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Like a great poet, Nature knows how to produce the greatest effects with the most limited means. – Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)
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[poems by Wendell Berry, Gerard Manley Hopkins,
Chapman Hood Frazier, Maria Rouphail, Charles Carr –
shared by Les Brown, Joyce Brown, Joan Barasovska, Bill Griffin]
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What We Need is Here
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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.
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Wendell Berry
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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
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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.
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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.
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Gerard Manley Hopkins
Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985)
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Selected and shared by Joyce Brown
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Surviving the Six Worlds
for David Sanipass
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In the sixth world of the Mi’k maq
you walk as if in water
fluid, changing and final.
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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.
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Water becomes land
and land, air.
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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.
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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,
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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.
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Smell the lilac in the wind
and feel how your foot will ache
before finding its step, this your ?
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signature into a white world
where you decay
green and back again.
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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
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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
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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.
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Maria Rouphail
from This small house, this big sky (Redhawk Publications, 2025)
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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Charles Carr
from Autumn Sky Poetry, January 29, 2018.
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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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