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Posts Tagged ‘nature poetry’

What Claims Us – Poems for the Earth

Posted in Imagery, tagged Bill Griffin, Earth Day, Ecopoetry, imagery, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry on April 25, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Golden Ragwort, Packera aurea

[poems by Charles Simic, Sylvia Plath, Katharine Spadaro,

Rosanna Warren – selected and shared by

Sharon Sharp, Kitsey Burns, Brad Strahan, Bill Griffin]

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photographs in today’s post are from the banks of Dutchman Creek,

Elkin NC, within a 2 meter diameter circle, taken on April 16, 2025

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Stone

Go inside a stone.

That would be my way.

Let somebody else become a dove

Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth.

I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:

No one knows how to answer it.

Yet within, it must be cool and quiet

Even though a cow steps on it full weight,

Even though a child throws it in a river;

The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed

To the river bottom

Where the fishes come to knock on it

And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out

When two stones are rubbed,

So perhaps it is not dark inside after all:

Perhaps there is a moon shining

From somewhere, as though behind a hill-

Just enough light to make out

The strange writings, the star-charts

On the inner walls.

Charles Simic

Charles Simic’s Stone delights me because I’ve been a rockhound since childhood. This poem celebrates the mysterious, silent presence I’m aware of when holding stones, turning them in my hands, and wondering about the part of Earth’s – and even the cosmos’s – history each one represents. I keep stones as reminders of my own history, and clear scenes from various places emerge anew as I cradle these inanimate yet vibrant objects tying me to the natural world. I take Stone as an invitation to savor what is interior, silent, often overlooked, and unique in all aspects of nature.

I keep a wrinkled, often-read copy of Stone posted near some of my collected treasures, including the tektite that inspired my own poem, which follows. – Sharon Sharp

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Tektite

From my necklace chain dangles a shiny,

pocked, black-glass exclamation point,

minus the dot, full of chemical clues

about celestial origins and a likely

ancient collision: a comet or an

asteroid smashing into Earth.

Upon impact, melted shards

catapulted back into the

outer atmosphere, then

descended, cooling.

The hard rain that

pelted hundreds

of miles still

mesmerizes

dreamers.

Sharon A. Sharp

Snakewort (Liverwort), Conocephalum salebrosum

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The Beekeeper’s Daughter

A garden of mouthings. Purple, scarlet-speckled, black

The great corollas dilate, peeling back their silks.

Their musk encroaches, circle after circle,

A well of scents almost too dense to breathe in.

Hieratical in your frock coat, maestro of the bees,

You move among the many-breasted hives,

My heart under your foot, sister of a stone.

Trumpet-throats open to the beaks of birds.

The Golden Rain Tree drips its powders down.

In these little boudoirs streaked with orange and red

The anthers nod their heads, potent as kings

To father dynasties. The air is rich.

Here is a queenship no mother can contest—

A fruit that’s death to taste: dark flesh, dark parings.

In burrows narrow as a finger, solitary bees

Keep house among the grasses. Kneeling down

I set my eye to a hole-mouth and meet an eye

Round, green, disconsolate as a tear.

Father, bridegroom, in this Easter egg

Under the coronal of sugar roses

The queen bee marries the winter of your year.

Sylvia Plath

from The Kenyon Review, Autumn 1960 • Vol. XXII No. 4

I sat down this morning to read some Sylvia Plath poetry. I read The Bell Jar for the first time a few years ago, while at my Dad’s deathbed. You would think it would have been a poor choice for that time in my life, but truly I loved the book, so beautifully written. So my Earth Day selection from Plath is The Beekeeper’s Daughter. Bees are the ultimate example of community working together for good. This piece is very sensual and dark, in a way too. For me it is a reminder that light and darkness, life and death are an irrevocable part of the human experience. While we may be in a time of darkness and existential dread about the future of our earth, it is imperative now more than ever, that we seek community to sustain us.

Thank you, Bill, for these lovely poems you send each week. It brightens my week immensely when I am able to take the time to read them. – Kitsey Burns

Star Chickweed, Stellaria pubera

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The Day of the Funeral

Are you ready? they say, preparing to go. The search

how to say, how to feel, becomes a groping for jackets,

a finding of shoes. I look for a place to tie up my hair

and there is the cabinet, forever there.

Its mirrored backing can barely be seen

behind gold-speckled teacups, presents child-made,

crystal marching away to the past. Kneeling on carpet

I join in this scene and serious features

echo and float amongst

gilt generations of gently washed china.

An accordion of hands is fixing my hair.

Has anyone ever been ready?

Katherine Spadaro

from Visions International, Vol. 109

I often think of how much we have buried or pushed nature aside but she is there waiting and will sooner or later reclaim it all from us, our brief, brief dominion.

For earth day I thought of the subtext of this little poem from the past (mine). – Bradley Strahan

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Ghosts

In a lost corner of childhood

where marshland sleeps

beneath concrete,

the tide of evening

still climbs the forest wall.

Across the pond,

now drained and lawned,

the path looks westward

through the red receding flood of day.

There June is always a memory of redwings

singing with a chorus of frogs,

and in dank basements ghost cattails grow

through the temporary habitations of man.

Bradley Strahan

Rattlesnake Fern, Botrypus virginianus

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The Cormorant

for Eunice

Up through the buttercup meadow the children lead

their father. Behind them, gloom

of spruce and fir, thicket through which they pried

into the golden ruckus of the field, toward home:

this rented house where I wait for their return

and believe the scene eternal. They have been out

studying the economy of the sea. The trudged to earn

sand-dollars, crab claws, whelk shells, the huge debt

repaid in smithereens along the shore:

ocean, old blowhard, wheezing in the give

and take, gulls grieving the shattered store.

It is your death I can’t believe,

last night, inland, away from us, beyond

these drawling compensations for the moon.

If there’s an exchange for you, some kind of bond,

it’s past negotiation. You died alone.

Across my desk wash memories of ways

I’ve tried to hold you: that poem of years ago

starring you in your mater dolorosa phase;

or my Sunday picnic sketch in which the show

is stolen by your poised, patrician foot

above whose nakedness the party floats.

No one can hold you now. The point is moot.

I see you standing, marshalling your boats

of gravy, chutney, cranberry, at your vast

harboring Thanksgiving table, fork held aloft

while you survey the victualling of your coast.

We children surged around you, and you laughed.

Downstairs the screen door slams, and slams me back

into the present, which you do not share.

Our children tumble in, they shake the pack

of sea-treasures out on table, floor, and chair.

But now we tune our clamor to your quiet.

The deacon spruces keep the darkest note

though hawkweed tease us with it saffron riot.

There are some wrecks from which no loose planks float,

nothing the sea gives back. I walked alone

on the beach this morning, watching a cormorant

skid, thudding, into water. It dove down

into that shuddering darkness where we can’t

breathe. Impossibly long. Nothing to see.

Nothing but troughs and swells

over and over hollowing out the sea.

And, beyond the cove, the channel bells.

Rosanna Warren

In the Afterword to Small Planet, Robert Pack writes, “When the primary models for beauty and creativeness no longer are grounded in nature, we will already have evolved into another kind of species. . . . Without the sense of beauty that derives from an awareness of others, from the realization that we are merely creatures in an evolving world that we share with other creatures, a prior world on which our fabricated cultural world depends, the capacity for taking delight in our surroundings will wither away. Even before the planet becomes inhospitable to the human species, we will have died in spirit.”

One thing we inevitably share with every other creature is our mortality. Turning our backs and refusing to see death, or chasing promises to extend our lives at all costs, are simply among the many ways that we also choose to ignore and overlook life. Lichen stone and bee, ghost cattail and cormorant, I will sit down at your wake and invite you to mine. Until that day, let us live together. – Bill Griffin

Sensitive Fern, Onoclea sensibilis

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Earth Day 2025 – Poems for the Earth

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Earth Day, ecology, Ecopoetry, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry on April 22, 2025| 5 Comments »

[poems by Veiga Simões, Barbara Conrad, Mary Oliver, Camille Dungy –

selected and shared by Christina Baumis, David Radavich,

Scott Owens, Bill Griffin]

Ao Viandante

(To the Person Who Passes Through This Place)

You that pass and raise your arm to me

before you hurt me, look at me well.

I am the heat of your home in the cold winter nights.

I am the friendly shade that you find

when walking under the August sun

And my fruits are appetizing freshness

That satisfy your thirst on the way.

I am the friendly beam of your house, the board of your table

the bed in which you rest and the wood of your boat.

I am handle of your hoe, the door of your dwelling

the wood of your cradle and of your own coffin.

I am the bread of goodness and the flower of beauty.

You that pass, look at me well and do no harm.

Veiga Simões

a tree with a poem on sign beneath it, located in Lisbon, Portugal.

https://www.kruckeberg.org/a-tree-poem/

This poem brings into stark view how we use and harm trees in a final plea from the tree; “You pass, look at me well and do no harm.” The poem certainly made me ponder the consideration of a grove of trees and what they give of themselves for us and our community over generations from their community. As a nature lover who enjoys walks under and among trees, trees had my gratitude already, yet this poem enhanced it even more. The poem is written almost a caveat, testimonial, or witness statement from the specific tree in Lisbon. The article in which this appeared had a nice side note about the relationship between tree canopies and crime rates, too. – Christina Baumis

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Evergreen trees are like nature’s high rises; their community intermingles to sustain ecosystems as well as us. Posted on the California Urban Forests Councils’ Facebook Page (published on January 21, 2024) from their Haiku contest 2024.

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The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: ‘What good is it?’ If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. … To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering. – Aldo Leopold

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Blue in Winter, Blame the Moon

+++ after a New York Times article on biological rhythms,

+++ peppered with phrases from the dining section

Blue in winter, blame the moon, say the scientists

for anyone living dark in the northern latitudes.

Overeating, sleeping in fits, activity cycles

shifted—even for mutant hamsters and fruit flies.

We trudge through cabbage season, tongue tingling

at the thought of gumbo and Sazerac, more laissez-faire

than the fusty French. Earth spins and the moon

thumps inside our cells. Trillions of clocks, ticking, ticking.

The universe feels it. Some cataclysm must have caused

our nights to topple like this, seasons spliced

like a butchered hog. We’re a mélange of earth crust

and asteroid dust—yes, that asteroid,

ejected into space, continuing as moon, tilting

primordial earth. We are orbs of something

we can’t quite claim. A recipe for stardust.

Chickpeas coming home to roost.

Barbara Conrad

I have long been a fan of Barbara Conrad’s poetry, admiring her commitment to social justice causes. This poem is remarkable for its yoking of the cosmic and the everyday, with climate change radiating in the nexus between galactic forces and routine human activities like eating and sleeping. Plus lots of colorful imagery you can feel and taste. The final line is a trenchant joke but also brings the interplanetary down to earth, namely to our dinner tables. Delicious! – David Radavich

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In the New Year

Ice is on the move—

broken off and floating freely

toward South Georgia Island

with a force to wipe out

indigenous life

and redirect our planet.

Those of us far away

see mostly waters rising,

rising, claiming

sand and beach houses

and boats of the wealthy

along lapping shores.

Carving of life

by the power of tides.

So we arrive at

another year: uprisings,

more ire in politics,

love reduced to islands

under siege,

we move inward

to protect ourselves—

bold nesting terns

or astronauts

in deepest space.

David Radavich

from Snapdragon

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All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land. – Aldo Leopold

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Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Mary Oliver

One of my favorite poems ever by one of my favorite poets ever. Wild Geese simply reminds me of my place in the intricate web of existence, in the universal community. – Scott Owens

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Wild and Precious

In Memoriam, Mary Oliver, 1/17/19

Seen at a distance this time of year

when trees are silhouettes

against a white sky

every shadow, I think,

must be a bird I’d like to identify,

waxwings, falcon, the largest of them

surely a beautiful hawk waiting

to chase a careless squirrel

across the yard and twice

around the trunk of the pecan tree,

rising on perfectly banked wings

so close it could almost reach out

and grasp the tuft of tail fur

dancing behind.

Often it turns out to be mistletoe,

nest, mere leftover leaves,

but even these speak

of life that was,

that will soon enough return,

and that thankfully always is.

Mary Oliver, the woman I’ve introduced

to more than 40 years of new students

as one of our greatest living poets,

died today,

but in view of trees, and birds,

and winter skies, and everything

that can be expressed in leaves,

it is impossible to think of her

as ever going away.

Scott Owens

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A philosopher has called this imponderable essence the numenon of material things. It stands in contradistinction to phenomenon, which is ponderable and predictable, even to the tossing and turning of the remotest star. The grouse is the numenon of the north woods, the blue jay of the hickory groves, the whisky-jack of the muskegs, the piñonero of the juniper foothills. – Aldo Leopold

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Trophic Cascade

After the reintroduction of gray wolves

to Yellowstone and, as anticipated, their culling

of deer, trees grew beyond the deer stunt

of the mid century. In their up reach

songbirds nested, who scattered

seed for underbrush, and in that cover

warrened snowshoe hare. Weasel and water shrew

returned, also vole, and came soon hawk

and falcon, bald eagle, kestrel, and with them

hawk shadow, falcon shadow. Eagle shade

and kestrel shade haunted newly-berried

runnels where mule deer no longer rummaged, cautious

as they were, now, of being surprised by wolves. Berries

brought bear, while undergrowth and willows, growing

now right down to the river, brought beavers,

who dam. Muskrats came to the dams, and tadpoles.

Came, too, the night song of the fathers

of tadpoles. With water striders, the dark

gray American dipper bobbed in fresh pools

of the river, and fish stayed, and the bear, who

fished, also culled deer fawns and to their kill scraps

came vulture and coyote, long gone in the region

until now, and their scat scattered seed, and more

trees, brush, and berries grew up along the river

that had run straight and so flooded but thus dammed,

compelled to meander, is less prone to overrun. Don’t

you tell me this is not the same as my story. All this

life born from one hungry animal, this whole,

new landscape, the course of the river changed,

I know this. I reintroduced myself to myself, this time

a mother. After which, nothing was ever the same.

Camille T. Dungy

from Trophic Cascade, Wesleyan University Press. August 16, 2021 at Poems.com

Yesterday walking beside Elkin Creek, Linda and I remarked that Wood Anemone and Star Chickweed like to grow together. Each white bloom points to its friend and neighbor. Why? Just the right balance of sun and shade for them both? Enough nourishment in the leaf mould but not too much? Are their tiny hands clasped beneath the surface in a group hug of mycorrhizal fungus?

I remind myself that the connections and community are so much vaster than I can even imagine. And I recall this final quotation by Aldo Leopold:

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. . . Modern natural history deals only incidentally with the identity of plants and animals, and only incidentally with their habits and behaviors. It deals principally with their relations to each other, their relations to the soil and water in which they grow, and their relations to the human beings who sing about “my Country” but see little or nothing of its inner workings. – Aldo Leopold

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What We Need – Poems for the Earth

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, Imagery, tagged Bill Griffin, Earth Day, ecology, Ecopoetry, imagery, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, poetry on April 18, 2025| 3 Comments »

Like a great poet, Nature knows how to produce the greatest effects with the most limited means. – Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)

[poems by Wendell Berry, Gerard Manley Hopkins,

Chapman Hood Frazier, Maria Rouphail, Charles Carr –

shared by Les Brown, Joyce Brown, Joan Barasovska, Bill Griffin]

What We Need is Here

Geese appear high over us,

pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,

as in love or sleep, holds

them to their way, clear

in the ancient faith: what we need

is here. And we pray, not

for new earth or heaven, but to be

quiet in heart, and in eye,

clear. What we need is here.

Wendell Berry

The Poetry Foundation

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When I read What We Need is Here, Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese came to mind. And this poem gives us permission to accept what is here because it is ingrained in our very being as is the flight of geese overhead. Nature can provide all we need. Not explicit, but implicit, in the poem, nature can only provide all we need if we respect and protect it. – Les Brown

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God’s Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985)

Selected and shared by Joyce Brown

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Surviving the Six Worlds

for David Sanipass

In the sixth world of the Mi’k maq

you walk as if in water

fluid, changing and final.

Each world a hybrid you move through,

a blink, bend and flutter

where the roots are

and in each power, a sigh or shadow

at the edges of things

that live beyond you

in their hush and whisper.

Water becomes land

and land, air.

The golden frog in the dead pool,

the black bear

and, in your long dream, a word

becomes a crow’s call you wake from

that erodes into this life and back again.

Learn where to walk and where not to,

listen to the wind as if it too might

become you. Discover in your feet

where each path leads. Look,

a redwing blackbird

settles on the birch branch

and, in its croak, you glide

in a slow melt and shine,

a transparency

as solid as stone

but in a flash, gone.

Smell the lilac in the wind

and feel how your foot will ache

before finding its step, this your ?

signature into a white world

where you decay

green and back again.

Chapman Hood Frasier

from The Lost Books of the Bestiary, V Press LC, February 2023.

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I hope you love birds, too. It is economical. It saves going to Heaven. – Emily Dickinson

Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a song bird will come. – Chinese proverb

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I Buried a Little Bird Today

in the backyard

behind the old beech.

What sort of bird I cannot say,

or its age or where in its body

it suffered the fatal flaw.

I only held in one hand

its beating wings, the closed claw

and gaping beak,

its shuddering feathered head.

And when it stopped, I dug a hole

and to the beech I said,

Be kind, be kind.

Maria Rouphail

from This small house, this big sky (Redhawk Publications, 2025)

My connection to this poem is as the bird itself. At its dying moments it lies loved and protected in kind hands, as I hope to be. We cannot know, as the speaker cannot know about the bird, what our “fatal flaw” will be. Trust in my loved ones and in a loving God connect me to the little bird buried with compassion under the beech. – Joan Barasovska

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I was a girl, shy and secretive

If I just ran fast enough – I was the fastest one –

I knew I could take off, fly, I mean, not sprout wings

or turn into a bird or angel but, as in a recurring dream,

leave the broken sidewalk below, float above the kids

I played with, higher, above the giant sycamore. Higher.

God was sorry I felt so bad.

Joan Barasovska

from The Power of the Feminine I: Poems from the Feminine Perspective; ThreshPress Midwest (volume 002, 2024)

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Appalachian Come Inside

Morning ends

like a last bite

of apple,

fifty degrees

but who’s counting,

January and coffee

strong enough to hold

my own turns sixty-one,

I would click my heels

if not for their knees.

A tall hickory pitches

a bird at the sky,

noon is a high fly ball,

The New River is quiet

applause,

the air so clean it splashes

the city from my face

and I want to say thank you

but the sun is already

an arm of you’re welcome

around my shoulder.

Charles Carr

from Autumn Sky Poetry, January 29, 2018.

Today when I walk outdoors I hope I remember to invite that arm around my shoulder. I confess I need it. – Bill Griffin

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If we can believe that we are loved just as we are and that everything else is equally loved, we unveil a cosmic reality that is life-giving and a Christ-like reality that affirms the goodness of all creation. — Barbara Holmes

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