Spring Is Sprung

Forsythia and Bradford pears, daffodils and wood violets -- all abloom as we make our way north from the Okefenokee Swamp where we spent a weekend, the warmest in many southern weeks. Now in North Carolina for a few days with our family, we look back on that idyllic weekend in the great wetlands of Georgia, remembering our kayak outing on Billy's Lake (lower photo) and walks on the boardwalk through the swamp where I took the upper photo of Red Blanket Lichen (an endemic species) and Old Man's Beard (an epiphyte aka "air plant") growing on a smooth-barked Dahoon Holly Tree.


Like the Everglades, the Okefenokee is to me a sacred place, and both are mercifully preserved thanks to the National Park Service in the case of the 'Glades and the National Wildlife Refuge System in the case of the Oke'. Both places have been muses to me over the years.

So as we turn our eyes toward the warming sun and bask in its rays, enjoying the blossoming of trees and flowers, I'll leave you with this poem about the Okefenokee, written several years ago and still applicable.

Happy spring...and see you from the home front where we are due to arrive on April 3.


***


The Epiphyte on Plato’s Trees

by Karla Linn Merrifield


What it is to capture
the imagination
of a poet to go with her
into longleaf pine flatwoods
or follow her into the heart
of the Okefenokee Swamp
to be in southern Georgia
beneath its maritime
or its vast half-land inland
island canopy to be held
in its sway:

chiggers snagged in a swag
of Spanish moss itself
caught in the snarl
of live oak on twisted limb

saw palmettos netted
in thorny catbriers climbing

partly on terra firma
partly in tannic water
a black gum, a tupolo
in a coppice
in the understory
in the hardened grasp of
a strangling vine

it is a great entanglement
this forest of words
that has arisen with
some million gripping tendrils
a composition in green
profligate enchantment
where you are meant to be
one standing still

Winter Reflection

I'll say one thing about this winter: The cold -- yes, even in Florida -- has given me much time to reflect. What with three frosts (to date!) and a hailstorm earlier this week, it hasn't been kayaking weather. And the cold has taken a toll on this plein air poet who's so fond of sitting in the great outdoors to pen her verse. Still, hiking and thinking go together nicely and, with added layers to keep the brain warm, I've enjoyed letting both poetic and prosaic ideas float into my head and away with no intentions other than to listen to the ideas and let them evaporate on another gust of north wind.

One thought that did take root is that beauty survives regardless of the weather forecast. Sounds rather mundane doesn't it?! But true. So, on a chill morning along the Ochlockonee River on the Forgotten Coast of Florida's eastern panhandle, I watched the sun rise in puissant splendor, warming the North American continent toward spring, if not firing up the day much above 50 degrees.

A poet friend of mine, Tom Holmes, always urges readers at the end of his e-mails to "Find beauty." To which I will add: Let beauty find you.

Here's to the coming of spring but with joy in the grip of winter.

Island New Year's Greetings

New Year's Is for the (Tropical) Birds

Frigatebirds wheel fractals
in infinite turquoise skies.

***



Roger and I spent New Year's Day on Garden Key in Dry Tortugas National Park, a constellation of small tropical isles 70 miles west of Key West and actually closer to Cuba than the Keys!

After a tour of Fort Jefferson (once a prison for Confederacy soldiers during the Civil War) and some snorkeling (notherin to write home about, alas, but the water was soothingly warm), I stretched out on my back on a beach blanket under the warm subtropical blue skies and watched some 50 magnificent frigatebirds wheel effortlessly across the blue. It was a half-hour of pure bliss.

We also had a close encounter with a burrowing owl who was not burrowing but rather perched in a niche in the brick walls of the ammunition repository at the fort. Who, who, who knows what he was doing 70 miles at sea on a small Gulf island!

Tomorrow we'll be back in the Everglades for a week of hiking and kayaking in my favorite place on Earth! And, as 2009 National Park Artist-in-Residence, I'll have a return engagement with a poetry reading on the 9th at the Coe Visitors Center.

From there we'll be settling down in the Western Everglades' Ten Thousand Island area for a month on Chokoloskee Island. More to come from the Gulf Coast!

Happy New Year to All!

Wood, Sand, Water

Visual Aid


Complexity is underrated,
the trees teach us.


***

My snowbird sojourn is well under way. I write this morning from Jekyll Island, GA. However, the adjacent image, "Uprooted," was taken a few days ago at Hunting Island State Park in South Carolina, my favorite state park in all the land where we always stop en route south. In recalling that memorable visit (several beach walks!), I wrote the above poem. It's a scherzo, a form developed by friend and poet William Heyen and one restricted to 13 syllables, not including the title. Each scherzo must also include a rhyme as does "Visual Aid."

Hunting Island will recede further into the distance as we make our way later this morning to Georgia's lovely Crooked River State Park for three days beneath the rare long-leaf pines in the habitat of gopher tortoises. I will breathe the tidal rhythms of the St. Marys River and ponder further the miracle of diversity in Nature.

In Snowbird Season

Today is our last day at home; we head for points south tomorrow morning at daybreak, a 294-mile run to Carlisle, PA.

But I take a few minutes' rest from the whirlwinds of packing van and trailer, savoring our home on a wintry, gray morning. Beloved husband Roger is off to nearby Albion to tend to repairs on the minivan. Seems after 132,000 miles -- most of it pulling Alis Elizabeth Trailer -- Bore the Van needs new struts and related suspension work. Unplanned, unexpected, this duty calls him off on one more last-minute mission. Men's work.

It gives me some time to bask in the glow of a candle, listening to Simon & Garfunkle's Concert in Central Park in the comfort of the library one last morning. I get to do poet's work. Drafting a sonnet, revising a poem I wrote last week.

And quietly reveling in this morning's good news: Literary House Review has nominated my poem, "According to Instinct" for a Pushcart Prize! A second nomination! Yehaw! Thank you, LHR!

Soon I will turn my thoughts to my winter to-do list. The mundane calls.

Be well, friends and visitors.

May you receive the many gifts of the Universe this holiday season. And fellow poets? Write on!

Godwit: Poems of Canada Chosen for the University of Rochester's Andrew Eiseman Writers Award

On Thursday evening, November 5, I had the honor of receiving the Andrew Eiseman Writers Award at a ceremony at the University of Rochester's Rush-Rhees Library. I was thrilled to the point of tears, an upwelling of emotion that had nothing to do with the $1000 prize.

Poets really do suffer long and hard in the lonely world of words. We really do, I believe, write because we have to. A powerful internal impetus drives us to the blank page. And we write, write, write (and edit, edit, edit) because we feel we must. The spirit moves us; the muse moves us. Occasionally poems see the light of day and appear in journals. And, if we are lucky, the poems make their way into books, which a few people may actually end up reading.

So, to be honored in public with this distinguished award was breathtaking and tear-making.

Once again, I wish to thank many people: Andrea Weinstein of the University of Rochester for all her work in coordinating and planning the award process and Thursday's ceremony; the award judges for believing in my traitorous book; FootHills Publishing, a small press of 20+ successful years that has furthered the careers of poets and kept poetry alive in the world -- I owe so much to publisher Michael Czarnecki; and Bill Heyen, my mentor and friend…who stood at this podium a few years ago -- I was so very, very honored to follow in his footsteps. But most important of all, I offer here my undying gratitude and devotion and love to my husband, Roger Weir, who traipsed with me across Canada to every province and territory in that great country. We are proud to be south Canadians. And I am so very proud to be his wife.


For more details about the award, go to:


http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=3491


To order your copy, write me at klmerrifield@yahoo.com.

Let Your River Journey Begin

A “quest for the center of poetry itself…” – FootHills Publishing Releases Karla Linn Merrifield’s Newest Poetry Collection



Etowah River Psalms is a chapbook that seeks the primal

Wheeler Hill, NY – “I focus and actually exult” is how poet Karla Linn Merrifield of Kent, NY, succinctly conveys the poetic process of exploring life’s timeless themes – eros, death, time, patience, longing –- in her new chapbook, Etowah River Psalms.


Merrifield’s is a deeply spiritual and sensual collection in which nature is worshiped and the human-as-animal is integrated into the web of life. Thus, in “The Beholder,” two lovers are united under “shimmering light… under the ancient stars above us. And in “Entering the Garden of the Universe,” what is human in the poem’s speaker is part of the fabric of nature in its entirety: “I now choose to live carnally. / Like the ocean, I have no other god / than gravity.”


“In psalm after riverine psalm here, whether her subject is tongue or Indian summer or the eye or box turtle and moon or mountain or love, Karla Linn Merrifield continues her quest for the center of poetry itself, the primal, and we are glad, by way of her voice, to hear and behold, to draw closer, says poet William Heyen, author of Shoah Train: Poems, and finalist for the National Book Award, about Etowah River Psalms.


The collection was inspired by Georgia poet Beau Cutts’s master poem, “The Etowah,” from which she drew lines that became the kernels for all of the poems in this chapbook. Thus, Cutts originally wrote of “cleansing the inner gray” and Merrifield, borrowing the line, created with it the poem “Darkroom Work,” the first stanza of which is:

Cleansing our inner gray,
we plunge first into black and white,
a glossy emotional tableau
of Ansel’s grandest views:
mountains, mesas, canyons, coulees.
He parses the territory
of our great hearts in full moonlight.

Thus, from one poem about a river flowed the many poems of Etowah River Psalms.

Etowah River Psalms (40 pages), with a cover photograph by the author,is available for $10from FootHills Publishing at http://foothillspublishing.com/2009/id63.htm or directly from the poet at klmerrifield@yahoo.com.

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