A Mormon literary backcountry where words and place come together.

 

 

 

 

Archive for the 'Stewardship' Category

“Faint Refrain” by Karen Kelsay

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

Elizabeth Songstaffe, whose name
is inscribed in my gold-edged bible,
how was your life composed?
Did your pockets brim
with grace notes that scattered
like freckles on a shoulder?
Were you awkward
as a lonely clap, sounding after
a symphony’s first movement?
Born one hundred years ago,
your death was not recorded–
yet, I hear a faint refrain.
Did you once hum across prairies
on humid evenings, or [...]

Thank You, LONNOL Month participants!

Sunday, March 7th, 2010

Thank you very muches to all those who participated during Love of Nature Nature of Love Month on WIZ.  The list includes:
D. H. Lawrence
Rainer Maria Rilke
Th. (Eric Jepson)
Adam K. K. Figueira
Laura Craner
Andrew Marvell
An esteemed company!

Also, today is Wilderness Interface Zone’s birthday

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

I almost forgot!  Today, WIZ turns one.  Happy Birthday to us! I’ve been preoccupied and haven’t come up with any fun thing to do in celebration, but I would like to run out a line of thanks yous.
Thanks–deep, ever-flowing thanks–to Wm Morris, for helping me open this space and for providing solid support.
Thanks, WIZ readers, [...]

The Manger Scene

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

She could smell the season on him.  Summers
he came through the door redolent of horses
and wild mint; winters, copper and ice.
Metallic and snow-clean, he cooled the house.

Cosmic Turtles, Part Five

Friday, January 29th, 2010

In Virginia during the sixties and seventies, with a little concentrated looking, I could consort with eastern mud turtles, spotted turtles, elegant eastern painted turtles, snapping turtles, eastern box turtles, and even, I believe, although we lived rather east of its range as depicted in Petersen’s Eastern Reptiles and Amphibians, the occasional Terrapina ornata, the [...]

Cosmic Turtles, Part Four

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

Although Turtle is a trickster of the highest order, it is true also that Turtle may be tricked.  When this happens—when the trickster’s trickster is tricked—you may be sure the world has tipped out of balance.
Every year along the southeastern and gulf state coastlands of the U.S., females of several sea turtle species such as [...]

Cosmic Turtles, Part Three

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

On a warm Virginia day I walked to the Eastern Seaboard Coastline double tracks near our house and came to a small pond lying between the track grade and the woods.  A stand of wild irises grew in the water, along with rushes, green bubble-beaded algae, and sedges.  It was a small habitat not entirely [...]

Cosmic Turtles, Part Two

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

Beside serving as the foundation of the world, Turtle surfaces in folk literature as the trickster’s trickster. It may surprise some to learn that Turtle has the smarts necessary to get the best of flimflammers like Jackal and even Anansi, the trickster spider, but then surprise is part of the strategy.

Cosmic Turtles, Part One

Monday, January 25th, 2010

This is the first installment of a five-part post.
Always it’s the same: the woods are leaf-fatted, midsummer.  Low-growing Mayapple and ginseng creep among roots of massive white oaks whose limbs form their own green-clouded groves.  Ferns half my height unroll from fiddleheads.  Fiddleheads, with their scrolled fronds, put me in mind of unborn things—pale, web-footed, [...]

Snow day and dishwashing haiku

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

Just as the deep snow here had melted to half-gone and I’d broken usable trails through the month-old snowpack remaining, a new storm blew in, dropped another five or six inches, and undid my hope for a winter thaw.  Two more storms over the next three days are expected to fluff things up even more.  [...]