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Augury — Zoo Poetry Day 5

Posted in Imagery, tagged Ann Deagon, Nature Deficit Disorder, nature poetry, NC Zoo, poetry, Poetry of Conservation, Zoo Poetry on July 12, 2012| 1 Comment »

Wilderness is essential in the lives of children. I mean essential,
like edible food, drinkable water, breathable air. I cannot imagine
a decent, sane and healthy life without it.
Edward Abbey

When our grandson Saul was born we bought a framed poster for his nursery: mother and child giraffe, very similar to the photos we’re seeing from the NC Zoo of Juma (born July 6). We actually thought it might be a little scary for a small child, the huge animal bending to lick the head of the youngster, and we were actually a little surprised that Allison and Josh hung it directly over Saul’s crib. It’s still there.

Last week I was playing with Saul, now four, in the living room while Linda prepared to go to the grocery store. She had her hand on the front door when she looked back over her shoulder and called to us to come QUICK! A four-foot long black rat snake was undulating across the dining room (Pantherophis obsoletus, I think – I didn’t really handle it to examine the finer details). It froze when it sensed her. Until Saul and I came running in, that is, when it tried to escape back down the basement stairs.

I should have come to the Zoo two weeks ago, because there’s a poster at the Streamside installation that diagrams how to get a snake out of your house. I cornered it with a broom while Linda brought me a plastic bucket. The snake actually seemed quite relieved to be in a dark, enclosed space with a bucket over it. I scooped bucket and all into the end of a cardboard box, and then we made a little expedition down the block to the edge of the woods.

Saul stood right beside me while I slowly lifted the bucket. The snake climbed the side of the box easily, its body extending a full foot or more before it cascaded down into the grass. Saul remarked at how the tall grass moved from side to side as Mr. Snake slithered out of sight into the woods. A four-year old naturalist.

When Allison came to pick Saul up that evening we weren’t really intending to inform her about the adventure (would she ever accept an invitation to dinner again?), but Saul is Mr. Story-teller. Once the truth was out his Mom asked him, “Were you afraid?”

“No! My favorite animals are giraffes, kitties, and snakes!”

. . . . .

Augury

Tonight my father cupped his hands and blew
into their hollow sphere and brought to life
the long wild resonant cry
of country boyhood, owl-haunted evenings
and the dark modulations of distant hounds,
fluttered his fingers throbbing into memory
those sobbing whistles hunting down the rails
my childhood dreaming in the restless city.

And as my children wondered cupping their hands
to capture that primeval mimicry
of all that haunts and heightens our precarious sense
of living rooted in immemorial time,
I saw my father new, and shared his knowing
the secret of our give and take of breath:
live long enough to know that we are dying,
hand on with tenderness and dignity
our resonant art
the long learned call
of trumpeter man.

Ann Deagon

. . . . .

In a few minutes I’m heading down to the soon to be completely renovated KidZone in the Zoo. I’m presenting a lunch time poetry workshop for the staff – we’re going to each write a “persona poem,” in first person in the voice of an animal we love or identify with. An imagination stretcher. It’s the same workshop I’ll be doing with children tomorrow. Who will be most convincing at assuming the persona of an animal? On the other hand, who hasn’t taken the voice of the Three Bears or the Big Bad Wolf or other Wild Things when reading to son, daughter, niece, nephew? What’s the opposite of “anthropomorphize?” Here’s an opportunity not only to be a spectator to wildness but to express the wildness within ourselves. I cannot imagine a decent, sane, and healthy life without it.

. . . . .

In her bio in the anthology Word and Witness, Ann Deagon remarked that she didn’t begin writing until she was forty, “when that three-headed dog love death and poetry took me in its teeth and shook me.” She subsequently published six collections of poetry and has written fiction and plays. She taught Classics at Guilford College and has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literary Fellowship.

. . . .

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A Songbird Will Come – Zoo Poetry Day 4

Posted in Imagery, tagged birds, Mary Belle Campbell, nature poetry, NC Zoo, poetry, Poetry of Conservation, Songbird, Zoo Poetry on July 11, 2012| 7 Comments »

Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a songbird will come.
Chinese Proverb

It’s five o’clock. The waterbuck and Thomson’s gazelle single-file it to their nighttime holding. Moms with strollers and jostling teenagers single-file it for Akiba exit. I lean against the railing at Rhino as the breeze freshens and a suggestion of thunder growls to the south. The last guest in the Park ignores his cell and joins me.

The great horned beasts are standing now, three of them in the distance across the browning field, the vast male turned profile to us. First time I’ve actually seen them move – today’s rain popped July’s hot bubble and the rhinos now seem willing to forsake their shade. The man eyes my camera. “Bet you can really zoom in on them with that lens.”

“No, it’s not really much of a telephoto. I got a good look with these, though.” I fish my binoculars out of my pack and hand them to him.

He thanks me and sighs. “I love the rhinos. I came just to see them. Oh, I love all the animals, but I really wanted to get a good look at the rhinos.”

Now all three are moving across our field of vision, a slow parade for the man who loves them. He watches them out of sight. At last he returns the binocs, thanks me again, and hustles toward the exit. Tomorrow he and his family are on to Wilmington, but today he’s had his moment.

. . . . .

It was raining this morning, but I couldn’t go back to sleep. I called Zoo Com and got permission to enter the Park early. By 7:30 I had walked past bellowing alligators in the cypress swamp and crept to the edge of marsh (just below North America Plaza). It was still sprinkling. A yellowthroat sang. Barn swallows perched at the tips of tall reeds in between their insect forays. Then in the world of muted green and gray something larger moved.

A green heron was perched on the lowest branch of a dead bush at marsh’s edge. No, two green herons! The lower one assumed hunting posture while the second, perched higher, preened. My camera doesn’t have much of a telephoto; I would just have to watch them. It was all I could do. Bullfrogs and leopard frogs played a counterpoint duet. The yellowthroat sang and sang from low in the water grasses. Swallows flashed their ruddy chins and forked tails. And the two herons acted as if their rapier bills, their fencer’s stance, and their plumage, hunter green and bronze, were just the most natural things imaginable.

. . . . .

Pine Lake at Twilight

Whispering Pines, NC 1975

In the afterglow of February sundown
I hear the honking of two migrating ducks
over-flying our home –
fore-flyers of the flocks to come.

They swoop down over the pine-rimmed lake,
land on water, join the wintering mallards,
the pintails and widgeons feeding here
on the corn we spread at water’s edge.

The air tonight is soft as the lapping water,
sweet with songs of indefinable
pre-spring waking, quiet as the maples
lining the inlet to the pine-rimmed lake,

their branches reddening, swelling to liven
with starbursts of strange red-brown
tree flowers. Something of last year’s
dying is in the air, swelling to ripen anew.

Even as we do. We go from one year,
one love, one life, to another,
knowing spring will unfold us, summer
fly us, autumn flay us, till our veins

burst with longing to understand,
and we drop down – to lie with mosses
and fungi – under layers of leaves,
flexing our muscles on stone.

Mary Belle Campbell

. . . . .

Mary Belle Campbell was a devoted supporter of poetry in North Carolina, influencing a generation with her teaching, her encouragement, and her support of the NC Poetry Society and its endeavors. She endowed the NCPS Brockman-Campbell Award, which has been bestowed upon such notable poets as A.R.Ammons, Charles Edward Eaton, James Applewhite, Fred Chappell, and many others. When Peg, as she is known, was in her nineties she made a donation to become a lifetime member of the NC Poetry Society. Our memories of her thrive.

. . . . .

“I love all the animals.” I believe you, rhinocerous-loving man. I do, too. But the birds I can just watch and watch. There are Eastern Bluebirds nesting beneath the eaves just outside my window at Schindler Learning Center. I hear the cheeping each time they bring an insect to the nestlings (like every five minutes); sometimes one parent will perch on the Handicapped Parking sign with a beakful while waiting for the other to finish at the nest.

This drizzly morning at Dragonfly Pointe I heard a familiar gravelly rattle across the water and spotted a Belted Kingfisher ascending to his surveillance vantage in a dead snag. In just a minute or two he swooped down and caught a small fish; he carried it to the far shore of the lake to eat while swallows accompanied him. Harassing? Fighter escort? They gave up when he reached his perch.

Yesterday at Oak Hill (a picnic area above Hippo Beach) I heard a Red-Shouldered Hawk with a somewhat tentative call. Hmmm . . . suspicious. Sure enough, soon enough two Blue Jays flew out of the huge white oak, one of them assuredly the mimic.

. . . . .

For an hour or so this evening after all the visitors had vacated the Park I sat and wrote these comments. It was after 6:00 when I left – as I passed Forest’s Edge, a raccoon was hunkered down in the giraffe’s high-mount feeding trough. He looked quite sheepish when he realized I’d spotted him.

. . . . .

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To Teach the Heart – Zoo Poetry Day 3

Posted in Imagery, tagged Anna Wooten-Hawkins, baby giraffe, imagery, Juma, nature, nature poetry, NC Zoo, poetry, Poetry of Conservation on July 10, 2012| 2 Comments »

This afternoon Ellen and Christa showed me a secret or two about how the magic is done. Master welder, painter, and fabricator, Christa is one of seven sculptors who work in the design section at the NC Zoo. We had just been looking at models of the new polar bear exhibit that will open in stages over the next two years. I noticed a lichen-encrusted slab on the work table. I picked it up. It was a light sheet of some composite material painted in layers – I’ll still swear it was lichen.

Christa said, “When the visitors don’t even notice that the stones are hand-made, then we’ve done our job.”

Does that mean that the Zoo’s mission is to create illusion? No, the mission is to transcend and transport: to transcend illusion and transport the visitor into a larger reality. It is no accident that the sections have titles like “forest edge,” “African plains,” “rocky coast.” In one day’s stroll you can enter all these habitats and, for however briefly, become part of that which makes each place unique and notable. And you get to see wild animals.

It’s called education. The mission of the Zoo is to teach. In five hundred acres or five hundred thousand acres the Zoo can’t conserve the world, but if we who come here to share the lives of these creatures gain even a glimmer of understanding and compassion, then we may become engaged in conserving the world for all creatures. And for ourselves.

So why poetry at the Zoo? The displays and installations are already various and superb. They employ photographs, diagrams, puns (“just lion around” indeed). You can walk right into a bush-copter hanger, a chimpanzee research station, a jungle, a desert. Why do you need poetry?

Poetry can teach in a way that exposition and rhetoric cannot. You are shaken by an unexpected metaphor. You are halted in your tracks by an arresting image. Poetry has slipped through the bars of your logical, calculating mind and has begun to teach directly to your heart. Maybe, just maybe, you are transported into a larger reality.

You don’t even notice you’re being taught. Poetry has done its job.

. . . . .

Advice for Long Life

Keep simple, as simple as you can.
Like the heron who stands one leg on the sand.
Like the maple who stands one leg on the land.
Like the robin who, thirsty, gargles the worm.

The spider is simple if the web is not.
The tern is simple in a watery spot.
To be flexible, fluid, adored as a druid,
cryptic, mystic, blessed, lurid,
love simple as you can.

Plural by purpose, design, and make,
the effort to give is the urge to take.
Keep a hambone of joy at your right side.
Live broad, long, deep, wide,
but ride simple as you can.

Imitate wind and creep of dark –
as much as you can, the natural stark,
sun-driven crops and gradual shoat,
a frog spilling basso from a plum-blue throat
at river’s edge. Be simple if you can.

Anna Wooten-Hawkins

. . . . .

Anna Wooten-Hawkins grew up in Kinston, North Carolina and received her MFA in creative writing from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She was a poet and professor of English at Gardner-Webb University, and later at Campbell University, St. Mary’s College, North Carolina State University, Peace College, and Meredith College. Her accomplishments include being the faculty editor of The Lyricist at Campbell University and coordinating the annual Muse Literary Festival at St. Mary’s College. Before her untimely death in 2000, Anna won many honors for her poetry. Her collection “Satan Speaks of Eve in 7 Voices After the Fall” won the 1986 North Carolina Writers’ Network Chapbook competition in 1986. In 1985 she received the City of Raleigh Arts Commission Award for her excellence in writing and service to the arts. Some of her works have appeared in The Green River Anthology, The Lowlands Review, The Lyricist, The Greensboro Review, and Pembroke Magazine.

(from http://www.uncg.edu/aas/ccwa/AnnaWHawkins.html)

. . . . .

Today my friends and fellow poets Guy and Carolyn York stopped by to see me at the Zoo. If you’re intrigued by the Hippo Beach sculptures, that’s where we’re holding our adult workshop on Saturday, 7/14, at 10 a.m. As Robert Frost would say, “You come too!”