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Poetry and Earth – Awe

Posted in Ecopoetry, tagged Christy Hamrick, Donna Wojnar Dzurilla, Earth Day 2026, Ecopoetry, Gene Hyde, George Ella Lyon, Joey Hall, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Ron Rash, Ronnie Scharfman, Sam Love, Southern writing on April 27, 2026| 5 Comments »

[ poems by Sam Love, Joey Hall, Donna Wojnar Dzurilla, Ron Rash,

George Ella Lyon, Christy Hamrick, Gene Hyde, Ronnie Scharfman ]

Golden Spiral

Blowing the conch shell

can herald a call to prayer,

warn of danger,

or celebrate a victory.

With lips clinched the breath

enters a small hole

in the end of the shell

and bounces off the spiral cavity

to expand in volume.

The conch mimics nature’s designs

of spiral galaxies, spiral bacteria,

packed atomic particles,

and the contours of sand dunes.

This sympathetic vibration

amplifies inside the conch

until a loud ohm-like sound

exits the large opening.

Listen to contemporary poets

trumpet warnings of:

global warming,

stronger hurricanes

increased forest fires,

and beaches so hot

mollusks cook in their shell.

May this voicing of our survival instinct

resonate like the expanding volume

in the conch and awaken the masses.

Sam Love

I worked with a Boys and Girls Club to create some poems for a local Earth Day event on the theme of water, which we are doing in New Bern next Saturday, April 25. I was particularly pleased with a poem from an 8th grader. [see below] I am also including Golden Spiral, the opening poem for my book of environmental poems Earth Resonance: Poems for a Viable Future published by The Poetry Box.

— Sam

❀

Water

The ichor, the future, the blood of our earth,

older than life, and there since our birth,

The life-giving fluid of infinite worth,

still teeters yet on the edge of full dearth.

If you haven’t yet guessed, this ichor is water,

the crystal clear fluid and life’s grand supporter,

Our vital restorer, and marine life’s transporter,

and yet its supply just grows shorter, yet shorter.

You see, o’er ninety percent of this water toils,

in salty tides, but that’s not just where it spoils,

because pipes and fields leak harmful fluids and oils,

leading Earth’s greatest resource to be dirtied and soiled.

But actions are clear in their paths, and essential in taking,

or else this great resource may end up breaking.

So conserve it in usage, and limit your taking,

and don’t contribute to the Earth’s nigh unmaking.

Preserving this water, this lifeblood, is dire,

lest every dear creature on Earth soon expire,

So avoid a drought’s wrath, and Mother Nature’s mad ire,

and preserve the clear liquid that we all require.

Joseph ‘Joey’ Hall, Grade 8

selected by Sam Love

❀ ✿ ✾ ❁

Fire Along the New River Gorge

FAYETTEVILLE, WVA—A brush fire of unknown origin in the New River Gorge National Park & Preserve burned 1,550 acres as of 11/11/23.

The prehistoric Teays River

flowed northward branched

east to west cut

roots out of the old mountains.

Meltwaters, pulled by the moon

flowed back, filled the New River

from plateau to silted bottom—

a thousand foot drop.

Forests

Rise.

Fall.

Rise.

Steep Valley

War Ridge

Backus

Mountain

Sugar Maple Sweetgum White Ash Eastern Hemlock Beech Pawpaw

Yellow Buckeye Tulip Tree Basswood Eastern White Pine

Northern Red Oak Black Walnut

Burn.

Rain

cuts

new roots.

Donna Wojnar Dzurilla

from the anthology, Tributaria: Poetry, Prose, & Art Inspired by Tributaries of the Ohio River Watershed. Sherry Cook Stanforth, Richard Hague, and Michael Thompson eds. Dos Madres Press. Originary Arts Initiative. Fall 2025.

I wrote “Fire Along the New River Gorge” after spending time enjoying the New River Gorge National Park and Preserves. I learned of the brush fire in the epigraph on the news. I arrived home in Pittsburgh to learn that smoke from the Canadian wildfires drifted through Pittsburgh’s skies. I thought about how during the 60+ years of my life (I grew up and live in Pittsburgh) I saw the air and rivers clear (for the most part) from pollution. It may seem foolish, but it was the first time I realized that fires could be harbingers of climate change. I thought about how the ancient Teays River defined the Appalachian Mountains–that it flowed north, then backflowed, and that intrigued me. I thought of rain as rebirth and of how brush fires have always occurred; about how fire can cleanse after which rain restores. I am afraid of the Earth reaching the point of no return. I hope we, as a planet, aren’t too late and that rains will come.

— Donna

✾

Speckled Trout

Water-flesh gleamed like mica:

orange fins, red flankspots, a char

shy as ginseng, found only

in spring-flow gaps, the thin clear

of faraway creeks no map

could name. My cousin showed me

those hidden places. I loved

how we found them, the way we

followed no trail, just stream-sound

tangled in rhododendron,

to where slow water opened

a hole to slip a line in,

and lift as from a well bright

shadows of another world,

held in my hand, their color

already starting to fade.

Ron Rash

first published in Weber Studies, 1996, and reprinted in Raising the Dead, Iris Press, 2002.

selected by Donna Wojnar Dzurilla

✾

What Do I Hope to Learn by Watching Birds?

Sunflower seed shells

pepper the snow.

A lone male

Red-bellied Woodpecker,

crimson crown

rusted ivory breast

armored against cold

by chevron wings,

worries suet

through the wire frame.

A spectrum of

preternatural blues,

flash of white

swoops crosswise,

Blue Jay

breast thick

like the gray mourning

doves; spooks away the

Juncos

Starlings

House Finches

Tufted Titmouse

Chickadees,

and little brown jobbies: the sputzies

(spatz, German for sparrow).

The woodpecker

finds perch atop

silver maple—

bare but for russet buds

hoping for sun and spring.

Jay claims ownership

of the full feeder.

In response to the bird’s girth,

it swings

to center of gravity;

dumps fresh pips

to dance

amidst hollow husks

strewn atop

ice-crusted snow.

I hear

no birdsong

through

the double-

pane window.

Careful not to:

move

make a sound

be seen

be a threat.

Mated cardinals

find ground. Six pair.

A flock of ghosts?

Brilliant redbirds

shoo chestnut mates

away from piles of seed,

collapse their mohawk crest;

prepare for battle,

to challenge

the blue bird. But

a bald eagle,

juvenile;

dark umber

black beak

ivory speckled under-feathers

no mate, no aerie,

up from the frozen river,

hunting;

shadow-tracks over

crystal battlefield.

Weighted pause

in the solid snow-quiet.

Ice diamonds glister,

revealing luminous

gleaming facets;

sparkle

broken by

bird

tree

dry husks.

My backyard a stage.

Donna Wojnar Dzurilla

I wrote “What Do I Hope to Learn by Watching Birds?” after returning from a weekly vigil that I attend, conducted each Friday by a different religious denomination in front of Pittsburgh’s I.C.E. field office. The vigil’s prayers are for those murdered and those detained, as well as prayers for peace and change. When I returned home I looked out my kitchen window at the birds at the feeders in my backyard and watched a busy snapshot of nature play out. Watching the birds made me think about the many sides of nature. It made me think about human nature and I considered whether fascism and hate are an ugly trait of human nature–something we will never be rid of, something that resurfaces and returns. In my poem, the red and blue birds mix. I don’t know if the young eagle will revert to its nature–is it a predator or a noble, heroic protector?

— Donna

❀ ✿ ✾ ❁

The Meadow Does Not Know

about the stock market.

Today she is worth

exactly what she was worth

yesterday, a year ago, at creation.

I don’t mean property value,

taxable assets. I mean

milkweed and copper moths

honeybees, cow vetch,

king snakes. Meadow life

is not money. What rises

and falls here are stems

and flowers, leaves and fruit.

No zigzag line of profit and panic

but the great wheel turning.

Here God gives of her

extravagance and here, like

flicker, viceroy, dragonfly

we come into our inheritance.

George Ella Lyon

from She Let Herself Go: Poems (LSU 2012)

In the fall of 2008, I was on a writing retreat at the Mary Anderson Center in southern Indiana. It’s surrounded by 400 acres of woods, fields, meadows threaded with trails. I was there when the subprime mortgage crisis hit. There were terrible consequences, of course, & all the talk was about how bad it could get. As a freelance writer & teacher, I was particularly worried that my jobs would disappear. Heart tight, thoughts spinning, I walked first around the lake & then through my favorite meadow. Ironweed, Joe Pye, goldenrod, more varieties of flowers & grasses than I could name. I was overcome by the beauty & faithfulness of it all, & that’s when “The Meadow Does Not Know/ about the stock market” came to me. A praise song. I kept saying it to myself till I got back to my room where some version of the rest of the poem came to me. Then I worked on it.

— George Ella

❀ ✿ ✾ ❁

Awe

great blue

heron spreads

its wings and squawks

rising from stream bed

we pause and hold our breath

it takes flight over Horne Creek

soaring above Yadkin Islands

easy talk picked back up as we walk

reminder tucked away to seek stillness

Christy Hamrick

❀ ✿ ✾ ❁

I Should Hope to Pray Like the Trees

The trees can’t control their lives. We can’t always control what happens to us. The trees can teach us acceptance. And metamorphosis. Linda Brown, quoted in The Nature Fix.

I should hope to pray

Like the trees, roots running deep,

Limbs singing above.

Blending earth and sky,

Supplicants sway and bow, each

Snowy branch and bough

A sylvan chorus,

A genuflective dance, a

Chance to waltz with God.

Gene Hyde

I’ve attached one of my ekphrastic poems, “I Should Hope to Pray like the Trees,” for your consideration. The photo was taken outside of Banff, Alberta, and the poem and photo were originally published in the Tiny Seed Literary Journal. I was moved by the way the snow-covered trees seemed to bow, looking like they were praying.

— Gene

photo by Gene Hyde

❀ ✿ ✾ ❁

Serengeti Psalm

Let the Land Rovers be our camel caravans,

let the Masai herders, bare-legged,

wrapped in checked cloth

be our shepherds.

Let Your dirt roads, rain-rutted to mud,

or sun-scorched to dust

take us over savannahs, by shining lakes

flecked with flamingos, vast grassy plains

punctuated by acacia trees and majestic creatures.

You had Adam name them; did he see all of these?

long-legged, long-necked. giraffes browsing or grazing,

sleek velvety leopards lazing on branches,

baboon families racing by the road

as if late to a meeting,

gazelles, faces like African masks, leaping

and zebras, still, as if in prayer,

hippos wallowing like old ladies in a pool,

elephants flapping huge ears, their fans under the blazing sun,

warthogs, burrowing, backside first, ugly faces watching ours,

migrating wildebeests, crossing the horizon, strangely hideous.

On the endless green caldera floor, we are but specks among them all,

a moment in Your eternity.

You created them first, witness to Your glory,

Your living proof.

So that when it is our turn, we shall respond

with praise.

Ronnie Scharfman

My family and I recently returned from safari in Tanzania where we witnessed the variety and proximity of wildlife in awae! The game parks are their happy place, and we, tiny specks among them.

— Ronnie

❀ ✿ ✾ ❁

We need a renaissance of wonder. We need to renew, in our hearts and in our souls, the deathless dream, the eternal poetry, the perennial sense that life is miracle and magic.

— E. Merrill Root

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to who this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

— Albert Einstein

Thank you for celebrating the month of April with International Earth Day (April 22) and National Poetry Month. And thank you, Readers, who have selected poems to share that connect us to our planet and each other. We will continue posting EARTH POETRY throughout the month of April – and beyond April as well, of course, since EVERY DAY is EARTH DAY!

❁

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Thanks again for joining the conversation.

— Bill

❀ ✿ ✾ ❁

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EARTH DAY EVERY DAY

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, Imagery, tagged Bill Griffin, Daniela Danz, Earth Day 2024, Earth Day Every Day, ecology, Ecopoetry, Gus Speth, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, poetry, Sam Love, William Blake on April 24, 2024| 2 Comments »

April 24, 2024

Our true home lies outside, deep in the wilderness of forest and mountain, river and desert and sea, the source of our being and the destiny of our great meandering blundering dreaming journey through time. Like Odysseus in his wanderings, we are homeward bound whether we know it or not.

++++++ Edward Abbey

Wilderness has drawn humans closer to God throughout history. Why should we, in the twentieth century, believe this is suddenly no longer true? Long after the Exodus, in a time of recurring apostasy, Hosea spoke of God wishing to ‘allure’ the people back into the wilderness yet again — this time to the parched hills beyond Jericho. There, wrote the prophet, God would ‘speak tenderly’ to them.

++++++ David Douglas

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

++++++ John Muir

❦ ❦ ❦

[Come wilderness into our homes]

Come wilderness into our homes

break the windows come

with your roots and your worms

spread yourself over our wishes

our waste-sorting systems our prostheses

and outstanding payments

cover us with your rustling greenery

and your spores cover us that we may

become green: green and reverent

green and manifest green and replaceable

come weather with your storms

and sweep the slates off the roofs come

with snow and hail smash

through the collective sleep

we are all enjoying in our beds

our worn rationalizations come ice

and form glaciers over the shadow banks

and our drive for liquidity

come through the cracks under the doors

you desert with your sands fill

our desolation up until it forms into a solid mass

rise up over the search-and-rescue teams

and our growth compulsion trickle into

the control panels of the missiles

and the missile defense systems into

the think tanks and the hearts of internet trolls

just leave the hedgehogs with their

snuffling so that it may calm us

come rising sea levels

up over our shorelines both the developed

and the undeveloped the homey

lowland areas wash

jellyfish into our soup bowls

and ramshorn snails into our hair

as we swim in each other’s direction panicked

with our yearning for one another

because almost nothing is left because it’s all gone

and thoroughly soaked through with regrets

finger-pointing and tranquilizers

come earthquakes shatter the apartments

which we built on the foundations

of how we always did everything

come tremors fill the mine shafts

the end of work and

the literature of redemption bury anger

and affection and all manner of added values

swallow up the memories come tremors

hurry so that the bedrock covers us

so we are covered with water desert weather

and over everything that which covers all the wilderness

Daniela Danz

Translated from the German by Monika Cassel

[Komm Wildnis in unsere Häuser] from the journal POETRY,December 2023

https://poems.com/poem/come-wilderness-into-our-homes/

Shared by Bill Griffin, Elkin NC, who writes:

To the ancient mind, wilderness was dangerous, something to be feared and held at bay even while mysterious and fascinating. In recent times, as we’ve come to consider ourselves ‘modern’, wilderness has been conquered – we control it, we rule it, we exploit and use wilderness. Indigenous voices tell us we are one with the wild and can only be fully ourselves when we know and respect wildness. Romantic voices long to return to Eden and live in harmony with wilderness. The voices of mystics and spiritual seekers remind us that wildness is in us and part of us, that all things are one and that we have cut off a vital part of ourselves when we separate ourselves from the wild.

This poem by Daniela Danz brings us full circle to our 21st century shuddering realization – wild nature is back and beyond our control. For a few centuries we’ve kept wilderness at arm’s length, just outside the widening circle of our campfires, but now the seas rise and the storms mount. All of our consumption economies and gods of growth and development will not keep us safe. In the literal sense, wilderness comes into our homes, welcome or not. In the metaphorical sense, perhaps it is not too late indeed to invite it in, ‘come’. Perhaps we are on the threshold of a new age in which we admit our part in wild nature and its part in us. Or perhaps we shall be covered.

++++++ Bill

❦

My own poem, Spent, begins with fatalism and regret but discovers, I hope, some communion with wild nature to end on a note of connection. – Bill

Spent

Coreopsis spent, limp rays curling,

curdled disk and one lone fly like aster’s

dry winged seed perched on delusion

that the head still holds some promise:

I turn away from everything sere

and brown – where else would I turn

this sullen afternoon? until

she calls me to join her, leaf strewn trail

beside Grassy Creek where it sings

to itself oblivious, two soft pairs

of footfalls among fern and shadow,

partridge berry makes its own warm light

and ground cedar runs rings around us:

I crouch before a cranefly orchid, determined

buds dainty as dewclaws still unopened

mid-July (and absent basal winter leaves

pocked olive but upturn them for satin

underleaf maroon), yet while she reminds me

about co-evolution, blossoms that couple

with their pollinators, I can’t stop seeing

that useless fly, bulging maroon ommatidia,

wings’ blush iridescence, proboscis needle

dripping one sour jewel spent, until

for just this moment the world opens itself

around us and I open to its secrets, kingfisher

rattle from another planet, fecund dank

of moss and fungus, every vireo our familiar,

swelling benediction breeze that gossips

among beech and laurel and promises

always, always something new.

Bill Griffin

finalist for the James Applewhite Poetry Prize of North Carolina Literary Review, 2023

https://nclr.ecu.edu/issues/nclr-winter-online-2024/ page 48

❦ ❦ ❦

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.

++++++ R. Buckminster Fuller

We cannot be truly ourselves in any adequate manner without all our companion beings throughout the earth.

++++++ Thomas Berry

❦ ❦ ❦

The Tyger

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand, dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? what dread grasp

Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,

And water’d heaven with their tears,

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

William Blake (1757-1827)

https://poets.org/poem/tyger ; this poem is in the public domain

Shared by Les Brown, Troutman NC, who writes:

I love Blake’s Tyger not only because of its incredible poetic craft and rhythm, but for its recognition of the beauty and duality of the tiger as a creature of strength and beauty but also an instrument involved in the balance of nature.

++++++ Les

❦ ❦ ❦

The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves,

The brilliant moon and all the milky sky,

And all that famous harmony of leaves,

Has blotted out man’s image and his cry.

++++++ William Butler Yeats

It seems clear, as I’ve argued, that the humanities can be broadened enough to make the connection [with science] in three ways. First, escape the bubble in which the unaided human sensory world remains unnecessarily trapped. Second, sink roots by connecting the deep history of genetic evolution to the history of cultural evolution. And third, diminish the extreme anthropocentrism that hobbles the bulk of humanistic endeavors.

++++++ Edward O. Wilson, The Origins of Creativity (2017)

❦ ❦ ❦

Bread and Roses

When the big sea has stopped rising

and the maps we’re through revising

and I can think of storms as friends,

I’ll go down to the beach again.

I’ll stand still there in that bright surf

and sing a song to this dear Earth.

I’ll sing for climate change to end.

I’ll sing tears for where we have been.

I’ll sing to things that we have learned –

the fossils we should not have burned

releasing the power of former suns,

bringing losses that cannot be undone.

Sad losses the children will inherit.

Species gone without much credit,

thanks to the piles of money earned

and all the corners left unturned.

I’ll sing to anger rising still.

Our leaders let firms do their will.

The people did assert control

but not before the barons stole.

Our job is now to make the best,

finding purpose in what is left.

It is a joy to live to fight

and on that beach to fly two kites.

Gus Speth

Shared by Sam Love, New Bern NC, who writes:

I love the lyrical nature of this poem using the “songs” as a way to tie assaults on our planet’s web together. Also the transition from songs for the abuses to singing “to anger rising still”. A call to action. And here is one of my poems that is more literal with the theme of Earth Day and all things being connected.

++++++ Sam

❦

The Web

No one is alone

We are all part

of life’s web

In each breath we inhale

remnants of star dust

and exhale nourishment

for the Earth’s plants

Each action we take

to support our bloated

lifestyle tugs on a strand

of the planet’s web

To understand our impact

visualize a spider’s web where

pulling on one strand

alters the whole

Sam Love

Shared by Gus Speth, South Carolina, who writes:

The following poem by Sam Love is lovely but cautionary. It reminds us that we humans are part of an interconnected web of life here on Earth and part also of the journey of the universe. And gently it says we should act like it.

++++++ Gus

❦ ❦ ❦

We need the tonic of wilderness… the silence, the cold and solitude… to be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor… pasturing freely where we never wander.

++++++ Henry David Thoreau

Wildness made man but man cannot make wildness. He can only spare it.

++++++ David Brower

Wilderness is two things — fact and feeling. It is a fund of knowledge and a spring of influence. It is the ultimate source of health — terrestrial and human.

++++++ Benton MacKaye, the man who planned and conceived the Appalachian Trail

Any creative deed at the human level is a continuation of the creativity of the universe.

++++++ Thomas Berry

Life is a chemical system able to replicate itself through autocatalysis and to make mistakes that gradually increase the efficiency of autocatalysis.

++++++ National Geographic, Jan. ‘03

❦ ❦ ❦

Special thanks throughout these Earth Day celebrations to my hiking buddy and nature guide Mike Barnett, who has let me into the wilderness and won’t let me leave. Most of the quotations included in these sections are compiled in Mike’s Medicine Bag, which he carries with him into every new adventure

And EXTRA SPECIAL THANKS to my companion in the universe, Linda French Griffin, who allows the cosmos to flow through her pen onto paper. She has given permission for me to use a few of her drawings throughout these Earth Day celebrations.

++++++ Bill .

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Earth Day Every Day

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Ada Limón, Bill Griffin, Ecopoetry, imagery, Jennifer Elise Foerster, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, poetry, Robert Service, Sam Love on April 23, 2023| 2 Comments »

[with poems by Jennifer Elise Foerster, Robert Service,
Sam Love, Ada Limón]

One day for Earth Day? One day to honor our kinship with every thing that lives – Animal, Plant, Fungus, Protist, Archaea, Bacteria, all of them? One day to celebrate chlorophyll, the absolute best idea that life has ever had? One day to ponder in reverence this single solitary place in the universe that sustains life?

In Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent novel, The Ministry for the Future, one character, a member of The Ministry, reckons that what the earth needs to save itself is a new religion. Not new economics, not new politics, not even new technologies – a new religion.

Why religion? At its essence, religion is about The Good – how to define it, pursue it, encounter it, how to live encompassed in its expansive presence. Religion is permeative and interpenetrative – for its adherents, it occupies every aspect of life and every moment of consciousness. Religion is transcendent – ego, personal comfort, power, possessions, all fade to irrelevance in the presence of The Good. Religion is immanent, not there & then but here & now.

Here and now. Every day. Reverence and celebration. Stop and listen and you will hear Earth whispering its transcendent message: “More Life!”

❦

Thank you to the readers of these pages
who have responded to my call for poems this Earth Day.
Watch for new posts on April 21, April 22, and April 23.

All photographs were taken April 11-17, 2023,
along the Elkin & Allegheny Nature Trail,
part of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail in North Carolina, USA.

Earth Day 2023 art by Linda French Griffin.

❦ ❦ ❦

Origin of Planets

In this version, the valley
lime green after rain
rolls its tides before us.

A coyote bush shivers with seed.

We hold out our palms as if catching snow—
our villages of circular tracts
overcast with stars.

We have been moving together in sequence
for thousands of years, paralyzed
only by the question of time.

But now it is autumn under bishop pines—
the young blown down by wind feed
their lichens to the understory.

We follow the deer-path
past the ferns, to the flooded
upper reaches of the estuary.

The channel snakes through horsetails
and hemlock as the forest deepens, rises
behind us and the blue heron,
frozen in the shallows.

The shadow of her long neck ripples.

Somewhere in the rustling tulle reeds
spider is casting her threads to the light

and we spot a crimson-hooded fly agaric,
her toadstool’s gills white
as teeth as the sun
++++++++ bleeds into the Pacific.

We will walk the trail
until it turns to sand
and wait at the spit’s edge, listening
to the breakers, the seagulls
as they chatter their twilight preparations.

What we won’t understand
about the sound of the sea is no different
than the origin of planets

or the wind’s crystalline structures
irreversibly changing.

The albatross drags her parachute
over the earth’s gaping mouth.

We turn back only for the instant
the four dimensions fold
into a sandcastle—before its towers
are collapsed by waves.

The face that turns
toward the end of its world
dissolves into space—

despite us, the continuum
remains.

Jennifer Elise Foerster comments: “This poem emerged from one particular version of a day when I had the gift of walking with a friend on the Point Reyes National Seashore. I say ‘version’ because the path this poem follows is inevitably different from the path we walked, and distinct, too, from the many paths in my memory of that day. What all my versions share is that we walked toward the beach, toward twilight, at which point I wondered what it really meant to ‘turn back.’ At which point I watched the waves, the wind, the endless endings and beginnings, the turnings of gulls and seashells, planets peering through dusk. I love that wonderment doesn’t require understanding. How brief we are, and infinite in our versions of being here on earth.”

. . . wonderment doesn’t require understanding. I love understanding like I love the specifics of this poem, the creatures that occupy it, their occupations, but I also love the door it opens into reverence that requires no understanding. That, in fact, requires nothing of me at all except to take my place as part of the continuum.

– Bill Griffin / Elkin, North Carolina

❦ ❦ ❦

The Call of the Wild

Have you gazed on naked grandeur, where there’s nothing else to gaze on,
Set pieces and drop-curtain scenes galore,
Big mountains heaved to heaven, which the blinding sunsets blazon,
Black canyons where the rapids rip and roar?
Have you swept the visioned valley with the green stream streaking through it,
Searched the Vastness for a something you have lost?
Have you strung your soul to silence? Then for God’s sake go and do it;
Hear the challenge, learn the lesson, pay the cost.

Have you wandered in the wilderness, the sage-brush desolation,
The bunch-grass levels where the cattle graze?
Have you whistled bits of rag-time at the end of all creation,
And learned to know the desert’s little ways?
Have you camped upon the foothills, have you galloped o’er the ranges,
Have you roamed the arid sun-lands through and through?
Have you chummed up with the mesa? Do you know its moods and changes?
Then listen to the wild, — it’s calling you.

Have you known the Great White Silence, not a snow-gemmed twig a-quiver?
(Eternal truths that shame our soothing lies.)
Have you broken trail on snowshoes? Mushed your Huskies up the river,
Dared the unknown, led the way, and clutched the prize?
Have you marked the map’s void spaces, mingled with the mongrel races,
Felt the savage strength of brute in every thew?
And though grim as hell the worst is, can you round it off with curses?
Then harken to the wild, — it’s wanting you.

Have you suffered, starved, and triumphed, groveled down, yet grasped at glory,
Grown bigger in the bigness of the whole?
‘Done things’ just for the doing, letting babblers tell the story,
Seeing through the nice veneer the naked soul?
Have you seen God in His splendours, heard the text that nature renders
(You’ll never hear it in the family pew),
The simple things, the true things, the silent men who do things?
Then listen to the wild, — it’s calling you.

They have cradled you in custom, they have primed you with their preaching,
They have soaked you in convention through and through;
They have put you in a showcase; you’re a credit to their teaching –
But can’t you hear the wild? – It’s calling you.
Let us probe the silent places, let us seek what luck betide us:
Let us journey to a lonely land I know.
There’s a whisper on the night-wind, there’s a star agleam to guide us,
And the wild is calling, calling… let us go.

Robert Service
Selected by Mike Barnett; published in Robert Services’ first book of poetry, Songs of a Sourdough, in 1907.

Robert Service (1874-1958) was a British-Canadian poet, often called “the Bard of the Yukon.” This poem has always had a positive affect on me with its rugged description of wild places similar to the ones I have traveled while camping and backpacking. I have used the last two stanzas as quote material or ‘words of wisdom’ in camps I have directed, and I still use it often with my Family Nature Club.

– Mike Barnett / Eustis, Florida.

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Forest Bathing

My artificial cocoon
is really cozy as it
guards me from
nature’s wildness

My illuminated habitat
wards off the elements
and creates its own micro climate
oblivious to its carbon footprint.

And yet something is missing
as the artificial light challenges
the setting sun and the stale air
maintains a constant temperature.

In contrast a short distance away
nature beckons me to a forest
where natural bioenergy
can alter my mental state.

Strolling through this verdant space
I enjoy a heightened awareness
of life’s web and become open
to unspoiled wildness.

Feeling restored I thank the trees
and say goodbye to the
rustling leaves, trickling water,
melodic birds, dappling light,
and healing spirits.

Sam Love
Published in Earth Resonance: Poems for a Viable Future (Poetry Box, Portland Oregon)

The Japanese believe time in the forest can be healthy. They practice “forest bathing” or shinrin-yoku. Shinrin means “forest,” and yoku means “bath.” I find the noise in my head begins to quiet when I walk in an area untouched by so called civilization.

– Sam Love / New Bern, North Carolina

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Give Me This

I thought it was the neighbor’s cat back
to clean the clock of the fledgling robins low
in their nest stuck in the dense hedge by the house
but what came was much stranger, a liquidity
moving all muscle and bristle. A groundhog
slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still
green in the morning’s shade. I watched her
munch and stand on her haunches taking such
pleasure in the watery bites. Why am I not allowed
delight? A stranger writes to request my thoughts
on suffering. Barbed wire pulled out of the mouth,
as if demanding that I kneel to the trap of coiled
spikes used in warfare and fencing. Instead,
I watch the groundhog closer and a sound escapes
me, a small spasm of joy I did not imagine
when I woke. She is a funny creature and earnest,
and she is doing what she can to survive.

I love this poem because the speaker at first mistakes the groundhog for a cat, something typically tame, but as she watches the animal enjoy its life, somehow this wild thing has sucked away all the speaker’s pain and replaced it with a jolt of unexpected joy. The wild draws us out of ourselves and into a healthier being.

– Melinda Thomsen / Greenville, NC