EMILIE LYGREN

Ritual

Each new place I look at leaves to help me arrive. 
Some are gray and withered, others, gold or green.

The round spots of fungi, insect holes, split lines along veins all say: 

I have been here long enough for here to change me. 

May I stay half as long. 

JUDITH WRIGHT

Five Senses

Now my five senses
gather into a meaning
all acts, all presences;
and as a lily gathers
the elements together,
in me this dark and shining,
that stillness and that moving,
these shapes that spring from nothing,
become a rhythm that dances,
a pure design.

While I'm in my five senses
they send me spinning
all sounds and silences,
all shape and colour
as thread for that weaver,
whose web within me growing
follows beyond my knowing
some pattern sprung from nothing-
a rhythm that dances

and is not mine..

EMILY DICKINSON

A Bird Came Down the Walk

A Bird, came down the Walk - 

He did not know I saw -

He bit an Angle Worm in halves 

And ate the fellow, raw, 

And then, he drank a Dew

From a convenient Grass -

And then hopped sidewise to the Wall 

To let a Beetle pass -

He glanced with rapid eyes,

That hurried all abroad -

They looked like frightened Beads, I thought,

He stirred his Velvet Head. - 

Like one in danger, Cautious,

I offered him a Crumb,

And he unrolled his feathers, 

And rowed him softer Home -

Than Oars divide the Ocean,

Too silver for a seam,

Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon, 

Leap, plashless as they swim.

TINA DEMIRDJIAN

Two Dying Bees

I peered at them one by one
their wings
disintegrating
into the afternoon light:
their huge black eyes
staring back at me,
motionless,
and without a sound:
wispy skeletons
that had grown silent
on the leaves
of my red-flowered cactus
and my purple geranium.
How silent we can become.

MARY OLIVER

Song for Autumn

Don’t you imagine the leaves dream now
how comfortable it will be to touch
the earth instead of the
nothingness of the air and the endless
freshets of wind? And don’t you think
the trees, especially those with
mossy hollows, are beginning to look for

the birds that will come—six, a dozen—to sleep
inside their bodies? And don’t you hear
the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
the everlasting being crowned with the first
tuffets of snow? The pond
stiffens and the white field over which
the fox runs so quickly brings out
its long blue shadows. The wind wags
its many tails. And in the evening
the piled firewood shifts a little
longing to be on its way.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

ROBERT FROST

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

JENNA VILLFORTH VEAZEY

Portal

Sometimes the water, glassy-still 
Was a portal into a mirror world

 The girl would stare until the clouds
In the river became the only clouds

 In the sky and she floated away
From this life into another world

 And sometimes when she painted the river
She caught the sky instead.

 Clouds upon clouds upon clouds
Like white caps on rapids.

 When she was little and alone
She’d pretend to walk the ceiling.

 Laying on her back, legs dangled 
Up or down had no meaning anymore.

 Sometimes when she painted the river
She fell into the sky instead.