“Poetry is not man made; it is not pretty words.

Poetry is a quality or aspect of existence. It is the thinking of things. It has been here for as long as things have been thinking and dreaming themselves into being, and maybe even longer…”

Robert Bringhurst

I know myself as a lover of words.
I bathe in adjectives, tincture with consonants,
tickle my tongue with vowels.
But there’s a catch.

I sit here writing to a fading flame,
and it dawns on me that words are scarce of meaning
when isolated from the many-voiced landscapes

that birthed their original form.
Where are those countless tales
that breathed my very letters into life?

I stop.
I listen.
I let the land sing me.

The forest that surrounds my cabin thinks and talks in trees.
The crackle of fragrant bark, upturned root, cries of entrapped stone.
Mossy pillows summon me to kneel down and stroke, purring.
The forest tells me its myths through thickets of ferns waist high –
hush and listen – hear the whispering songs of squirrel and coyote pups.

Outside my window is a wild orchid composing a love poem
Its petals held in tenuous bloom.
Her stamens reach out their vulnerable arms
in tremulous powdery anticipation
Waiting for the kiss of bumblebee.

The world thinks in the language of salty oceans coarsing with blood,
Granite mountain streams tinkling in mirth,
Jagged rocks consummating ecstasy, thick with foam,
Impervious families of mussels clinging onto rocks
A shellfish bedlam of stoic determination.

Nature’s stanzas are found in the echo of a hummingbird’s wings,
A minute force of fury that
Tumbles a leaf
Continents away.

Would our greatest soliloquys ever be superior
To the circling flight of the bald eagle as it hunts at sunset
Its wings painting poems on the dusk?

No – our soliloquys exist because the eagle exists.

Poetry is not man made.
Poetry has been alive long before we came along and gave it elegant forms
in alliteration and iambic pentameter.
It lives on, in the book of all books. The book we forgot to read. The library in whose pages I am but a fleeting verb.

We forget to listen to the songs of our kin, and even how to sing with them.
Our poetry begins to fall silent.

As humans, we can choose to carry the world’s stories like turtleshells on our newborn backs.
We can lay our eggs on the shores of memory –
On lone and level sands, where they are to be swept up and carried away.

And so, tonight,

I am putting down my pen
And all of its pretty words.
I am donning my turtle suit
Sinking my claws into starfish and wet sand
And joining an inky symphony I hear chiming far below.

… One day in the woods, you might come across an empty cabin
Melted candlesticks
Half-finished sentences
And a floor littered with broken eggshells.

(Written in a remote inlet of Vancouver Island, June 2019)