Poems by Polly Brody

Called to the Forests

by Polly Brody

From Canary Fall 2019

Polly lives in an exurban Connecticut town, about 500 ft. above sea level, about an hour's drive inland from Long Island Sound. Every year she listens from her window for the first chiming peep of spring hylas that give voice to a pond, just within hearing.

We describe our world as the “blue planet,” and yes, seen from space it is a swirl of white clouds over blue seas. However, there is another color vital to our planet’s health; it is green—the living green of forests and savannas, of gardens, and the indispensable phytoplankton that blooms in our oceans. All these bank carbon, while contributing to and maintaining oxygen in our atmosphere.

. . .

Tropical rainforests are a choir of green. Their trees reach high overhead, forming a dense, unbroken canopy. There is a secondary level of lesser trees beneath the crowning canopy, and these layers of green so effectively intercept sunlight that at ground level, a shadowed atmosphere exists that seems like the undersea bed of a verdant ocean. Indeed the humidity is such that the air feels almost liquid.

Only slivers of direct sunlight reach the ground. The jungle is yeasty with life and rot and life anew. From the tiny carmine frog cupped within his leaf, to the jaguar that may walk the forest floor, bearing its dapple on his back, creatures are embraced and nurtured by this world—one can feel a great heart pulse.

This is habitat in which a chorus of avian voices exalts at dawn and sings through the morning. Voices heard but birds unseen. Until suddenly, there is a Crimson Topaz Hummingbird in gleaming hover, caught within a stray sunbeam that has managed to reach the forest floor. Or a brief glimpse of the Musician Wren—small rufous bird, with a blue eye ring—perched momentarily on a fallen log. Its flute-like song entrances the air, but this songster is rarely viewed. I waited many patient minutes for my once-in-a-lifetime glance.

What is the allure we find in mystery and why the special satisfaction felt when one attains a personal revelation? For me, the more challenging it is to view a bird whose voice is present in that lush forest, the greater my delight, should it finally present itself.

The music and magic of Pan’s pipe has called me to rainforests of Panama, Venezuela, Ecuador and Australia. Deeply felt moments have blessed me in each. Here is one from my Australian trip’s journal.

“Today, I hiked six miles out from the Lamington Park lodge. My daypack contained sandwiches, fruit, and a bottle of water. Over my shoulder rested my tripod. On it rode my camera, with its attached telephoto lens. The highland’s temperate rainforest canopy let little sunlight reach the ground, so the air was cool. I felt I was walking in a subtly lit, vast hall. All along my way I heard the dual outcries of the whipbirds, so named because their paired vocalizations sound like a whip cracking.

I reached the escarpment that was my goal. The forest had thinned in the last kilometer, and now I emerged into full sunlight, finding myself on open ground approaching the verge of the great ravine. It was the overlook I’d sought—an immense landscape of slopes, clothed in trees. These were the famed “broccoli forest” views of which I had heard. The green crowns of those massy trees were round, packed tight one against the next, and lumpy in texture. Seen through my binoculars, they looked indeed like bunched broccoli. The land, falling away on both sides, and before my feet, gave me the sense of a giant bowl cupping the sky…a vast silent space embraced by this spacious, verdant chalice.

But, not silent…a plaintive skirling sounded from the escarpment’s far side. I raised my binoculars and scanned the distant forest tops, seeking its source. What bird might I find there? Then I saw them, a skein of Black Cockatoos gliding down-slope. These large birds at that distance, miniature, even through my field glass, their raucous calls attenuated across the bowl of space; their downward drift along the forest wall a lyric grace.

Yes, gifted to have experienced such moments in the undisturbed wild woods. Yet the heart blanches when one understands the onslaught now in progress. Over recent decades, and continuing at an accelerating pace, the great forests clothing our world’s tropical latitudes are being “harvested,” cut down and cleared away, reduced in their extent to a degree that threatens climate and soil stability, promising consequences as potent as those from global warming. We pour carbon dioxide into our airs, while erasing the very living green that would return oxygen while utilizing that carbon dioxide.

Removing the benevolent cover of tropical forests exposes the ground to a merciless sun, changing its fecundity within a handful of years to baked lateritic soil not even able to support healthy grassland. In addition, tropical rains yearly wash this exposed earth away into streams and rivers. The jungles’ rich treasure houses of animal and plant species are decimated along with their trees.

I first experienced a tropical forest in Panama, where I spent 18 days with an Earthwatch research group. Our project was to mist-net birds that inhabited the ground level vegetative zone, record the variety of species captured, weigh and band each bird, then release it unharmed. Mist nets are filamentous tiers of black netting strung between aluminum poles. Birds flying into them are entangled but not injured. It is an art of the utmost delicacy and agility of fingers to unwrap each bird from the black threads imprisoning it. I frequently chose to be the scribe, as my fingers were clumsy at best for such a challenging task.

We furled those nets every sundown, before returning to our sylvan camp along the Pipeline Road—not a road but rather a dirt jeep track. Nets were furled to prevent the entrapment of bats and any nocturnal birds. We would not be tending the net lines until sunrise each morning. During the day, we patrolled our nets every hour, assuring no bird was held prisoner longer than that.

Dr. James Karr, professor at the University of Illinois, was our research chief. Evenings after our camp supper, he lectured on the ecology of a western hemisphere rainforest. We learned bird species are extremely localized within its three vegetative zones: canopy species do not inhabit the forest floor; birds of the middle level rarely venture into the canopy foliage, nor are they common in undergrowth below; while those species living within the ground level zone do not ascend to higher elevations. Thus our nets, all except one line placed halfway up a slope, ensnared only bottom-zone inhabitants.

I was very impressed to learn that these bottom-zone species: antbirds, antwrens, antpittas, antshrikes, and many others that had evolved to live in a shadowed world rarely invaded by sunlight, would not even cross the Pipeline Road to enter the forest on its opposite margin.

Thus it is that opening a tropical forest by lumbering, even to a moderate extent, has a disastrous effect on many in its avian population. Of course, not only birds, but the whole intricate web of living organisms that has evolved suited to this sylvan universe will be ripped apart.

It will be dreadful if, in a future our grandchildren may inhabit, earth seen from near-space will show vast, pinkish scabs—desert where once was green.

© Polly Brody

Clear Cut

by Polly Brody

From Canary Summer 2012

Yellow "Cats" claw and rip
this tropic pelt.
Sap-wet shards fly from the chain’s bite,
teeth grinding toward heartwood.
Falling, each tree drags through
lianas linking it to others
in verdant tapestry,
opens a tear its length
to the cauterizing sun.
Under rain-season thunder,
bared earth will bleed red streams
pouring away, a silent scream.

Absentee landlords to the north
realize their Midas dreams
in lumber and dirt-cheap cattle—
quick-order hamburgers far from famine.

Lateritic soil hardens, scabs.
A bird, unheard, circles
crying for its canopy
and frogs, carmine-bright,
shrivel in the unrelenting light.

© Polly Brody

Dart

by Polly Brody

From Canary Fall 2023

Waxwings spew from the Bradford Pear,
a streaming torrent of wings
spills over the shopping center
and suddenly, bursts apart
like the exploding sky-chaff
of July fireworks.

The charcoal dart from heaven
that sent panic out of the tree,
scatters that eruption now
to every point of the compass—
a Merlin.

Merlin, now homing on one bird,
the confusion of many dispersed,
zigzags over the huddled cars
pinned to the jinking flight of its prey,
a heat-seeking missile
avid for pulsing flesh.

Shoppers wheel carts with confident leisure,
their eyes pinned ahead
to the self-opening doors of market.

The Merlin strikes, talons stretched forward—
hunter and hunted one clutch in the air.
Inert captive clasped
tight to its breast,
boomerang-winged raptor
scythes toward the horizon.

© Polly Brody

First Comers

by Polly Brody

From Canary Fall 2013

Man entered the western hemisphere, carrying Stone Age weapons and fire. The glacial age tundra teemed with megafauna whose 20 million year evolution had been apart from that of Homo. In a few millennia this fauna was extinct.

You mammoths: shagged hulks who
barely stepped aside at first,
panic now before their clever fire
driving you toward ravines
and fatal plunges.

You steppe ponies: fat rumps inviting butchery,
stampede screaming confusion
within the circle of their ambush.
Your kind will not again set hoof here
until your second coming, bearing Spaniards.

You ground sloth: slow herbivore
large as the mighty bear, but un-fanged,
how you swing your stunned head
above this rabble, as honed stone
drives into your liver.

And you great-antlered caribou:
migrant dependable as the sun,
jammed tight with your calves
into rivers, how your tangled racks clatter
while you buck in bloody froth.

Lion incisors dangle from the shaman’s medicine bag.
Bear pelts keep naked bodies warm.
Megabeasts dwindle, the People flourish.

In the voids they create,
they invent gods of fur and horn,
shapes remembered in mind’s dark negative.

Nurse Logs

by Polly Brody

From Canary Fall 2016

Stilled they lie—
long green combers
in the benthic shade
of rainforest floor.
Towering through centuries
into fog-wet air,
these Sitka Spruce and Western Hemlock
built histories—lean years and fat—
tales of themselves remembered
in heartwood’s dilations.
Rugged bark, slow to raddle,
resisted borer and fungus,
took lightning’s sizzling whip.
Yet even monuments come down
when years enough lay on.
Falling, each opens skylights
calling up new, frail green:
cushion moss, sweet fern, brambles.
Mould and insects soften trunks,
shape mounds of gentled pulp.
Wind drifts detritus down
and in this litter, cones germinate.
Rank upon rank, young conifers
raise the forms in which they root,
these long, prone swells, inspirited.

Previously published in The Spoon River Poetry Review.

The Sweetest Voice

by Polly Brody

From Canary Winter 2022-23

Each year’s growth ring, cramped and narrow,
forced their heartwood’s fiber denser, tighter—
those spruce, sun-starved, shocked,
endured the hammer of a frost-seared age.
Boreal cold gripped Europe,
fostering glacial creep from tundra to tree line.
Icy aprons whited-out the green.
Through seven decades of long winters,
parsimonious summers,
forests put on tensioned growth.
In their chilled ateliers, Cremonese masters
crafted violins from this stressed wood—
instruments of tone superior to any other.
They believed it was their own fine handiwork
that rang so sweetly in salons and courts
but in truth, it was the wood,
its voice and timbre of travail that sang,
and seized the heart.

Previously published in the author’s collection Stirring Shadows.

Tree Frog

by Polly Brody

From Canary Summer 2022

No longer than
my thumb’s last joint,
you wince as my scissors cut
that hosta stem you grasp.
I see your beige tremble,
just before the blind blades reach you,
and am glad.
Gently, I lift
both stem and you
away from the obscuring plant.
Your shadowy vale is lost
to a drench of sunlight,
yet you cling in stillness
save for your soft sides pulsing.
Tiny suede-skinned being
entire even to your toes,
each with its minute spatula
adhering you--
adhering you to whatever
is to come.

Previously published in the author’s collection Stirring Shadows