"We live among a gratitude of birds." Terry Tempest Williams

Moose in the Morning

Oh wild and gentle beast,
Immense antlered shape,
This morning in the meadow!
Like something ancient, lost
And found now, promise kept,
Emerging from the shadow,
Emerging while I slept—
Wilderness and escape!
You set me free to shirk
The day's demanding work
And cast my guilt away.
You make a truant of me
This moose-enchanted day
When all I can is see,
When all I am is this
Astonishment and bliss. 

May Sarton

 ***

Odessa

    for JS

I drove through Sacred Heart and Montevideo,
over the Chippewa River, all the way to Madison.
When I stopped, walked into grass—
bluestem, wild rose, a monarch—
I was afraid at first. Birds I couldn't identify
might have been bobolinks,
non-breeding plumage.
I am always afraid of what might show up, suddenly.
What might hide.
At dusk I saw the start of low plateaus, plains
really, even when planted. Almost to the Dakota border
I was struck by the isolation and abiding loneliness
yet somehow thrilled. Alone. Hardly another car on the road
and in town, just a few teenagers
wearing high school sweatshirts, walking and laughing, on the edge
of a world they don't know.
Darkness started as heaviness in the colors
of fields, a tractor, cornstalks, stone.
I turned back just before the Prairie Wildlife Refuge
at Odessa, the place I came to see. Closed.
Empty. The moon rose. Full.
I was driving Highway 7, the "Sioux Trail:"
I could feel the past the way I could in Mexico,
Mayan tombs in the jungle at Palenque,
men tearing papers from our hands.
Three hours still to drive home. 

Patricia Kirkpatrick

   ***

March

It is the first birds that startle us.

Make us feel most alive.

And ask us for more than we can give.

ECS

Happy Spring Equinox!

Spring

Oh the Spring

A good time

We can enjoy the summer…

Solstice

Oh mighty rain

Give/our/plants/water

Says the desert man

Oh Spring finally you,

No more Winter

Micah Joseph Bernard

Age 11


  ***

    III

Spring is like a perhaps hand

Spring is like a perhaps hand

(which comes carefully

out of Nowhere)arranging

a window,into which people look(while

people stare

arranging and changing placing

carefully there a strange

thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps

Hand in a window

(carefully to

and fro moving New and

Old things,while

people stare carefully

moving a perhaps

fraction of flower here placing

an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.

e. e. cummings

         

Even though it is in the 80's in the Sonoran Desert, I can envision snow...

Report from the West

Snow is falling west of here. The mountains have more than a
foot of it. I see the early morning sky dark as night. I won't lis-
ten to the weather report. I'll let the question of snow hang.
Answers only dull the senses. Even answers that are right often
make what they explain uninteresting. In nature the answers
are always changing. Rain to snow, for instance. Nature can
let the mysterious things alone—wet leaves plastered to tree
trunks, the intricate design of fish guts. The way we don't fall
off the earth at night when we look up at the North Star. The
way we know this may not always be so. The way our dizziness
makes us grab the long grass, hanging by our fingertips on the
edge of infinity. 

Tom Hennen

  ***

Goods

It's the immemorial feelings
I like the best: hunger, thirst,
their satisfaction; work-weariness,
earned rest; the falling again
from loneliness to love;
the green growth the mind takes
from the pastures in March;
The gayety in the stride
of a good team of Belgian mares
that seems to shudder from me
through all my ancestry. 

Wendell Berry