Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘nature poetry’

Same and Different

Posted in Christian themes, Imagery, tagged , , , , , , on August 29, 2025| 2 Comments »

 . 
[ with Breath by Phillip Levine]
 . 
❦
 . 
God within
God around
in all creation
God is found
 . 
We joined our voices to sing this tiny hymn by Randall Pratt to conclude this morning’s worship. Sing it once and the song is no more than a breath or two. Sing it through a second time, repeat, again. The simple refrain begins to open the singers, unexpected possibilities emerge, and an idea arises in these hearts gathered here – perhaps God desires to be found. Mystery of mysteries, revealed in simplicity. Together we repeat this tiny hymn ten times and it swells to become huge within us.
 . 
❦
 . 
God is stillness.
God is moving, moving, ever moving.
God is one beautiful truth discovered.
God is anxiety that so much yet remains unknown.
God cleaves together.
God cleaves apart.
God is always the same.
God is always changing.
There is nothing that is not God.
There is nowhere that is not God.
 . 
❦
 . 
Yesterday I walked a short trail not much frequented. In a few weeks I will guide a naturalist hike along this section and yesterday I wanted to make sure I knew everything. “Same and Different,” I’m thinking to title the gathering. So many autumn flowers are the same yellow; so many different forms and lives. And although I expected I would already be familiar with everything I would see as I walked yesterday, the universe, like God of course, is always new. No coincidence there. After squishing through a damp patch, knocked out by the riot of cardinal flower and the seethe and potential of unfurling ironweed, I was suddenly halted by something different.
 . 
Yellow. Its four petals arranged at right angles were soft, curled, but when I smoothed them I found little banners on short pedicels, like the cardboard fans we hand out in Southern churches on summer Sundays. At the center of each was a powder puff cluster of pistil/stamens. One notices such details when leaning in close to make friends, but even from down the trail some meters removed this odd little plant still whispered its distinctiveness. Different and the same. Surely I’ve seen you before! How many minutes shall I pause and contemplate?
 . 
Then of course being me I looked it up. The joy is in the encounter but also in discovering all the connections. Seedbox or Rattlebox this delicate bloom is called by human beings, with an almost comical genus name, Ludwigia. But this is how I know you now – humble cousin of primrose prepared to stand up to the flash of iron and authority of cardinals.
 . 
❦
 . 
Return to this Sunday morning. We’ve closed the service with song and hugged goodbye. As the others drive away from church, I walk down to the little pond at the back of the property. I’ve seen some yellow flowers there. Even before I reach them, clustering at water’s edge, I know they are the same and different. More like a shrub than a nature trail herb, leaves narrow little arrows, but here are four soft petals that want to curl under, here is the powder puff center. Ludwigia, every day you rise up to greet me and remind me there will always be more to discover. You certainly favor damp and muck. You certainly have yellow down pat. But before I delve into your taxonomy and dig up answers I’ve yet to even question, let me simply stand here a moment and appreciate. Stillness ever moving. The unchangeable that is always new. A certain melody that is still playing in my head belongs to you, too, little flower. Within, around, in all creation . . . found.
 . 
❦
 . 
Ludwigia alternifolia   —  Seedbox
Ludwigia decurrens  —   Wingleaf Primrose-Willow
 . 

Ludwigia alternifolia

 . 

Ludwigia decurrens

 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Breath
 . 
Who hears the humming
of rocks at great height,
the long steady drone
of granite holding together,
the strumming of obsidian
to itself? I go among
the stones stooping
and pecking like a
sparrow, imagining
the glacier’s final push
resounding still. In
a freezing mountain
stream, my hand opens
scratched and raw and
flutters strangely,
more like an animal
or wild blossom in wind
than any part of me. Great
fields of stone
stretching away under
a slate sky, their single
flower the flower
of my right hand.
Last night
the fire died into itself
black stick by stick
and the dark came out
of my eyes flooding
everything. I
slept alone and dreamed
of you in an old house
back home among
your country people,
among the dead, not
any living one besides
yourself. I woke
scared by the gasping
of a wild one, scared
by my own breath, and
slowly calmed
remembering your weight
beside me all these
years, and here and
there an eye of stone
gleamed with the warm light
of an absent star.
Today
in this high clear room
of the world, I squat
to the life of rocks
jewelled in the stream
or whispering
like shards. What fears
are still held locked
in the veins till the last
fire, and who will calm
us then under a gold sky
that will be all of earth?
Two miles below on the burning
summer plains, you go
about your life one
more day. I give you
almond blossoms
for your hair, your hair
that will be white, I give
the world my worn-out breath
on an old tune, I give
it all I have
and take it back again.
 . 
Philip Levine
from New and Selected Poems by Philip Levine. Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. © 1991
online at The Academy of American Poets
 . 
❦
 . 
Please explore my new page – FLORA – which meanders from spring into summer on the Elkin & Allegheny Nature Trail (a segment of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail).
 . 
 . 
Doughton Park Tree 4/30/2022

Read Full Post »

Convolutions

Posted in ecology, family, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on August 8, 2025| 6 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Beth Copeland]
 . 
Fog
 . 
Morning fog erases the mountain and trees.
No, not an erasure but unseen.
 . 
Not an erasure but unseen.
The mountain, the laurel still green.
 . 
Unlike the mountain and laurel still green,
the dearly departed lie beneath white sheets.
 . 
The deer depart beneath white sheets
of fog, stepping into a forgotten dream
 . 
of fog slipping into a forgotten dream
the ghost mountain dreams.
 . 
The ghost mountain dreams.
Crows fly to pines on mascara wings.
 . 
Crows fly to pines on mascara wings,
mourning. Fog erases the mountain, the trees.
 . 
Beth Copeland
from I Ask the Mountain to Heal My Heart, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory NC; © 2025
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
It’s a big web, here in the corner of our screened porch, but I’m not ready yet to broom it down. The spider is a jointed dried kernel in its center; when I blow, she doesn’t twitch. I don’t see an egg pouch or spiderlings. The strands are not an orb but a diffuse tangle, a chaos of delicate angles and tensions — a miniature of filaments revealed by the background microwave radiation that weave the structure of our entire universe. And what are they made of, those filaments? These I can see before me are nanometer reworkings of hemolymph from mosquitoes denied the opportunity to bite me. Most visible when dusted with pollen. A mess. But I and my broom are not ready yet to offend, to say farewell to the tribe of spiders.
 . 
Last week we visited Blue Whales with our grandson, turning eight. The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh is hosting this exhibit of the largest creatures that have ever lived on our planet – the mystery of their migrations, language, culture; the vital interconnections between their diet of krill, their massive enriching orange poop, and the entire deep ocean ecology. Linda and I stood in silence before the model of a blue whale brain and a model of our own. The whale’s is twice as large and twice as complex, convoluted with its twisting gyri and deep sulci. Surely such an abundance of neurons and synapses must create thoughts as complex as our own. Or more so. And yet blue whales struggle to survive as a species in a world degraded by human beings. I am thinking of that brain and I am not ready yet to say farewell to the tribe of whales.
 . 
Chapel Hill cartoonist Keith Knight draws a weekly panel titled (th)ink. Today’s is a portrait of and quotation by James Baldwin (1924-1987): “To be a Negro in this country & to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” Human being who is relatively conscious, choose your own rage focal point du jour – human beings caged like animals in a Florida concentration camp; children intentionally starved to advance a particular political agenda; boosting fossil fuels burned to appease a few billionaires; an ocean filled with plastic nanoparticles and deafening human vibrations where blue whales may soon be extinct? Some days I feel like I am not ready to go on living. Some days I am more than ready to say goodbye to the tribe of humans. In a few years I will depart as an inhabitant of planet Earth. Some years after that the last memory of my having been an inhabitant will finally depart as well. On that day, will any whales still remain to swim the depths? Will any love between humans remain, or any love for other creatures? I am not ready yet to answer.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
October Valentine
 . 
A heart-shaped leaf spied in the weeds on my walk
down the hill to the mailbox. I didn’t see a redbud tree
 . 
on the roadside, so it must have lifted on the wind
and dropped – a gift! – near my feet. Is it a message
 . 
from someone I love – my sweet mother in a halo of light,
my father singing the names of trees in his strong baritone?
 . 
Or is it from someone I’ve never seen and may never meet?
 . 
As I hike up the hill, I tuck the leaf in my pocket, rubbing it
with my thumb – as if I could read it – skin to skin – by osmosis.
 . 
Halfway home, I stop to study it. Cerise with splotches of green,
dark spots, a wormhole bored like a bullet wound, a battered
 . 
heart, like yours, like mine, but maybe its scars make it more
beautiful than before. My friends, there’s still so much
 . 
love in this world even when you’re alone.
 . 
Beth Copeland
from I Ask the Mountain to Heal My Heart, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory NC; © 2025
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Is it strange for me to be toying with despair while reading a book of healing and love like Beth Copeland’s I Ask the Mountain to Heal My Heart? Actually, if you’re not toying with despair you are the strange one. Give grudging thanks, though. Thank the stars and the mysterious hemlocks and the dark fecund earth that in a world full of rage and despair there are poems like Beth Copeland’s. These poems know the feeling of being lost in endless night. These poems have been battered, they have fallen, they have doubted plenty of times whether there is any wholeness or healing available to them, but these poems stand up to testify, My friends, there’s still so much love in this world even when you’re alone.
 . 
Often I tell myself it is ridiculous to imagine that any sort of inner peace is possible. I have my share of personal regrets and ongoing grief, and even though I’m tempted to look around and envy those people who don’t, when I’m really honest I admit that no one escapes whipping. But peace can’t be a wall built around my sadness – walls keep more things in than out. Despair is inevitable. How foolish is it, then, and how strange, to spend a few hours with a book of words arranged in lines on paper and discover the tightness in my throat is easing? The mountain has rested in one place for 480 million; today its peak is less than a third of its height when it was first thrust up in the big crunch. Does it reflect on loss and diminishment, or does it find peace in the weight of its daily being? Am I inflamed and scarred by the revelations of Beth Copeland’s battles and pain, or am I grateful for her gratitude and strengthened by her strength?
 . 
The tribe of human beings seems determined to destroy itself. The tribe of human beings seems determined to link arms and hearts in love. Perhaps discovering a moment of beauty is not a cowardly attempt to escape dire reality – perhaps it is the only thing capable of healing us.
 . 
❦
 . 
Explore REDHAWK Publications, including Beth Copeland’s I Ask the Mountain to Heal My Heart and Shibori Blue: Thirty-Six Views of the Peak HERE.
 . 
Sample poems from Shibori Blue at Verse & Image HERE.
 . 
More information about the North Carolina Museum of Nature Sciences HERE.
Dive into the K Chronicles with Keith Knight HERE.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
My Daughter Paints a Mountain
 . 
She wasn’t thinking as her brush swept
across canvas in wave-length strokes,
 . 
channeling a crest she’d never seen,
while I was still in the Sandhills
 . 
where there aren’t any hills, just fields
of cotton, soybeans, and cedar stumps
 . 
in swamp water, sleeping on an air mattress
in a small apartment with prints and paintings
propped against walls instead of hung,
newly separated, newly sober, living
 . 
between the husband and home I’d left
and a haven I hadn’t found yet.
 . 
*****
 . 
As I drove up a steep road to see a house
in the Blue Ridge, a large buck leapt
 . 
in front of the car to welcome me,
and I knew I’d found my new home.
 . 
I didn’t know the mountain seen at the top
of the hill was the mountain she’d painted
 . 
months before, and she didn’t know I’d move
to that house with a view of the mountain
 . 
she’d painted as if in a dream or fugue.
How could her mountain – purple, lavender,
 . 
pink, and forest green swirled to a peak
with white streak of snow against a blue sky –
 . 
mirror the one framed in my window?
Was it coincidence or synchronicity
 . 
that the mountain in her mind’s
eye was more map than metaphor?
 . 
It was a message from the universe:
You’re home. Open the door.
 . 
Beth Copeland
from I Ask the Mountain to Heal My Heart, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory NC; © 2025
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Doughton Park Tree 2020-11-22
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 

Read Full Post »

Spring. Whatever.

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on May 9, 2025| 2 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Kathryn Kirkpatrick]
 . 
Turbulence
 . 
Of the stomach lifting. Of the weightless
where I was and am again variety.
 . 
Sway and crack, our craft. Slalom
the wind. So much carbon in the currents.
 . 
Of the climate kind. Of the jerk and twack.
Of the hurtling toward. Shake right out
 . 
of our human. As if we might not
settle back into these bodies,
 . 
but land instead in someone else.
Yet the hare far below isn’t empty
 . 
to receive us. Neither is the horse.
They have their own embodied plans.
 . 
We will have to settle beside ourselves
Blurred boundaries and all. Bump,
 . 
rattle, and creak. Our enlightened selves
grasp cokes, play solitaire, read, sleep,
 . 
going on as if what’s happening isn’t.
With more than prayers
 . 
holding us up, we are nonetheless
tossed in the vastness.
 . 
Kathryn Kirkpatrick
from Creature, Jacar Press, Durham NC; © 2025.
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
ah spring spring 
how great is spring! 
and so on 
Bashō (1644-1694)
 . 
Basho has perfectly snared my mood this morning. I am reading Spring haiku at SeasonWords.com: Ah, Winter vanquished!, Ah, new life!, blah, blah, blah. I am not feeling newly lively these days, especially not as the sun so gaily rises. By day I seem to be the rock between two storms, my father and my son, but by 4 AM I have eroded to sand and the bed is far too gritty for sleep. Now this haiku blog offers a prompt for the season and encourages sharing? Here are my Spring lines:
 . 
what to say
when everyone’s “spring, spring” –
toads trilling
 . 
In her book Haiku and Senryu: A Simple Guide for All, Charlotte Digregorio states, Wherever one lives, one experiences changing seasons. The haiku’s brief flash illuminates one specific moment. We read the terse lines and might recognize where we are, but certainly, and more critically, we do know precisely when we are. Perhaps we have never shared the haiku’s circumscribed space, but we do share the time of pollen, the humidity, crisp crackling leaves, the shivers. A moment’s experience broadens into a communal truth.
 . 
In that sense, haiku becomes less an instruction in encountering nature and more an invitation to shared humanity. Besides the experience of changing seasons, the thing we all share is the experience of suffering. A moment’s observation may stand in as a piercing metaphor: Spring’s anticipation, Summer’s lassitude, Autumn’s anxiety, Winter’s dread. And perhaps pricked by that dart of connection upon reading a haiku, we might also share one more thing – joy.
 . 
Just to be fair, I imagine my Spring haiku is not really an indictment of inane people chattering around me. On a dark night after rain, the lonesome trill of an American toad rising from down in the woods is a peace offering. My son and I stood on the deck last night and heard it together. Yes, it was very dark. This morning, light has returned. Again. Oh my. The season rolls on.
 . 
❦
 . 
In 1685, the Japanese astronomer Shibukawa Shunkai adapted the 24 Solar Terms of the Chinese calendar for Japan and created 72 seasons. As we learn at SeasonWords.com, these 72 seasons “offer a poetic journey through the Japanese year in which the land awakens and blooms with life and activity before returning to slumber.” Mark, the site’s curator and naturalist, shares lessons from nature corresponding to the seasons; haiku both ancient and modern that complement the lesson; and craft tips / kigo with a prompt and an invitation. Readers share their haiku and receive commentary.
 . 
Visit https://seasonwords.com/ and subscribe to receive periodic postings in your mailbox!
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Ridge
 . 
1.
One day I found the outline of a deer
in the snow. She’d slept on the old logging road
above our home, curled against the cold.
 . 
Her imprint on a trail I’d walked for
twenty years was intricate and vulnerable
as I now feel since strangers bought this land.
 . 
their cameras
nailed to the trunks of trees
Christ
 . 
2.
At first I waved. New to the neighborhood,
the seemed shy. Hovering at the side
of the road with their harnessed dogs, they walked
 . 
harnessed too, shoulders hunched, eyes averted.
About their money I didn’t then know, or
Appalachian families letting go of land.
 . 
orange flags
festoon the property lines
orioles in snow
 . 
3.
What we had of commons among
hill people here is gone, our hollow hollowed
out, our waves, our lifted heads, our calls across
 . 
casual borders fretted now by registered
mail. “Not authorized.” “Legal action.” They’ve
no bonds to sunder because they’ve no bonds made.
 . 
camera 1
my shetland sheepdog framed
first day of spring
 . 
4.
Surveyed for surveillance, the ridge. But I
can love what I don’t own. I miss the oaks,
their wide-girthed stillness. I miss the mountain’s
 . 
spine. Across family lands and state lines,
through Cherokee and Appalachian time,
the mountains stay. The mountains stay. They stay.
 . 
a taloned sun sets
the red-tailed hawk
needs no human hand
 . 
Kathryn Kirkpatrick
from Creature, Jacar Press, Durham NC; © 2025.
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Creatures – so we are. We seek what all creatures seek, but especially we seek the closeness of other creatures. Kathryn Kirkpatrick is visited by crows and grieves for house wrens dying and for cows separated from their calves. She reveals her creature’s struggle and confusion as she loses her mother. She is not afraid to say that she hesitates to speak of death because every creature must face death but fears to do so. She reveals moments and connections and we readers look about us to discover her light is casting our own shadow. And in the closing section of Creature, Kathryn Kirkpatrick has written the finest collection of dog poems I’ve read in twenty years.
 . 
Creature by Kathryn Kirkpatrick at Jacar Press: HERE.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
On Finding Monarch Caterpillars in September
 . 
And whatever love a parent
feels stealing bread for a starving
child, I have it as I dig by
the flimsy light of my bargain
headlamp, having driven miles for the last
of the chain-store milkweed, which will
feed these ravenous young in their striped
skins, who are no metaphor, who stand for
themselves only, though in my ecological
worry, my long-range fright, I am surely
standing for something as I shovel in the dark.
 . 
Kathryn Kirkpatrick
from Creature, Jacar Press, Durham NC; © 2025.
 . 
In their multi-generational migration pattern, the endangered monarch butterfly bears its fourth generation in September and October. Rather than dying after two to six weeks as the earlier generations do, this generation migrates to warmer climates like California and Mexico, living six to eight months before starting the process again. – K.K.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
 . 

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »