Poetry rhythms ooze out of the ground as they have for as long as we can imagine, and the job of a poet is to regularly gather them up and match them with words.

— Anita Sullivan, The Rhythm of It—Poetry's Hidden Dance

Krzysztof Golik WC CC

With every stroke of my arms, the clamor drains out of my mind into the lake. The rest is silence and thoughts in all the lake’s greens. As I reach the bobbing buoy, I cling to it, relaxing my legs and breathing in the scenery. But I want to go further. I want to lose all touch with the land. I want to be the smallest, most insignificant dot in the vastness of the lake. Swallow me. Make me your own. One day, my hair will be flowing algae, my feet luminous stones, my tongue little blue fish, and my eyes the heart of the lake. I will be the lake and the lake will be me. I am water. I am wave. Green.

Florence Hazrat
“All the Names of Green: Days at Lake Geneva”  
Still Point Arts Quarterly, Summer 2019

in dim light now

we untangle ourselves

to this day's music

its unmet surprises

sorrows and blessings

— Elizabeth Bodien, Oblique Music

HGolaszewska WC CC

Nature is resilient and compensates. I need to be resilient, too, and bounce back. I need to be nature.


Florence Hazrat. “All the Names of Green: Days at Lake Geneva,” Still Point Arts Quarterly, Summer 2019.

l.montanari, 2014. WC CC

That this is not quite true, that nature cares not one little bit about borders, and that it’s me, actually, who’d like to have a cleaner and neater reality, is something I am yet to learn.




Florence, Hazrat. “All the Names of Green: Days at Lake Geneva,” Still Point Arts Quarterly, Summer 2019.

 

Rick Shu, 2015. WC CC

To think that we can finally get it all together is unrealistic. To seek for some lasting security is futile. Believing in a solid, separate self, continuing to seek pleasure and avoid pain, thinking that someone “out there” is to blame for our pain — one has to abandon these ways of thinking. Hopelessness means that we no longer have the spirit for holding our trip together. It’s all suffering, it’s all despair, and the sooner I can accept this the more beautiful and sad it all becomes. I know I have to let go; I can’t keep going on at this age with such feelings of rage and emptiness. I love the world and the temporality of it all. And despite my long visit to the dark side, I see the light. I can emerge and find a new path. The world has always been this way.


— Brent Martin, "Pushing Through," Still Point Arts Quarterly, Summer 2019.

Life cracks us open, Sara,
removing what we've ripened inside,
using us for its purpose.
If I'm to be used,
and for this have lost everything,
I pray to be joyous in my use.


— Justen Ahren, "24 September, from a Photo," A Machine for Remembering

US Forest Service, 2009 WC PD

When you sign up to plant trees because you think this place is owed something more of your life, or because of flash floods, or for any other combination of reasons, sometimes you only get blisters and bee stings and a word of thanks. Sometimes you get a new friend. Sometimes you get butterflies, sometimes lukewarm soup. Sometimes you come home and, a day later, understand suddenly how you ought to live. Sometimes you only pull a deer guard into the sun and watch as ants scurry, water falls, spiders scatter, slugs slip, young moss tumbles over your knees. And sometimes, in the smallest of spaces, you get a new view of a new universe — seven thousand times. The transaction is impossibly uneven — it always was. And the dirt of it, because there is always dirt, will probably stick under your fingers for a long time to come.


— Alistair Herbert, "The Deer Guard: Planting Trees and Discovering New Worlds in the Upper Calder Valley," Still Point Arts Quarterly, Summer 2019.

In such a place, to be
meant no longer being bound
to where or when.


— Joseph Murphy, "Above Kloppenhiem," Shoreline of the Heart