linda French Griffin.

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Kinship

Rootless and restless and
warmblooded, we
blaze in the flare that
blinds us to that slow,
tall, fraternal fire of life
as strong
now as in the seedling
two centuries ago.

Ursula K LeGuin
Selected by Bill Griffin; appeared online in The Dewdrop, March 26, 2022

❦

What truth is more profound, more amazing, more assuring, more urgent than our kinship? That Ur-puddle’s restless swirl of nucleotides and amino acids, way back in time before there was ever a cell, is still reflected in the minutest truth of our bodies, every glint and dark crevice of them. All of us are neighbors.

– Bill Griffin / Elkin, North Carolina

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Raven’s Beak

But you’d have to understand
Raven’s beak,
drive that comes before
all else,
plunges for praying mantis,
plucks, disbands dirt,
stabs a wrangled tuft of weed.

And you’d have to
be
the bird, inhabit
black eyes that beam location,
yes, stealing sweetness
even
from the cocky cat,

feasting on envy.
This hunger lives beyond prey
I tell you, a wild want
not to be tamed
by blood, sinew or travail.
In dreams I gather others.
I grow feathers and wait.

Sandra Dreis
originally published in CREOSOTE, Spring 2021. (East Arizona)

This, my first published poem, was inspired by a walk with my two small dogs, stopping by a grassy ultra-green, pampered lawn. There, under a pin oak, was a sizable raven, beak inserted into the earth. In that moment, while I held my leashed dogs, a cat on a nearby stoop kept the raven in her sights. My dogs begged after the cat. I felt the perfect continuum. The balance. The tame. The wild.

– Sandra Dreis / Winston-Salem, North Carolina

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Otherworldly

Odd trick of the wind in leaves,
water flowing over stones.

You don’t have a mouth, said Fox.

Moth never blinked, rippling its crescent
tail wings.

You only live for a week, said Fox.

Moth lifted its wings, flew the moon up
to meet the night.

You and I are daydreams, soughed Fawn.

It’s been a long time. Think back and listen.
Voices in the woods. Angelic, untarnished.

Articulate, I can hear words rising

then falling,

a benediction.

Jenny Bates
originally published in Dark Forest, Planisphere Q, 2021

I want to bring the kindness and wonder I have found in wild creatures as well as their courage and pragmatic truth. I want my voice to be their voice as I believe they will teach us appropriate ways to heal the wild land. The wild is mysterious but also thrilling, nostalgic, liquid, musical when we listen.

– Jenny Bates / Germanton, North Carolina

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The Bear

+++++ 1
In late winter
I sometimes glimpse bits of steam
coming up from
some fault in the old snow
and bend close and see it is lung-colored
and put down my nose
and know
the chilly, enduring odor of bear.

+++++ 2
I take a wolf’s rib and whittle
it sharp at both ends
and coil it up
and freeze it in blubber and place it out
on the fairway of the bears.

And when it has vanished
I move out on the bear tracks,
roaming in circles
until I come to the first, tentative, dark
splash on the earth.

And I set out
running, following the splashes
of blood wandering over the world.
At the cut, gashed resting places
I stop and rest,
at the crawl-marks
where he lay out on his belly
to overpass some stretch of bauchy ice
I lie out
dragging myself forward with bear-knives in my fists.

+++++ 3
On the third day I begin to starve,
at nightfall I bend down as I knew I would
at a turd sopped in blood,
and hesitate, and pick it up,
and thrust it in my mouth, and gnash it down,
and rise
and go on running.

+++++ 4
On the seventh day,
living by now on bear blood alone,
I can see his upturned carcass far out ahead, a scraggled,
steamy hulk,
the heavy fur riffling in the wind.

I come up to him
and stare at the narrow-spaced, petty eyes,
the dismayed
face laid back on the shoulder, the nostrils
flared, catching
perhaps the first taint of me as he
died.

I hack
a ravine in his thigh, and eat and drink,
and tear him down his whole length
and open him and climb in
and close him up after me, against the wind,
and sleep.

+++++ 5
And dream
of lumbering flatfooted
over the tundra,
stabbed twice from within,
splattering a trail behind me,
splattering it out no matter which way I lurch,
no matter which parabola of bear-transcendence,
which dance of solitude I attempt,
which gravity-clutched leap,
which trudge, which groan.

+++++ 6
Until one day I totter and fall-
fall on this
stomach that has tried so hard to keep up,
to digest the blood as it leaked in,
to break up
and digest the bone itself: and now the breeze
blows over me, blows off
the hideous belches of ill-digested bear blood
and rotted stomach
and the ordinary, wretched odor of bear,

blows across
my sore, lolled tongue a song
or screech, until I think I must rise up
and dance. And I lie still.

+++++ 7
I awaken I think. Marshlights
reappear, geese
come trailing again up the flyway.
In her ravine under old snow the dam-bear
lies, licking
lumps of smeared fur
and drizzly eyes into shapes
with her tongue. And one
hairy-soled trudge stuck out before me,
the next groaned out,
the next,
the next,
the rest of my days I spend
wandering: wondering
what, anyway,
was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?

Galway Kinnell
Selected by Paul Jones; appears in Three Books (Houghton-Mifflin, 2002)

Galway Kinnell speaking for himself about himself: “I don’t recognize the distinction between nature poetry and, what would be the other thing? Human civilization poetry? We are creatures of the earth who build our elaborate cities and beavers are creatures of the earth who build their elaborate lodges and canal operations and dams, just as we do … Poems about other creatures may have political and social implications for us.”

I first heard Kinnell read this poem in maybe 1977 at the UNC English Department. I was thinking of taking a job at UNC. I did and The Bear has been with me ever since.

– Paul Jones / Chapel Hill, NC