Category: nature poetry

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

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

Sandhill Cranes

I took a trip to Cardinal Marsh to check out the ducks and some sandhill cranes, stalking the shore, lifted into the sky. Watching their transition from ground to air caused me to reflect on the seasonal transition and how often transitions, even for the graceful, contain an ungainly moment when The Before and The After tug equally.

Photo by John Duncan on Unsplash

Sandhill Cranes

Six sandhill cranes stood
near the slough –
just filled with flights of ducks
as winter lurches toward spring –

when wary, watching
each-as-one breaks a short run –
one,
two, three steps – their
thin legs reaching, wings
stroking, necks craning
upward toward the darkening sky.
Powerful wingtips sweep the ground. And

for three slow wingbeats, they are
suspended,
hanging in the cooling March air,
drawn back toward the Earth,
straining for the sky.

— Steve Peterson

Ice

On a Christmas Day hike up the Cascade River on the north shore of Lake Superior, I walked and wrote this poem in my head thinking that, sometimes, I am this river.

Ice

river water rolls under the ice, over the rocks,
falling, falling on its way to the lake

drawn downward, rolling stones
round boulders and over –

the lake does not fill up
the river does not run dry

even now, in winter, when snow lands
firmly on the ground and stays until April

when the trees have given up their leaves,
their roots frozen in the ground

water slides
beneath the ice

– Steve Peterson

After Seamus Heaney’s, Postscript

This was inspired by Seamus Heaney’s, Postscript. I’ve been working outside a lot this summer (as usual). It’s been hot and humid. Another world entirely from spring and fall.

Reading Heaney’s poem caused me to think about how even though summer in Iowa is so much different than fall in Ireland there is a presence to it, too.

Photo by Ruben Engel on Unsplash

After Seamus Heaney’s, Postscript

And someday take the time to walk up the hill, beyond
the still oaks that look over the valley. Go on farther,
into the old field now filled with goldenrod and Indian grass.
Do this in June or July when the sun is high, as the
last drenching rains are drawn up by the green and
exhaled into the air; when even the dragonflies pause
to rest on glistening stems of grass. Stillness and
waiting. The sun and humid air press you into the ground
until your legs no longer move. Stand still.
Draw a breath. Feel the steamy air enter
your lungs, feel your feet planted on the earth, and
the sweat trickle down your back. Know that all around you,
all that moves stands still, waiting, and all that stands still
stretches upward toward the heavy sun. And for a moment,
you might feel the convenient lines that separate plant
and animal, animate and inanimate, the quick and the dead
shimmer and blur.

– Steve Peterson