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Posts Tagged ‘nature poetry’

Augury

Posted in ecology, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 17, 2024| 10 Comments »

“Black Vulture” – Clayton Joe Young – http://www.joeyoungphoto.com

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[poems by Scott Owens, photos by Clayton Joe Young]
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Buzzard
 . 
Always
when you look up
at white clouds, blue sky,
 . 
you see
that hyphen of a bird,
not flying but floating,
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silently
keeping two worlds
you imagine apart, together,
 . 
connecting
earth to sky,
life to death.
 . 
Closer,
we see the hunched neck,
bald head, vulture stoop
 . 
as something that gives us
chills.
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Scott Owens
from An Augury of Birds, forthcoming from Redhawk Publications; poems by Scott Owens, photography by Clayton Joe Young
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❦ ❦ ❦
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The naturalist Robert Lynd is quoted as saying, “In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence.” How often do we actually pause and participate in silence? Become part of it? Sunday afternoon Linda and I had hiked a couple of miles along the Mountains-to-Sea Trail when we came face to face with friends we hadn’t seen since before COVID. They were hiking in from the opposite direction but our destination was the same: the Forest Bathing trail along Grassy Creek.
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We continued on together. We outpaced noisier hikers; they turned back and left us in solitude. The thrum of voices at the winery and of pickups on Route 21 receded. We stopped – a gentle murmur of water flowing over the new beaver dam. Stopped again – breezes swishing through fresh Joe Pye Weed along the creek. As the trail led us up and away from the water, we left the laurel and holly and entered a glade of slender young tuliptree still recovering from logging. Our friend stopped us once more. She had taken off her sandals to feel the earth. Late afternoon sunlight streamed slant among the saplings and we were part of the silence. A vireo sang. She raised her arms and said, “This is what I came here for.”
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❦
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If we create silence, within us and around us, air and earth will magnify the silence with beauty. Birds will complete the silence with wing whirr and song. Here’s an invitation to silence, offered to us in the poems and photographs of An Augury of Birds. Scott Owens and Clayton Joe Young reward our held breath and contemplative approach with their avian celebration. They make these feathered creatures our companions – individual, distinctive, ripe with purpose. And Augury is such an apt title. Wasn’t Rachel Carson’s prophecy of a silent spring the spark that ignited our current fire of conservation and environmentalism? Noticing birds is a gateway to noticing the universe. Lift the latch, enter these pages, become part of these lives – If you close your eyes / you can hear the cosmos opening.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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“Northern Mockingbird” – Clayton Joe Young – http://www.joeyoungphoto.com

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All There Is to Say
 . 
If it happens that you find yourself
at the front of a room full of people
listening to all you have to say
about what you think you know
and suddenly you hear
from an open window
you hadn’t even noticed was open
the voice of a mockingbird
as clear as the voice of God
singing in every language at once
you owe it to yourself
and all with the possibility of hearing
to stop in the almost silence
and say out loud, Listen
 . 
Scott Owens
from An Augury of Birds, forthcoming from Redhawk Publications; poems by Scott Owens, photography by Clayton Joe Young
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Hiwassee
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Long fingers of catalpa trees,
Green globes of apples
Hang low over Licklog Road.
 . 
White crowns of Queen Anne’s lace,
Orange umbels of butterfly weed
Fill a field where flycatchers
 . 
Dart from limb to grass
and back, consuming
Whatever rises. Swallows
 . 
Carve endless angles across
The tops of weeds let go.
Brown headed cowbirds
 . 
Follow white-faced cows
Near a lake surrounded
By mountains in a place
 . 
Where everyone waves
And everyone remembers
What it means to live.
 . 
Scott Owens
from An Augury of Birds, forthcoming from Redhawk Publications; poems by Scott Owens, photography by Clayton Joe Young
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❦ ❦ ❦
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An Augury of Birds will be published by Redhawk Press in 2024. Check HERE for ordering information.
Scott Owens enlarges the community of creativity. He is professor of Poetry at Lenoir Rhyne University, former editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review and Southern Poetry Review, and he owns and operates Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse and Gallery where he coordinates innumerable readings and open mics, including POETRY HICKORY.
Clayton Joe Young is the Director and Senior Professor for the Photographic Technology Program at Catawba Valley Community College in Hickory, NC. He has won numerous awards for his photography and has published several books, including other collaborations with Scott Owens and with poet Tim Peeler, featuring rural North Carolina, especially Catawba County.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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“Chickadee” – Clayton Joe Young – http://www.joeyoungphoto.com

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All the Meaningful Noise
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How can you be on this earth
and not close your eyes on occasion
and listen to leaves give voice to wind,
hear the laugh of crow,
annunciation of blue jay,
moan of mourning dove,
all the meaningful noise
of another spring day?
 . 
Behind the finishing plant
just off the run-down road
between failing furniture towns,
a field is bursting with purple flowers.
If you close your eyes
you can hear the cosmos opening.
 . 
Scott Owens
from An Augury of Birds, forthcoming from Redhawk Publications; poems by Scott Owens, photography by Clayton Joe Young
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❦ ❦ ❦
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2020-06-11a Doughton Park Tree
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Joy Harjo’s Birds

Posted in Imagery, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , on May 10, 2024| Leave a Comment »

IMG_0328
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[two poems from An American Sunrise]
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I Wonder What You Are Thinking,
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The feathered wife asked her feathered husband –
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She watches as he cleans his wings, notes how he sends his eyes
+++ over the horizon
To viridian in the flying away direction.
So many migrations stacked within sky memory.
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Her body is stirring with eggs. She tucks found materials
Into their nest with her beak.
The nerves in her wingtips sense rains coming to soften the ground.
To send food to the surface of the earth.
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He says nothing –
As he wonders about the careless debris that humans make
Even as it yields ribbon, floss and string.
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Housecats and their sporting trails are on his mind’s map.
There are too many in this neighborhood.
 . 
A ragged yellow fellow eats birds after hours of play.
He stays out of that tom’s way, and has warned his wife
The same. Though she’s more wisely wary than him.
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Dogs are easy. They bark and leap and wag their tails.
They have no concerns for most flying things.
They lap up human trails for love.
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And why do we keep renewing this ceremony of nests?
Each feathered generation flies away.
What does it mean, and why
the green growing green
turning red against yellow,
then gray, gray and green again?
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When I need her heartbeat
In the freeze winds why is she always there
And not somewhere else?
 . 
Her lilt question has made an echo in his ears
like a string fluttering from a bush
In the delicate spring wind:
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I wonder what you are thinking . . .
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He doesn’t answer.
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Then he does.
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“Nothing.
I was thinking about the nothing of nothing at all.”
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Joy Harjo
from An American Sunrise, W. W. Norton, New York NY, © 2019
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❦ ❦ ❦
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I wonder what this House Wren outside my kitchen door is thinking. I think I can tell what he is thinking by watching what he is doing and listening to what he is saying, but is what I’m thinking he’s thinking really what he’s thinking?
 . 
Two weeks ago he – and I do mean “he,” no question about male behavior – discovered the new wren house my daughter and her Josh gave us for Christmas. For days he perched on it and blasted us with what he calls song: three razor sharp notes followed by high decibel jumble sounding like everyone’s tripping all over each other. He would sing for a few minutes, then I’d hear him on the other side of the neighbor’s yard, then down in the woods, then back to us. Pretty soon I caught him shoving sticks into the wren-sized hole in the little hanging house, then hopping inside before jutting his head out and singing again.
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House Wren males build two or more “dummy nests” to attract a mate. If the female likes what she sees, she picks him for her chicks’ daddy and picks one site; she finishes off the nest with soft before laying eggs. My personal wren spent at least a week making the circuit of his three nests. Were there no females in this end of Surry County? Did I detect his singing becoming ever more energetic? (“Frantic” and “insistent” would also be good descriptors for that revving engine of a song.) Finally I noticed two wrens hopping branch to branch in the serviceberry tree where the nesting box hangs. Yes! And they’ve stayed, so they must be a pair. (To mere humans male and female House Wrens look absolutely identical, no trace of sexual dimorphism).
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And he still sings. A few times an hour instead of every few minutes. I’m thinking those first songs conveyed him thinking, “This is my big chance. c’mon C’mon C’MON!” Now he’s thinking, “OK, off to a good start, kids to raise, you other wrens listen and weep and KEEP YOUR DISTANCE!” But how do I know? Just because that power-song jumps my heartbeat 20 points doesn’t mean it’s not, for the wren himself, the most laid back Zen-song in the Avian Class. In fact, it’s probably fruitless and a little silly for me to even think I can know what he’s thinking.
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But then there is this: I am grateful for the tiny eggs and I’m positive he and she are as well. Let me sing for you, little House Wren, my song of gratitude.
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❦
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Joy Harjo’s An American Sunrise is a journey, a revelation, a lament, a celebration. I featured three poems last week in THE WAY HOME and pondered what it might take for us to all become family. This week, though, I can’t leave her book without sharing these two poems about birds. They knock me out. I often suspected but now I see it’s true that I share a lot of DNA with birds (well, Family Hominidae and Class Aves are all part of Phylum Vertebrata, so YES we all share plenty of genes). If you, too, want to be a bird when you grow up, send me a comment after you finish reading.
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❦
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An American Sunrise, Joy Harjo; W. W. Norton & Company, New York NY © 2019. Joy Harjo served as Poet Laureate of the United States for three terms, 2019 through 2021.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Redbird Love
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We watched her grow up.
She was the urgent chirper,
Fledgling flier.
And when spring rolled
Out its green
She’d grown
Into the most noticeable
Bird-girl.
Long-legged and just
The right amount of blush
Tipping her wings, crest
And tail, and
She knew it
In the bird parade.
We watched her strut.
She owned her stuff.
The males perked their armor, greased their wings,
And flew sky-loop missions
To show off
For her.
In the end
There was only one.
There’s that one you circle back to – for home.
This morning
The young couple scavenge seeds
On the patio.
She is thickening with eggs.
Their minds are busy with sticks the perfect size, tufts of fluff
Like dandelion, and other pieces of soft.
He steps aside for her, so she can eat.
Then we watch him fill his beak
Walk tenderly to her and kiss her with seed.
The sacred world lifts up its head
To notice –
We are double, triple blessed.
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Joy Harjo
from An American Sunrise, W. W. Norton, New York NY, © 2019
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❦ ❦ ❦
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2020-09-08b Doughton Park Tree
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Earth Day – Afterword

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 26, 2024| 8 Comments »

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April 26, 2024
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In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence.
++++++ Robert Lynd (1879-1949) – naturalist
 . 
To see a wren in a bush, call it a wren and go on walking is to have seen nothing. To see a bird and stop, watch, feel, forget yourself for a moment, to be in the bushy shadows, maybe then feel wren – that is to have joined in a larger moment with the world.
++++++ Gary Snyder
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Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a song bird will come.
++++++ Chinese proverb
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❦ ❦ ❦
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November
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It is an old drama
this disappearance of the leaves,
this seeming death
of the landscape.
In a later scene,
or earlier,
the trees like gnarled magicians
produce handkerchiefs
of leaves
out of empty branches.
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And we watch.
We are like children
at this spectacle
of leaves,
as if one day we too
will open the wooden doors
of our coffins
and come out smiling
and bowing
all over again.
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Linda Pastan (1932-2023)
from Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968–1998, W W Norton & Co, © 1999
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Shared by Bradley Samore, Plano TX, who writes:
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This poem by Linda Pastan reminds me of our hushed wonder toward the non-human and our tendency to imagine ourselves in relation to what we see. Perhaps there is no objective way to view something as each species, each person, has their own limitations and reference point. Like Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall”, Pastan makes the connection between the leaves falling and our own human death but also hints at the possibility/impossibility of our rebirth, another budding.
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++++++ Bradley
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❦
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Revelation
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Nothing compares to exploring the land
++++++ but what of becoming part of it
 . 
to sit so still that lizards
++++++ mate by my sandaled feet
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to kneel at the grave where from shadows
++++++ a fox approaches unafraid
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to lie on the grass as daylight fades
++++++ and birds feather the branches above
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Bradley Samore
first appeared in Hoot
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❦ ❦ ❦
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The charm which Henry [David Thoreau] uses for bird and frog and mink, is patience. They will not come to him, or show him aright, until he becomes a log among logs, sitting still for hours in the same place; then they come around him and to him, and show themselves at home.
++++++ Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his journal, May 11, 1858.
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I hope you love birds, too.  It is economical.  It saves going to Heaven.
++++++ Emily Dickinson
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❦ ❦ ❦
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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.
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Ursula K LeGuin
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❦ ❦ ❦
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The cockroach and the birds were both here long before we were. Both could get along very well without us, although it is perhaps significant that of the two the cockroach would miss us more.
++++++ Joseph Wood Krutch, from The Twelve Seasons (1949)
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More than at any other time, we feel the strangeness of birds when we stop and pick up a feather in our path. There is nothing on Earth to compare it to; there is no material like it, no form, nothing that functions quite the same way.
++++++ Bruce Brooks, from On the Wing
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Landscape with Jeffers and the Connecticut River
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Oat stalks hang their oat-heavy heads.
Panic grass shakes in the wind
off a goldfinch’s wing. Cause,
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ effect, and cause.
 . 
Drone, like the bee, of goldenrod and aster,
tool of the stick-tight and cockleburr,
I park and wade into high riverside grasses.
 . 
A dog gnaws on a box turtle, a spider rides
a floating log, straining the air of its midges and leafbits.
A fisherman lazy as late summer current,
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ casts, reels, and casts.
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It occurs to me I am alive, which is to say
I won’t be soon. Robinson Jeffers
from Carmel Point, in “an unbroken field of poppy and lupin”
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ashamed of us all (of himself ), took solace in time,
in salt, water, and rock, in knowing
all things human “will ebb, and all/
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ Their works dissolve.”
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Me, too. And I’m not always so patient. I’ve caught myself
wishing our spoiler species gone, just swept away,
returned to rust and compost for more deserving earthly forms.
 . 
Meanwhile, flint arrowheads turn up among the plastic
picnic sporks, the glacial crags and bottom silt.
Hawks roost across the river on the now defunct
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ nuclear power plant cooling tower,
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flotsam left at the human high water mark.
Like mussel shells, like driftwood or seedpod,
like the current’s corrugations in the sand.
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Here, on this side, a woodchuck sits up, lustrous,
fat on her chestnut haunches, (she thinks herself
queen of her narrow realm) and munches
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ the fisherman’s crust.
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Who wouldn’t smile? Who doesn’t pity—and love—
the woodchuck not only despite but for her like-human smugness?
How can I not through her intercession forgive
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ for now a few things human.
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Jennifer Atkinson
from The Thinking Eye, Parlor Press, © 2016
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Jennifer Atkinson writes in Poems.com:
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But how do we live with our knowledge and the emotional cloud of fear, guilt, anger, grief, and helplessness, a cloud that surrounds us, each of us alone, and all of us together? That cloud has become intrinsic to my ecopoetical work. Burdened with the beauty and loss and malicious awfulness ahead, weighted with the anxiety that hits whenever a winter day dawns without frost on the ground or another ‘unprecedented’ downpour rings in the gutter, how do I live?
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❦ ❦ ❦
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The bluebird carries the sky on his back.
++++++ Henry David Thoreau
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We lose our souls if we lose the experience of the forest, the butterflies, the song of the birds, if we can’t see the stars at night.
++++++ Thomas Berry
 . 
It is the ancient wisdom of birds that battles are best fought with song.
++++++Richard Nelson
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Rain Light
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All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning.
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W.S. Merwin (1927-2019)
from The Shadow of Sirius, Copper Canyon Press, © 2009
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❦ ❦ ❦
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My favorite weather is bird-chirping weather.
++++++ Terri Guillemets
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You can observe a lot by just watching.
++++++ Yogi Berra
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Look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time. Then your time on earth will be filled with glory.
++++++ Betty Smith, from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Special thanks throughout these Earth Day celebrations to my hiking buddy and nature guide Mike Barnett, who has let me into the wilderness and won’t let me leave. Most of the quotations included in these sections are compiled in Mike’s Medicine Bag, which he carries with him into every new adventure
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And EXTRA SPECIAL THANKS to my companion in the universe, Linda, who allows the cosmos to flow through her pen onto paper. She has given permission for me to use a few of her drawings throughout these Earth Day celebrations.
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++++++  Bill
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