Writing in the Wild

Two new (short) pieces for you, from nature

At the beginning of August I got to spend four days writing at the Biological Field Station at Itasca State Park in northern Minnesota. It was pure delight to be a fish out of water (pun intended) among scientists and poets: far from my normal companions. And what a wonder in mid-life—or any time, truly—to become a beginner again, to walk into a room and not know the language others are speaking, to scribble down notes furiously and try out foreign words and spark fresh curiosity about yet another part of God’s vast creation.

To say it was sacred time and space is an understatement.

While I’m turning over the soil of those fertile days, here are a handful of poems I started to write there, still in process. Even if poetry is not normally your thing, I hope you might find a word here to lift your head to the sky or sink you to your knees in the dirt. My own eyes are being tugged open wider every day to the holiness of the natural world around us, and it’s a joy to share a sliver of that resurrection hope with you.

six poems for
a summer after cancer

1.

“Aren’t you so ready
For the kids to go back?”
She sighs, blowing bangs
Off her sweaty forehead.

No, I think, no—I am 
Ready for them 
(and me)
To go forward 
And forward 
And forward
And forward.

2.

hope zests open 

like an orange unzipped in a sunny kitchen 

spritz bursting through the whole house

until everyone wants a juicy slice

3.

Hair keeps growing,
Softer, lighter.

Scars keep fading
Softer, lighter.

Sun keeps rising,
Softer, lighter.

What proof to keep seeking
Resurrection in our midst?

4.

“If you lived fifty years ago, 
You’d be dead.”

I laugh at the doctor, startled, 
And laugh and laugh and laugh, wide-eyed.

What more can you do
When truth slaps you in the face?

5.

You do not have to choose
Grateful.

You can choose
Bitter. Jealous. Haughty. 
Bruised. Jaded. Hurt.

I do, and do and do.

But gratitude is a small worn key
Pressed warm in the palm 
By a wise one who knew you
Would need another way.

It unlocks doors long rusted shut.

6.

When wild rice is ripe,
The seed shatters.

Imagine trusting that 
By breaking, you will grow.

Tribes came here seeking
The food that grows on water.

Manna is always given,
Enough if we gather

And never hoard. If we listen
To ancient ways and wisdom.

All life long we keep learning
The same slow lessons.

What looked like weeds
Was sacred food.

---

Inspired by the Itasca Pioneer Cemetery.

Noma & Nora Morris
January 12, 1912—April 12, 1912 

Ode To The Pines Which Stand Over Their Grave

First let’s get the metaphors out of the way—
You are not their guardians, grievers, 
Or substitute parents watching over their growth.
They are dead and cannot grow,
You are alive and do.

Which leads us to a second point—
Compare and contrast.
They lived three months exactly,
Twins in birth and death.
White pines can live two hundred years or more,
You have seen centuries.
Noma and Nora are named, spelled out in stone.
You stand nameless, anonymous but known.
Your mottled bark is lichened, marbled by moss.
Their slender bodies are dust, long decomposed
From eleven decades underground.

But now shall we turn to third—your connections? 
Together you are primary inhabitants of a six-by-six plot.
Your roots have touched their bodies, 
Nourished by their passing.
Every storm you have weathered together,
All four of you soaked by rain, heaped with snow,
Thrummed by hail, blown clean by wind.
No small thing to keep upright
When so many of your kin have fallen. And yet you stand,
Something they never learned to do.
Dead at three short months:
Disease, prematurity, house fire, no one knows.

But here, finally, let us go fourth—
Twist and turn to a song of celebration, strange
Praise for a place haunted by grief. You continue,
Keep cones coming through impossible springs. 
Your long soft needles stretch lakeward, 
Irrepressibly green. You make it possible to breathe here.
And you point—up, out, down, beyond—
Cardinal directions of living. 

For that and for what you might have been—
Sweet scent of childhood Christmas trees,
Twinned needles spun like whirlygigs,
Sapped hands rubbed clean in dirt,
Bark peeled (past parents’ protest) for tiny lake canoes,
Limbs lunged by growing arms lusting to climb,
Boughs perched by favorite birds and
Shelter from a sudden rain—

We thank you. On behalf of those who died
And lie beneath, two girls who never got to speak but smiled.
On behalf of those who mourned them,
Now returned to soil themselves.
And for every curious visitor, idling car, inquisitive child or
Passerby parent who reads the names beneath your limbs,
You give the space to stop. 
You hold the untetherable grief in place
In shadow and in shade.

---

If you have a favorite poem, prayer, or piece of writing on nature, I’d love if you would share it here with us? Someone’s gotta say Gerard Manley Hopkins, or I’ll be shook like foil.