January 2025 - The Winter Wood-lot: A Found Poem

Winter is an acquired taste, one which no one ever has savored more than Henry David Thoreau. As another winter settles in and a new, uncertain year approaches, I’ve been turning to Thoreau’s journals for reassurance that beauty still can be found even within the darkest of days.

In a departure from the usual Poem of the Month offering, this month’s featured poem is a “Found” one from HDT’s journal entry of December 3, 1856. The words and images are all Thoreau’s own; only the ordering of the lines and stanzas is mine.

The Winter Wood-lot: A Found Poem

Henry David Thoreau, journal entry 12/03/1856

For years I fed

On the pine forest’s edge

Seen against the 

Winter horizon.

I ranged like 

A gray moose

Looking at the spiring

Tops of the trees

And fed my imagination

On them, far-away, ideal

Trees not disturbed by the axe

Nearer and nearer

Fringes and eyelashes

Of my eye.  

Where was

The sap, the fruit,

The value of the forest

For me, but in that line

Where it was relieved

Against the sky?

That was my wood-lot;

That was my lot in the woods.

The silvery needles of 

The pine straining the light.

Henry David Thoreau, was born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1817 and died there in 1862. In between, he observed and reflected on nature as no one had before nor has anyone since.

Thanks to the dedication and generosity of The Walden Woods Project https://www.walden.org/collection/journals/ , Thoreau’s journals are available to all who wish to plumb their wisdom.

December 2024 - Coyotes

The year has dwindled down to days. How do we not tote up our gains and losses, our quotidian triumphs and catastrophes? How do we not wonder which will fade and which will remain as we sidle into the unknown wilds of 2025?

Coyotes

by Cammy Thomas

bent on prey

sidle into the woods

near my house

soundless indifferent

gray among grasses

what have they taken

from me at the edge

of the field what

part of me stays

with them in the brush

Cammy Thomas’s most recent book is Odysseus’ Daughter (Parkman Press, 2023), poems written in response to the Odyssey. Three previous poetry collections were published by Four Way Books. Cathedral of Wish received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Tremors received 2022 Poetry Honors from the Mass Book Awards. She teaches literature to adults and lives near Boston. “Coyotes” originally appeared in Flush Left (Indolent Books). www.cammythomas.com.

November 2024 - November

The season of brilliance known as Fall Foliage is now past its peak. Nature, never one to indulge in instant gratification, will keep us waiting until next year for such glory to return again. Indeed, as October fades into November, the comparison to the morning after a much anticipated celebration is difficult to avoid. Whatever emotional let-down we might feel is physically reflected in the dull, dry leaves skittering and piling around our feet. Yet, as this month’s poem reminds us, “The loss of beauty is not always loss.” The trees’ (and our) restorative chill hours await.

November

by Elizabeth Drew Stoddard

Much have I spoken of the faded leaf;
Long have I listened to the wailing wind,
And watched it ploughing through the heavy clouds;
For autumn charms my melancholy mind.

When autumn comes, the poets sing a dirge:
The year must perish; all the flowers are dead;
The sheaves are gathered; and the mottled quail
Runs in the stubble, but the lark has fled!

Still, autumn ushers in the Christmas cheer,
The holly-berries and the ivy-tree:
They weave a chaplet for the Old Year’s heir;
These waiting mourners do not sing for me!

I find sweet peace in depths of autumn woods,
Where grow the ragged ferns and roughened moss;
The naked, silent trees have taught me this, —
The loss of beauty is not always loss!

Elizabeth Drew Barstow Stoddard, born in 1823 in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, was a poet, novelist, essayist, and literary critic. Her work appeared in such notable publications as Harper’s Monthly and Atlantic Monthly and was hailed at the time by such literary luminaries as Nathaniel Hawthorne (a distant relative) and W.D. Howells. She died in 1902. Her poem, “November,” is in the Public Domain.

October 2024 - Darshan - Visions of the Divine

Poem of the Month followers are, in great probability, people who care about the environment and the arts. There is an equally great probability that you, dear readers, are fully aware of the impending election. Therefore, for this last, long month before the first Tuesday in November, we offer you a wise and calming meditation inspired by the beauty of our favorite farm. 

Darshan – Visions of the Divine

The word is the ultimate silence ...

From Suniai by Ajeet Kaur

—by bg Thurston

near the pond’s edge

the stillness of a frog sleeping

with one eye open

I remember now

gazing upon the lilies—

no mud, no lotus

moored to the bridge

a green boat rocks in silence

waiting to be free

bright blue dragonflies

compose cursive poems above

the pond’s reflection

only one day each

orange daylilies trumpet

among the brown reeds

stones stacked upon stones

obey laws of gravity

as countries topple

a plain gray bird sings

his gift—this present moment

of pure melody

the curved stone path

ends where a small black figure

sits, hugging his knees

we live here, amidst

a world forgetting its purpose

lost in our pretense

bronze temple bells hang

no breeze visits the quiet porch

oh, to hear them ring!

bg Thurston lives on a sheep farm in Warwick, Massachusetts. She received her MFA in Poetry from Vermont College in 2002. She has taught poetry courses at Lasell Village, online for Vermont College, and conducts poetry workshops. Her third book of poetry, The Many Lives of Cathouse Farm/Tales of a Rural Brothel, is forthcoming in 2025 from Cervena Barva Press and is the culmination of a decade of historical research about her 1770’s farmhouse.

September 2024 - The Hike

September is a liminal time. Some days, summer still lingers in the air.  Yet, there are other days – increasingly so - when the suddenly chilly winds stir the changing leaves and send us scrambling for our sweaters.  Indeed, along with the inevitable equinox, change is coming; to quote this month’s poem (and its echo of a line by Galway Kinnell), “what we don’t know” - both the wonderful and the not quite so wonderful - is waiting for us in the weeks and months ahead.

The Hike

after a line by Galway Kinnell, and for my son

 by Jason Tandon

We squat

on a bench

missing its middle slat,

tear jerky with our teeth.

What we don’t know

is the fountain a mile off,

the pistol spigot

that will ice

our spines at the root.

What we don’t know

is the sight of the first chalet

sloped above town,

shutters flung wide to the open air,

and the boxes beneath them

frothing with flowers

in the sop

of summer’s heat.

Jason Tandon is the author of five books of poetry, including This Far North (Black Lawrence Press, 2023), longlisted for the 2024 Massachusetts Book Awards, and The Actual World (Black Lawrence Press, 2019). His poems have appeared in many journals, including Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, North American Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. He teaches at Boston University, where he is a master lecturer in the Arts & Sciences Writing Program.  https://blacklawrencepress.com/books/this-far-north/

August 2024 - I Am the Storm

August is sun and heat. It is vegetation, sere-edged and crisp underfoot; and it is fruit nearing ripeness on the tree.  And sometimes, often with little warning, it is the punch and wonder of a late-summer thunder storm.

I Am the Storm

by Catherine Weber

The air is still.

No roo-roo-room of the bullfrog,

No drone or bellow. No caw.

I wait on the steps as the weather turns.

Now, I am the storm.

I am the raindrops pelting the ground,

I am the thunder and the rage

of all that has come before.

So we sit in the webbed lawn chairs

sheltering from the onslaught, waiting it out.

Working through a litter of thoughts,

treading to the other side of the storm.

Ghosts arrive, reminding us how we got here.

The wash of loss, a shroud of bitter sadness,

a rush of kindness, and blurry hope.

Finally, the sun arrives

and we walk the path home, still

sorting out what comes next.

Catherine Weber is an award-winning storyteller (3X Moth StorySLAM winner), poet, visual artist, community organizer, and marketing executive. In 2017 she founded Art on the Trails, a juried art exhibition and poetry program in Southborough, MA. Catherine is also owner of Southborough Free Art Gallery, a tiny gallery at the end of her driveway. Learn more at catherinemweber.com. 

July 2024 - Estuary

Twilight in July is a mystical and liminal time. Within its shadows mingle the vestiges of the day’s bright, hot glory and the night’s hushed, fragrant promise of soothing respite. July evenings bridge and blend two distinct environments and, in so doing, create a new one all its own.

Estuary

By Mary Pinard

The estuary is slide and suspension, a prism

of rhythms. It has a tidal chorus, high crested

in a freshet, hushed at the ebb, like in a Greek play.

Impossible to limn, almost, says an artist I know —

it’s made of remnant floods and inflow, flux, plus

mudflat habitat and beds of silt, whose sheets go

twisted, shorn, remade. Epibenthic green algae

like it there, or depending, starry flounders, anchovies,

even the longfin smelt. A form of expansion, like

an epic for a poet — the Hudson’s is 300 quixotic miles —

or a fleet, deep eddy Dickinson might have turned.

Sweetgrass, sedge weave a marsh around it, as kestrel,

curlew, vagrant shrew carry its evanescent route to light:

no two ever alike, ephemeral as phosphorescence at night.

Mary Pinard, a long-time plein air poetry contributor, is the author of two books of poetry: Portal (Salmon Press, 2014) and Ghost Heart (Ex Ophidia Press, 2022).  She lives in Roslindale and teaches at Babson College. 

June 2024 - Fire Fireflies

June’s gifts are rich and dazzling. Indeed, after the sun finally has set on these, the longest, loveliest days of the year, June lavishes us further with magic.

First Fireflies

by Merryn Rutledge

Fireflies, come to celebrate desire,

bring me back to summer nights

when we sat on grown-ups’ laps

lulled by the to and fro of rocking chairs,

lingering heat, and family voices

lowing like the cows beyond the fence.

In the deepening dark we cousins watch

for insect flash, then rouse and run

into the stardust to catch the magic bugs

in cupped palms now lantern-lit.

Against my skin, a fluttering tickle

like when my mother’s feathery

eyelash brushes my kissed cheek.

Opening our hands, we set the tiny beacons free

and spread our arms to wings,

tilting our faces skyward to the bigger lights

that spin around our haloed heads.

Winner of the poetry prize for Orisons’ Best Spiritual Literature 2023, Merryn Rutledge is widely published. “First Fireflies” originally appeared in As Above So Below and is included in the poetry collection, Sweet Juice and Ruby-Bitter Seed (Kelsay Books). Merryn teaches poetry craft, reviews poetry books by women, and works for social justice causes. She formerly taught literature, film, and creative writing at Phillips Exeter Academy, and then ran a US-based leadership development consulting firm. Born in Arkansas, where generations of forebears were farmers, Merryn lives in New England. http://www.merrynpoetry.org

May 2024 - Eve: The Naming

As the second Sunday of May approaches, mothers – all those literal, legal, and figurative mothers who bore us or reared us or mentored us – fill our minds.  May your thoughts at this time be joyful and multitudinous. And, if they are not, may nature, popularly personified as the ultimate maternal figure,  provide you with inspiration and solace.

Eve:  The Naming

( In memory of Denise Levertov)

by Kathleen Hirsch

A paper sky ,

a blazing fig,

what deep, forgotten memory

in a tree?

I see myself

long ago -- a being

newly sprung

a dawn-struck slip of green.

From deep within

a blind and senseless solitude

I heard my name,

and woke to a desire

still unnamed:

To taste the light

within the flame --

To speak to fire

from a heart of flesh.

To know for whom

or what I longed.

Unleafed in all but my desire,

I had, I saw, arrived.

Kathleen Hirsch, M.A., is the author of three works of nonfiction, Songs from the Alley, A Home in the Heart of the City, and A Sabbath Life: One Woman’s Search for Wholeness.  She co-edited Mothers, a collection of contemporary fiction.  Currently, she directs the Contemplative Writing Program at Bethany House of Prayer in Arlington, MA, where she leads workshops on poetry and spiritual journaling.  “Eve - The Naming” is from the forthcoming collection, Mending Prayer Rugs. Her website is: www.kathleenhirsch.com.

April 2024 - I follow the tangle and the tendril

Ah, April!  Such a luscious month in New England that it seems akin to blasphemy to mark its start with a day to celebrate pranks and fools. Let’s, instead, look to April’s twenty-nine other days, each one ripe with nature’s promise and National Poetry Month’s poems. Let’s emulate poet Louise Berliner and “follow the tangle and the tendril” into the serious delight and enlightenment the rest of April has on offer.

 I follow the tangle and the tendril

tracing the leaf’s lineage

long before the bloom and the burst

back to the hard shell of a spit seed

nestling and nesting —

back to when a pip was part star.

What possessed me to climb my own thin thread

to that first touch of sky?

What impulse made green, made curl,

pushed twist and twine?

I didn’t stop at blossom or pink,

barely hesitated when it came to the fruit —

had to chase the pull to produce as if snake-charmed

even though sometimes I thought

I was the one with the flute.

By Louise Berliner

Louise Berliner tells stories through fiber and found objects, novels, poems, and essays. Her writing has appeared in VQR, Porter Gulch Review, Ibbetson Review, The Mom Egg Review, Sacred Fire, and various chapbook collections as well as the online blog, Dead Darlings. Her first book, Texas Guinan, Queen of the Night Clubs, written in part thanks to an NEH grant, is a biography of a Roaring ‘20s night club hostess famous for saying “Hello, Suckers!”. She has a studio at the Umbrella Center for the Arts. https://louiseberliner.weebly.com

March 2024 - On the Ground, Alone

The first day of March marks the start of meteorological spring. Yesterday, on a stroll around the Acton Arboretum, I came upon a clutch of snowdrops, the first I’ve seen this season.  Their white petals, delicately edged in the green of summer grass, nodded to a ground still winter bleak and bare. All about us the world is awakening, from low to the ground to high above in the blue-lit sky.

On the Ground, Alone

By Dawn Paul

You catch the high wind above the sheltering trees

sift it through your outspread wing feathers

as though fingering a silk scarf

rock gently side to side, wings held at the perfect tilt

alert for the scent of something cooked by the sun,

or maybe just cruising the sky on this spring day

after the long winter.

When another of your kind comes kiting along

to drift by your side and you lift together on an updraft

I breathe deeply, fill my chest with air.

Dawn Paul is the author of  The Country of Loneliness, a novel, and What We Still Don’t Know, poems on scientist Carl Linnaeus. She has published poetry, fiction and science/nature articles in journals and magazines, including Orion Magazine, Comstock Review and Stonecoast Review. She has been awarded residencies at Shoals Marine Laboratory, Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference and Friday Harbor Marine Laboratories.  

February 2024 - Cattails

February is full of surprises. Just when you think the snow will never end, you awaken to a balmy thaw. The pond, once frozen solid, is suddenly set free in startled dishevelment. Yes, February is nature’s roller coaster ride: Unpredictable and fast - just like life.

Cattails

by Susan Edwards Richmond

One side: three stalks in an island of bent

and broken reed; on the other: six poles,

wave slightly, two naked, four rife with seed.

One completely plush and inside out,

the others turning. I can see the brown

densely packed grains, the tawny cream pulling

away; the shortest stalk has the largest.

Shook down quivers, but doesn’t break away.

I put my hand atop and squeeze, not down

at all but firm well-sugared cotton candy,

as addictive to finch, sparrow, and wren

as that confection once was to my children,

heads bright with golden floss spilling loose

trailing to each booth at the country fair.

Susan Edwards Richmond is the award-winning author of four books for young children, including Night Owl Night and Bird Count, winner of a Parent’s Choice Silver Award, the International Literacy Association’s Primary Fiction Award, and a Mathical Honor Book. Susan's five collections of nature-based poetry for adults include Before We Were Birds and Purgatory Chasm, both published by Adastra Press. A passionate birder and naturalist, Susan teaches preschool on a farm and wildlife sanctuary in eastern Massachusetts. She is happiest exploring natural habitats with her husband and two daughters, and learns the native birds wherever she travels.