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Posts Tagged ‘nature poetry’

Bright and Brighter

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , on October 6, 2023| 9 Comments »

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[with 3 poems by Linda Allardt]
 . 
Rx
 . 
Spend more time looking into woods
watching the black squirrel
chasing the sparrows off his branch.
 . 
Get to know the stranger your friends know,
the one you can only see in snapshots,
the profile they know as you.
 . 
Smile in your sleep and wake not knowing why
like a writer trying to remember
that perfect lost line.
 . 
Consider the judgement of trees
branching, dividing to hold up their leaves
to all available sun.
 . 
Linda Allardt
from At the Confluence, FootHills Publishing, Kanona, NY. © 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
For now we see as in a dim mirror, but then face to face.
Apostle Paul to the believers at Corinth
 . 
Piedmont prairie restoration – Land Conservancy riparian easements protect the Mitchell River here in Surry County. Might this be how the Blue Ridge foothills appeared before tobacco and soybeans? Mitigation suggests alternate water sources to keep cattle out of creeks and plowing and planting practices that reduce runoff; restoration envisions a renewed and brighter landscape. A few years ago, Linda and I joined a guided hike to see the autumn butterflies attracted to milkweed, thistle, yellow asters in the newly planted prarie. We also discovered a former cow pasture converted to native bunchgrass: redtop, foxtail, bluestem. Startling diversity and color. The brightest of mornings.
 . 
Here we are on an unmarked trail that leads through tall flowers, seedheads, leaping and flying things, then gently on downslope until we reach the South Fork of the Mitchell. The overshaded water is so fresh and clear we imagine we might count every dapple on a brook trout’s flank. We continue downstream in twos and threes past riffles, rainbows of polished riverstones, and sweet bank vegetation toward the meeting of mountain streams. Cool riverbreath, talkative watercourse, whispering hikers – now we reach the confluence.
 . 
What is this magic, this mystery suddenly revealed? As the clear South Fork stream merges with the main channel, we perceive it dull and sluggish compared to the crystalline purity of the Mitchell it now encounters. Even the bright water we’ve followed is overshadowed by the brighter. We have looked through the flow to its bank and bed and been blind to the vestige of silt it still carries. At the confluence one’s eyes are opened to one’s true nature.
 . 
❦
 . 
The poems of Linda Allardt’s At the Confluence are deep and still as a dark glade with its secretive woodland stream. Linda wrote these between her eighty-sixth and ninety-third years, the final decade of a long life as writer and teacher, and her friend and student Kathleen A. Wakefield collected this volume for publication. Linda moves from the poet’s constant question, “Why am I here?” to the even more piercing question, “Why am I still here?”
 . 
How to reply? The poems themselves are their answer. I count the years from the stumps in the yard . . . in the things that are gone. . . . Then I count what still stands. Each of the short poems is an observation and a contemplation. Oh yes, a long life must heft its burden of regrets: How many mea culpas must be said . . . Wasn’t there, once, the right question, / and the right answer to it? But astounding as it may seem, even written in one’s ninth decade, this is not a book of looking back but of looking forward. And even more, a book that in looking outward looks within. May each of us look past the dark swirl we carry to glimpse the bright truth that is our nature.
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❦
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[Order At the Confluence from FootHills Publishing HERE]
[Kathleen Wakefield would appreciate your reactions to these poems by her friend; you can reach her at COMMENTS@GRIFFINPOETRY.COM]
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Retrieval
 . 
So much is hidden,
what’s past forgotten
or in its slow retrieval rewritten.
What we think we know
is lost in the telling.
 . 
Yet echoes of half forgotten lines
like wind in the wiring
remind us of words once loved
and only half forgotten.
Lines we may have read somewhere,
or written.
 . 
Linda Allardt
from At the Confluence, FootHills Publishing, Kanona, NY. © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
In Late November
 . 
I said to the trees, Let go
but the wind-lashed leaves hung on.
I asked them why.
The trees said, You let go,
but I hung on at 93,
knowing no more than the leaves
what handclasp holds us here.
 . 
Linda Allardt
from At the Confluence, FootHills Publishing, Kanona, NY. © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
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2016-10-17b Doughton Park Tree

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Expected and Unexpected

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on September 8, 2023| 4 Comments »

 . 
[with two poems by Katherine Soniat]
 . 
The Right Frequency
 . 
allows the next stillness to occur. Welcome each space
as it appears but confirm slowly –
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ as if an adage drifting
down through centuries of smoke.
 . 
Try a later roll in summer grass with its sundial fingers
holding you on top the seven-veiled mysteries
of green.
 . 
Above that, motionless clouds predict it’s never lickety-split
to the apparent state that counts.
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ Urn, goat, and crimson altar-cloth
are flighty suggestions, hard to pin down despite humans
and their sharpened articles of faith.
 . 
Tie a select few to the calf-bell of dogma, then with due respect
leave the dotted lines.
 . 
Maybe even get off your mount (the high one) and walk beside
those roped or chained, and stumbling.
 . 
Each time you are kind, feel how your breath changes,
the frequency of birds at dusk settling in.
 . 
Be aware. ++++ ++++ ++++ One pivotal moment
++++ does not foreshadow a calmer forever on earth.
 . 
Katherine Soniat
from Starfish Wash-Up
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The fence will squander its energy through juicy longstem grasses, nutsedges, greeny ferns, the unimpeded conduction of their potassium solute intracellular conduit. Grounded, not shocking. And so the cattle farmer may be forgiven for having applied his two-foot swath of herbicide all down the half mile of the fence’s length. Nevertheless, even months later we measure this still brown compacted earth and imagine what’s been lost. We do not expect to find the blossoms of September a year ago.
 . 
Nevertheless, here they are. Oh yes, beyond the fence’s reach where moisture seeps down from the upslope we find exactly what we expected: Ironweed, Cardinal Flower, Crownbeard. And within the fence’s boundary, where grazers have not been re-introduced this summer, we are not at all surprised to discover swath upon swath of Meadow Beauties. But here before us we suddenly come upon precisely what we had not expected to discover: two low herbs with blue thumbnail flowers.
 . 
The hikers walking up behind me are a little rattled when I shout, “Look at this!” I point out the swoop of curving stamens and the spotted lower petals and they say, “How nice,” then move along down the trail possibly hoping I won’t be following them too closely, but as of this moment I am having a very good day.
 . 
❦
 . 
Katherine Soniat’s poems do not enter at the front door and take a companionable seat at the kitchen table. They shift, they transform, they bury their meaning then suddenly burst forth. To read  Starfish Wash-Up, I find I must lay my expectations aside. If I stare at the lines too hard they elude me, but then pages later the unexpected connection emerges and allows itself to be recognized. Soniat describes this as “a dissolving context in which time and space blur – only to reassemble in as part of the vaguely familiar.” The themes I sense, across time and generations, are father / daughter, separation / blame, searching / belonging. The two poems I’ve chosen here display these in their own right without requiring the context of the entire collection to fully convey meaning. To read most of the poems, though, one must read all the poems.
 . 
This is an unusual and unique book, disturbing at times. The entire volume is titled FATES and it actually includes full-length works by three poets: The Medea Notebooks by Ann Pedone, Starfish Wash-Up by Katherine Soniat, and overflow of an unknown self by D. M. Spitzer. The three collections are completely different in style but their themes and tropes intertwine and challenge. I am repeatedly wrenched from my comfortable perch and yanked into these narratives. As Ann Pedone writes in Jason Confronts Medea, We soak our bodies in the oil of words / all our lives and yet now / after the thousands we have / spoken to each other / you are as strange to me / as the dark-eared goats / feeding on the grasses / beneath your feet.
 . 
FATES: The Medea Notebooks / Starfish Wash-Up / overflow of an unknown self. Ann Pedone, Katherine Soniat, D. M. Spitzer. Etruscan Press, Wilkes-Barre, PA, © 2021.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Kingdom
 . 
There could have been time for another life before the strong March wind
swept us from us from all-fours, and dropped us near water.
Mirrors waiting.
 . 
No denying that the Nth degree of the unknown is upon us, and there’s no hint
of direction for our wasted planet. Our run at flamboyantly hot lifestyles shrunk
the ice (and more) to pieces. Huff ant strut, and we’ve about destroyed
the globe.
 . 
We mark time, belch, and remain on the lookout for chatter, though truth is
we are most awkward within the family circle where the food tastes good
bu the term lineage shows ugly signs of meltdown.
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ Who sits where
at the last family feast (?) when any mention of disagreement is met
with angular glares of Thou shalt not repeat tales of personal or climate crisis.
And thou shalt instead sip all thy wine then nod at the endlessly grinning?
 . 
My determined place at that annual folly? I doze with my clutch of poems
in the family broom-closet – me, yet another calculated risk to the authenticity
of family history.
++++ ++++ ++++ Cursing in couplets, tweeting of human drift measured in masses:
poor continental wanderers – lost infants, men and women. The elders choking on
water, while in my pine-oiled burrow I grow heavy and sniff broom straw – one
way back to the lost animal kingdom.
 . 
Katherine Soniat
from Starfish Wash-Up
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❦ ❦ ❦
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Join me in celebrating the release of my newest poetry collection, How We All Fly, from The Orchard Street Press.
 . 
Poet Patricia Hooper comments: “Through close observations of the physical world, these clear, direct poems yield insights into the corresponding life of the spirit.” And Rebecca Baggett says this: “Throughout these poems, but particularly toward the collection’s end, How We All Fly leads the reader up and onward, infusing even inevitable losses with tenderness, trust, and hope.”
 . 
Thank you for your support, both of the writing you discover here in my weekly posts and of the literary arts!
 . 
You may purchase a copy of How We All Fly directly from me by mailing a check for $15 (postage included) to this address:
++++++ 131 Bon Aire Rd.
++++++ Elkin, NC 28621
Please make your check payable to Bill Griffin.
 . 
If you would prefer to pay via PayPal or Zelle, please contact me for transaction details at:
++++++ comments@griffinpoetry.com
 . 
 . 
[Patricia Hooper is author of Wild Persistence, University of Tampa Press. Rebecca Baggett’s most recent book is The Woman Who Lives Without Money, Regal House Publishing.]
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
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Doughton Park Tree 4/30/2022

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Water Dreams

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , on September 1, 2023| 10 Comments »

 . 
[ with 3 poems by Jack Coulehan]
 . 
Darwin’s Prayer
++++ He saw Darwin on his knees, and there
++++ was no difference between prayer and
++++ pulling a worm from the grass.
++++++++ Roger McDonald, Mr. Darwin’s Shooter
 . 
Bright bunches
of gardenias
bloom in November,
 . 
the loam at their feet
moistened by dew
and spongy with debris.
 . 
As I fill my container
with handfuls of earth
alive with these
 . 
marvelous worms,
perfected in being
by the wisdom
 . 
of randomness,
I’m astonished
by gratitude.
 . 
from The Talking Cure: New and Selected Poems. Plain View Press, Austin TX, © 2020
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Last night the storm whispered its secrets into my dreams. A long dryness, a vain hoping. This morning the drought has ended and flood warnings will as well in an hour or so. Linda and I head to the E&A rail trail beside Elkin Creek to laugh and point at the heights reached by frothy current. To breathe in the hot seethe and funk of saturated forest. To celebrate.
 . 
The sadness of the creek slams us, stops us, stills us. Its churning water is the color of pumpkin soup; Spike the Heron does not stalk here; the rattle of Kingfisher is silent, fled. Oh yes, we generally get muddy after a downpour, but never this bad. Miles from here, north of Carter Falls, the dry weeks have parched and cracked 500 acres of tobacco field. No riparian buffer, no catchment pond, not one single fuck does the tobacco farmer give for all of us downstream: when rain eventually returns it can’t slow itself, can’t soak the earth. It has no choice but to sluice foaming into the creek carrying inch-acres of red clay with it.
 . 
❦
 . 
The poems in Jack Coulehan’s The Talking Cure are expansive; they span the human experience and human influence. Many of his poems have arisen from his decades as teacher, physician, healer; the lines are populated by his patients and their struggles. So often these lines also reflect his own struggle, both to heal and be healed. Other poems explore his family through the generations. Others reflect his deep relationship with literary figures that formed him and with teachers who informed him.
 . 
In all of these poems I sense a web of connection. As humans we must all struggle to discover our purpose in being. In this struggle each of us is touched by the people we allow to approach us, to close in, to climb over the wall. And each of us touches others and touches the earth: the human experience and the human influence.
 . 
I selected these three poems in particular for their focused peering into that influence, and also for their universality. Jack Coulehan is a humanist, a person who believes that human beings have it within their power to improve the lives of other people whom they are willing to touch. So often, so easily and thoughtlessly, so many of us focus only on our power to dominate, to harm. We easily destroy the earth itself without even noticing. Let us stop and think. Let us feel. Let us touch and allow ourselves to be touched. Perhaps each of our individual lives can enlarge its span. The power of many begins with the power of one.
 . 
We are all downstream from someone, and all upstream.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Cherry Orchard
++++ If a great many remedies
++++ are suggested for some disease,
++++ it means the disease is incurable.
++++++++ Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard
 . 
The end of the century
has come upon us
without a sign of release
or the beginning of justice.
We’re selling the orchard
to pay our debts
and reminiscing about
love’s excitements,
life’s mistakes. I suspect
a century ago the hearts
of the people sitting here
were just as generous,
intense, and cruel as ours.
 . 
A miniature flower
thrives in the moisture
and dust of a broken
pavement – this is the gist
of the matter. We want
so strongly to believe
the flower will spread
everywhere. How quickly
it dies! If the disease
had a cure, we would not need
so many remedies.
 . 
Jack Coulehan
from The Talking Cure: New and Selected Poems. Plain View Press, Austin TX, © 2020
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Garden of Endurance
++++ Cassia grandis, Costa Rica
 . 
Cassia fruit covers the forest floor,
a blanket of black sausage stinking
in the heat as it decomposes,
a mote in the eye of permanence.
 . 
Built for grinding by gigantic teeth,
Cassia’s fibrous case condemns its seeds
to suffering, with neither mastodon
nor megatherium alive to free them
 . 
and distribute their undigested life
in mounds of shit. Its glory left behind
by climate, tooth, and claw, Cassia
endures by the grace of rodents
 . 
that gnaw its weakest fibers
and let a few fertile seeds escape
before they rot. Anachronistic
fruit, your survival – sweet tickle
 . 
of a breeze, illusion of peace,
diminishment that overcomes
extinction – is an inheritance
for my kind, too. A hopeful omen.
 . 
Jack Coulehan
from The Talking Cure: New and Selected Poems. Plain View Press, Austin TX, © 2020
 . 
For additional poems by Jack Coulehan, see last week’s post, Plow Straight, from August 25, 2023.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Join me in celebrating the release of my newest poetry collection, How We All Fly, from The Orchard Street Press.
 . 
Poet Patricia Hooper comments: “Through close observations of the physical world, these clear, direct poems yield insights into the corresponding life of the spirit.” And Rebecca Baggett says this: “Throughout these poems, but particularly toward the collection’s end, How We All Fly leads the reader up and onward, infusing even inevitable losses with tenderness, trust, and hope.”
. 
You may sample the opening poem from the collection here:
Thank you for your support, both of the writing you discover here and of the literary arts!
 . 
You may purchase a copy of How We All Fly directly from me by mailing a check for $15 (postage included) to this address:
++++++ 131 Bon Aire Rd.
++++++ Elkin, NC 28621
Please make your check payable to Bill Griffin.
 . 
If you would prefer to pay via PayPal, please contact me for transaction details at:
++++++ comments@griffinpoetry.com
 . 
 . 
[Patricia Hooper is author of Wild Persistence, University of Tampa Press. Rebecca Baggett’s most recent book is The Woman Who Lives Without Money, Regal House Publishing.]
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
IMG_0880, tree
 . 

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