A few years ago I was walking along the rugged rocks by the sea at Hånke in Norway at dusk, just as shadow was descending on the land and I was startled by a gathering of deer who started leaping around me and each other in the darkness, a mysterious ritual. This poem came of it years later
My stone patio is home for a 3" lizard pal. On a morning, just after I moved a heavy, sharp-edged. metal flower pot,, my eye landed on a writhing piece of flesh on the ground next to it - a tail??! OMG, I chopped off Lizard''s tail. I fretted. I worried. Had I killed Lizard, too? No way... I searched but no sign of his amputated body. Days later there he was, basking on a cedar house plank - and what?! the stub of a new TAIL. Child's glee in me - how mind-boggling - to re-grow half your body's length. That's WILD (and primal)
I cannot claim to love centipedes. I’ve have always simply been intrigued by them — they are the only insect I will tolerate in our house. Why? Why’s retreat into irrelevance! How does such intricate mobility converge in a creature so small? How does it know to find the damp towel in our laundry? How does it calculate its most efficient escape? Who do they think they are?
This reminds me of buckthorn, but in the opposite way. So many people curse its presence and speak of it in such a negative manner. Yet, as I am a Early Childhood Forest Teacher, we have had more and more children responding sympathetically, lovingly, and protective of the buckthorn. They get very upset when we are pulling it out and removing it from places. It is as if they are coming into the world with a more evolved knowledge and relationship to this plant being...
At a retreat this weekend, also in Colorado Springs, I went on a walk and a great horned owl flew right above me a landed on a branch 15 feet above my head. Surrounding it were 5 or 6 crows and even more smaller birds, all jumping around the owl and screaming. I wanted to yell at the crow and tell them to leave her alone. Finally, it was just me and the owl. And for some reason, I starting speaking to her and asking her to speak back. “Speak, for your servant is listening”, I said. She said nothing but simply stared at me. Then I realized I was just one more noise and disruption squawking at her peace. Joining the off-tuned chorus of crow and starlings.
It’s easy to always think I sit at the center of the universe and animals and birds are here for me, to bring signs and symbols and messages from above. When reality just might be that my presence is the same as a annoying crow, and the owl waiting and praying I would stop talking and staring. How easy it is to romanticize everything.
Nov 13, 2022·edited Nov 13, 2022Liked by Pádraig Ó Tuama
Oh how I marvel at the many shades of wildness in the world, one where a rough beast relentlessly slouches toward Bethlehem and the very same one where Billy Collins writes a whimsical poem called "Morning Walk": 'The dog stops often to sniff the poems of others before reciting her own.'
I can't wait to buy his new book of short poems called "Musical Tables".
Thank you, Pádraig. This prompt calls my mind to the grand and majestic North American Bison, or buffalo. Because they eat grass and might remind us of cattle, people do not always realize their wildness, speed, and power.
We have the wonderful opportunity to live near the Theodore Roosevelt National Park where I see them each year. When we are safely in our car, we observe them very close at times when a herd is crossing or traveling down a road.
Signs of their wildness can be observed when their winter coats are shedding off, and rolls of dusty, tangled hide hang from their flanks. When scars of past battles are visible through their hides. When they wallow in dust bowls.
Once we were traveling by car through their lands at the time of the rut. Females were urinating, and males would put their noses right under the cows’ tails to detect their readiness for the rut. Males pursue the females, and females flee or outright turn to resist. I felt like a voyeur.
Eagle Poem by Joy Harjo comes to my mind. I often listen to John Siddique recite this poem. I believe it’s about the cycle of life or at least that’s my interpretation. I wouldn’t say eagles are beautiful, but they certainly command your attention. I’ve had a couple of encounters with them as one tried to carry me away as a young child while I was playing in a field beside my house. Luckily, it just got a couple tufts of my hair. A few years ago while driving down a highway close to my childhood home, one flew into my windshield. The windshield shattered, but luckily I wasn’t harmed. So Eagles do bring up a tenderness in me.
Barry Lopez begins Chapter One, “Origin and Description,” of the first section of OF WOLVES AND MEN with, “Imagine a wolf moving through the northern woods.” What follows is, for me, the most extraordinary empathic effort to write into an animal life. Instead of imagining what “wolf” has meant, means, will mean, could mean, etc. (that all comes later in the book), Lopez opens with the invitation to live into animal imagination and animal body. I feel my hairs and muscles, nose and teeth, when I read that opening passage. For a moment, before the mind crashes back in, I feel my animal body.
I am drawn to a poem by Marge Piercy who has this beautiful phrase, "nothing living resembles a straight line" when describing "old quarrels" between two who love each other... and how to find a place called home, even for those who travel or move many times.
Here are the last 2 stanzas from "The spring offensive of the snail" by Marge Piercy
Well I just wanted to write that the only poem I remember about animals is from Rilke, the Panther and then I saw that the comment before mine is about this poem. Actually it is the poem I still know by heart from my youth. We had to learn a lot by heart in school but this one I learned on my own. I guess I was about 15 when I learned it. As my native language is german, it is in German in my head and I don´t know the words in English. - sometimes an image enters and stops in the heart
This passage on a cougar from the great Canadian poet and memoirist, Patrick Lane says so much:
“There have been moments of great beauty in my life. I remember staring into the forest outside my trailer on the North Thompson. It was early evening and I had gone into the night to breathe after a long day at the mill. A man ripped open his hand on a jagged edge of fir and I had put in seven stitches and wrapped it so he could return to work. A great gray owl’s cry had drawn me into the night.
An owl’s flight is one of the perfect silences, like the sound of snow falling. I tried to reach through the shadows to her and caught another sound, the brush of paw against leaf. A cougar had come to the creek pool to drink. His head was low to the water and his shoulder’s arched above him as he drank. His long tail twitched. The cougar knew I was there, but to him I didn’t matter. He was willing to share the night with me. He lifted his head after lapping and looked into my eyes. I could see the water drops on his whiskers.
The deep forest had come to see me. Satiated, the cougar raised himself up, then turned and moved back into the shadows. The muscles under his golden hide were long, lean and hard. I got up from the stump I was sitting on and walked over to the creek. There in the sand were the splayed tracks of his front paws. I reached down and placed my palm inside one of the paw prints. It was far larger than my hand. I thought of my brother in Vancouver among poets and writers and at that moment the far cities meant nothing. There among the trees I was myself. It was there in the north where my poems had to be made. I swore I would never betray them.
The owl called again high on the mountain. the echoes receded, then died, and I lifted my hand out of the cougar’s mark. I stared at my trailer and where I had been sitting only a few moments before and I saw myself as I had been seen.
I went to seminary many years ago because I thought if I heard one more person say, 'Christdiedforoursins' I would scream obscenities in public - my husband being use to them in private - and start hitting people, perhaps with more enthusiasm than would be polite. Four and a half years of study later, there was still no deep understanding to rest upon - I mean truly, not just religiously. Though I suppose, it was an odd expectation. After all you wouldn't go to design school and hope for a class on the spiritual properties of light or the poetry of cement. Oh, but wouldn't that be a fun design school?
Sometime later, on a dirt road on my way to the little parish church I served, I drove with a vase of flowers wedged between my legs because, well, yes, I wanted the blossoms just so - a gift for someone. Thus somewhat distracted by the flowers just below the steering wheel, I did not see the doe jump up out of the ditch, run beside my car for a pace, and then, as I stared in horror, shift across the front of my car and fall into the opposite ditch.
I sat with her in her dying while the milk flooded from her teats, her eyes frantic and frightened and forgiving all in one. I wept a field of regrets and sorrows, wondered how her dying in my lap could impart understandings not found in any books or seminaries or wisdom schools. I marvel at the strangeness of it still, the horror of having killed a new mother, the birthing of something in me, feeling it can never be made right, and, living with the burdened gift of it. Sometimes I dream of her fawn.
My sister died from pancreatic cancer to this poem. ❤️
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
A few years ago I was walking along the rugged rocks by the sea at Hånke in Norway at dusk, just as shadow was descending on the land and I was startled by a gathering of deer who started leaping around me and each other in the darkness, a mysterious ritual. This poem came of it years later
SICUT CERVUS
Give me rain to hide my thirst
hope to give it shelter.
Let me run to the rocks on the water
where junipers meet the sky at dusk.
There I will find my friends,
shadows all,
and hop and prance
until darkness twists us into bone.
Antlers, limbs, and hooves
scratch the starry sky
beckoning a generous moon
to restore our inner radiance.
It turns the wind
and calls the sea to touch us.
I rise, parched and golden
stepping on kelp and broken urchins
until
deep calls to deep:
roaring waves sweep over me,
and I am new.
Rat Ode: For the Poet Who Told Me Rats Aren't Noble Enough Creatures for a Poem
Elizabeth Acevedo
(video link here; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvivkT4ENG8&ab_channel=AllDefPoetry)
Because you are not the admired nightingale.
Because you are not the noble doe.
Because you are not the blackbird,
picturesque ermine, armadillo, or bat.
They've been written, and I don't know their song
the way I know your scuttling between walls.
The scent of your collapsed corpse bloating
beneath floorboards. Your frantic squeals
as you wrestle your own fur from glue traps.
Because in July of '97, you birthed a legion
on 109th, swarmed from behind dumpsters,
made our street infamous for something
other than crack. We nicknamed you "Cat-
killer," raced with you through open hydrants,
screeched like you when Siete blasted
aluminum bat into your brethren's skull—
the sound: slapped down dominoes. You reigned
that summer, Rat; knocked down the viejo's Heinekens,
your screech erupting with the cry of Capicu!
And even when they sent exterminators,
set flame to garbage, half dead, and on fire, you
pushed on.
Because you may be inelegant, simple,
a mammal bottom-feeder, always fucking famished,
little ugly thing that feasts on what crumbs fall
from the corner of our mouths, but you live
uncuddled, uncoddled, can't be bought at Petco
and fed to fat snakes because you're not the maze-rat
of labs: pale, pretty-eyed, trained.
You raise yourself sharp fanged, clawed, scarred,
patched dark—because of this alone they should
love you. So, when they tell you to crawl home
take your gutter, your dirt coat, your underbelly that
scrapes against street, concrete, squeak and filth this
page, Rat.
She Asks Me to Kill the Spider by Rudy Francisco
“She asks me to kill the spider.
Instead, I get the most
peaceful weapons I can find.
I take a cup and a napkin.
I catch the spider, put it outside
and allow it to walk away.
If I am ever caught in the wrong place
at the wrong time, just being alive
and not bothering anyone,
I hope I am greeted
with the same kind
of mercy.”
My stone patio is home for a 3" lizard pal. On a morning, just after I moved a heavy, sharp-edged. metal flower pot,, my eye landed on a writhing piece of flesh on the ground next to it - a tail??! OMG, I chopped off Lizard''s tail. I fretted. I worried. Had I killed Lizard, too? No way... I searched but no sign of his amputated body. Days later there he was, basking on a cedar house plank - and what?! the stub of a new TAIL. Child's glee in me - how mind-boggling - to re-grow half your body's length. That's WILD (and primal)
I cannot claim to love centipedes. I’ve have always simply been intrigued by them — they are the only insect I will tolerate in our house. Why? Why’s retreat into irrelevance! How does such intricate mobility converge in a creature so small? How does it know to find the damp towel in our laundry? How does it calculate its most efficient escape? Who do they think they are?
This reminds me of buckthorn, but in the opposite way. So many people curse its presence and speak of it in such a negative manner. Yet, as I am a Early Childhood Forest Teacher, we have had more and more children responding sympathetically, lovingly, and protective of the buckthorn. They get very upset when we are pulling it out and removing it from places. It is as if they are coming into the world with a more evolved knowledge and relationship to this plant being...
At a retreat this weekend, also in Colorado Springs, I went on a walk and a great horned owl flew right above me a landed on a branch 15 feet above my head. Surrounding it were 5 or 6 crows and even more smaller birds, all jumping around the owl and screaming. I wanted to yell at the crow and tell them to leave her alone. Finally, it was just me and the owl. And for some reason, I starting speaking to her and asking her to speak back. “Speak, for your servant is listening”, I said. She said nothing but simply stared at me. Then I realized I was just one more noise and disruption squawking at her peace. Joining the off-tuned chorus of crow and starlings.
It’s easy to always think I sit at the center of the universe and animals and birds are here for me, to bring signs and symbols and messages from above. When reality just might be that my presence is the same as a annoying crow, and the owl waiting and praying I would stop talking and staring. How easy it is to romanticize everything.
Oh how I marvel at the many shades of wildness in the world, one where a rough beast relentlessly slouches toward Bethlehem and the very same one where Billy Collins writes a whimsical poem called "Morning Walk": 'The dog stops often to sniff the poems of others before reciting her own.'
I can't wait to buy his new book of short poems called "Musical Tables".
Thank you, Pádraig. This prompt calls my mind to the grand and majestic North American Bison, or buffalo. Because they eat grass and might remind us of cattle, people do not always realize their wildness, speed, and power.
We have the wonderful opportunity to live near the Theodore Roosevelt National Park where I see them each year. When we are safely in our car, we observe them very close at times when a herd is crossing or traveling down a road.
Signs of their wildness can be observed when their winter coats are shedding off, and rolls of dusty, tangled hide hang from their flanks. When scars of past battles are visible through their hides. When they wallow in dust bowls.
Once we were traveling by car through their lands at the time of the rut. Females were urinating, and males would put their noses right under the cows’ tails to detect their readiness for the rut. Males pursue the females, and females flee or outright turn to resist. I felt like a voyeur.
Eagle Poem by Joy Harjo comes to my mind. I often listen to John Siddique recite this poem. I believe it’s about the cycle of life or at least that’s my interpretation. I wouldn’t say eagles are beautiful, but they certainly command your attention. I’ve had a couple of encounters with them as one tried to carry me away as a young child while I was playing in a field beside my house. Luckily, it just got a couple tufts of my hair. A few years ago while driving down a highway close to my childhood home, one flew into my windshield. The windshield shattered, but luckily I wasn’t harmed. So Eagles do bring up a tenderness in me.
Barry Lopez begins Chapter One, “Origin and Description,” of the first section of OF WOLVES AND MEN with, “Imagine a wolf moving through the northern woods.” What follows is, for me, the most extraordinary empathic effort to write into an animal life. Instead of imagining what “wolf” has meant, means, will mean, could mean, etc. (that all comes later in the book), Lopez opens with the invitation to live into animal imagination and animal body. I feel my hairs and muscles, nose and teeth, when I read that opening passage. For a moment, before the mind crashes back in, I feel my animal body.
I am drawn to a poem by Marge Piercy who has this beautiful phrase, "nothing living resembles a straight line" when describing "old quarrels" between two who love each other... and how to find a place called home, even for those who travel or move many times.
Here are the last 2 stanzas from "The spring offensive of the snail" by Marge Piercy
....
But remember to bury
all old quarrels
behind the garage for compost.
Forgive who insulted you.
Forgive yourself for being wrong.
You will do it again
for nothing living
resembles a straight line,
certainly not this journey
to and fro, zigzagging
you there and me here
making our own road onward
as the snail does.
Yes, for some time we might contemplate
not the tiger, not the eagle or grizzly
but the snail who always remembers
that wherever you find yourself eating
is home, the center
where you must make your love,
and wherever you wake up
is here, the right place to be
where we start again.
Well I just wanted to write that the only poem I remember about animals is from Rilke, the Panther and then I saw that the comment before mine is about this poem. Actually it is the poem I still know by heart from my youth. We had to learn a lot by heart in school but this one I learned on my own. I guess I was about 15 when I learned it. As my native language is german, it is in German in my head and I don´t know the words in English. - sometimes an image enters and stops in the heart
This passage on a cougar from the great Canadian poet and memoirist, Patrick Lane says so much:
“There have been moments of great beauty in my life. I remember staring into the forest outside my trailer on the North Thompson. It was early evening and I had gone into the night to breathe after a long day at the mill. A man ripped open his hand on a jagged edge of fir and I had put in seven stitches and wrapped it so he could return to work. A great gray owl’s cry had drawn me into the night.
An owl’s flight is one of the perfect silences, like the sound of snow falling. I tried to reach through the shadows to her and caught another sound, the brush of paw against leaf. A cougar had come to the creek pool to drink. His head was low to the water and his shoulder’s arched above him as he drank. His long tail twitched. The cougar knew I was there, but to him I didn’t matter. He was willing to share the night with me. He lifted his head after lapping and looked into my eyes. I could see the water drops on his whiskers.
The deep forest had come to see me. Satiated, the cougar raised himself up, then turned and moved back into the shadows. The muscles under his golden hide were long, lean and hard. I got up from the stump I was sitting on and walked over to the creek. There in the sand were the splayed tracks of his front paws. I reached down and placed my palm inside one of the paw prints. It was far larger than my hand. I thought of my brother in Vancouver among poets and writers and at that moment the far cities meant nothing. There among the trees I was myself. It was there in the north where my poems had to be made. I swore I would never betray them.
The owl called again high on the mountain. the echoes receded, then died, and I lifted my hand out of the cougar’s mark. I stared at my trailer and where I had been sitting only a few moments before and I saw myself as I had been seen.
It took a long time for me to be human again.”
I went to seminary many years ago because I thought if I heard one more person say, 'Christdiedforoursins' I would scream obscenities in public - my husband being use to them in private - and start hitting people, perhaps with more enthusiasm than would be polite. Four and a half years of study later, there was still no deep understanding to rest upon - I mean truly, not just religiously. Though I suppose, it was an odd expectation. After all you wouldn't go to design school and hope for a class on the spiritual properties of light or the poetry of cement. Oh, but wouldn't that be a fun design school?
Sometime later, on a dirt road on my way to the little parish church I served, I drove with a vase of flowers wedged between my legs because, well, yes, I wanted the blossoms just so - a gift for someone. Thus somewhat distracted by the flowers just below the steering wheel, I did not see the doe jump up out of the ditch, run beside my car for a pace, and then, as I stared in horror, shift across the front of my car and fall into the opposite ditch.
I sat with her in her dying while the milk flooded from her teats, her eyes frantic and frightened and forgiving all in one. I wept a field of regrets and sorrows, wondered how her dying in my lap could impart understandings not found in any books or seminaries or wisdom schools. I marvel at the strangeness of it still, the horror of having killed a new mother, the birthing of something in me, feeling it can never be made right, and, living with the burdened gift of it. Sometimes I dream of her fawn.