#ecopoem

Web of green life

Pulsing in sunlight

How long can you survive

Among barren, toxic minds

Gaze of greed cannot see why

False landscapes will not thrive

Past rhythms of earth’s tide

For future’s child

Rewild

This is where we learned love and where we learned depth and where we learned layers and where we learned connections between layers. We learned and we loved the black sandshell, the ash, the american bittern, the harelip sucker, the yellow bullhead, the beech, the great blue heron, the dobsonfly larva, the water penny larva, the birch, the redhead, the white catspaw, the elephant ear, the buckeye, the king eider, the river darter, the sauger, the burning bush, the common merganser, the limpet, the mayfly nymph, the cedar, the turkey vulture, the spectacle case, the flat floater, the cherry, the red tailed hawk, the longnose gar, the brook trout, the chestnut, the killdeer, the river snail, the giant floater, the chokeberry, gray catbird, the rabbitsfoot, the slenderhead darter, the crabapple, the american robin, the creek chub, the stonefly nymph, the dogwood, the warbling vireo, the sow bug, the elktoe, the elm, the marsh wren, the monkeyface, the central mudminnow, the fir, the gray-cheeked thrush, the white bass, the predaceous diving beetle, the hawthorn, the scud, the salamander mussel, the hazelnut, the warbler, the mapleleaf, the american eel, the hemlock, the speckled chub, the whirligig beetle larva, the hickory, the sparrow, the caddisfly larva, the fluted shell, the horse chestnut, the wartyback, the white heelsplitter, the larch, the pine grosbeak, the brook stickleback, the river redhorse, the locust, the ebonyshelf, the giant water bug, the maple, the eastern phoebe, the white sucker, the creek heelsplitter, the mulberry, the crane fly larva, the mountain madtom, the oak, the bank swallow, the wabash pigtoe, the damselfly larva, the pine, the stonecat, the kidneyshell, the plum, the midge larva, the eastern sand darter, the rose, the purple wartyback, the narrow-winged damselfly, the spruce, the pirate perch, the threehorn wartyback, the sumac, the black fly larva, the redside dace, the tree-of-heaven, the orange-foot pimpleback, the dragonfly larva, the walnut, the gold fish, the butterfly, the striped fly larva, the willow, the freshwater drum, the ohio pigtoe, the warmouth, the mayfly nymph, the clubshell. And this was just the beginning of the list. Our hearts took on many things. Our hearts took on new shapes, new shapes every day as we went to the stream every day. Our hearts took on the shape of well-defined riffles and pools, clean substrates, woody debris, meandering channels, floodplains, and mature streamside forests. Our hearts took on the shape of the stream and became riffled and calmed and muddy and clean and flooded and shrunken dry. Our hearts took on the shape of whirligigs swirling across the water. We shaped our hearts into the sycamore trees along the side of the stream and we let into our hearts the long pendulous polygamous racemes of its small green flowers, the first-formed male flowers with no pistil and then the later arriving hairy ovary with its two curved stigmas. We let ourselves love the one day of the adult life of the mayfly as it warms, mates in flight, and dies all without eating. And we shaped our hearts into the water willow and into the eggs spawned in the water willow. Our hearts took on the brilliant blues, reds, and oranges of breeding male rainbow darter and our hearts swam to the female rainbow darter and we poked her side with our snout as she buried herself under the gravel and we laid upon her as she vibrated. We let leaves and algae into our hearts and then we let the mollusks and the insects and we let the midge larvae into our heart and then the stonefly nymph and then a minnow came into our heart and with it a bass and then we let the blue heron fly in, the raccoon amble by, the snapping turtle and the watersnake also. We immersed ourselves in the shallow stream. We lied down on the rocks on our narrow pillow stone and let the water pass over us and our heart was bathed in glochida and other things that attach to the flesh. And as we did this we sang.

Don’t Call Me the Grass

This is a poem I wrote for my climate change class. The prompt was to write an ecopoem which is a poem relating to some aspect of nature. I thought it was actually pretty good so I decided to share it. Don’t call me the grass As if to comfort me, You told me that I was like the grass Because all grass must grow through dirt In order to emerge into its true potential But I am not like the grass…

Learn what it is to be toxic

Invasive

Sound out        in the language of crows

Be                        the black bladed omen

strut                   with no particular purpose

or perch           atop a branch or telephone pole

sparrows and finches                   will dive and circle

to…