Poems by Connie Soper
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Spirit Animal
by Connie Soper
From Canary Spring 2024
Connie is fortunate to live in a city with many public parks and natural areas, not far from the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers. She takes full advantage of the rich and diverse environment by walking and taking photographs in these special places.
When a whale dies at sea
it descends with quietude—in death,
feeding the life that once sustained it.
Today, another gray has washed ashore.
No whale fall, this—bloated carcass
buoyed by wind and currents, by the wake
of the ship that struck it.
We have come to witness this enormity,
gazing as if in the museum
of once-in-a-lifetime.
Scientists probe the corpse, exposing gash
and wound. They measure blowhole to tail,
teach us a whale’s heart can weigh half
a ton. That it sings to find
companions, swims the miracle of migration,
Arctic to Mexico.
How lucky we are, how small,
huddled around the barnacled
creature already in decay, bitten by sharks.
Skin loose and slack as a deflated parachute.
Its huge heart, withered within
a cathedral of bones, knock
knocking at the edge of the ocean, waiting
for king tides to reclaim it.
© Connie Soper
The Tree at Sycamore Gap
by Connie Soper
From Canary Spring 2025
This iconic and beloved tree, estimated at nearly 300 years old, once stood in a dip next to Hadrian's Wall in Northern England. It was chopped down by vandals on September 23, 2023.
Gone in twenty minutes—gone forever
when just last week, last year, last century
this one tree silhouetted its psyche over
all of Northumberland. We have come
to lament the mutilation with bouquets,
ribbons with nowhere to tie them.
Stem to branch, branch to trunk—
no fallen tree can be resurrected.
The severed stump smells
of sawdust, the remains of its own demise.
We circle it, standing next to scars
in the landscape, a new emptiness
at this place named for a sycamore
that shook its deciduous
skirt between the hillocks
next to an emperor’s ancient wall.
We mourn for the nests and the hives,
for what cannot be undone;
that we could not protect
what would save us.
© Connie Soper