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Tiny Tiny Flowers

Posted in Ecopoetry, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Ecopoetry, imagery, Louise Gluck, Mary Oliver, nature photography, nature poetry, poetry, Tim Seibles on March 29, 2024| 11 Comments »

[with 3 poems from The Ecopoetry Anthology]

First Verse

I admit the world remains almost beautiful.

The dung beetles snap on their iridescent jackets

despite the canine holiness of the Vatican

and, despite the great predatory surge of industry,

two human hands still mate like butterflies

when buttoning a shirt.

++++++++++++++++ Some mornings

I take myself away from the television

and go outside where the only news comes

as fresh air folding over the houses.

And I feel glad for an hour in which race

and power and all the momentum of history

add up to nothing

As if from all the mad grinding

in my brain, a single blue lily had grown –

my skull open like a lake. I can hear

an insect sawing itself into what must be

a kind of speech.

++++++++++++ I know there is little

mercy to be found among us, that we have

already agreed to go down fighting, but

I should be more amazed: look

at the blood and guess who’s holding

the knives. Shouldn’t we be more

amazed? Doesn’t the view

just blister your eyes?

To have come this long way, to stand

on two legs, to be ++ not tarantulas

or chimpanzees ++ but soldiers of our own

dim-witted enslavement. To utterly miss the door

to the enchanted palace. To see myself

coined into a stutter. To allow the money

to brand us ++ and the believers

to blindfold our lives.

+++++++++++++++ In the name

of what? If that old book was true

the first verse would say ++ Embrace

the world. ++ Be friendly. ++ The forests

are glad you breathe.

I see now

The Earth itself does have a face.

If it could say I ++ it would

plead with the universe, the way

dinosaurs once growled

at the stars.

++++++++ It’s like

the road behind us is stolen

completely ++ so the future can

never arrive. So, look at this: look

what we’ve done. With all

we knew.

With all we knew

that we knew.

Tim Seibles

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I bend to pinch off a few stems as I walk down the drive beside the school. What is this tiny blossom? Four petals no bigger than a sliver of fingernail, lavender, pointed and neat. Whorl of slender leaves. Poking up through asphalt where it hugs the brick wall. I finger the hand lens in my pocket.

By the time I reach the ball field where the middle schoolers are at recess, I’ve gathered a mini-bouquet of the usual suspects: blue violets, henbit, deadnettle, bittercress. Their teacher turns them over to me and I lay out the plan, an hour and a half of Science Friday. Each takes their little paper cup and we spread out. The neglected. The overlooked. The beautiful in their own tiny tiny way – these are our quarry.

Sure, most folks would say we’re gathering weeds, and in a minute we’ll discuss that word, “weed,” something growing where it isn’t wanted. For now we scour the waste places, along the storage shed and storm fence, within the winter-brown kudzu invading from the ditch. Their cups fill up with yellow, pink, lavender, blue. After half an hour we sit down at the picnic tables behind the school; I pass around magnifying glasses and ask them to draw a tiny tiny flower as large as they can make it. And they do!

Are these kids listening while I talk about taxonomy and plant families, about native versus introduced, about flower anatomy of the little mints and asters we’ve discovered? Whether they are or not, I’m pretty confident that there will be days in the future when they look down at their feet and notice something they never paid attention to before.

It becomes a habit, this paying attention. I can’t not see them now. These tiny tiny flowers are not in my lawn – they are my lawn. OK, sometimes I pull up the mock strawberry and the bittercress when they crowd my “flowers,” and I do dig dandelions out of the front walk, but I’ll not curse them for their tenacity. Instead, I’ll do my best not to make them feel unwanted. I’ll resist the impulse to call them weeds.

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Here’s what you’d discover in the mini-bouquet from our paper cups:

Henbit +++++ Lamia amplexicaule

Deadnettle +++++ Lamia purpurea

Creeping Charlie +++++ Glechoma hederacea

Common Blue Violet +++++ Viola sororia

American Field Pansy +++++ Viola bicolor

Common Dandelion +++++ Taraxacum officinale

Common Groundsel +++++ Senecio vulgaris

Hairy Bittercress +++++ Cardamine hirsuta

Smallflower Fumewort +++++ Corydalis micantha

Yellow Fumewort +++++ Corydalis flavula

Cut-leaved Crane’s-bill +++++ Geranium dissectum

Early Buttercup +++++ Ranunculus fascicularis

Mock Strawberry +++++ Potentilla indica

Common Chickweed +++++ Stellaria media

And my tiny tiny lavender blossom, the one you wouldn’t even notice for a flower within its handful of green if you hadn’t knelt before it?

Field Madder +++++ Sherardia arvensis

A member of the same family as my all time favorite plant genus, Coffea.

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Scilla

Not I, you idiot, not self, but we, we – waves

of sky blue like

a critique of heaven: why

do you treasure your voice

when to be one thing

is to be next to nothing?

Why do you look up? To hear

an echo like the voice

of god? You are all the same to us,

solitary, standing above us, planning

your silly lives: you go

where you ware sent, like all things,

where the wind plants you,

one or another of you forever

looking down and seeing some image

of water, and hearing what? Waves,

and over waves, birds singing.

Louise Glück

Scilla, in English also called Squill, is a genus of bulb-forming lily-like flowers that spread in a carpet of blossoms.

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The Lilies Break Open Over the Dark Water

Inside

+ that mud-hive, that gas sponge,

+ + that reeking

+ + + leaf yard, that rippling

dream-bowl, the leeches’

+ flecked and swirling

+ + broth of life, as rich

+ + + as Babylon,

the fists crack

+ open and the wands

+ + of the lilies

+ + + quicken, they rise

like pale poles

+ with their wrapped beaks of lace;

+ + one day

+ + + they tear the surface,

the next they break open

+ over the dark water.

+ + And there you are,

+ + + on the shore,

fitful and thoughtful, trying

+ to attach them to an idea –

+ + some news of your own life.

+ + + But the lilies

are slippery and wild – they are

+ devoid of meaning, they are

+ + simply doing,

+ + + from the deepest

spurs of their being,

+ what they are impelled to do

+ + every summer.

+ + + And so, dear sorrow, are you.

Mary Oliver

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Tim Seibles (b. 1955) has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts; he teaches at Old Dominion University and in the Stonecoast MFA program, and leads workshops for the Cave Canem Foundation. First Verse appears in Buffalo Head Solos.

Louise Glück (1943-2023) received the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris (1993), in which Scilla appears and won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature. She served as US Poet Laureate 2003-2004.

Mary Oliver (1935-2019) received the Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive (1984) and the National Book Award for New and Selected Poems (1992), in which The Lilies Break Open Over the Dark Water appears.

More about Trinity University Press and The Ecopoetry Anthology HERE

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Embrace

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Ecopoetry, imagery, Joanie McLean, Like Wind into Air, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing on February 23, 2024| 11 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Joanie McLean]

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

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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

that’s all

just this holy light

just for now.

Joanie McLean

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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.

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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

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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!!