I
The breeze has caught
the cherry tree ready to shed
her petals and the air
is filled with flakes.
They settle in grass
and the lee of the garden steps.
The rosebush that clasps
the creaking trellis
is speckled with white.
II
What is the time?
It is now. And the place?
The place is here.
How does now look?
It looks like here.
III
Time will take away the thrill
of [...]
The twentieth century has gone down in history for a number of ignominious as well as heroic events, but certainly one of its more troubling legacies is its treatment of rivers. As agriculture gave way to industry and massive development of cities, water was victim to an increasingly private and individualistic conceptualization of property. Consequently, [...]
Prologue
When two universes collide
one is destroyed, or
is it
masked?
hidden
in the wind,
preserved,
like a seed to come
forth later?
The other however
folds in on itself,
slowly,
a topological twisting,
until it engulfs itself and
is gone.
Coyote-Man, it seems, never
learned how to deal
with motorized vehicles.
They escaped his desert
logic.
Hasje-altye—Talking God—
never prepared him for
the intrusion.
The invasion.
But who’s to blame?
Who would have believed that
metal
and carbon
seduced from the earth
could [...]
A compass needle, a lizard, spins half a turn
To keep me in sight, tweaking my sense of direction:
Spring is coming — that way.
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. [...]
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!
Listen to Mark Bennion read “Waters of Mormon”
Amid the tingle of forest and shadows,
you ford through the water
to the sway of its purl and girth,
a surge of billow where air arrives
in speckles of light. The only
distance is the reach of your hand
and the life after petition and promise.
Trees rustle in incandescence
as the crowd’s whisper fades.
You [...]
The intertwining of spirituality with images, metaphors, analogies, parables and other language containing strong veins of agrarian- and wilderness-oriented content is part of what gives scripture its power. Along with a large proportion of the rest of this Bible-reading country, as Mormons increasingly move inside and explore via the electronic frontier, scripture becomes one of [...]
Dave’s post here caused me to reflect more self-consciously on what it is I do when I go out in the desert. Do I walk off pavement’s edge to get away from stresses or disappointments? Do I go out to have adventures? To think? Dave’s post is about seeking God in nature. Is that what I’m doing–looking for God out [...]
Chin on sandstone
She turns her head to see
The sky running toward her—
The last sun on the last water.
Who can count the knots in the braid?
Through the cottonwoods
Mourning doves’ blue ballads purl:
Coo-ahh, hoo-hoo-hoo.
Day lifts from the mesa.
Stars bloom unevenly:
White hyacinths
Through pewter snow.
She stands to go
Where friends have grown a fire.
At a bend she startles a [...]
This brief, light treatment of possibilities for the LDS nature writer is excerpted from my unpublished paper “Why Joseph Went to the Woods: Rootstock for LDS Literary Nature Writers,” presented at the 2008 Association for Mormon Letters Annual Conference. This paper arose out of blog posts at A Motley Vision and Times and Seasons.
Perhaps one [...]