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 lilt between bramble
and heather on mud-soaked moors?

Were you housebound, gazing through
leaded windows while landscapes
blurred into the sea?

I imagine you, a ballad of emotion,
deep with French horns, wistful violins
and whimpering flutes,

ascending quietly into a mysterious
finale, while the cadence of your life
slowly lowered into another accord.

According to my 2010 turtle calendar, the Vernal Equinox arrives Saturday, March 20.  To celebrate spring’s arrival last year, WIZ ran a Spring Poetry Run-off that turned out to be lots of fun.  So beginning March 19, we’re running WIZ’s Second Annual Spring Poetry Run-off, this time as a poetry contest!

In keeping with WIZ’s mission to help develop, inspire, and promote literary nature and science writing in the Mormon writing community, we encourage poets to help call an end to winter and midwife the birth of a milder season, a season of gardens, returning flocks, and light that takes the tarnish off the blood.

Contest rules

• Submit poems to wilderness@motleyvision.org between March 7 and March 31.
• All poems submitted must be original, published or unpublished work.  If the work has been previously published, please provide publication information and be sure you can grant us rights to re-publish the work.
• Please submit poems 50 lines long or less.
• All poems submitted must be spring-themed or at least mention spring.
• Poets may submit up to 3 poems.

The contest will run from March 19 through March 31 or longer, if enough poems come in to warrant extending the contest. All submissions will be published on the blog, where they’ll become automatically eligible for competition as well as open to readers’ informal feedback in the post’s comments. Authors retain all rights to their work.

Entries will be posted one per day until all entries have been posted.  Following the contest’s closing, readers will vote on WIZ to choose the winning poem.

A winner will be announced within a week after the last poem has been posted and all votes have been cast.  The winner will be awarded his or her choice of either a copy of Lance Larsen’s Backyard Alchemy (University of Tampa Press 2009) or Warren Hatch’s Mapping the Bones of the World (Signature Books 2007).

If you don’t want to compete but would like to participate in the Spring Poetry Runoff, let me know and I’ll mark the poem, “Not for competition.”

So, if you have written a poem which mentions spring or one in which spring figures prominently and that fits WIZ’s themes and content, e-mail it to us at wilderness@motleyvision.org.  Please review our submissions guide before submitting.

D. H. Lawrence
Rainer Maria Rilke
Th. (Eric Jepson)
Adam K. K. Figueira
Laura Craner
Andrew Marvell

An esteemed company!

Thanks–deep, ever-flowing thanks–to Wm Morris, for helping me open this space and for providing solid support.

Thanks, WIZ readers, for taking time out of your no doubt very busy schedules to while away moments here.  Writing without audience is, if not dead, not as alive as it might be.

Thanks to contributors who have submitted work and helped establish literary bio-diversity for the site.  You have no idea how good it has been to meet you (in an Internet way) and work with you.

Thanks to my family for enduring my distraction with this project, and especially thanks to my son Saul for his tech support and other vital forms of participation.

My hope is that, over the next year, I’ll be able to take WIZ to another level, one that will make more worthwhile everyone’s interest, faith, and participation.   The literary nature and science writing field is burgeoning, including among LDS.  I fully intend to find a way to gather its flowers while I may.

Fair quiet, have I found thee here,
And Innocence, thy Sister dear!
Mistaken long, I sought you then
In busy Companies of Men.
Your sacred Plants, if here below,
Only among the Plants will grow ;
Society is all but rude,
To this delicious Solitude.

No white nor red was ever seen
So am’rous as this lovely green ;
Fond Lovers, cruel as their Flame,
Cut in these Trees their Mistress name.
Little, Alas, they know or heed,
How far these Beauties Hers exceed!
Fair Trees! where se’er your barks I wound
No Name shall but your own be found.

When we have run our Passion’s heat,
Love hither makes his best retreat :
The Gods who mortal Beauty chase,
Still in a Tree did end their race.
Apollo hunted Daphne so,
Only that She might Laurel grow,
And Pan did after Syrinx speed,
Not as a Nymph, but for a Reed.

What wond’rous Life is this I lead!
Ripe Apples drop about my head ;
The Luscious Clusters of the Vine
Upon my Mouth do crush their Wine ;
The Nectaren, and curious Peach
Into my hands themselves do reach ;
Stumbling on Melons as I pass,
Insnared with Flow’rs, I fall on Grass.

Meanwhile the Mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness :
The Mind, that Ocean where each kind
Does streight its own resemblance find ;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other Worlds, and other Seas ;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green Thought in a green Shade.

Here at the Fountain’s sliding foot,
Or at some Rruit-tree’s mossy root,
Casting the Body’s Vest aside,
My Soul into the boughs does glide :
There like a Bird it sits, and sings,
Then whets, and combs its silver Wings ;
And, till prepar’d for longer flight,
Waves in its Plumes the various Light.

Such was that happy Garden-state,
While Man there walked without a Mate :
After a Place so pure and sweet,
What other Help could yet be meet!
But ’twas beyond a Mortal’s share
To wander solitary there :
Two Paradises ’twere in one
To live in Paradise alone.

How well the skillful Gard’ner drew
Of flowers and herbs this dial new ;
Where from above the milder Sun
Does through a fragrant Zodiack run ;
And, as it works, th’ industrious Bee
Computes its time as well as we.
How could such sweet and wholesome Hours
Be reckon’d but with herbs and flowers!

__________________________________________________________

Andrew Marvell
Hugh Macdonald, Ed.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul LTD, 1972.  51-53.

He stood to see the stable from
above.  The pine gleamed rough and white
like roasted fowl, the figures’ polished
grains swirled, recalling river sand.
The child was round and red, as healthy
newborns are.  Cedar and spruce
thickened the room.  He fell to heavy
thought. “Since I made these will I
prophesy.” The tree behind,
dark and spangled, spread a woodland
presence.  Beside the tree the amber
of the grate fire splintered, spilling heat
into the room.  “Though you come
like manna on the grass with voice
to raise the dead among us, we
will not ask, ‘What is it?’ as before.
No. We’ll cleave to Now, and though
you say ‘I am all that’s made
alive; if a man believe in me,
though he is dead, my body
shall unbind his, he shall live,’
we will not think to ask, ‘Will you raise
my dead?  Will you unwind my shroud?’
No, we’ll lament, ‘Had you been here,
you could have changed it all.’ We
will not notice that you are and that
You have—not cry, ‘Speak!  And earth
will yield hyacinths of spring, the dead.’”

He half-woke and set aromas chanting.
“Loaves, loves, and judgment.”  He stirred the coals.
“’Twill be the loaves distracting us.
We’ve got no eyes to see beyond
our flesh or yours, forgotten how
to ask, ‘What is it?’ and so be drawn
into the question of God.”
He tossed
the cedar shavings, cherry, hemlock
all, onto the coals.  The flakes of wood
flared against the cobbles, embers popped.

Next year, mahogany for the magi;
he’d carve them like the chessmen he saw
once in a city museum, gaunt
and stag-like, hesitant, stalking kings
to the manger. He spread the fire’s warm leavings
on the hearth, he turned, he walked
through the door, the only part of night
Not yet grown black and solid.

They are indivisible incompatibles,
This landscape and
The mutterings of a middle woman.
Her words lie naked in a field,
Lost in the grazing cows,
Being licked up and slobbered on
By their wide, warm tongues,

Always emphasizing individuality
And difference and commonality and similarity,
Exploring, teaching, imposing,

Crying, “Look at me!
Learn from me!
Listen!”

The weather-beaten woman
Tanned, freckled, and dry,

Green, red, brown, and white—
With wrinkles round her many-faced smile—
Observes her fleeting springtime
And is always living tenderly.

____________________________________________________________

Laura is a mommy and sometimes writer who dabbles in gardening and the expressive arts.  She says of this poem, “Back when I was in college I wrote a poem about spring in Utah as an homage to May Swenson. It’s a mash-up of titles of her work and bits of her prose and I thought it might be a good fit for Love of Nature month at WIZ.”  You can read more of her stuff at A Motley Vision or Depressed (But Not Unhappy) Mormon Mommy. She is very excited for spring.

________________________________________________________________________________

Adam K. K. Figueira was born to the east of where he lives now, but then went west, and back towards the middle again. He doesn’t see himself as a figure of any importance, but he likes to watch, make, and write about films, particularly LDS films. His greatest achievements are all girls, and that doesn’t appear to be changing in the foreseeable future. Adam’s work is available to read and/or watch at his blog, Anew; Toward an LDS Cinema, the other blog he writes for; his YouTube channel; and his professional site, adamkk.com.

“If you will only tell me what sort of girl Miss King is, I shall know what to think.”

“She is a very good kind of girl, I believe. I know no harm of her.”

“But he paid her not the smallest attention till her grandfather’s death made her mistress of this fortune.”

“No–what should he? If it were not allowable for him to gain MY affections because I had no money, what occasion could there be for making love to a girl whom he did not care about, and who was equally poor?”

“But there seems an indelicacy in directing his attentions towards her so soon after this event.”

“A man in distressed circumstances has not time for all those elegant decorums which other people may observe. If SHE does not object to it, why should WE?”

“HER not objecting does not justify HIM. It only shows her being deficient in something herself–sense or feeling.”

“Well,” cried Elizabeth, “have it as you choose. HE shall be mercenary, and SHE shall be foolish.”

“No, Lizzy, that is what I do NOT choose. I should be sorry, you know, to think ill of a young man who has lived so long in Derbyshire.”

“Oh! if that is all, I have a very poor opinion of young men who live in Derbyshire; and their intimate friends who live in Hertfordshire are not much better. I am sick of them all. Thank Heaven! I am going to-morrow where I shall find a man who has not one agreeable quality, who has neither manner nor sense to recommend him. Stupid men are the only ones worth knowing, after all.”

“Take care, Lizzy; that speech savours strongly of disappointment.”

Before they were separated by the conclusion of the play, she had the unexpected happiness of an invitation to accompany her uncle and aunt in a tour of pleasure which they proposed taking in the summer.

“We have not determined how far it shall carry us,” said Mrs. Gardiner, “but, perhaps, to the Lakes.”

No scheme could have been more agreeable to Elizabeth, and her acceptance of the invitation was most ready and grateful. “Oh, my dear, dear aunt,” she rapturously cried, “what delight! what felicity! You give me fresh life and vigour. Adieu to disappointment and spleen. What are young men to rocks and mountains? Oh! what hours of transport we shall spend! And when we DO return, it shall not be like other travellers, without being able to give one accurate idea of anything. We WILL know where we have gone–we WILL recollect what we have seen. Lakes, mountains, and rivers shall not be jumbled together in our imaginations; nor when we attempt to describe any particular scene, will we begin quarreling about its relative situation. Let OUR first effusions be less insupportable than those of the generality of travellers.”

___________________________________________________________

From Chapter 27.  Text courtesy of Wikisource.  Submitted by Th.

Wege will ich erkiesen,
die selten wer betritt
in blassen Abendwiesen -
und keinen Traum, als diesen:
Du gehst mit.

***

Understand, I’ll slip quietly
away from the noisy crowd
when I see the pale
stars rising, blooming, over the oaks.

I’ll pursue solitary pathways
through the pale twilit meadows,
with only this one dream:
You come too.

(From Advent. Translator unknown)