I have two new poems out this month to share.
The first is in EcoTheo Review. Lately, I have been in one of those seasons when I feel stuck under the weight of the unstoppable endings of things. So it is fitting to have a poem about the loss of a favorite tree last fall on EcoTheo Review’s website this week.
“How the Maple Tree Grandpa Planted by the Barn Cracks Open in a Too-Early, Too-Heavy Snow” is about loss, particularly through the lens of climate change, but more broadly through the lens of all sorts of losses – people, relationships, places, dreams, seasons of life – wherever and however the ‘way it was’ is no longer the way it will be.
When a beloved thing goes down, maybe the best prayer I can offer is to hold the experience close enough to feel the love in it as deeply as I can. Because despite linear time’s unbudging walls, the love in what passes away surely (please, God) lasts forever.
Click here to read the poem on EcoTheo’s website. While you’re there, scroll down a bit to find Dean Rader’s Winter Light Poems, among many other outstanding selections. These two poems are exquisite and new favorites of mine.
The second poem, “Mirrors,” is part of Blue Heron Review’s Issue 16 on Sanctuaries and Places of Peace. As I lean into my inclinations to love and merge with the natural world, I learn more and more from trees, rivers, mountains, and animals.
This poem began when re-reading the first stanza of section 7 of Mary Oliver’s “More Beautiful than the Honey Locust Tree Are the Words of the Lord” which ends with the line, “Instead I went back to the woods where not a single tree turns its face away.”
I was reading Oliver’s poem last summer on the porch of a cabin in the mountains and found myself in it, especially that last line. I had recently been studying Richard Rohr’s teachings on mirroring. I listened to the birds in the ponderosa pines after a day of hiking and the beginnings of what became “Mirrors” took shape.
Click here for BHR’s Issue 16 and find “Mirrors” about halfway through the issue. (You can use the Control ‘f’ function to search for it.) Please consider spending some time browsing this issue. It is rich with treasures.