Original Sin

I try to grab it just behind the head, but it’s  too quick for me; as my fingers close on the slender body, it whips around and grazes my hand with needle-sharp fangs. I drop the young black snake onto the laundry-room floor and gather a container and some stout cardboard. Eluding my clumsy efforts at capture, the snake vanishes beneath a cupboard. I crouch down just in time to see the tip of its tail disappearing through a narrow gap in the baseboard—back into the crawlspace whence it came, no doubt seeking a dry haven from the waterlogged yard. 

That evening, I watch the news: as Typhoon Mangkhut batters the Philippines, Hurricane Florence continues to dump Biblical rains across my already flooded state.  The coastal city of Wilmington, with virtually every tree and power line down, is completely cut off by rising water.  

A torrential downpour drums on the sheet-metal roof, drowning out the newscaster’s voice. As I reach for the remote, I notice a curious strip of glossy, black-and-silver metal lying along the wrought-iron trim of the gas fireplace. I take a closer look—and meet the unblinking eyes of a small snake just as it slips behind the fireplace facing. 

a drop of blood

seals an ancient covenant . . .

our debt

to fellow travelers

on a planetary ark

~Haibun Today 12:4, Dec. 2018

Harbingers

a trickle

in the long-dry creek . . .

chorus frogs

piping a memory

into the heart of winter

I fell under an enchantment when I was only a small child. The sun warm on the back of my neck, I would stand stock-still at the edge of a marsh, waiting for the voices to begin. I heard them first in the distance—one, two, then more and more until they merged into a sound like a million silver sleigh bells.  Even when a voice pealed out right at the toe of my boot, I could not spot one singer hidden in the reeds.

still seeking

what I cannot see—

a mystery

haunts the marshes

of a wayfaring mind

Half a century later and halfway round the globe, 25 new species of frogs have been discovered on Mount Oku in central Africa.  But as fast as their voices are heard, some fall forever silent.  Nearly half of Mount Oku’s amphibians are threatened with extinction as people cut the forests and poison the water . . . as the climate heats up and diseases spread.

found and lost

in the space of a song

the spells

of an unknown weaver

undone by hexing hands

~Skylark 5:2, Winter 2017

safely delivered

Printed in 1725 and thicker than my hand is broad, the leather-bound Bible that once belonged to my grandmother contains several cracked and yellowed pages closely written on both sides in faded brown ink, the entries dating back to 1699.  The ink has bled through the thin paper, which is torn and mended in several places with cloudy tape.  I photograph the pages with my iPhone and enlarge the images, laboriously transcribing as much as I can. 

Here is my ancestor Elizabeth, married on August 20, 1717 ‘old stile.’  In the next twenty years she bore thirteen children—seven of them born dead. Her granddaughter, also called Elizabeth, married a lieutenant in the 55th Regiment of the British Army and sailed with him from New York to Ireland and back again.  Widowed with at least three children, she later remarried.  An oil portrait of her second husband, in powdered hair and flowing cravat, hangs on the wall behind me. One forefinger marks his place between the pages of a half-closed book. 

a brittle history

of baptism and burial—

the refrain

        thanks be to god

 in a spidery hand

~Skylark 4:2, Winter 2016

Roots

The old sugar maple at the southeast corner of the house had been declining for two years, and despite a wet summer its canopy was brown and bare long before autumn.  Yesterday, men with chain saws took it down limb by limb, leaving a gaping hole in the sky where the tree’s green depths once harbored hummingbirds. On winter nights I used to look out at its windswept branches, combed by fingers I never saw.

moon shadows

on the window pane 

. . . the silver

of my mother’s hair 

fresh-washed in death

~Haibun Today 11:4, December 2017

But Now We Are Many

fire

on the mountain

fire in the mind

ashes ashes

we all fall down

The Smokies: ridge beyond ridge of ancient mountains, wrapped in a soft blue haze of rain and the moist outbreath of trees. The highest peaks are temperate rain forest, mossy and dripping. But now the picture changes . . . because the climate changes. Hot smoke replaces the gentle mist as fire consumes the forest, tinder-dry after months of heat and drought. Crown fires leap from treetop to treetop. High winds drive a firestorm through Gatlinburg, trapping people in their homes where they burn to death. Several days have passed and children are still missing. The Appalachian Trail smolders.

smoke

from distant wildfires

fills my lungs . . .

I dream of the blue planet,

one seed sprouting in ash

Pollen grains tell stories.  Drifting like gold dust on a cold wind, grass pollen sifts into lakes, to be buried in mud for 20,000 years. Grass pollen tells of an Ice-Age Europe covered with open steppes where forests should have grown—the climate favored trees, not grasses. But layers of ash tell stories, too—the story of fires that burned the forests, fires set by Paleolithic hunter-gatherers who transformed their world long before the first factory smokestacks began to spew their plumes of ash and deadly gases.

sparks

from a stone-age campfire

scorch the map

crumpled in my hand

a dusty oak leaf

~KYSO Flash 7, Spring 2017.  Finalist in ‘One Life, One Earth’ Contest.

On the Cusp of Winter

An unfamiliar car crunches slowly up my quarter-mile gravel driveway. I hope it’s not the Jehovah’s Witnesses again. An elderly lady climbs out of the driver’s seat. I  don’t want to intrude, she says, but I was born in this house, in 1938.  I just lost my husband, and I had a yen to see my homeplace again.  Her eyes swim with tears. She points to the well-house. I remember my Daddy climbing down into that well, she says. My, it was a long way down!

water

rising from a deep place  . . .

the last petals

of the autumn-blooming cherry

drift earthward

~Skylark 4:1, summer 2016

Many Happy Returns

I wonder what the baker’s assistant thought as she squeezed blue icing onto our sheet cake, spelling out the words ‘Happy 5,974^th Birthday, Mother Earth!’  My friends and I had just learned about Archbishop James Ussher, the 17^th-Century Primate of All Ireland who calculated the age of the Earth based in part on the Biblical ‘begats’ from Adam to Solomon. He concluded that the Earth was created at about 6:00 p.m. on October 22 in the year 4004 B.C. Giddy with our own youth, we reserved the shelter in our college arboretum for that chilly autumnal evening and celebrated the birthday of the Earth.

revelry

rouses the barred owl

to flight—

across spangles of moonlight

a silent shadow passes

That was 1970. Fast-forward forty years. No longer young, no longer giddy, I learn that those forty years have seen the disappearance of just over half the world’s wildlife.  Fish. Amphibians. Reptiles. Birds. Mammals.  Populations cut in half in just forty years, the prime years of my own eye-blink lifetime on a planet that has been wheeling about the sun for 4.5 billion years. Where life has been evolving for 3.8 billion years. Where vertebrates— fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals—have been flowing through their myriad, ever-changing panoply of forms for over 500 million years.

dinosaur feathers

shimmering in amber . . .

shards of light

in the slow kaleidoscope

                       of deep time

Five hundred million years arising . . . and half gone within my own brief lifespan?

giddy again

I cannot catch my breath--

as time whirls

on gargoyle wings

I join the danse macabre

~Earth: Our Common Ground anthology 2017