Poems by Laura Grace Weldon
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Compost Happens
by Laura Grace Weldon
From Canary Summer 2018
Laura lives on a small Ohio farm where rain rushes toward Little Sweetly Creek, enters the Black River, merges with Lake Erie, and then the St. Laurence River on it its way to becoming the ocean.
Nature teaches nothing is lost.
It's transmuted.
Spread between rows of beans,
last year's rusty leaves tamp down weeds.
Coffee grounds and banana peels
foster rose blooms. Bread crumbs
scattered for birds become song.
Leftovers offered to chickens come back
as eggs, yolks sunrise orange.
Broccoli stems and bruised apples
fed to cows return as milk steaming in the pail,
as patties steaming in the pasture.
Surely our shame and sorrow
also return, composted by years
into something generative as wisdom.
© Laura Grace Weldon
Feral
by Laura Grace Weldon
Moonlight leaks through the curtains.
I lie awake, listen to coyote songs
circle and connect, stitching together
the night's raw edges.
Each time I hear their howls
my bone marrow sings.
What's muzzled in me lifts.
I seem silent and still,
yet my pulse races through the trees.
First published by Shot Glass Journal
© Laura Grace Weldon
Lick of Wildness
by Laura Grace Weldon
From Canary Summer 2020
I see a snake sidle through grass
in a moment’s hushed quiver.
Find muddy fox prints by the coop and glance,
swift as breath, for a red blink between trees
before counting 36 hens safe on their roosts.
Hear an owl speak, another respond.
The moon’s shy cheek wavers on the pond.
What I don’t know is vast,
but enough to walk back inside
and leave the night to its own rejoicing.
© Laura Grace Weldon
Redwood Dharma
by Laura Grace Weldon
From Canary Fall 2020
Redwood trees have lived on Earth
for over 240 million years.
Homo sapiens, about 200 thousand.
Despite massive size,
old growth redwood
root systems are shallow.
Trees reach 350 feet tall
yet don’t topple in the strongest winds.
Each one’s roots interlace
with its neighbors’ roots,
creating a vast network of support
unseen on the surface.
They hold on for a thousand,
two thousand years, maybe more,
all the while showing us
how to grow up.
First published by The MOON Magazine.
© Laura Grace Weldon
Significance of Planetary Flatus
by Laura Grace Weldon
It is called The Great Dying.
250 million years ago
(only seconds in Earth's long day)
90 percent of all species perished.
It's blamed on gas.
Eon's amnesia hides certainty,
yet experts say our verdant Earth
was broiled and poisoned
by these likely suspects:
1. Methane clathrate,
known as "fire ice"
(hat tip to Robert Frost).
2. Massive volcanic eruptions.
3. Asteroids slamming into
shale deposits, instigating a sudden
Permian-Triassic fracking.
Now, research incriminates
one-celled Methanosarcina.
It bloomed across oceans,
converting marine carbon
into so much methane
the weather broke.
You who insist humans
can't change the climate,
consider this microbe.
It waits on the ocean floor.
It waits in your convoluted guts.
It asks you to remember.
Last time
our blue green world
needed ten million years to recover.
© Laura Grace Weldon