April Poetry Month- Earth Day Release

The following are poems I’ve written for April Poetry Month–all in stages of becoming. I’m opening with the pantoum I wrote this morning at dawn in response to the River Heron Review‘s April 22 prompt on getting sociopolitical and expressing that in pantoum form).

We Have no Choice But to Bloom

Buttercup buds held tight as fists
floating on lobed leaves pressed close
to the mud where I drop to my knees
beside melting mountain snow.

Floating on lobed leaves pressed close,
we who love this Earth as holy
drop to our knees in the mud
paused in the grace of our becoming.

We who love this Earth as holy
ready ourselves for blossoming
Paused in the grace of our becoming,
Unafraid of all who would trample beauty.

Ready ourselves for blossoming,
our canary petals singing not warning but action.
Unafraid of all who would trample beauty,
Buttercup buds held tight as fists.

April 20 River Heron Review prompt: Behind the door waits something you are scared to say. What are you very scared to say? (Note–I have helpful feedback from my April Poetry Month group that I have not yet incorporated).

Keynote

Shaking fingers on my script
held below the microphone.
Sea of people at dinner tables
attending me—the keynote .

Why me? Why listen? What
is this podium? Am I worthy?
At least it’s not the nightmare.
No clothes. Naked in the spotlight.

I begin with my poem even
if I am a fraud, not a real poet.
So many submissions rejected,
floundering with form.

But then? I say the title,
“Anam Cara, Soul Friend”
and I am lofted with geese
flying wingtip to wingtip.

Walls fade. Wildness rushes
into the room. I can do this.
Finish the Abecedarian poem.
Launch into my speech.

Ask the crowd, “Isn’t it time
we let go of the reins?” Calling
for more Wilderness, my
hands spread wide.

Surprised. Shocked. I lean
into the applause. Give room
for this audience to lift
out of their chairs.

But then? The scary part.
Sharing my badass “saving
the wilds” stories. Exposing
my lawbreaking past.

Like the time I sprayed black
paint on big pines marked in
blue to be cut down. Saving
them from the saw.

Wine glasses clinking. More
Cheering. Deep breath.
Secrets exposed for a reason.
This is the time to be BRAVE.

Here’s what I know at sixty-five.
Take the platform. Inspire
this next generation. Do
not let fear muffle your voice.

Be like a honking goose
in a V-shaped flock
flapping to the front,
unafraid to lead.

River Heron Journal April 1st prompt on writing close focus with the attention of a child gazing at a beloved object:

Becoming

When western cedars exhaled steamy breath,
When my boots tracked over hooved passages
of elk imprinted on snow in late winter’s morning sun,
When the Metolius River misted frosty inflorescences,
I noticed the tiniest of motions in a spider web strung
like a hammock between a wound in the thick layered auburn bark
of an elder ponderosa pine and right at eye level.

The arachnid spinner with a bulging abdomen the color
of creamed honey and the size of my thumbnail palpated
a strand, her front four legs clasping and unclasping,
her back four legs balanced like a tightrope walker on a wire
of her own making.

Droplets diamonded every silken crisscrossed trail
of her irregular net. No symmetry here, yet in each linkage
a firmament affirming my neurons firing and webbing
in my brain now swaying on a suspension bridge,
every thought teetering above a waterfall
of tree sap sticky and sweet.

Where there is a wound, there is a safety net
waiting to catch me, or I will be only
another fly the spider bundles up for her meal.
You never know, except at some time
I will cease my breathing and be only mist rise,
tree breath, or one silken strand plucked
by a bird and tucked in a round mossy
nest havening her just hatched chicks.

This next poem prompt is from Kelli Russell Agodon: “Grab the closest book. Go to page 29. Write down 10 words that catch your eye. Use 7 of the words in a poem.” I chose a beautiful chapbook of poetry I recommend to keep by your side –Earth Elements, An Alphabet of Sacred Beings--by Kim Stafford .

Softly

Flashing his ruby crown, the kinglet preens
olive feathers until –free of dust—they shine
from a budding alder branch by a ribbon of river.

One wisp of a bird shakes cosmic particles
over the rim of my binoculars where I hunch
nebulous as a great blue heron at dusk.

His white eye ring is the sun’s corona
of a total eclipse, his whistled notes
the music of the spheres.

Flashing ruby crown, Kinglet preens
olive feathers until –free of dust—they shine
from a budding alder overhanging the river.

Soon kinglet will wing North tracing thicketed
waters to reach home in spruce forests sparking
green fires of Aurora Borealis.

My wish upon a star? Find your mate. Nest well.
Return next spring. Survive every peril. Go softly all
for we are kin hanging onto the same ribbon.

River Heron Poetry Prompt for April 4th, about greens and transformation in nature:

Circinate Vernation

My favorite scientific term for fiddlehead ferns
unfurling in spring from a tight spiral
a hundred violins waiting
for musicians to enter
moss-spun light
at spring’s
cusp

Circinate:
Circling spiraling
Vernation: vernal verdant
Try this. Roll up in a tight ball
on spongy, needled, and leaved earth
Embrace the safe harbor of your once fetal
self. Now slowly oh so slowly feel the spring sun
loosening every knot as you join a hundred fiddlehead

violins
playing Vivaldi
this string orchestra
urging you to lift your head
from knees, to stretch every limb
out until you are splayed open gazing
up at trees swaying whorled branches in tune
to this birthing of your spirit renewed by two words

River Heron prompts for April 7th. Draw a Word Web around one word and then create a poem
from the word as inspiration. I chose dark and one stanza–inspired by Poet Laureate Ada Limon’s talk about the power of a single stanza for uninterrupted thought:

In the Dark

Awake before the dawning, I hear a Snipe winnowing
over slumbered meadows as he wings high and dives,
fanned tail feathers splitting the air into wavered laughter.
Muffled hoots of a Great-horned Owl tuck triplet notes into my ears
tuned to American Robins breaking the bread of songbird silence.
Soon, Western Meadowlarks will tang crisp April into lemony duets.
All this after yesterday when night fell to her knees raptured
by tree frog harmonics peeping from an unblinking pond.
Cocooned in flannel sheets, dreams tendrilled my day-driven body.
Now after Snipe, Owl, and Robin, a Northern Flicker thrum drums
on my ribcage, urging me to fling open the camper door
where Canada Geese flock over the Grande Ronde River,
every flap a folding and unfolding of flanneled softness,
this unspun day.

Kelli Russell Agodon prompt for day 16: make a list of ten things seen in the past 24 hours and put in a poem. My list is from birding during the recent Harney County Migratory Bird Festival—Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. (I presented on kingfishers and my book there as well)

Flooding

When five thousand Snow Geese feather the sky,
black wing tips enunciating calls pitched high and far

Floods chorus through the meadow of my body
awakening to spring, to urgency, to flocking north.

Imagine a library of nature poetry scattered pell-mell
over an undulating plain, infusing the winds in bird quotes:

Emily Dickinson—”Hope is the thing with feathers,”
Ada Limon–“It’s the season I often mistake birds for leaves”

Mary Oliver—”Meanwhile the wild geese high in the clean blue air
are heading home again.”

So much lyricism I am in danger of looking up and out
without noticing the gopher snake underfoot

diamond patterned with a blunt head and rattle-less tail,
a ribbon muscling forward to wrap around a sagebrush.

Wandering the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge
headquarters once violated by a violent takeover

of gun-wielding bullies, I see ten Yellow-headed
Blackbirds by the pond blazing the day in affirmation

as if the taxidermy Belted Kingfisher
in the stone museum might burst right out

of her glassed-in box. As if all borders might dissolve
in this cornucopia of snow geese pouring abundance

upon my drought-stricken self, opening every pore
to the fresh sweet flooding of Spring in the high desert.

April 18, day 8 prompt from Kelli Russell Agodon. Turn your paper so that it’s in the landscape position. Write a poem about God or the universe or the horizon of the ocean with longer lines and see what happens. (Note–As Ann Lamott says– God can also be GUS–Great Universal Spirit).

Hummingbird Dawn
God appears as a fiery fist of wings fanning the scurrying California Quail into three-note praise songs as my bare feet touch frozen earth of this dawning day. Anna’s Hummingbird flashes by my ear and lingers in a buzzy hover, wings patterning figure eights in a blur too quick to discern, and isn’t that the way of God? Suspended just beyond reach and requiring a leap of faith to believe all we cannot see within this profligate April radiance when lilac buds unfold prayer hands in the grace of the blinding rising sun.

I can’t resist ending with a kingfisher poem in celebration of my book Halcyon Journey, In Search of the Belted Kingfisher, earning the John Burroughs Medal for distinguished nature writing—received April 1st at a luncheon in New York City. This prompt also came from River Heron Poetry–inviting the addition of a soundtrack to a scene that brought happiness. The lines are from “Songbird” (Chrstine McVie of Fleetwood Mac).

Halcyon

Bliss within a camouflaged blind
alone with a pair of kingfishers taking turns
feeding their tucked-away chicks deep
within an earthen burrow
of a shaded, vertical streambank
above Rattlesnake Creek.

I hear the creek singing in whitewater
spray arcing rainbow droplets and score
this cloudless, breeze-spun day as “Songbird,”
with Eva Cassidy and a Yellow Warbler
duetting “I love you, I love you, I love you
like never before.”

Birdlike at last, my freed spirit lifts
from tight quarters to merge
with Halcyon, the Belted Kingfisher,
pluming cool air in her silken plunge
only to nick the water, scissoring
a minnow in her black beak.

She slaps her granite-blue wings
on yielding water, flaps up to land
midstream on a boulder, and then?
Swiveling her head toward me, she glares
“How dare you be here?” But I’m smitten.
“For you, the sun will be shining”.

To love wary kingfishers who will
never break my heart is to slip
out of my weary skin, to let
all songbirds keep the score.

A HALCYON EARTH DAY TO YOU.