A Poem on the Way to a Report

Now back from the Embracing Nature’s Complexity conference in Munich, I’m wrestling with the complexity of perspectives encountered there and how to convey that complexity in a single simple Substack post. This will take a little while. In the meantime, the experience generated a number of poem fragments, three of which I’ve combined into a little triptych.

A Poem on the Way to a Report

Morning and the rituals of birds
which aren't rituals
but original force
and intelligence.
What have we have forgotten?
What might we yet remember?
Strange chorus
car sounds and bird song
heavy engines and slender throats
and me sitting before a plate glass window
surrounding a pulse
hand across the page
like a pushed wave.

*
A clutch of pines rise
on the neatly clipped lawn
upper branches opened 
by light:
    this other kind of singing.

*
When water is enough again
    and the sacred prose of stones
the old forms will be remembered
    children will have more to stand on

for gravity and light
    motion and remembrance
the dark-eyed knowing of deer
    the halls between Alder
the unseen rivers
    moving beneath our feet
the cloud-passings and wind-liftings
    will resume their order.
Tomorrow will be safe
    as yesterday.
A sunrise will be our proof.