Members' Writing

Earth Writing by Poet Elders

 

THE WAVES

Florence Dacey

You noticed the waves are never still.

The waves change just as your hands do, as needed,
as a task arises.

Today, in this world we have made,
all the waves must carry us, keep us
from drowning in ourselves
even as they bring us back to ourselves,
without illusions.

We’re going to scatter, we’re going to evaporate.
We’re going to not continue as we are,
as we imagine we are.

Do you think waves imagine anything?
No, you might say, but they haven’t needed to,
so far.

But now that we are killing water, perhaps they do?
Perhaps they have dreams of a world without us
without nets and poison and calculator brains.

How much do you love the waves?
Would you say, it would be fine if they washed
us all away, this moment?
Would you drop everything to work
to clean the waters?

But here is something we could actually do.
Lie down by the sea
or river or lake or stream
until the water in us
begins a small conversation
with the waves
who are waiting.

 

UPLAND SANDPIPER

Florence Dacey

Sitting on the earth, studying
prairie smoke, its soft purple plumed
tresses grasped between my fingers,

I noticed she’d come up
from the reclaimed ditch, her wide-eyed look
like a child’s, startled from her dream.

Her body gleamed like a woods
mottled and laced, with barred browns and whites
and sighs of wind under feather.

I wanted to hear her mournful whistle.
I wanted to defend her pinkish buff eggs.
Did she carry deep in that delicate brain

perched on her long neck
the memory of harm from my kind?
Was my face a known alarm?

She looked at me straight on
making her head a slim demarcation. Her neck
pressed forward, back, forward, back

until I, too, had to move,
bringing us both to that moment when
the wild one understands,

flees.

 

 

COTTONWOOD

Florence Dacey

Fountain of moonlight,
spry upstart among the sprawling
cedars, the flushed wind sends
you swaying into fall.

Like tears
your fluttering heart
shaped leaves turn gold.

Inside you pour
tunnels of rough stars.

You want to climb up to the lowering sky,
pull your feet from out this dry hillside.

We see your sisters along the river
throwing light off
as young girls do water after
dips or a naked dash in rain,
growing fast and soft
to break,
to die that much sooner.

........................................................................................................................

 

EYES FOR EACH OTHER

John Calvin Rezmerski

The light of heaven glowing from mushrooms growing on rotting stumps
is suggested by the museum’s tank of luminescent jellyfish swaying.

Each kind of firefly flickers at its own rate, its own hour, to its own kind only,
and we may guess the function of the message, but not what it deeply means.

Campfire sparks, a small plane cruising with navigation lights, a sliver of moon,
northern lights, fireworks on the horizon. A low candle fluttering in the tent.

In the dreams of poor children in deteriorating schools (some people say
children who won’t amount to much) blinks a light that spells out words.

Members of a family changing by necessity into animals keep human masks
behind which shimmers the energy of tigers or birds, or the light of bulls’ eyes.

Fluorescence, incandescence, lambency, scintillation, crepuscularity, reflection,
noctilucence, foxfire, nimbus, aura, translucence—good night, good night.

The brick-red krill that pave the surface of parts of the antarctic sea
shed an eerie sexual light at night, providing a background for reflected stars.

Lost in her own sweet pleasure, she opened her eyes to absorb the sight of his,
in a mutual daze of wonder and holding on, till intimate light blazed and dimmed.