Sleeping by the Athabasca River, Late September

by Susanne von Rennenkampff

After dark, the river raises its voice,
or maybe I just listen more closely,
only the thin skin of the tent
between me and the night.
After a while, the susurrus of slow rain.

I think of the morning, of getting up
to a wet camp, how to rekindle the fire.
Again I’m ahead of myself.
It is autumn, nights are long.

A coyote’s call cast into the silence,
sent back by another, far away; once,
very late, the honking of geese. This music
I know well. Soon the rain grows quiet, too.
The night is at rest, only the river
tugging a snag.

© Susanne von Rennenkampff

Unto Each Season

by Gloria Heffernan

Plum purple clematis,
those harbingers of summer,
climb the birdhouse trellis,
opening like parasols over
the yellow knock-out roses
and pastel pink phlox.

It would be perfect
if not for the fact that
it is November in Syracuse
where the eleventh month
should be the time when perennials
sleep under blankets of frost.

My coat hangs on a hook,
woefully out of place with
the thermometer hovering
at 78 sunny degrees.
I tell myself to just enjoy it.
The snow will fall,
eventually.

Perhaps a picnic today.
Or a walk along the lakeside.
Don’t worry about that rumbling
you hear in the distance.
It’s only the echo of a glacier
falling into the sea a long, long way off.

© Gloria Heffernan

When a Poem Burns

by Kim Schnuelle

Your words formed the weaving.
Corded thick cedar, midnight raptures.
A foundling’s prayer
that joined us kindred.
Until the loss.
Until the fire came.

And now, what happens
when a poem burns?
Releasing its seeds and swans
in curled black embers.
Parchment ashes fall like pollen,
feeding the gods around us.
Can its cinders nurse
the ryegrass and rabbits
that lie in word’s wake?
Do its remnants reach you,
last seen wavering,
green and translucent
on far Northern shores?

For the leaves have fallen now.
And alder branches stab the sky.
The surrounding wind a strange new language
that no one yet understands.
November passes by.
Compost, thick with chips of bone,
slips through my quivering hands,
feeding the dreams of springtime ferns
and what could have been.

All one can do is wait.
Snows will fall. The dead will rest.
And from the midden a new poem will rise
loose scaffolded on the old.
She is heavy with milk let down.
Thistles tangled in sooty braids.
The wolves see her first
and bow in supplication.
Owls drop wood mice at her feet.
Bears roll, showing their pregnant bellies.
A new home emerges
built from the relics of sleet and memory.
Its doors open
to woods and sudden rockfall.
You move in and plant the seeds.

© Kim Schnuelle

Migration of the Monarch

by Daniel Boland

A September flight of butterflies –
unsteady, quavering
yet relentless in their goal.

They are tiny flags of independence unfurled in brilliant unison
or perhaps the silk
some ancient king might have worn.

They are a field of airborne oriental poppies
now on their way
to join some unfathomably
intricate tapestry.

A huge release
of new souls.

Previously published in The Trumpeter

© Daniel Boland

Ode to the Aspen

by Pepper Trail

All summer
your leaves
are turbines
spinning sun
into sugar
feeding
the multitude
that you are
sharing
through your roots
everything

Your silver trunks
shelter together
their scars
concealing nothing
of your history
legible record
of your trembling

October now
the yellow
traveling down
your veins
dividing
the green
shutting down
the working time
tuning all
to the pure note
of praise

In the cold wind
in the days
remaining
you will
shivering
sing hallelujah

Offering
to the blue sky
one by one
the treasures
of the year
let go, gold

© Pepper Trail

World View

Song of the White-Breasted Nuthatch

by Elizabeth Libbey

I'm swinging on the suet cage
'upside down,'
as you might say,
I'm hanging on the suet cage,
feet hooked to the wire mesh,
my long bill's
stiletto-down,
I'm looking around,
every thing, no thing,
the breeze ruffling
my feather-whites, oh,
that seed you hang
of the big flower sun,
I like that, I'll
hack that, spear that, oh,
I'll clown away
your lonely,
make it migrate,
I'll stay,
show up early
in a curtain of flurry in
the blue steel air,
I'll let you
believe that to see
the every, see the no
the way you do,
head in the clouds
your one flight,
is the right,
oh, the only
way to be
all this

© Elizabeth Libbey

The Journey There

by David Chorlton

A burst of distant rain
hangs like an invitation from the sky
while here to there
is guesswork and a thirst
with power lines swaying and empty cans
shining at the edge
of the road. One moment the surroundings
are a blueprint for nowhere,
the next they bow in prayer
to what created them. Follow the fingerprint
left by the moon. Straight ahead
into space as open
as infinity, without any thought
of a destination to reach, just
the easy rolling of Earth
beneath the wheels. It’s easier
without a map to fill the tank
with hope and take
whatever comes. It might be sand,
it might be mud, it might
be rock that flowed
through time, it
might be voices in the air duct
crying out to know
which century they’re trapped in.
And there is a way to continue
on from here, another road
where cars are few and each one moves
at the pace of a fig beetle
crawling on creation’s open palm.

© David Chorlton

Spirit Land

by David Chorlton

Stop in the center of it all.
The land was restless long ago. It didn’t know
what to become. A mesa rests
on the horizon like a bone
the wind had chewed on and spat
out for the rain to pick clean.
It’s a long way everywhere
and the roads won’t tell
where they are going.
Look ahead, look
back, look inward and discover
the sky in the mind.
The hours
fall into place and stretch for centuries
beyond the visible; time
as spirits floating and daylight as water
going underground at dusk.
It occurs that the mountains
nobody else wanted
were crushed and reassembled
where emptiness seeks form.

© David Chorlton

Bird Notes, July 2, 1937: Earhart’s Last Decision

With thanks to Hob Osterlund, Long-time Protector of Laysan Albatross

by Sherrida Woodley

There comes a time when flying isn’t enough.
Ebb and flow of human decision has become
so much wasted effort on Earhart.
And the only thing left that still bears value as
Amelia Earhart flies her last twenty-five hundred miles
is emulating Ocean’s most solitary companion.
While the Lockheed Electra courses gently toward her own
Pacific destination, the Laysan Albatross
follows no pattern but her own. Earhart’s final notes lead on.

Explore: Earhart writes, has beginnings
without assurance and certainly without
permission. A map in the head of a bird is the most
dependable piloting device there is.
Carried in the fossilhood
of twenty-five million years, to be an albatross means
to live out of one’s country. To be secretive and
dedicated and unexplained except by her native
onlookers who know her spirit lies in oceanic pursuits.

Piloting: Earhart continues, admits finding her own way.
There is no real plan. Just the forgiveness of success
that depends on moving through air everlasting.
There can be no stopping once airborne. Only the wind
knows the way, allowing the great bird access to gravity’s
overriding dynamic, carrying Earth’s whimsy and its load.
Flying fifteen hundred miles just to feed her single chick and as much as
three million miles in a lifetime of flight’s primary bereavement—
Wandering.

Mystery: The pilot infers, does not occur to the albatross.
Earhart’s notes prescribe something she hasn’t been able to correct
in human flight—the desire to conquer, to squelch all disruption.
Radio frequencies have become more important than the adventure.
Practical application is less expensive than personal revelation. No one
wants to know the truth.
And so the albatross carries a message through what can be
almost a century of her existence. She carries at least fifty of those years
without ever touching land. She provides Earhart a long leash.

Distance: Earhart admits, is the culprit. It has tangled her in its
dependency on fuel, on navigation and the collective view that
she is in over her head. There is no place to unload her frustration.
And so she doesn’t speak, even when asked life-affirming questions.
Earhart is fixated on the albatross, who can only plunge into the first
few feet of ocean, hunting for squid sometimes vomited up by whales.
Taking what is afforded her to continue her journey back toward
her chick. Nothing will stop her trajectory, Earhart surmises. She
will know her way through some means still unknown to man.

Instinct: She recalls, has something to do with her own insistence to fly.
She jots a quick side note. . . “Was I once a seagoing bird?” This is unusual, her
traipsing into her imagination, which is normally dismissed for
fretting over people who disappoint her.
“Albatross is a gliding machine,” Earhart further writes. “No flapping wings,
no engine requiring upkeep, she makes her way through lift, locking her
wings, even her elbows into rigidity. She doesn’t trouble herself with the
quirks of man whose instincts have thinned to technical confinement.
She lives for the hunt.”

Achievement: Earhart’s only beguilement, her only disadvantage.
By now she has flown the equator thousands of miles beyond human
expectation. She has allowed herself to disappear from humanity for
at least hundreds of those miles. But she doesn’t show amazement or
even relief at her success. Trained through practice, she
lacks new growth. She bears the weight of stigma. “I’m no longer good
enough,” she writes. “But Laysan Albatross originates in ancient myth.
Accepted despite her limitations, her chick the only reason to succeed.
Everlasting, she returns to the sea, flights for days without a wingbeat.”

Space: She finally writes, “My only solace. No one knows exactly
where I’ve been. No one notices the long absences anymore. These
are more bird-like than any description I may finally achieve, either
dead or alive, flying my own heading. In the middle of a long
Pacific night, I give myself permission to lose track of humanity.
To linger with albatross, who knows no heading. Only heart and silence
and the meander of a coursing wind.”

© Sherrida Woodley

Pine Stand 2005

by Mary Kathryn Wiley

I don’t remember what my grief was.
Sixteen, searching for a place to weep.
I picked my way through the chaos of a clearcut—
sawdust, blackberry, shelf fungus, poison ivy.
A great open wound on the earth’s face.
I passed the stump where I used to meditate,
watching the big sky over all that devastation.
Until I stepped into a sacred space:
utterly still, dark and cool;
a young pine forest. Only pines. Slender,
narrow trunks like columns; canopy of
green needles. Carpet of brown quills.
Here I stood. Here I wailed, bruising
my knuckles on bark.

© Mary Kathryn Wiley

The Clearing in the Wood

by Dan Thompson

When I was a young boy, I loved being in wooded areas. I grew up in rural New England, and from the age of six or seven spent a lot of time playing games, alone or with my younger brother, in the small pinewood that lay just beyond my family’s backyard perimeter fence – so much so that nothing felt more natural to me than to be surrounded by trees.

One summer day when I was eleven years old, while walking through a different pinewood in my hometown, I had a singular experience that cannot be chalked up to either fear or ignorance of woodlands – for by that point I had already spent several years playing in wooded areas, some of which were much larger than the one beyond our backyard.

This other pinewood – dense, dark, and difficult to enter – was not as attractive as the one behind our house. Its trees and brush grew very thickly, right up to the edge of the narrow paved road that bounded that side of the wood – the vegetation creating a natural wall that pressed against the road for about five hundred feet, beyond which was a very large empty lot.

This dark wood was nearly impenetrable from the roadside – except for at one spot: Not far from the near end of the pine wall was a naturally camouflaged entrance to a path that I had already used a couple of times during a previous summer to briefly explore that corner of the “dark forest.”

On this day, however, I walked up the road – the dark wood on my right – past the tunnel entrance, until I reached the far corner of the wood, and then turned onto the empty lot. As I walked away from the road, I noticed that the trees on this side of the wood – the side that faced the lot – were generally less thick than those that faced the road; and the further from the road I walked, the less impenetrable the wood. I soon found a clear path between the trees, and decided to see whatever there was to be seen.

To my great surprise and pleasure, I immediately discovered that this part of the wood was far nicer than the part that I had already explored. The pathway I was on was an easy walk – so much so that I soon became somewhat preoccupied as I hustled happily along – the carpet of pine needles completely silencing my footfalls.

And then I came around a bend that topped a gentle rise – my thoughts elsewhere, my eyes focused on the ground in front of my feet – and was stopped cold.

Alarmed, I jerked my head upward, eyes peeled, because I had just heard someone in very close proximity make a sound of surprise, and I expected to see someone only a few feet away – someone who hadn’t expected me.

But there was no one to be seen.

What was to be seen, directly in front of me, and in the midst of an otherwise uniformly wooded area, was a nearly perfectly round clearing, roughly thirty feet across. Around the perimeter were four or five pines – one of them, off to my left, grew upward at a pronounced angle – that were somewhat larger than their nearby neighbors. The clearing was big enough that there was a large open space in the canopy, through which the sun was shining, lighting-up the dead, rusty-brown pine needles on the ground into a fiery orange color – a shaft of sunlight hitting the tree that was leaning away from the circle. It was a striking tableau, as if it were the real-life model for a painted scene, and I was very surprised to see such an inexplicable and attractive spot within what I had always thought of, until that day’s expedition, as an unexceptional and even unattractive pinewood.

However, this entirely unexpected vision was what I saw after my progress had been so abruptly halted. What had stopped me was my immediate and dead-certain feeling that I had just interrupted someone who had been right there ... somewhere. And then, while still in a state of shocked surprise, I heard a quick chuckle of mischievous laughter.

But there was no one to be seen – except for me.

I strongly felt that I was being watched. At first, I was certain that the watching was being done from somewhere near the base of the tilted tree – I couldn’t have explained why I felt that way – but then this “presence” became somehow more diffuse, or even plural.

I just stood there, absolutely spooked – peering around the clearing and beyond, my heart thumping in my chest until it gradually settled down. Nonetheless, I was still so convinced that someone was hiding behind a tree and playing a trick on me that I continued to look around for a bit longer, in spite of the fact that it was clear that none of the trees in the immediate vicinity were big enough or close enough to each other to hide anyone who might be nearby. And then I noticed that the presence had simply evaporated.

Although the whatever-it-was had disappeared, what remained was the arresting visual beauty of the clearing, with its lighted orange floor and the gentle shadows around the perimeter – and this continued to hold me for yet a bit longer because there was something magical about it. And then I had a realization – something that I now think of as a distinctly adult sentiment that I would probably not have expressed in this way at the time: If I crossed over to the other side, I would destroy the moment.

But then the moment destroyed itself – as moments do – and although it was still a pleasant spot, the plain reality was simply that I was standing by myself at the edge of an open area in the middle of the woods.

On the other side were two paths, maybe fifteen or twenty feet away from each other. I crossed the clearing and took the right-hand path, guessing – correctly, as it turned out – that it would lead me to the tunnel entrance at the side of the road; but then I turned around to take one last look back, and was profoundly shocked to realize that I had indeed been to the clearing before, but had approached it from the opposite direction – on the path I was now on. During the earlier expedition (or two) that had brought me to this place, I had not crossed the clearing, but had moved instead to the right, along the perimeter, and then continued on the trail that had been, from my pre-crossing perspective, the left-hand path – a decision that had served to confine to the ugly part of the wood those previous treks. From where I now stood, the clearing was not at all visually striking – nor did it even look particularly round or circular.

Furthermore, as if the simple change of perspective weren’t enough damage done to the vision, a cloud had moved into position overhead during the few seconds between my crossing over and my looking back, strongly punctuating the end of the enchantment, and dealing me a heavy-handed lesson on the value of light and perspective – and also, perhaps, that of the unexpected.

Looking back today at my eleven-year-old self, I’m prepared to admit – in spite of my then-familiarity with wooded areas – that the laughter I heard may well have been only a peculiar birdcall; and the sound of surprise and the “watching presence” nothing more than the reactions of squirrels or other creatures of the wood, invisible to my clumsy human eyes. Nevertheless ...

This was all a long time ago. During the many years since, I have been fortunate enough to be able to do a good deal of traveling, one result of which has been that I have had the chance to see many of the world’s greatest cathedrals from the inside. However, none of those mightily impressive structures have ever moved me in the way that that natural chapel, lit up in the dark wood, did on that distant day when I was a kid. Nor has anything ever grabbed me by the heart and stopped me in my tracks in the same way that the whatever-it-was did ... before I crossed over, choosing the right-hand path, on my way out of childhood.

© Dan Thompson

Morning Glory

by Diane Elayne Dees

After an entire summer of vining green,
in autumn, the leaves—some already
destroyed by insects—turn brown
and curl, turn black and fall off.
Then, suddenly, one cold mid-November
morning, an explosion of cornflower violet
blooms takes my breath away, and I,
the aging gardener, must trust
that I have received a gift
of shocking blue metaphor.

© Diane Elayne Dees

Before Fiona and Ian, there was Dorian

by Tara Pyfrom

Yet another hurricane season is upon us, forecasted to be record-breaking with up to 39 named storms.¹ The forecast is irrelevant to anyone living in the path of these monsters. Either you are lucky, or you are unlucky. When you live at the water’s edge, by birth or by choice, you just live with the consequences of these storms year after year. As someone who falls into the former category, being born at the water’s edge does very little to make the reality of our warming planet any easier to bear. 

For six months out of every year, we watch the ocean and the weather forecasts. Through years of repetitious experience, we’ve learned the best way to shutter a house and exactly how long we can wait to do it. Memories of Andrew, Katrina, Sandy, Floyd, Francis, Jean, and Matthew leave goosebumps on our necks and quickened heartbeats in our chests. 

We prepare each time we watch the birth of a storm, so far out into the depths of the ocean that Hurricane Hunter aircraft can’t even reach them. We wait on bated breath as they grow from infancy to toddlerhood to angry teenagers. We know the appearance of an empty hole at the center of the infrared image means a psychopathic adult will be hell-bent on destruction very soon. It’s doomsday, and we have zero control over the where and when.

My doomsday was in 2019 when my wife and I, our then-six-year-old daughter, and our five dogs were living in Freeport, Grand Bahama, the northernmost island in the Bahamas. Having been born and raised in the Bahamas, we had already successfully weathered more hurricanes than we could name. 

In 2016, we survived Hurricane Matthew when it made a direct hit on our home, knocking out electricity on the entire island for weeks. In an interview, a Hurricane Ian survivor in South Florida said they were Irma-ready, but not Ian-ready. I know precisely how they feel because my family’s story is the personification of that sentence. We were Matthew-ready. We weren’t Dorian-ready.

When the 185-mph wind reached us, it pushed a monumental storm surge of up-to-25-feet-of-ocean across the island. We knew some flooding might be possible, but our area was never ordered to evacuate. Some reports say more than 50 percent of the island was underwater. 

In the early morning hours, water reached the doors of our elevated house, and all hell broke loose. We tried desperately to force the sandbags to keep the water out, but they were useless as the ocean rose even higher. We had a few feet of water inside within a couple of hours. We sat on our kitchen countertops as the furniture in our house began to float. Terror struck, and tunnel vision took over. 

What I feared most of all was being trapped inside our home, my wife, our 6-year-old daughter, and five beloved dogs, all drowning with our heads pressed against the ceiling, gasping for air. That image in my mind drove us outside in the middle of the worst hurricane ever recorded in the Bahamas.

Hindsight is always 20/20. We could have prepared for a major flood. We could have purchased life jackets or even a kayak in our storm prep. Instead, we had a pool float and a semi-buoyant cot mattress. 

Outside, we struggled to stay afloat as we huddled against our house. All that mattered was keeping our young daughter and the five animals from being swept away and drowned. Ultimately, that idealistic decision to react to what fear told me was coming proved wrong. After 30 minutes of fighting the waves and wind, we were forced back into our flooded home to avoid drowning then and there.

Back inside the house, rapidly filling like a fishbowl, we struggled with the next steps. As we paused, exhausted from hours of battling with fear and the prospect of death, we tried to work out a better plan to stay alive. The attic was our only remaining option. As I transported the last of our five dogs up the ladder into the attic, the water had risen high enough to cover the doorway to the closet where the attic access was located. I had to dive under the water to move from one room to another.

Even from a place of assumed safety, my idealism guided my decisions. We had no drinking water in the attic and only minimal food. I made a solo trip across the dimly lit attic space to our kitchen, thinking I could stomp a hole in the ceiling to retrieve water from a high cabinet there. Once again, the terror spurring me clouded my brain as I misjudged and fell into the flooded kitchen below. I ended up in the exact position I had been trying to avoid all along, as breathing room in the flooded kitchen was minimal.

I made my first attempt at pulling myself back into the attic. Without enough upper body strength, and running dangerously low on mental fortitude, I fell back into the water again, bruising myself as I fell. My fear weighed heavily on me as I realized that I might be stuck until the storm passed, or I drowned, whichever happened first.

With a renewed burst of adrenaline brought on by the fight or flight response, I tried twice more to haul myself out and eventually managed to get my upper body up into the hole. With more twisting, bruises, and scrapes, I managed to claw my way out of my worst nightmare and back into the darkness of the attic. 

Unbeknownst to us then, Hurricane Dorian stopped moving and sat over our tiny island. Trapped in the attic, with no contact with the outside world, we were on our own to hold on until the storm passed and rescue could begin. For 24 hours, we sat in inky blackness and waited. We waited for the ocean to rise and drown us in a watery grave above our house. As we waited for death, we repeated the inner mantra “Please let the roof hold” over and over again.

After a full day of waiting in fear for our lives, the flood water receded, and the wind weakened over six hours. When we finally returned to the main part of the house, everything looked like it had been in a washing machine cycle for 24 hours. Almost immediately, rescuers arrived in a dangerous grassroots operation. While the wind speeds continued at hurricane force, we waded through the chest-high ocean to get to the small rescue boat that transported us and our five dogs to a nearby staging area.

We lived, but precious little of our lives remained after Dorian finally decided to vacate the islands. Our home was destroyed. Along with many others, we were homeless. The island’s potable water source was contaminated by the ocean water that penetrated the water table. Many utilities on the island had to be rebuilt or replaced. Retail stores were ruined. Schools were months away from repair. In the immediate aftermath, my family and I were evacuated to Florida. It was only luck that there wasn’t another storm headed in on the heels of Dorian that year.

We gave up on hurricanes and life at the water’s edge after Dorian, choosing to immigrate permanently to Canada to run from the monsters that seem to grow, in size and frequency, with each season. Recovery has been slow. The effects of Dorian are still felt by us personally and by the Bahamas as a whole.

People around the world have seen a documentary or two about the ocean and its connection to all things. Before Dorian, I would watch a film and admire the breathtaking cinematography and be awestruck by the statistics and claims about climate change, though rarely remembering much of what I’d seen within a week. Since Dorian and our firsthand experience with climate change, my eyes have been opened to the reality of our relationship with nature.

Dorian was all over the news in the first few days, but the news coverage dwindled quickly. Retelling the story of our survival and recovery in my upcoming memoir has become a mission and a passion born out of therapy and resilience I did not know I had. My only wish is that our brush with climate change can help others see the truth.

The Bahamas rebuilds after each of these monster storms, though with each direct hit, that rebuilding becomes slower and more costly. Florida rebuilds. New Orleans rebuilds. The entire Eastern Seaboard rebuilds. It is not about if another storm like Fiona, Ian, or Dorian will strike again; it’s when. Global warming and its effect on the weather are real. The United Nations estimates that as much as 40% of the world’s population lives within 60 miles of the coast.² As the years go on, the effects of warming oceans and changing weather patterns will impact those living at the water’s edge much more harshly.

It is up to average people to sympathize and understand the connection between how they live to how the earth reacts, in some cases, thousands of miles away. Natural disasters are becoming more and more frequent. It is only a matter of time before climate change unleashes your own personal worst nightmare. Eventually, climate change catastrophe will be on the doorstep of everyone on planet Earth.

¹ https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/04/24/record-atlantic-hurricane-season-forecast/

² The Ocean Conference. (2017, May). Factsheet: People and Oceans. UN.org.
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Ocean-fact-sheet-package.pdf
Accessed 2022, Oct 13.

© Tara Pyfrom

Vowels

by Ed Ruzicka

If you listen to
   The language of trees
   It is constantly about sun
   Rain, wind, light, water.
Well, yes, how they
   Provide for the owl,
   The ant, sparrow
   Raccoon, squirrel.
It is only when you listen
   To trees exhale
   Listen to the vowels
   Beneath their consonants
That you understand how it is.
That trees are the lungs of the earth.

© Ed Ruzicka

Smoke Sonnets

...burning with low to moderate intensity along the perimeter,
with creeping, smoldering and occasional torching behaviors.
~Inciweb description of the Cedar Creek fire

by Sara Burant

1
Air Quality Index 839
So we creep outside with the dogs. So we crawl
in our car to buy wine, smoldering with regret,
with longing & frustration over what’s been lost
or misplaced in our haste to be set, ready to flee:
phone charger, recipe box, Book of Changes,
our friendly face. Where are you, are they, am I
inside the smoke’s creeping unfathomable body,
its greasy stench, the ambivalence with which
it recognizes us: vapor, reek, & ash. It doesn’t
bother to care if we mask ourselves or meet it
wearing a sooty bewildered expression. We post
startling videos: the crackling orange dirges
sung by torching trees, absent views, steel-wool air,
with monstrous red cheeks the sun going down.

2
Another red flag warning
This roughed-up air chafes like trying to erase a scar
with sandpaper, the violence of self-forgetting, our
sundered, cindered bonds. Do we stay & if we go
do we take the neighborhood with us? In our mouth
the coal of a mother’s worry, in our heart a father’s
devotion, do we take the lofty unquenchable shade?
Grandmothers, do we take your aprons & sourdough,
grandfathers, your shovels & guns, the ships that
carried you from Prussia, Poland, Sweden, France?
Do we take the coltsfoot, the nettle, the uva ursi,
the salve? The fagots, the stakes, the witches & heretics
screaming as they burned? Dear smoke, if we go,
will you leave? If you leave, will we recognize
ourselves without you?

3
Late October’s need
More worrisome than midnight mail the hills
are gone again. We don’t know where we are,
in whose house, in which past or future year,
fortune’s wheel turning sideways, upside down,
taking us where it will, a doe refusing to let us
pass, harassing us with out-thrust chest, we
try but cannot read her eyes’ hieroglyphs,
so we wait for the moon to favor us with a sign
we’ll read with confidence & precision;
but we’ll need your eyes when they were winter’s
blue flames burning clear with assurance
that all will be well. When most they’re needed
the hills will come back, won’t they,
bringing their tender gravities?

4
A beach offers a kind respite
A bird pipes from inside beachgrass whose ancestor
some humans planted to stabilize the sand, the grass
so happily spreading while the sand strains to shift
the gears of its immense body—we feel it tugging,
tugging, a leashed dog who would be running after gulls,
gull-shadows & every scent wind seasons the air with,
air so replete with recollection we wheel under its touch.
Gulls turn the wheels drawing the world on, behind us
fire’s smolder & creep, before us a spellbound mist,
pelicans in frayed lines as if straining to break from
the harmony binding them. If there’s singing we have
to reach beyond hearing to grasp at its threads, waves
droning a gravity that pulls us back to a brindled dog,
taut leash, sand’s blue grit blown rough against our shins.

© Sara Burant

Back to the Land

by Rebekah Jensen

I came in the later years,
when the place was dogeared
from too much attention
and heating up.

Still, I found a pocket to pretend in,
wild enough for wolves.
But for Starlink, it could be
the day of my birth,
before the critical junctures,
before all possible futures
converge.

If I hold my breath, it’s like
the birds haven’t been told
to stop coming back.
The trees don’t know to burn.

© Rebekah Jensen

Goose Season

by Eileen McLellan

Fall arrives on Maryland’s Eastern Shore with the first cold front from the north. Overnight the sullen heat of late summer is swept away. In the morning, I open the windows, and feel the house – which has been holding its air-conditioned breath all summer – exhale. In the surrounding fields the cornstalks rattle as they dry. Only a month ago they stood triumphant, the soldiers of a conquering army; now they shiver in the wind, soon to fall beneath the blades of the combine. The fields that seemed no more than factories, planted and fertilized to specification, are reborn as habitats where wild things can live. I too can breathe again. The next night I hear the clamor of wild geese.

It’s as if they know that the landscape has been transformed for their delight. By day, they can feast on the leftover corn. When they have eaten their fill, they can loaf on the edges of the hundreds of farm ponds that speckle the landscape, glinting in the low sunlight. At night, seeking shelter from predators, they can retreat to the larger ponds, the tidewater creeks, and the tidal coves where the Chesapeake Bay embraces the land. For the next few months, the gabbling of geese is an ever-present soundtrack, a low but unceasing exchange of goose gossip occasionally punctuated by the more vigorous honks that accompany squabbles.

The geese seem to be the essence of wildness. In their honking and yelping I hear tales of a distant land, of arctic ice and arctic foxes, of midnight sun, of a wilderness where no people roam. For they are the Atlantic race of Canada Geese, and they have spent the summer on the tundra of the Ungava Peninsula of far northern Quebec.

And yet their arrival here in great numbers – some 500,000 geese winter in the region —follows changes in farming since the 1950s. In those days, the Eastern Shore produced milk, fruit and vegetables for Baltimore and other East Coast cities, but the loss of farm labor, the ready availability of artificial fertilizer and the post-war emphasis on economic efficiency helped drive a shift to today’s fields of corn and soybeans. It’s ironic that this vast area of productive farmland is in many ways a food desert, in the sense of growing vast amounts of food for animals (primarily chickens) raised elsewhere and very little food that local people can eat straight from the farm. The geese, of course, are oblivious to this.

*

On a grey morning in late November, I am jolted out of bed by the sound of gunshots. It takes a few minutes before I remember: goose season opens just before Thanksgiving, and I am living in what local boosters refer to as “the goose-hunting capital of North America”. Geese are big business here. I’ve heard it said that farming geese is more profitable than farming corn, and indeed thousands of acres of the landscape are managed to attract geese for hunting. Hunters tell me that nothing compares with sitting in a goose blind on a frosty November morning, waiting for the birds to descend on fluttering wings into the range of the gun. “It’s the moment I feel most alive”, one of them said.

A pity that a goose has to die for it.

*

As a volunteer bird rescuer, I see the other side of the story. Last year, in the days before Christmas, I got a call about an injured goose in someone’s backyard. “It’s just sitting there” said the homeowner, “and it doesn’t seem right”. When I arrive at her house, the goose has wedged itself into a corner of the fenced yard; it is half-sitting, half-lying, with its head and neck stretched out. A frightened, injured goose can be quite difficult to capture, but this one has no energy to resist. I throw a blanket over it, and as I’m bringing it up against me to check for wing damage, I realize that blood is streaming down the front of my jacket. That’s the moment when I realize that the goose has been shot.

It feels like it takes forever to bundle the goose into a transport crate, wrestle the crate into my car, and begin the drive to the bird hospital – an hour’s drive under good conditions, but with the roads crowded with holiday traffic I realize that this trip will take much longer. Not for the first time, I wish I had a flashing light and siren that would mark my car as being on a mission of mercy, an ambulance for which a route must be cleared. In the back of the car, the goose is making whimpering noises. As sad as they are to hear, I realize that silence would be worse. I’m not sure that this goose is going to survive the journey.

Although as a scientist I’m trained to believe that what matters most for the planet is overall biodiversity, and that survival of a species is more important than the fate of any individual creature, it’s hard to look at this goose and not see it as a being whose life is worth just as much as the human lives around me. And, because geese are strongly social, it’s probably some other goose’s mate, or mother, or father, or daughter, or son, and I picture them grieving for it. The world changes when you look at it through the eyes of a goose. I finally get to the hospital, and hand the bloody mess of bird and blanket over to the veterinary technicians. There is nothing more I can do. As I walk away, I hear one of them say “Clean shot”, which gives me some hope that this bird will survive.

*

As fall turns to winter, the geese adapt to being hunted. They quickly learn which fields are safe, and which are not, and they spend increasing amounts of time at the local wildlife refuge, where the fields have been planted with clover, and the tidal creeks are rich in underwater grasses. In the last week of January, as the end of goose season approaches, hunters become increasingly desperate, and the geese retreat deeper into the refuge. On the last day of the season, hunters are in a blind at the end of a spit of land only a few hundred yards from the refuge entrance. They are not allowed to shoot geese inside the refuge, but at the sound of every shot groups of geese rise into the air in panic. No doubt the hunters hope that some will drift over the refuge boundary and into range. But as the sun sets, and the hunters retrieve their decoys and put away their rifles, it seems as if every goose on the refuge takes to flight. Silhouetted against the red-streaked sky, hundreds of thousands of birds swirl in a maelstrom of beating wings, a vortex of birds that rises and then collapses, birds drifting down to reclaim the land and water in which they were so recently hunted.

Goose season ends much as it began, with a shift in the wind. In late February, the birds become restless, days and nights filled with goose hubbub as they wait for a wind from the south. At sunset on the first day that speaks of spring rather than winter, they begin to leave, turning towards the north, flying in family parties of ten to twenty birds. I hear their calls all through the night, and by sunrise the next day only a few stragglers remain. The fields and marshes are silent. Goose season is over for another year.

© Eileen McLellan

Hawk Mountain

by John Smith

I didn’t see my favorite stone in the trail this year,
but there were merlins and a peregrine at the top,
though not as many broadwings as I’d hoped for,
even with the cold front and Northwest wind
like a broom sweeping them down from Canada,
no big numbers to speak of, no spiraling gyres
after all my looking up, since the 80s, my birthday
ritual, a vertical mecca hiking the sandy stone trail
uphill to North Lookout – like a beach path
to a sea in the sky – and perching my boney butt
atop the hard coastline of that rocky outcropping
to consider what’s left of the Iapetus Ocean,
its sedimentary floor now Blue Mountain ridge
where what isn’t stone is farmed field
or wooded valley. I look out on the horizon
for incoming hawks to kettle-up and ride thermals
as they have done since before the word migration.
It isn’t about catching the big swell for me.
I just like the view, and to bear witness to birds passing,
as we all do, season to season. I believe clouds
will become whales again, fish swim in what is
currently wind, and that it is marvelous how small
I am, how immeasurably brief, my life, and that I
know nothing of the other side, nor need to know.

Previously published in Exit 13

© John Smith

Marigolds

by John Smith

I brought in marigolds from my garden
when I heard of frost by morning.
They are said to be the light that lives inside a person
because their blossoms glow yellow, burnt orange, and red
like campfire embers long after most flowers
have tucked petals in for the night.
One shrub-size bunch, which I did not disturb,
had all three colors mixed
and a morning glory vine strung among them
with blue trumpets for blossoms.
What I didn’t notice in my hurry
until I arranged the cuttings in a vase on the kitchen table
was the backlit, green translucence of a praying mantis
standing on the uppermost leaves,
front legs up in arms, ready to strike,
eyes popped out of its head, following me.
I stopped and watched the mantis watch me.
It had an Erector Set body, streamlined, all frame,
with long, green, coattail wings tucked together
and legs jackknifed into each other, fit as a zipper.
Sharp fangs lined the fringe of its front feet.
The head swiveled with me when I leaned side to side,
but its body remained poised—like the Kung Fu position
that swiped its name— at absolute attention,
which is how Simon Weil defined praying.
When the mantis turned to run down-stem,
I swooped in, scooped up, carried outside,
and placed it on top of the tri-colored marigold
with the blue morning glory vine,
then stood, for a while, not a cloud in the sky,
and watched my moonlit breath vanish in front of my face,
headed for stars over four billion light years away.

© John Smith

Roaming Coastal Hills

by Monica Stillman

Long before I discovered this place
in my thirst for freedom,
someone stitched these hills together
with lines of fences to hem in the cows.

Great silent oaks hover over the grassland
snagged like tumbleweeds.
Wouldn't they like to ramble
across the vales?

Mightn't the cows want to climb
to the ridgeline to meet
the crisp October sky,
the limitless oceans beyond?

I would unlace the fences, strip the barbs
from the drying forbs this October
if I could, take back clipped words,
reach for ways I once passed by.

© Monica Stillman

Dimming

by Ilene Millman

This emptiness hardly noticeable
not like an empty coat on a café chair
or empty seat on a crowded train,
more a lessening.
My patio screen once
covered with moths
more delicate even than a song of air

the host of Monarch butterflies
milkweed hungry hovering
over my zinnias on pink afternoons
and fireflies, those lanterns of the night sky,
of the multitude
less.

A neighbor’s pitch—
it’s not for sure
a friend posts a quilt of patchy science—
What don’t they see
under streetlamps at night
naked windshields after hot summer drives?

Perhaps we’ve grown used to it
this emptiness that resembles fullness—
yes, mosquitos still bite
but the thin cricket-sound
breathing last fall,
a thread unraveling?

© Ilene Millman

Sassafras

by Barbara Crooker

the sounding brass of October—
Here in Virginia, in the kudzu-thickened
woods, the sticky red clay, these spindly
trees are everywhere, the only ones
with three different types of leaves: footballs,
mittens (both left and right), and open hands.
Deer and porcupines love the bark and twigs;
bobwhites, phoebes, vireos the fruit. Humans
grind the leaves to make filé, for gumbo.
The roots used to make sarsaparilla, but now
it might be a carcinogen, so it’s gone. When
the days start to grow shorter and the light
leaks out, these are leaves that will burst
into flame, turn the color of traffic lights:
red/orange/yellow, stop you in your tracks.

© Barbara Crooker

Leaves

by Barbara Crooker

And now these are the autumn years,
everything turning to gold. As the leaves
let go, so do old friends, the hardest to lose;
they take your history along with them.
These yellow leaves outside my window
flitter down, a flock of finches landing.
on the lawn. Which frost will soon
coat with its hard white glitter.

© Barbara Crooker