Category: Nature Poetry

I will sit in the sun and write a poem,
sit right next to the shed leaf; in my hand
I shall take it, hold it up
and reflect the sun’s light onto you, onto bee,

onto planes cutting across sky,
carrying dreams across sea. I will sit
where I am sitting,
at the center of you and me,
at the core of the heart of the earth
and of the dusty things that rise from its depths:

the flowers that whisper their pollen
over hills and atop graves,
over soldiers and atop war,
over love and into naked sex
and violence splayed.

Each word I will write
will be an unerasable mark, a star of a star
wrapped in the darkness of space. Infinite
will be its song. Silent
its effect, but the waterfalls roaring
will draw from its darkness their breath.

I will draw from you what you draw from day,
experience in the manner of matter turned haze:
the prick of a thorn, the split of the flesh,
the soft bubbled blush
of a pulsing bead bled.

All is droplet and cloud,
and everywhere your name will slicken
streets and stones with the echo of your birth.

Hear it in the valleys! Hear it in the veins!
Hear it in the songs of heroes,
the mourner’s refrain.

I will honor you as you honor me,
as the world turns and sun blazes;

I will
sit right here, a poem
next to a leaf.

I use the leaves, wood, and stones of nature
as tools,
not to construct anything graspable by the hand,
or anything that could house a shivering body.

No, I borrow that which nature offers,
so that I can work, perhaps shoddily,
into form and substance

the sole figure of beauty,

of which all things that stir
eyes and blood
derive their essence.

Imperceptible to minds
coated in the smoke and grime
of daily life, yet somehow
I have been gifted

with a strange and undefinable sense.

I can feel beneath
the marrow of my skin, muscles, and bones
the finest brushes of this shy
yet gold gilded wind.

Its beauty overwhelms my every thought
with its slightest touch, and thus
I am shattered by awe,

and reborn time and time again.

I am wood turned into ethereal flame,
alive and compelled to spread
that which has stoked my being in full—

for beauty is not mine to keep,

and nonetheless,
it cannot be contained.

It is the air beneath the air.
It is the light within the light.
It is the dawn that inspires the bird
as it builds a nest

for which to give its song sensuous life.

On soft earth
this body of muscle and bone
dissolves

into the soil
from which all things wriggling,
scuttling, and flying
rise.

A humble beginning
for all of Heaven—
and in the end,
humility.

The whole of life
is observable in one flicker of the eye.
In a single blink
flashes sunlight and sky.
The moment, not merely the sight,
is the miracle.