Poems for the End of Summer
Dedicated to our friends and loved ones in Maui and throughout Hawai’i. Our hearts and spirits are with you in your time of fire.
We have not posted often this summer. Like many of you, we are living in the moment, glad for the pause that summer often provides, reveling in nature, and also, at times, mourning the destruction of our natural world at a pace almost no one saw coming.
The question often is now: how to hold two true things equally balanced in our minds and hearts? On the one hand, there’s the ease and freedom and beauty of the world in full bloom and the long sweet days, on the other there is the ever-present sorrow of burning, flooding, the heartbroken awareness of the millions of species of plants, animals, insects who still inhabit the world with us but soon may no longer, and our knowledge of the species whose time has already passed in what we’re now calling the Anthropocene. Where are the raucous frogs? Where are the endless, undulating flocks of butterflies?
During this beautiful, difficult summer, we’ve come back again and again to the poetry of the poets we love, some of whom we have had the honor of meeting and interviewing, who address this conundrum with tenderness and clarity. Often, our favorite poets celebrate the profound intelligence of the natural world, as in this poem by Anne Waldman entitled“Devotee,” dedicated to the wisdom of the Rocky Mountains:
what to call wild use
of nature
to the human
where character
is centered
entering like a devotee,
genuflecting, vast space
what to call drama
of containment edging
unknown? tundra’s
tenacious
front to the stars,
above all tree-lines
can you breathe?
Other poems that we love investigate beautiful uses of the gifts that nature gives us, as in this fragment of Diane di Prima’s beautiful poem about “Paracelsus“:
Extract the juice which is itself a Light.
Pulp, manna, gentle
Theriasin, ergot
like mold on flame, these red leaves
bursting
from mesquite by the side
of dry creekbed. Extract
the tar, the sticky
substance
heart
of things
Yet another of our favorite poet’s poems delves into nature’s fundamental indifference to the wants of human existence, reminding us that the world is our home, not our servant, and that we disrespect this at our own peril:
The locusts’ hum, at first, was like a line of flame;
then the air burst into reds, silver-edged
and filled with mouths like snapping scissors.
They ate our wheat, blacked out the skies
until the falling bodies settled like a fog
over Great Salt Lake, the carcasses brined
to a black and growing wall. We thought
the soil here was rich. But who knew how
rare rich was, how terribly fragile, and how
temperamental we’d become
trying to sustain these plots too alkaline
to keep a crop alive.
— from “Soil”, by Paisley Rekdal
Of course, we also turn to poems that celebrate the way that nature generously allows us to see our own lives and loves reflected in her:
So much like sequins
the sunlight on this river.
Something like that kiss—
remember?
Fourth of July, with the moon
down early the air moved
as if it were thinking,
as if it had begun
to understand
how hard it is
to feel at home
in the world,
but that night
she found a place
just above your shoulder
and pressed her lips
there.
— From “Unmarked” by Tim Seibles
Or this poem, “Wild Geese,” written and narrated by that great poet of nature, Mary Oliver, which reminds us that:
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Some poems observe the world with great care and precision, revealing something we might never have understood before in just this way, something that we will now observe for ourselves with new-born eyes:
After the Spring
The first hay is in and all at once
in the silent evening summer has come
knowing the place wholly the green skin
of its hidden slopes where the shadows will
never reach so far again and a few
gray hairs motionless high in the late
sunlight tell of rain before morning
and of finding the daybreak under green
water with no shadows but all still the same
still known still the known faces of summer
faces of water turning into themselves
changing without a word into themselves
— W.S. Merwin
And sometimes we rest inside poems that simply bring us back from daily distraction into the sense of indivisibility with the Now that poetry, the natural world, and meditation can mindfully bring us to, as in these poems by Jane Hirshfield:
Solstice
The Earth today tilts one way, then another.
And yes, though all things change,
this night again will watch its fireflies,
then go in to a bed with sheets,
to lights, a beloved.
To running water cold and hot.
Take nothing for granted,
you who were also opulent, a stung cosmos.
Birds sang, frogs sang, their sufficient unto.
The late-night rain-bringing thunder.
And if days grew ordinarily shorter,
the dark’s mirror lengthened,
and one’s gain was not the other lessened.
I asked to be lush, to be green.
I pressed myself to the clear glass
between wanting and world.
I wanted to be lush, tropical,
excessive. To be green.
On the glass that does not exist,
small breath-clouds rose, dissolved.
A creature of water, I found myself.
Tender, still also of air.
The dry bark of trees
sequestered its hidden rising.
I told my want: patience.
I offered my want the old promise—
a tree not wet to the touch is wet to the living.
Wherever you are, whoever you are, if you’re reading this, we invite you to take a pause in nature simply to breathe and be. And we remind you to turn to the poets and painters and artists who reflect and honor the natural world in their work, underscoring that now, in the moment, we are here, part of everything, the great whole, blessed and challenged and present.
