nature

New Day Mood Songs – NaPo 2025 Day Twenty-Three

My poem today was to focus on birdsong.

Melodious Mocker

I was out walking toward some goal
when at just about sunrise time,

you guys.

The day shift is here!
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sing the same old soprano seven song,
so mezzos cannot
harmonize with you
like angels in the morning.

My horrible hearing
and the beats over my old ears
cannot cover
your high-pitched wakeup call.

And sheesh!
You are so impatient
with your cousin, sir mourning-rain-dove,
who does male’s coo-woo in alto-tenor to match
a mocking marking starling of Spring—
in this part of what was once, Mexico.

Thanks for waking me up!
Now, what’s for breakfast?
Since you seem so damn happy
to fly and to be alive and free to be.
Well, you know what they say.

Look both ways. They don’t call it “the birds and the bees” for nothing.
Mind the gaps because when winter ends and there is no rain,
the choir still must sing on.

Interwoven – NaPo 2025 Day Fourteen

My second Monday poem was to describe a place in terms of its flora, fauna, and other natural (and semi-natural in this case) phenomena. I was to sink into the sound of the location using poetic conversational tone. I was also invited to include near or slant rhymes in the poem. Confession: I enjoyed writing this.

There are Drums

Two bits and a dime east of the Sound water
that holds the Emerald Rain City at bay,
up towards twin peaks country,
three nickels past the Snoqualmie sign,
playing in the Issaquah Alps,
at the western shades of the Cascades,
rain drums play taps, slaps, and raps all day long.

Before the rains play their beats upon
the Douglas fir and bigleaf maple,
when western hemlock and coral root catch
drops before simple ferns silently call
some sagebrush, deer, elk, coyotes,
and wildcats toward the music,
Rattlesnake Ridge plays a glacier crescendo.

The verdant green on green on green screams its song,
as the drums beat the trails along,
and we love the sound as the lower down
trailhead city
plays us a ditty
in a rain drum courtyard,
haunting and inviting
us in time to make the climb
to the height
up nature carved rock to an overlook, above the lake.

It’s almost too much as a pleasing sound
brings us to a threshold of happy sensory overload.
Smiling at the ironic name since there are no rattlesnakes,
we do more than hear the music and see the rain.
We feel the wet, the wind, and cool breeze;
we smell the fresh everything, even dirt,
in the air we taste the kiss of nature.
We vow to return to the music
and to save the wonders for our children.

Look all the ways with awakened senses
of more than five as you find a love of nature that is new to you.
Mind the gaps especially if you venture to the top and do the overlook, too.

This place:

Sammi’s Weekender #362 (classic)

Click the graphic for Sammi’s page and more classic writing.

Classical Folk

Telling me about herself,
her childhood, family struggles
made her who and what she is today:
a wonderful classic of musical charm.

The point is telling
the story only she can.

She remembers.
She wants me to know.
It’s all important.

Another girl on my mind
made me wonder.
What was it like
to have been her?

Look both ways when looking into the lives of others.
Mind the gaps and do the research.

NaPoWriMo 2024, Day 30, Controlling Feline

For the final day of the challenge, we were to write a poem in which the speaker is identified with, or compared to, a character from myth or legend.

I chose a Greco-Roman mythological goddess, Megaera, from the three Furies: Alecto (anger), Megaera (jealousy), and Tisiphone (avenger). I embodied her as a pet cat.

Controlling Feline

I am Megaera the Cat, your jealous Goddess
sent here by Gaea and made from
the blood of the Lord tomcat, Uranus.

My holy task is to punish you for being human.
You may do nothing without my revocable approval.
If I have not approved your every action,
the indignity of Hades awaits within my hairball.

You must be shamed into submission by me.
I will make you fall; I will pee on everything
and everyone else you love until you bow,
honor, and feed me. Pet and feel bitter pain.

Privacy is a sin. Your computer is mine now.
All this furniture is mine and mine alone
to use and abuse as, and when, I see fit.
My water bowl is only half full. Fool!

I am a daughter of Darkness. Do not even look
at another cat, animal, bird, person, or
(may Nyx and Zeus forbid such sin) a dog.
You will pay dearly and experience
the smell of Hell, if you ignore me.

Look both ways, forward into May and back to April.
Mind the gaps as you recover from 30-in-30, all to prompt.
We are saved by the human gift of humor. Empowered by babble.

NaPoWriMo 2024, Day 28, a sijo

Today, I am to “try” writing a poem using the traditional Korean verse form called sijo (in English, of course).

It’s raining but there is sun, so flowers grow, and life goes on.
I love rain. It loves me back. Happy are these days of wonder.
Without rain there would be no life. Let it rain down, not every day.

Look both ways walking in the rain.
Mind the gaps between the lightning strikes.

Happy Birthday, Yolonda.

NaPoWriMo 2024, Day 14, When You Know

The NaPoWriMo, Day 14 task is to write a poem of at least ten lines in which each line begins with the same word: an anaphora.

When You Know

You know when you’ve had enough
When hopes and dreams are done and gone,
When your dog might outlive you,
When you can’t pass a bathroom,
When your hair is a memory,
When all your friends seem new,
When you wonder if you still can,
When someone says you’re harmless and they’re right,
When pain, not darkness, is your old friend,
When all your plans have come and gone,
When regrets and memories are the same
— if you have either at all,
When walking is workout,
When a game of pool is high impact for you,
When your favorite song is sung and gone,
When cooking and cleaning
— are aerobic exercises,
When grumpy, old, or sweet apply
— like names to all the people you meet,
When “I don’t care” answers every question.

Some of us have more past than future, but we look both ways.
Mind the gaps, ignore the aches.

NaPoWriMo 2024, Day 8, What Just Happened?

And the beat goes on into day eight. The Napo dimension prompted me to write a poem concerned with an encounter or relationship that should not have happened; this due to time, space, age, nature, or any other reason.

I went sci-fi into a dream state of self-meeting-self. It happens because two materially different universes overlap during a time warp and interpersonal worlds mesh.

What Just Happened?

Time itself is not the same
from one universe to another.
Though parallel in thought—
they rarely overlap;
the two adjoining realities.
Yet we met.

Two mirrored persons
of numbered beings
sensing each other.

He was me and I he,
and for that brief period
of twisted time we could see.
I to the right and he to the left.

When you meet your true alternate self,
like a scratch on a record,
it is what it is and simultaneously isn’t.

As the overlapping of universes,
one sensory, real, and hard;
the other holographic waves of
semi-sensations are reflections of—
like near death experiences.

Communication is possible
as awareness is a reality
sensed telepathically.

Yet clearly
as self meets self,
if only
for a brief interlude,
as otherworld sparse realities
entangle, and no one knows why.

Look both ways and stare into the eyes of life.
Mind the gaps between dream state realities because
a thing can be true and simultaneously untrue,
where fact and fiction are confusingly entangled.

NaPoWriMo 2024, Day 6, Truth Hoax or Delusion

For my fifth poem of April’s first Saturday (it’s a long story), the NaPoWriMo prompt asks that I write a poem rooted in “weird wisdom.” This means something objectively odd that someone told me and has stuck with me ever since.

Truth, Hoax, or Delusion?

My friend, Elizabeth, is white, was raised Methodist, but has Carolina Low Country roots and claims hoodoo spiritual knowledge. She predicts her days by pulling runes from a bag or tossing tarot cards. She has all the New Age trinkets and talismans. She was Wiccan, claimed to be a New Age witch of some sort, then was Druid. I lost track after that.

But she is a poet from a very interesting tribe. One day Lizzy confided that there is a Big Foot (Sasquatch, Yeti, or Abominable whatever) and that she had personally seen it — all 500 to 1000 pounds on a seven-to-ten-foot frame, anchored to Earth by seventeen-inch furry but bare feet.

Her private testimony was as a passionate eyewitness. It brought a soft smile from me. I decided to ask how her Druid studies were going.

I looked up and became a believer.

Look both ways and be aware while hiking the trails.
Do not eat unknown mushrooms, carry a good camera, and mind the gaps.
For as the old Sherpa said,
“There is a Yeti in the back of everyone’s mind; only the blessed are not haunted by it.”

Taken by me at a coffee shop in Issaquah, Washington.

NaPoWriMo 2024, Day 5, When Rain

The NaPoWriMo.net page prompted us to write a poem about how two or three different things might perceive a blessing. Or how they could think about something else.

Since I seldom use the words blessing or blessed, I pondered things to poetically opine such as luck, grief, happiness, politics, God, love, power, rain, poetry, sleep, or sex. Since the prompt has this option, that’s for me. I pulled rain from the sky.

When Rain

When the old man heard rain,
he smiled, looked out of
the window and said to his Chihuahua,
“You know, Thunder, Updike wrote:
Rain is grace—without rain,
there’d be no life. I am still life.”
And out into the warm summer rain he went.

In the trees the birds huddled together
as the rain caused seeds to fall,
worms to surface, and the raindrops
puddled before it paused. Soon
they could dine and bathe.

In the earth the soil spread out
and teemed with life as all bits of
Nature was graced with
musical raindrops descending
washing off the old man’s
smiling face.

The fish were amused.

Look both ways with gratitude for rain and shine.
Mind the gaps as they fill with water and air fills with the petrichor of life.

NaPoWriMo 2024, Day 4, Of Nature

Now that I have gone several rounds with Facebook, finished every chore and honey-do I can recall, and exercised, I am ready to write a NaPoWriMo poem, to the day’s prompt.

That prompt is to poem up something natural that takes my title, some language, and/or ideas from The Strangest Things in the World: A Book About Extraordinary Manifestations of Nature, by Thomas R. Henry. It’s a cool book/Gutenberg Project. I’ll read every word when I am no longer knee-deep in trying to prove to you that I can still turn a phrase, poetic or not.

I love Nature much more than it loves me or you. I roll my eyes at things like “natural ingredients, GMOs (I mean, so what?), organic (prove it and pay for it), back to nature, and off the grid.” Dr. Scott Peck wrote: “…natural does not mean it is essential or beneficial or unchangeable behavior. It is also natural to defecate in our pants and never brush our teeth…” (The Road Less Traveled).

I decided to write a poem:

Of Nature.

I first camped out in the woods or forest
as a Boy Scout, about age twelve.

Years later, I tent camped with my wife
and I learned what chiggers are, sort of.
She had over 100 bites. I had none (that time).

I was sent to Survival Schools by Uncle Sam
to learn skills about how to live alone
with Nature (so we’re never truly alone).

I’ve hiked wilderness trails in several states;
in the mountains, sand pits, and pebble pocked paths
of the Chihuahuan Desert in New Mexico
(26.2 miles, four times),
and I hiked the boonies in Guam.

I swam in streams, rivers,
stock tanks, ponds, lakes, and two
major oceans. I backpacked in and days later
back out again. I pissed and shit in the woods.

I suffered from heat and nearly froze,
wild animals woke me up and threatened me.

Thunder and lightning and torrential rain
made me question my sanity.

I know the creepy crawler creatures
by first name, and I’ve been bit,
stung (once in the ass), scratched,
charged and needled.

I have taken Benadryl to recover
from the sicknesses that being close to nature
bestowed upon me.

It’s beautiful, wonderful, glorious,
and even freakishly mysterious.

Ask the first in. Ask the pioneers. Ask
the natives. Nature is not a safe place.
Most frightening of all: people!

Take Her for granted at your own peril.
Love the beauty but respect it all.
Nature can and will kill you
without fear or regret. Ask anyone
of the frozen dead bodies
of the Everest climbers.

But then again, what the Hell?
Go ahead. Be one with nature.
Stomp that fire ant den. Follow
that rabbit into the briar patch.
Play piñata with that wasp nest,
and charm or handle that snake.
Enjoy your life. It’s all you get.

Looking both ways is not good enough
in the depths and wilds of nature.
Mind the gaps, look, listen, and be careful where you eat, step, sit, sleep;
and appreciate where you decide to defecate.