A New Blog Location

I decided to switch over from this blog place to one using the Blogger platform.

I haven’t posted much, but I am hoping to write more. Teaching seems to take a lot of my time and energy; always has. But I’m feeling more of a draw toward poetry and some story writing, too. And, I’m getting older so I’m making more choices about how I spend my time. So, here’s to those plans!

I have a new poem up there that I found in two recent conversations: one with my mom the other night and the other with my neighbor, both of whom are getting to the decidedly old part of life. Here is the link to that post: Mom Called.

If you are so inclined, follow me over to the new blog. If not, thank you for reading. May your new year be kind and gentle and fascinating.

November Dog Walk

After school, if I can get out the school-door and home in time to catch the sunset, I take the dog for a walk through the woods. Dog-walking is one of my favorite things to do because it is so ordinary, so part of the ritual of daily life. And every dog-walking-day I see or experience something so exquisitely particular to the moment that it opens my heart.

I’m reading Matthew Zapruder’s, Why Poetry. He says this about stumbling upon poems when he was younger:

It was like plugging something into a socket, and electrifying my imagination, making me feel I was more aware, empathetic, thoughtful, engaged, alive.

Poetry makes dog-walking more meaningful; dog-walking makes poetry more possible.

#writeout

November Dog Walk

That interminable gray. All day,
the temperature hovers around 40.
Water, not able to freeze,
also does not evaporate. This
liminal space.
Perpetual twilight.
A single crow caws. A last-leaf
flutters to the ground
from the red oak, a species
that hangs on
long past when others
have given up.
The sun, hidden all day, slides
under a crack at the horizon.
And suddenly,
the Indian grass glows
golden;
the blue-stem:
rust.

– steve peterson

Ladybug Beetles

I wrote this poem quickly for #writeout after the annual Fall Ladybug Beetle Infestation. I can’t help but see this event as connected to a general sense of hubris, that we can control the natural world and make it do what we want.

ladybug beetles

the ladybug beetles arrived today.
hordes of them
tapping on the windows,
squeezing through the cracks
in the front door,
nestling in the clothes
I left on the line this last warm
October day filled with sun.

all night long
farmers harvested soybeans,
frost-killed and dry.
combine lights.
dust. and then
a cloud of beetles.

a cloud of beetles
flew in from the soybeans. this being
just one more small
disaster,
another sign of hubris.
some genius introduced them
from a far away land
to eat the aphids
that were lowering the
yield of the monoculture-soybeans.
well, they decimated the natives
(this always happens)
so, while

not a climate crisis
or a cancer cluster,
a cloud of beetles arrived today,
another sign of hubris,
small,
and familiar.

— steve peterson

Here is me reading the poem:

 

Embarrassment

Here’s a poem I wrote in class along with the kids.

We brainstormed some emotions.

Our task was to write a poem that used a metaphor or simile to help us understand an emotion more deeply.

Photo by Paul Green on Unsplash

 

Embarrassment

Embarrassment is a bright searchlight
that sweeps the ground
around the prison yard fence,
searching
for a bit of cloth
in the grass,
a color
that does not match,
for any movement
to reveal
the prisoner who
might try
to escape.

–Steve Peterson

After a Photo of a House in Syria, or Was it Bosnia?

Last week, I heard Caleb “The Negro Artist” Rainey read several spoken word poems at the ArtHaus Poetry Slam. One of them was in a form whose name I cannot remember, but it sounded intriguing: Begin each line with an important word from the line above. The poem he read had a circular quality, partly because of the content, but also because the form, itself, looped the poem backward as it moved forward, as if it were a thread and each line was a stitch.

I used a line by Wisława Szymborska (italicized) as a seed for this poem. The poem is partly ekphrastic, too, as it is based on a photo.

After a Photo of a House in Syria, or Was it Bosnia?
– borrowing a line from Wisława Szymborska

After every war someone has to tidy up — 
War being the hammer that smashes things —
Smashes them like that street or this building both bombed,
Bombed into the Stone Age. Smoke rises into a clear, blue sky.
Smoke, thick and black, pours from an apartment building, the
Apartment of a man who sits with his face in his hands
Sits on the curb by his bombed-out house, a
House filled with smoke when the fire consumed his life.
Consumed by this fate, he sits, face in hands, just the top of his head visible. On
Top of the rubble a woman shoves part of a broken wall and heaves it aside. This
Broken woman lifts the limp body of her young son from the rubble. The
Sun shines brightly and smoke pours from an old building. Near the man, an
Old woman and old man lift a slab of concrete from the street into a cart. The
Cart filled with rubble. After resting, they return to their work.
After every war someone has to tidy up.
Up above, the smoke hangs like a cloud in the clear, blue sky.

– steve peterson

Pine Spring Creek

To celebrate National Poetry Month, I’m exploring Amy Ludwig VanDerWater’s terrific book, Poems are Teachers. This poem combines two techniques from the book, “Visit a Place,” p. 48 and “Begin with a Question,” p. 182.

Simon Wilkes via Unsplash

I live near a small, spring-fed creek that still has a population of naturally reproducing brook trout. If you are really careful, you can sneak up on them and spend a delightful hour watching them feed in the current.

Pine Spring Creek

Does it matter that there is a creek that still runs clear,
even here in Iowa where the dead soil from fields that

were once prairies now chokes the life out of streams?
Does it matter that there is a place where I might still

crawl on my belly to the stream’s bank-edge
and peer into a pool whose rocky bottom is

filled with the larvae of insects, not manure from hog lots;
a place where at the end of the riffles rests a flotilla

of brook trout, facing upstream, mouths agape, festooned
in haloed spots, fins fluttering, steady in the current, waiting;

a place to lie down under the late afternoon sun and
a warbler’s song, a place to catch a glimpse of the past

as if through the keyhole of a locked door?

– Steve Peterson

Towhee

So I was out for a walk through the woods and heard this scratching coming from under a brushy area and, after kneeling and peering under the brambles, found a rufous-sided towhee (first I’ve seen this season) scratching quietly away, which appeals to my sense of wonder about all those small and inconspicuous things.

During National Poetry month I’m exploring Amy Ludwig VanDerWater’s great book, Poems are Teachers, as a source of inspiration. The inspiration for this piece came from p. 117, “Try on a Pattern from Nature.” And, of course, the pattern is this scratching-for-sustenance behavior so characteristic of towhees (and me.)

Towhee

The towhee knows to scratch under the brush,
under the leaves. Though he is
discreet on this gray day in early spring
under a sky hidden by brambles, by clouds,
when I heard his faint scuffle
I knelt to the damp earth,
placed my elbows on the ground,
and marveled at the sustenance he draws from this
persistent turning, this upending of things
already fallen. I honor his quiet
unearthing of the hidden places.
He finds what he needs to live.

– steve peterson

Erosion Questions

Devonian fossils from the Rockford Fossil Bed

This week geologists came to talk about the Decorah Impact Crater, which got me thinking about change on a geologic timeframe.

This poem was inspired by Amy Ludwig VanDerWater’s, Poems are Teachers, “Try on a Pattern from Nature” p. 117. In this case, the pattern is the big time-frame pattern of geologic time: Create. Destroy. Create. One of my goals is to use April Poetry Month to explore this terrific resource.

Erosion Questions

he said the meteorite struck during the Mid-Ordovician,
right where we stand now; that
the crater filled with water and
became a brackish pond, or even part of a shallow sea, that
over time it filled with mud; that
it teemed with life, that this mud turned to shale, which then
eroded off the rest of the landscape except
for the crater because something that is already missing
cannot go away; he said that
the fine sediments preserved even soft-bodied creatures well enough that
they could even be named; that
he has examined only one cubic meter of shale; that
95% of the species in the shale no one had ever seen before; that
without this crater an entire world of creatures
would have been lost to time; and
I wonder: what of these lost worlds, and
what of ours, and
why does this make my heart ache so?

– Steve Peterson

Great-Grandfather Tells What Happened

There is this family story of my great-grandfather’s death during the Moose Lake, Cloquet, and Duluth Fire of 1918. I have the letters my grandfather’s older brothers wrote to the other brothers describing that day. I’ve often wondered what that day must have been like. Adopting his persona helped me imagine.

I chose to write this prose poem using the persona of my great-grandfather, which was inspired by Amy Ludwig VanDerWater’s, Poems are Teachers, “Adopt another Persona” p. 75. One of my goals is to use April Poetry Month to explore this terrific resource.

Great-Grandfather Tells What Happened

Ralph and the boys found my body up there on the hill and even though he told Sophia that I looked “peaceful” and “only a little burned,” he wrote to Helge, who had shipped out with the AEF early in the fall, that when they found me a couple days after the fire they barely recognized me: “just a spot of white” amongst the destruction. Yes, sir, we knew that fire was out there to the west all morning; reports of flames and smoke kept arriving by telephone, spread through the party line. And then Floodwood, then Arnold burned. Then Woodland, which was us. So when the winds changed and the smoke and embers poured over the hill, Verner and the others took off through the swamp to find safety in the lower ground with the hope that the lake breeze would keep the fire away. But I turned back to open the barn door so the horses could escape. Their frantic neighs and white-eyed fright, oh my, that was too much for me to take. And it didn’t take long before I realized my time was up. The fire jumped the barn and closed off the way downhill. So, I said a prayer for the kids and Sophie. Sometimes things don’t work out the way you’d choose. But by then the only choice left to me was to go up the hill, to outrun the fire, which, as we found out, did not happen. Not even close.

– Steve Peterson