Ecopoetry handout #2

Eco-poetry & Ecological Awareness: Raising ecological consciousness through eco-sensitive poetry

Sleep and Spiders BY CATRIONE’ O’ REILLY It is too strange to kill, The symmetry of its eyes, its eight paired legs askew on the lintel, exoskeletal and tiger-striped, all digestion. It looks sudden but is still for hours, eyes on stalks, awaiting news from hair-triggers that might be legs or fingers (the whole thing a claw) come to touch me in sleep— hammock from which black shadows seep. Stars go milky, then go out. I wake at five to what five is— A cold blue glow and a self Trussed, barely breathing, Paralytic with dreams.

Dreaming Birds BY JOHN POWELL WARD The eyes and feathers intermesh. Descartes said birds were small machines. A startles starling clattered off And flew away at that, it screeched That birds are loops in modern minds, Weird flights, a mode, a fatal curve, Of values in the air. The thrush Is proto-sculpture on the lawn, The SS crow patrolling down A motorway’s hard shoulder struts At sentry duty. From a pole A blackbird soloist transmits Its live performance and the cool Woods pay to hear him, dark guitars Are slung there and electric cries Flash down the alleyways of spruce, Afforestaiton’s gentlest crop. The dreamer Kant thought of a dove That found air fretful and conveived Apurer flight in empty space. I dream of swifts that soar asleep. The Drive BY HUGO WILLIAMS The trees attend to the high wind Laying back their heads Sweeping low again. The wind shakes loose their leaves Which float down through the air Becoming days.

If the Owl Calls Again BY JOHN HAINES at dusk from the island in the river, and it’s not too cold, I’ll wait for the moon To rise, And then take wing and glide To meet him. We will not speak, but hooded against the frost soar above the alder flats, searching with tawny eyes. And then we’ll sit in the shadow spruce and pick the bones of careless mice, while the long moon drifts toward Asia and the river mutters in its icy bed. And when the morning climbs the limbs we’ll part without a sound, fulfilled, floating homeward as the cold world awakens.

Lighting the First Fire of Autumn

BY GREVEL LINDOP

Here they are, the quartered logs in their wicker

Basket woven of what I take to be

Birch and split willow plaited together,

The copse offering itself for the burning

Indoors, twig against twig, tree within tree.

Rough-cut block capitals of an alphabet

Older than writing: poplar, beech, pine,

Chainsawed joints of the wood bled and dried out

For a year, lodged in the season’s calendar,

Their rituals subordinate, now, to mine

As I build the pyre of oak twigs and newsprint

In the middle of the year’s first cold morning.

The TV news shows tropical forests on fire,

Drought in east England, and the Midlands flooded,

A crude mosaic of weather that looks like a warning.

St Columcille said he fears death and hell—

But worse, the sound of an ace in a sacred grove.

Now every grove is sacred, and still we burn

Wood at times, for the fire also is scared

And a house without it like a heart without love

When the world heads into darkness. The heat’s core

Will show you again lost faces and glittering forests,

Mountain passes, caverns, an archetypal world

Recited in the twinkling of a dark pupil

The epic buried inside us never rests:

Fire is the dark secret of the forest.

The green crowns drink sunlight until their dumb

Hearts are glutted with fire. Then, decaying or burning, 

Give up whatever they have. A match flares

And the paper ignites. What, and the poems will come.