"I Hear You Call, Pine Tree" by Yone Noguchi

A Bat Flying Near a Pine Tree, Issho, 19th Century

I hear you call, pine tree, I hear you upon the hill, by the silent pond

where the lotus flowers bloom, I hear you call, pine tree.

What is it you call, pine tree, when the rains fall, when the winds

blow, and when the stars appear, what is it you call, pine tree?

I hear you call, pine tree, but I am blind, and do not know how to

reach you, pine tree. Who will take me to you, pine tree?

1921. Public Domain.

Note: In Japan the pine tree, or matsu (松の木), symbolizes longevity,

virtue and youth and is often associated with masculinity and power

– prior to the Edo period it was a particularly popular decoration on

samurai armour. The word matsu means waiting for the soul of a god

to descend from Heaven, and in ancient Shinto beliefs, the gods were

said to have ascended to Heaven on a pine tree.

"Letter Home" by Pamela Alexander

Crow1916. Watanabe Seitei.

I can't write you because everything's

wrong. Before dawn, crows swim

from the cedars: black coffee calls them down,

its bitter taste in my throat as they circle,

raucous, huge. Questions with no

place to land, they cruise yellow air

above crickets snapping

like struck matches. My house on fire, crows

are the smoke. You've never left me.

When you crossed the river you did not

call my name. I stood in tall grass

a long time, listening to birds

hidden in reeds, their intricate songs.

The grass will burn, the wrens,

the river and the rain that falls on it.

I can go nowhere else: everything

I cannot bear is here.

I must listen deeper. Sharpen my knife.

Something has changed the angles

of trees, their color. Do not wait to hear

from me. I cannot write to you

because this is what I will say.

From Slow Fire by Pamela Alexander. Copyright © 2007 by Pamela Alexander. 

"Hay for the Horses" by Gary Snyder

He had driven half the night

From far down San Joaquin

Through Mariposa, up the

Dangerous mountain roads,

And pulled in at eight a.m.

With his big truckload of hay

          behind the barn.

With winch and ropes and hooks

We stacked the bales up clean

To splintery redwood rafters

High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa

Whirling through shingle-cracks of light,

Itch of haydust in the 

               sweaty shirt and shoes.

At lunchtime under Black oak

Out in the hot corral,

--The old mare nosing lunchpails,

Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds--

"I'm sixty-eight" he said,

"I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.

I thought, that day I started,

I sure would hate to do this all my life.

And dammit, that's just what

I've gone and done."

From Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems by Gary Snyder, published by North Point Press.

Copyright © 1958, 1959, 1965 Gary Snyder.

____________________

From The Writer's Almanac:

An Interview with Gary Snyder Gary Snyder was born in San Francisco. As a teenager, he wrote articles for the mountain-climbing club’s magazine and his high school newspaper, and then he went to Reed College, where he started reading Asian poetry. In the summers, he worked in logging camps, on trail crews, and as a fire lookout in the mountains. In 1955, he worked at Yosemite National Park on the trail crew. He said: “I had given up on poetry. … Then I got out there and started writing these poems about the rocks and blue jays. I looked at them. They didn’t look like any poems that I had ever written before. So I said, these must be my own poems.” They became his first book, Riprap (1959). That same year, he read with Allen Ginsberg at the famous October Sixth Gallery Reading where Ginsberg read “Howl” for the first time, and the two poets became lifelong friends. Snyder became a hero of the counterculture when Jack Kerouac published the book The Dharma Bums (1958), whose hero, Japhy Ryder, is based on Snyder. For over a decade, Snyder spent most of his time studying Zen Buddhism in Japan. He has published more than 20 books of poetry and prose, includingAxe Handles (1983), Mountains and Rivers Without End (1997), and Turtle Island (1974), which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. He has also translated poetry, taught English at the University of California, Davis, and is respected environmental activist and thinker. Snyder has lived in the same house since 1970. The house was built by hand on a 100-acre plot of land in California’s Sierra Nevada. His most recent books include Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Places (2014) and This Present Moment: New Poems(2015). Read the interview →

"In cold spring air" by Reginald Gibbons

"Line of Trees in Marshy Landscape" by Piet Mondrian, 1905-6

In cold

                       spring air the

         white wisp--

            visible

    breath of

                    a blackbird

    singing--

                          we don't know

to un-

                               wrap these blind-

    folds we

                          keep thinking

 we are

                           seeing through

"A List of Praises" by Anne Porter

"Autumn Wheat Harvest" by Walt Curlee

Give praise with psalms that tell the trees to sing,
Give praise with Gospel choirs in storefront churches,
Mad with the joy of the Sabbath, 
Give praise with the babble of infants, who wake with the sun,
Give praise with children chanting their skip-rope rhymes, 
A poetry not in books, a vagrant mischievous poetry 
living wild on the Streets through generations of children.

Give praise with the sound of the milk-train far away 
With its mutter of wheels and long-drawn-out sweet whistle
As it speeds through the fields of sleep at three in the morning,
Give praise with the immense and peaceful sigh
Of the wind in the pinewoods, 
At night give praise with starry silences. 

Give praise with the skirling of seagulls 
And the rattle and flap of sails 
And gongs of buoys rocked by the sea-swell
Out in the shipping-lanes beyond the harbor. 
Give praise with the humpback whales, 
Huge in the ocean they sing to one another.
 
Give praise with the rasp and sizzle of crickets, katydids and cicadas, 
Give praise with hum of bees, 
Give praise with the little peepers who live near water.
When they fill the marsh with a shimmer of bell-like cries
We know that the winter is over. 

Give praise with mockingbirds, day's nightingales.
Hour by hour they sing in the crepe myrtle 
And glossy tulip trees
On quiet side streets in southern towns.
 
Give praise with the rippling speech
Of the eider-duck and her ducklings
As they paddle their way downstream
In the red-gold morning 
On Restiguche, their cold river,
Salmon river, 
Wilderness river. 

Give praise with the whitethroat sparrow.
Far, far from the cities, 
Far even from the towns, 
With piercing innocence 
He sings in the spruce-tree tops,
Always four notes 
And four notes only. 

Give praise with water, 
With storms of rain and thunder 
And the small rains that sparkle as they dry,
And the faint floating ocean roar 
That fills the seaside villages, 
And the clear brooks that travel down the mountains 

And with this poem, a leaf on the vast flood,
And with the angels in that other country.

From Living Things by Anne Porter, published by Zoland Books, an imprint of Steerforth Press of Hanover, New Hampshire. Copyright © 2006 by Anne Porter.