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Posts Tagged ‘nature poetry’

Embrace

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on February 23, 2024| 11 Comments »

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[with 3 poems by Joanie McLean]
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Here Is What’s Left
 . 
Summer wanes as usual
the Rudbeckia succumbs
to mildew and wilt
the figs fall
under the weight
of sucking junebugs
the pond is muddy
scummed over and still
even the birds are quiet
their calls diminished
 . 
Looking out
at the brittle grass
in the crickety field
I see scraps and tatters
of old assumptions
of unearned grace
being dragged away
with the season’s remnants:
a semblance of security here
a shadow of normalcy there
pieces of convenience
disjointed shapes
of good times
all crumbling
as they go
leaving a light breeze
to stir the stillness
amidst the nodding
muhly grass plumes
 . 
So then
here is what’s left
the grass
the breeze
the slipping light
the emptiness
whose touch is so gentle
the kindness of it all
 . 
Joanie McLean
from Like Wind into Air, Redhawk Publications, Hickory, NC. © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Yesterday I took Dad and Mom to visit a senior living facility. After the tour we stayed for lunch, Dad and Mom seated at a table with two of the residents, Pat and Ken. Mary Ellen and I watched from a distance as Dad introduced himself and made conversation, charming, just charming. He and Mom seemed to be enjoying themselves. When we got home, I asked Dad for his impressions. “The place is nicely decorated, looks like it’s been painted. The lunch was good.” But when I asked if there were any negatives, he surprised me – “The people were all really old.”
 . 
Perhaps every ninety-seven year old man lives in a universe of constricted perspective. Just breathing, minute by minute, may exhaust all of his empathic resources; every event of the moment becomes wholly self-referential. Nevertheless I will grant Dad this: when he says, “They were all worse off than I am,” maybe it is true that none have retained their social skills like he has.
 . 
What about the seventy-one year old man? What is the insurmountable impediment inherent in becoming me-in-relationship with another? I watch myself constantly calculating how I will respond, or reflecting (regretting) how I have responded. I begin to see the other as the obstacle, the hurdle I must leap to become the actual me.
 . 
Since my Beloved is for me and I for my Beloved, who will be able to separate and extinguish two fires so enkindled? It would amount to labor in vain, for the two fires have become one.  .  . Teresa of Avila
 . 
And yet this is still me as observer and not as participant. Me watching and not being. Even if all others were to acquiesce and I in sidestepping could imagine my way forward now open and free and unhindered, I would still be tethered to me-in-relationship with myself. I am standing in my own way. I live by formulations and ruminations. I imagine it is the others who prescribe their expectations of me, but really I am the prescriber. I am the one who builds these enclosures.
 . 
Mystics and sages of all traditions speak of the inner fire, the divine spark hidden in our very cells and in all that lives. This flame of love is the pure presence of God.  .  . Paula D’Arcy
 . 
Do I spy a chink in the wall? The clamor of the world is not going to hush on my account, but perhaps I can press my eye up to the barrier and discern a little light. Not another book of philosophy or science, not a lambast of revelation or a self-created masterpiece – just a small warm flame. For even just a moment, let it burn. Let it burn me. Let it burn in me. May I glimpse me-in-relationship with all.
 . 
Becoming fire means saying yes to life by the very way we live.  .  . Christine Valters Paintner
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Still With the Light
 . 
First Sunday
after the first full moon
after the Spring Equinox
Easter morning for some
here on this particular land mass
so often a lovely day
at this latitude so often
a sort of gentleness
a willingness to smile
conveyed in the watery
green light that shimmers
and steps across
church lawns
and across my yard
where bluebirds jump
from the fence wire
into the broomsedge
and flutter back up
with crickets in their bills.
 . 
There is something else
shifting like clouds
below a horizon
insinuating just beyond
these Easter lawns –
something that would
come near now
if I let it
would bend this light
differently
would spurn
this morning’s naive smile.
 . 
So I stand
as still as I can
with the light
the breeze shifting
the shadows
the bluebirds
dropping and rising
dropping and rising
that’s all
just this holy light
just for now.
 . 
Joanie McLean
from Like Wind into Air, Redhawk Publications, Hickory, NC. © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
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I am jealous of these poems. No, not jealousy with its sour tang of spite. I desire these poems. I long for them; I long to walk where they walk; I long to lie down in their grass. May I not also please hear the cuckoo and the woodcock, sense the coyote just down the path, know the secret of every color and flavor of light?
 . 
Like Wind into Air by Joanie McLean sustains the beautiful image and promise of that title throughout its pages. Everything enters into everything, every season lives its truth, every life swirls and connects to every other: all-in-relationship-to-all. The poet gently dissolves every barrier between the reader and her world. In the grass in the slough in the stand of pines / life and death are fully accountable / part of a bargain –
 . 
May I be as emptied and as filled as these poems? May I enter the poems’ world? And as I embrace their world may I not escape my own world but embrace it as well? This is the point of the poetry; this is the point of love.
 . 
❦
 . 
Joanie McLean’s Like Wind into Air at Redhawk Publications HERE
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
In Late February
 . 
there is always
a wind in the woods
a basso continuo hum,
 . 
the fugue the chorus frogs
play toccata against,
the sound memory makes
 . 
when it wakes and rises
up through the earth
towards sleeping roots.
 . 
The field has forgotten
about summer and bees
and lightning.
 . 
But the trees,
whose roots are deepest,
are remembering something
 . 
and the frogs,
whose sleep is the lightest,
are dying to hear it.
 . 
Of course February
would sing like this
whether I heard it or not.
 . 
But again this year
I am here in the field,
at the edge of the woods.
 . 
Joanie McLean
from Like Wind into Air, Redhawk Publications, Hickory, NC. © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
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2020-11-03a Doughton Park Tree
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Old Sam Peabody

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , 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
from Essential, Redhawk Publications, Hickory, NC; © 2023
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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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❦
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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.
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** 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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❦ ❦ ❦
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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
from Essential, Redhawk Publications, Hickory, NC; © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
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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.
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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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❦
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Visit Redhawk Publications and purchase Essentials HERE
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❦ ❦ ❦
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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
from Essential, Redhawk Publications, Hickory, NC; © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
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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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Rushing

Posted in family, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , on February 2, 2024| 10 Comments »

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[ with 3 poems by Rae Spencer]
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Adaptation
 . 
Some days I hardly remember
what it is to fly
 . 
what loss is
When morning feels like betrayal
and shoulders ache
with the sudden load of gravity
pressed into cruel bones
too human for wings
 . 
As if I never once awoke
hair smelling of clouds
wound in wild knots
and damp with tears
 . 
or slept
curled in a crevice of wind
 . 
Other days I recall myself
grace confined to memory
in which I have never flown
and it was only ever a tale
from childhood
I was never meant to believe
 . 
Rae Spencer
from Watershed, Kelsay Books, American Fork, Utah; © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
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A shift in warmth of Pacific seas, a wet winter in the South: throughout January a storm a week, sometimes two, but this afternoon we are braving mud to hike our favorite trail from Carter Falls to Grassy Creek. The little farm pond is full and we see the channel where it overflows to carve a deeper path through last summer’s grasses and sedges. Both white pine groves have evidence of freshets, scoured hardpan courses with needles layered thick along each side. We cross Martin Byrd Road to enter the woods that curve alongside the big cornfield and wonder what we’ll find. Even though the acres are planted in winter rye, how much soil has rushed off those slopes and furrows into Grassy Creek?
 . 
The trail quickly turns downhill and we see the storms’ impact. Red field clay has silted full the first drainage swale and overtopped it to rush down the trail bed in a boiling soupy froth. Exposed roots and deep mud. Our trail crews clean out these erosion control features twice a year but one wet January has damaged the trail more than ten years of hikers’ boots. Too much water, too much incline, too much gravity.
 . 
Neither will nor wisdom inform its seep, writes Rae Spencer of water. It must seek its level, it must flow, it must rush. Water and time alike, each of them relentless and not to be held back. Have I spent too much of my life rushing? Have I abandoned will and wisdom to be always doing, doing? Even now my dreams are filled with urgency, long hallways, behind each door a patient fretting to be seen, and I with no hope of catching up. Waking from such, who would want to get out of bed and get started?
 . 
Better trail design can’t completely compensate for poor tillage and agricultural neglect, but the rest of today’s trail is actually in quite good shape. The outer berm has been mostly raked clear and there are several grade dips and rises that keep water from following the treadway. When we reach the more rustic forest bathing trail, it’s even better – consistent outsloping camber, plenty of runoff. Water’s gonna rush. Life too, I guess. How to prepare? How to respond? How to slow things down for a bit? A walk through quiet woods, a quiet hour with a book of poetry – maybe tonight my dreams will proceed more leisurely.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Of Warbler and Quail
 . 
Drab little she in the brush
Muttering her song to lure
Someone else
 . 
But only I respond
Drawn across the dune
To listen closer
 . 
As a child I spoke to quail
I whistled out their bobwhite name
To hear them shriek it back
 . 
But this little warbler
outside my beachfront door
Her accent slips my ear
 . 
Measures of water wisdom
Refrains of woven nest
Codas that fall silent
 . 
Because I have come too near
To understanding
What is lovely on this shore
 . 
Of daily tide
Of sandy soil and storms
Of quickening flocks
 . 
That speak their sea-swept names
In secret tangled tongues
Of salty sail and oar
 . 
And then they fly away
While I struggle, yearn to say
What I remember of briars
 . 
Of dry summer streams
And winter dreams
Of silent quail
 . 
Hungry among the thistle
Of home, my distant valley home
So many years from here
 . 
Rae Spencer
from Watershed, Kelsay Books, American Fork, Utah; © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Memory – home – loss – the path forward: Rae Spencer’s poetry has a distinctly formal feel as she settles deeply into these themes. Formal in the sense of meticulous language, lush natural imagery and description, architectural lines, internal rhyme. These poems need to be read slowly as they linger in the moment before releasing one to ponder and discover the writer’s metaphors, and discovering one’s own.
 . 
Watershed from Kelsay Books is an antidote to compulsion, to insistence, to the headlong rush into the next thing and the next. I am perfectly happy to pause and listen with warbler and bobwhite as the poet weaves from their stories one of longing for home (Of Warbler and Quail). I think I’m ready now for racoon to teach me how to live (Adaptable). At the close of Doppler Effect, I sit and listen long to the change in pitch of life I know I must expect, and prepare for, as my own parents age and travel their final days.
 . 
Poetry, in its phrasing, its junctures, its juxtaposition, often moves at the pace of breath. Speak it aloud, pause when it needs you to. Stop and linger in the midst of these lines so that they may breathe into you.
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❦
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[hint: I re-type the poems for these posts (thank you to my freshman touch typing teacher), fingers slower than scanning eyes, speaking the words individually in my head, each syllable and carriage return (aka line break) – so often in the adagio the lines reveal secrets of how they mean.]
 . 
Rae Spencer lives in Virginia, USA. As well as writing, she is a practicing veterinarian. Of Warbler and Quail first appeared in Bolts of Silk. Gravity first appeared in vox poetica.
 . 
Watershed is available from Kelsay Books HERE. Learn more about Rae HERE.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Gravity
 . 
Water doesn’t want
It only weighs
 . 
Neither will nor wisdom inform its seep
Downhill, settling to the lowest pool
 . 
Rivers cascade and marshes ooze
Toward inlet and gulf
Where tides surge
 . 
With the arid moon
Sere face lowered
In serene reflection
Over oblivious blue
 . 
Depths that teem with tin and polyp
Oyster clades awash in brine
That neither murmurs nor sighs
Through a shell
 . 
Held to the ear we hear
Blood’s heave
An eternal chorus
Singing sailors to sea
Dreamers to sleep
 . 
Daughters to voice
Their bare feet anchored
In restless churn
On heavy, ancient shores
 . 
Rae Spencer
from Watershed, Kelsay Books, American Fork, Utah; © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
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IMG_1948
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