Category Archives: nature

With a leaf, and angels.

nature, poetry, prayer,

A LIST OF PRAISES

Give praise with psalms that tell the trees to sing,
Give praise with Gospel choirs in storefront churches,
Mad with the joy of the Sabbath,
Give praise with the babble of infants, who wake with the sun,
Give praise with children chanting their skip-rope rhymes,
A poetry not in books, a vagrant mischievous poetry
living wild on the Streets through generations of children.

Give praise with the sound of the milk-train far away
With its mutter of wheels and long-drawn-out sweet whistle
As it speeds through the fields of sleep at three in the morning,
Give praise with the immense and peaceful sigh
Of the wind in the pinewoods,
At night give praise with starry silences.

Give praise with the skirling of seagulls
And the rattle and flap of sails
And gongs of buoys rocked by the sea-swell
Out in the shipping-lanes beyond the harbor.
Give praise with the humpback whales,
Huge in the ocean they sing to one another.

Give praise with the rasp and sizzle of crickets, katydids and cicadas,
Give praise with hum of bees,
Give praise with the little peepers who live near water.
When they fill the marsh with a shimmer of bell-like cries
We know that the winter is over.

Give praise with mockingbirds, day’s nightingales.
Hour by hour they sing in the crepe myrtle
And glossy tulip trees
On quiet side streets in southern towns.

Give praise with the rippling speech
Of the eider-duck and her ducklings
As they paddle their way downstream
In the red-gold morning
On Restiguche, their cold river,
Salmon river,
Wilderness river.

Give praise with the whitethroat sparrow.
Far, far from the cities,
Far even from the towns,
With piercing innocence
He sings in the spruce-tree tops,
Always four notes
And four notes only.

Give praise with water,
With storms of rain and thunder
And the small rains that sparkle as they dry,
And the faint floating ocean roar
That fills the seaside villages,
And the clear brooks that travel down the mountains

And with this poem, a leaf on the vast flood,
And with the angels in that other country.

-Anne Porter

Restigouche River, New Brunswick, by Richard James Taylor

The glad blowing of the wind.

nature, quotes,

“But while admiring my neighbour, I don’t think I shall ever try to follow in her steps, my talents not being of the energetic and organising variety, but rather of that order which makes their owner almost lamentably prone to take up a volume of poetry and wander out to where the kingcups grow, and, sitting on a willow trunk beside a little stream, forget the very existence of everything but green pastures and still waters, and the glad blowing of the wind across the joyous fields.”

― Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth and Her German Garden

See how they banter and riot.

nature, poetry, ,

It’s the season for Cabbage Whites! I’ve written about them before, and posted several poems. Mary doesn’t name these as Cabbage Whites, but I’m assuming. It doesn’t matter; the delightful thing is that she describes the essential “delicate in a hurry” nature of them, such that one wonders if they will ever stop and drink. Of course they eventually do, and I can get a decent picture of them then; but it’s the lobbing and banging I can never capture, so I’m glad Mary has done it, in rhythm and words.

SEVEN WHITE BUTTERFLIES

Seven white butterflies
delicate in a hurry look
how they bang the pages
…….of their wings as they fly

to the fields of mustard yellow
and orange and plain
gold all eternity
…….is in the moment this is what

Blake said Whitman said such
wisdom in the agitated
motions of the mind seven
…….dancers floating

even as worms toward
paradise see how they banter
and riot and rise
…….to the trees flutter

lob their white bodies into
the invisible wind weightless
lacy willing
…….to deliver themselves unto

the universe now each settles
down on a yellow thumb on a
brassy stem now
…….all seven are rapidly sipping

from the golden tower who
would have thought it could be so easy?

-Mary Oliver

 

The cricket sings.

nature, poetry, , ,

ON THE GRASSHOPPER AND THE CRICKET

The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper’s—he takes the lead
In summer luxury,—he has never done
With his delights; for when tired out with fun
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.

-John Keats

Yorkshire 2015 – Pippin photo