We encouraged our email subscribers and members to share Earth Day-inspired poems with us last week and wanted to share them with you, to extend the Earth Week celebration. You can also listen to poems by five Maine-based poets in our most recent podcasts.
The first poem is a haiku by 11-year-old Chloe G. of Otisfield, Maine:
Iceberg
You’re getting closer.
The ice shines beautifully.
Then CRACK, POP, it’s gone.
And Kathleen Galligan Riess of Bristol, Maine, also shared her beautiful artwork and poetry with us.
A shrouded mist, oil on panel 20” x 24”
The Protector
— Kathleen Galligan
In a marsh ghostly shrouded in mist
stands a skeletal and delicate structure.
Golden hues of ochers cast in low light
illuminate branches angling left, right,
twisting in and out, entangled
within the form itself.
A northern white pine,
robust and full of swagger,
majestically towered in former woodlands.
Protector and giver of life,
its boughs sheltered deer in winter.
Birds of prey circled
before lighting
on high branches to wait
and songbirds nested in cavities
or on limbs.
Gusty winds sought but couldn’t harm
those nestled close to its bifurcated trunk.
Deep crevices of the layered bark
provided sustenance and cover
to a world of insects and
a universe of microscopic lives.
Unjustly broken and long ago stripped
of the once rugged bark
it remains exposed,
defenseless in its mortality,
sustaining the impact
of each cruel blow.
In a marsh ghostly shrouded in mist
the mature pine succumbed,
its roots choked with water.
Weakened within, its bones now hollow,
its substance diminished.
Woodpeckers and waterfowl
repurpose it in death
again as protector
and still giving life
this skeletal and delicate structure.
