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Posts Tagged ‘Poetry of Conservation’

Time – Zoo Poetry Day 6

Posted in Imagery, tagged extinction, Kathryn Stripling Byer, nature, nature poetry, NC Zoo, poetry, Poetry of Conservation, polar bear, Zoo Poetry on July 13, 2012| 6 Comments »

. . . We’ve seen
how our breath on a bitter night
fades like a ghost from the window glass.
Kathryn Stripling Byer

The polar bears aren’t here. On sabbatical, or “off exhibit” in Park lingo. We’re assured they will return in time. In time . . . .

Aquila, born in 1992 at the Louisville, KY Zoo, arrived in NC in 2009 and currently resides at the Detroit Zoo. Wilhelm, rescued from a Mexican circus, had been here since 2002 and since this winter has really been cooling his heels in Milwaukee. The Zoo is deep (literally!) into a huge construction project that will expand polar bear habitat and renovate all of Rocky Coast. When the bears return in 2014 their living space will conform to Canadian standards which will allow for obtaining additional bears from Alberta – as many as six bears on site in all, with facilities for breeding. The NC Zoo will become a world-class site for preserving the species.

Conservation and preservation – along with education, these are the Zoo’s mission. I’m struck as I visit each exhibit how often I see the red-lettered admonition “Endangered” beneath the species name. The science fiction future is rapidly becoming reality when zoos are the only place on earth to see certain animals. For me, one of the most wrenching exhibits is a seemingly unobtrusive outdoor sculpture by Roger Halligan titled, “The Stone That Stands in an Empty Sky.” Just off the trail near the red wolves (how appropriate), a monolith rises twenty feet into the forest. At its apex is a sculpted opening. Stand at the proper angle and you see leaves and branches through the empty space, and then you recognize it: the full profile of the Carolina Parakeet.

Negative space. To see, really see, when you first realize what you’re not seeing. Almost eight million dollars for six bears. Worth it? It has my vote.

. . . whatever
won’t stop taking shape even though the whole
crazy quilt’s falling to pieces.

. . . . .

Mountain Time

News travels slowly up here
in the mountains, our narrow
roads twisting for days, maybe years,
till we get where we’re going,
if we ever do. Even if some lonesome message
should make it through Deep Gap
or the fastness of Thunderhead, we’re not obliged
to believe it’s true, are we? Consider
the famous poet, minding her post
at the Library of Congress, who
shrugged off the question of what we’d be
reading at century’s end: By the year 2000
nobody will be reading poems. Thus she
prophesied. End of that
interview! End of the world
as we know it. Yet, how can I fault
her despair, doing time as she was
in a crumbling Capitol, sirens
and gunfire the nights long, the Pentagon’s
stockpile of weapons stacked higher
and higher? No wonder the books
stacked around her began to seem relics.
No wonder she dreamed her own bones
dug up years later, tagged in a museum somewhere
in the Midwest: American Poet — Extinct Species.

Up here in the mountains
we know what extinct means. We’ve seen
how our breath on a bitter night
fades like a ghost from the window glass.
We know the wolf’s gone.
The panther. We’ve heard the old stories
run down, stutter out
into silence. Who knows where we’re heading?
All roads seem to lead
to Millennium, dark roads with drop-offs
we can’t plumb. It’s time to be brought up short
now with the tale-tellers’ Listen: There once lived
a woman named Delphia
who walked through these hills teaching children
to read. She was known as a quilter
whose hand never wearied, a mother
who raised up two daughters to pass on
her words like a strong chain of stitches.
Imagine her sitting among us,
her quick thimble moving along these lines
as if to hear every word striking true
as the stab of her needle through calico.
While prophets discourse about endings,
don’t you think she’d tell us the world as we know it
keeps calling us back to beginnings?
This labor to make our words matter
is what any good quilter teaches.
A stitch in time, let’s say.
A blind stitch
that clings to the edges
of what’s left, the ripped
scraps and remnants, whatever
won’t stop taking shape even though the whole
crazy quilt’s falling to pieces.

Kathryn Stripling Byer
North Carolina Poet Laureate 2005-2009

. . . . .

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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.