Tag: nature

Those Spiky Suns

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dande

How I loved those spiky suns,   
rooted stubborn as childhood   
in the grass, tough as the farmer’s   
big-headed children—the mats   
of yellow hair, the bowl-cut fringe.   
How sturdy they were and how   
slowly they turned themselves   
into galaxies, domes of ghost stars   
barely visible by day, pale   
cerebrums clinging to life   
on tough green stems.   Like you.   
Like you, in the end.   If you were here,   
I’d pluck this trembling globe to show   
how beautiful a thing can be   
a breath will tear away.  
~Jean Nordhaus “A Dandelion for My Mother”
The lawn is filled with them now
yellow spots in carpeted green
closed tight at night,
in the morning,
opening as miniature reflections
of the real dawn.
Growing up, paid ten cents per dandelion
I dug up each long offending root,
restoring the blemished green
to pristine perfection;
no more yellow splotches
unruly stems
blow away ghosts
releasing scores of
seedy offspring.
But it didn’t last.
The perfect lawn
like the perfect life~
unbesmirched~
isn’t possible.
The hardy seeds of trouble
float innocently on the breeze
or lie hidden deep in our soil
ready to spring up overnight
and overtake us.
Maybe that is our fear
of those little spunky spiky suns:
their cheerful glow
belies their pernicious
tendency to own us,
heart and soul.
puffball

Ununderstandable

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meadowfoxtail

applebuds

This fevers me, this sun on green,
On grass glowing, this young spring.
The secret hallowing is come,
Regenerate sudden incarnation,
Mystery made visible
In growth, yet subtly veiled in all,
Ununderstandable in grass,
In flowers, and in the human heart,
This lyric mortal loveliness,
The earth breathing, and the sun…

…The apple takes the seafoam’s light,
And the evergreen tree is densely bright.
April, April, when will he
Be gaunt, be old, who is so young?
This fevers me, this sun on green,
On grass lowing, this young spring.
~Richard Eberhart

It is a mystery
how dead,
so very dead
can live again.
Ground frozen
mere weeks ago
now leaps lush.
Branches snapped off dry
in midwinter
now burst with bloom.

Beyond understanding
Beyond imagining
Beyond each fevered breath
that could be,
but isn’t,
our last.

cherrybarn419

fragrant

aprilweed

Turned to Ice

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ice321420

ice321416

ice321410

…was it, maybe,
a frost that had turned its sap to ice,
and so it stood,
bitter-sweet,
still fair to see,
but stricken,
soon to fall and die?
~J.R.R Tolkien from Return of the King

Any hint of spring
is frozen in place,
buds encased,
unable to swell,
their future
suspendedand stricken,
bitter in
their beauty.

ice321414

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Imperishable Bliss

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barnstorm
But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss.
~Wallace Stevens from “Sunday Morning”
Earthly contentment~
whether a full stomach
or adequate bank account
or a covering of snow~
won’t last.
May I not settle in comfort,
but seek to fill
my continual need
with what will not perish,
even as the snow melts
and the light fades,
to rest assured,
I will be changed.
febbarn2
sunsettreeglory

The Winged Keys

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maplewings

febwoods

The set seed and the first bulbs showing.
The silence that brings the deer.

The trees are full of handles and hinges;
you can make out keyholes, latches in the leaves.

Buds tick and crack in the sun, break open
slowly in a spur of green.

*

The small-change colours of the river bed:
these stones of copper, silver, gold.

The rock-rose in the waste-ground
finding some way to bloom. The long

spill of birdsong. Flowers, all
turned to face the hot sky. Nothing stirs.

*

That woody clack of antlers.
In yellow and red, the many griefs of autumn.

The dawn light through amber leaves
and the trees are lanterned, blown

the next day to empty stars.
Smoke in the air; the air, turning.

*

Under a sky of stone and pink
faring in from the north and promising snow:

the blackbird.
In his beak, a victory of worms.

The winged seed of the maple,
the lost keys under the ash.
~Robin Robertson “Finding the Keys”

 

If only there were verbal keys as plentiful
as those that twirl from the maple branch,
words freed, ready to unlatch life’s secrets
and push ajar the doors of heavy hearts.

May we open just enough
to listen,
unlock horns,
and receive what falls
into our empty arms.

deerskull

deerrubbingtree

ferngrove

Like a Cushion

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microforestmoss

mossprouts4

 


To loosen with all ten fingers held wide and limber
And lift up a patch, dark-green, the kind for lining cemetery baskets,
Thick and cushiony, like an old-fashioned doormat,
The crumbling small hollow sticks on the underside mixed with roots,
And wintergreen berries and leaves still stuck to the top, —
That was moss-gathering.
But something always went out of me when I dug loose those carpets
Of green, or plunged to my elbows in the spongy yellowish moss of the marshes:
And afterwards I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road,
As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swampland;
Disturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,
By pulling off flesh from the living planet;
As if I had commited, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration.
~Theodore Roethke “Moss-Gathering”

The moss I gather
through the camera lens —
a microcosm forest
of sprouts and undergrowth,
delicate branches and blossoms.
An environ all its own
on an old stump, a roof of shingles,
the north side of an ancient rock.

Words I write
are like doormats of moss,
lying thick as a carpet across the page,
piled one upon another,
some more beautiful,
some so plain as not to be noticed,
some with just the right curve and form
to make a difference,
cushioning my fall
when gentle grace is about
to catch me.
mosssproutalone

mosssprouts

mosssprouts3

mosssprouts4

The Corner Has Been Turned

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croci3

…To be sure, it feels wintry enough still:
but often in the very early spring it feels like that.
Two thousand years are only a day or two by this scale.
A man really ought to say,
‘The Resurrection happened two thousand years ago’
in the same spirit in which he says ‘I saw a crocus yesterday.’

Because we know what is coming behind the crocus.
The spring comes slowly down this way;
but the great thing is that the corner has been turned.
There is, of course, this difference that in the natural spring
the crocus cannot choose whether it will respond or not.
We can.
We have the power either of withstanding the spring,
and sinking back into the cosmic winter, or of going on …
to which He is calling us.
It remains with us to follow or not,
to die in this winter,
or to go on into that spring and that summer.
~C.S. Lewis–in The Grand Miracle, God in the Dock

 

Whether mid-winter or early autumn
the crocus are unexpected,
surprising even to the observant.

Hidden potential beneath the surface,
an incubation readily triggered
by advancing or retreating light from above.

Waiting with temerity,
to be called forth from earthly grime
and granted reprieve from indefinite interment.

A luminous gift of hope and beauty
borne from a humble bulb;
so plain and only dirt adorned.

Summoned, the deep lavender harbinger rises
from sleeping frosted ground in February
or spent topsoil, exhausted in October.

These bold blossoms do not pause
for snow and ice nor hesitate to pierce through
a musty carpet of fallen leaves.

They break free to surge skyward
cloaked in tightly bound brilliance,
spaced strategically to be deployed against the darkness.

Slowly unfurling, the violet petals peel to reveal golden crowns,
royally renouncing the chill of winter’s beginning and end,
staying brazenly alive when little else is.

In the end,  they painfully wilt, deeply bruised and purple
under the Sun’s reflection made manifest;
returning defeated, inglorious, fallen, to dust.

They will rise yet again.

photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

croci13

Night-Weary Heavens

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sunrisesolstice

sunrise1019

Suddenly a blackbird flew to the top of a beech. She perched way up on the tompost twig that stuck up thin against the sky and sat there watching how, far away over the trees, the night-weary pale-gray heavens were glowing in the distant east and coming to life. Then she commenced to sing.

Her little black body seemed only a tiny dark speck at that distance. She looked like a dead leaf. But she poured out her song in a great flood of rejoicing through the whole forest. And everything began to stir. The finches warbled, the little red-throat and the gold finch were heard. The doves rushed from place to place with a loud clapping and rustling of wings. The pheasants cackled as though their throats would burst. The noise of their wings, as they flew from their roosts to the ground, was soft but powerful. They kept uttering their metallic, splintering call with its soft ensuing chuckle. Far above the falcons cried sharply and joyously, “Yayaya!”

The sun rose.
~Felix Salten from Bambi

 

I had not actually been aware of the silence of the winter sunrise until the birds returned this week and the stillness retreated.   Last autumn their joyous morning songs had gradually ebbed as darkness expanded,  the heavy frosts driving them south to more hospitable climates.  Once in a while, if I listened carefully, there would be geese and trumpeters flying overhead with audible wing rushes and an occasional honk, though invisible in the fog and morning clouds.

Otherwise the eastern winter horizon would be lit to glowing each morning in stillness, without announcement or heralding song.  As if no one was there to notice.

The sunrises have a soundtrack again, just a few lines to introduce the symphony of spring around the corner.   In a short few weeks it will be all out booming chorus and I’ll be wishing for bird mufflers at 4:15 AM.

And so joy returns in the morning and I’m noticing.

sunrise9133

Our Real Journey

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frost1419

frost148

“It may be that when we no longer know which way to go that we have come to our real journey…
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 
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frost1425

Awaiting the Whole Story

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moody1111

mistyfrontyard

I prefer winter and fall,
when you feel the bone structure of the landscape–
the loneliness of it,
the dead feeling of winter. 
Something waits beneath it,
the whole story doesn’t show.
~Andrew Wyeth

This time of year I am,
like the trees,
reduced to bare bones,
stark and vulnerable.
The cold wind of winter
buffets with bitter fingers.

Yet hope courses like sap
moving inside wooden veins,chilled and sluggish.
Waiting to waken, budding,
tips of naked limbs,
it hints at a story
yet to reach fruition.

sunrise1131

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