This week while working on a group of poems I have come to call my “wildness collection,” I considered, as is necessary, some of the wild places closest to my heart, some of the places that have shaped my perception of what it means to have a relationship with nature. Many of those places, where I have felt tethered to wilderness, where I have felt closest to people and God, were in the path of Helene last week, which was the most devasting natural disaster to hit the southeast US in my lifetime.
If you were able to read my last post, you know that I have recently experienced a great and tragic loss. While I’m still dealing with and processing the grief associated with the sudden loss of my grandparents, my heart is also grieving for all the people across our region who have over the past week experienced untold devastation at the hands of Hurricane Helene. I am thinking this morning of the holyland of Western North Carolina, where flood waters destroyed entire communities, erased beloved natural areas, and claimed innocent lives. The destruction there has been unimaginable, and it is impossible to capture what that means in a few words. I am thinking also of my homeland of southeast Georgia, where many small towns and farming communities experienced excessive wind damage and where lives were also lost. I know that the people in these places are resilient, but it will take years to recover from such damage, and some people may never recover.
As a prelude to the poem I’m sharing here, I simply wanted to express my sympathy to anyone who was affected by the storm. Our homes are more than just houses; they are extensions of the body, of nature, and they are dwelling places of the soul. Having beloved places transformed and lost is not as simple as just losing things. These are the places that raised us, that made us, and the loss of them can be as bad as losing people we love. Many folks lost their places and their loved ones. So many are still missing. If you feel as I do, please pray for these places and these people, that they may experience love and healing in the coming days, and please do what you can, send money and goods through whatever channels possible.
I hope that, each day, we all remember to count our blessings.
Now, some new wild words.
I hope I die in the belly of a bear
I hope while halfway gone over mountains,
mid-trek on a sunny afternoon under white pines
brilliant rays dancing through branches
I end up all the way gone
Or I hope I’m taken by the arms of a river
when at last I have made my final plunge
I hope to kiss the water’s cool, stony bottom
to see the redstone in river darkness
before blinking out
I hope to have by then lived beside water
I hope that my feet might know more time
outside of shoes than within them
that my mind would be a well-sharpened blade
that I might cook beans over campfire
I hope to have held your hand so long
that mine and yours are like ancient oaks
distinct trees grown together by root tentacles
I hope that my reactions have dulled, and
in quiet mornings, you are on my side
After I have lived many wild and honorable years
I hope to not meet God under fluorescent lighting
No intentional life deserves to go like that
Wherever I am when it happens
I hope poplar trees are in view
It need not be as bloody as death by bear
The point is that I want it to be wild
Maybe when I’m 80, I could take up
climbing waterfalls again – I stopped years ago
after a few too many close calls
It is true that caution delivers us to old age
but it is also true that too much caution
makes us old even when we’re young
and young life is meant to be lived
and what is youth but an untamed demeanor
I hope that I die in the belly of a bear
and that before I go I taste its fur
and feel its terrible embrace – the warm
coat of death that nature has promised us
the last wave that I must ride upon
Please don’t let me die in my classroom
even if it is true that my students loved me
I cannot stomach the idea that someone
unwilling to die for literature, someone
unversed in Dickinson and Whitman
might one day replace me there
Let me go like a good poet goes
only with less alcohol than Dylan Thomas
but perhaps in a warm, well-worn barroom
or on a craggy outcrop at the turning of seasons
or by a stream where a bending sycamore
meets rounded boulders
Let me lie down like the Buddha, sick but satisfied
on my holy right side in a shala grove in a way
that makes it easy for the earth to reclaim
everything that was never mine to begin with
Let me know, Lord, that I did what I came to do
with a heart full of love, watching the vultures circle
Love your definition of home. And that image of "redstone river darkness." So much to love about this one, actually. I look forward to reading more from your wildness collection.
Wow. I don’t have a lot of words, just tears for the pain and beauty. Thank you for sharing your gift, it’s remarkable.