This week's Poet of the People is Stephen Wing. In the environmental poetry scene, Stephen Wing is a force to reckoned with. I spent three days at the Off the Grid Festival outside Spartanburg, SC with him last Autumn and he has featured twice for events I organized in the Midlands area. He is authentic and writes from his strong belief in the sanctity of nature. We need more Stephen Wings.
- Al Black
Stephen Wing discovered the wilderness in the summer after ninth grade, and suddenly the world made sense. A deep connection to wild nature has been his spiritual center ever since. His work as a poet ranges from the personal to the pastoral to the fiercely political. Once each season he hosts the “EarthPoetry” workshop, exploring metro Atlanta's many protected greenspaces and nature preserves. His new book Wild Atlanta combines poems from 23 of these locations with stunning color photos by Luz Wright. He is the author of three previous books of poems and the Earth Poetry chapbook series. Visit him at StephenWing.com.
Lightning’s Compass
With every flash and flicker of the sky,
I glimpse another few steps
of the trail back to my tent,
this slow pilgrimage between the trees
without a flashlight—
fork to the left, jog to the right,
slippery downgrade, low-hanging branch—
like my life sometimes,
the chain of epiphanies lighting up my path
and the pitch-dark
between
Underfoot
Every time I walk down
into the hollow
through the winter woods
or up the mountain again,
I stop right here.
Standing on the packed earth
of an old logging road
where the creek slips quietly
through its rusty culvert
underfoot,
I’m not so much listening as feeling
a kind of tickling caress
through the soles of my shoes
and I recognize
a crossing of paths, a choice,
a way back
if I could only turn
and follow.
Ever Since Evolution
for Dawn Aura
Of all that’s ever
begun with an orgasm,
I think I like you
best:
Ever since the Big
Bang, ever since Genesis,
ever since the Milky Way gave birth
to a green-blue baby
called Earth—
All down the generations
of amorous plankton,
the dynasties of protozoa,
whole species that married and merged
into new species,
brewing up an atmosphere of
hospitable chemicals . . .
Down the golden ages
in the Garden, whole
civilizations of bacteria
that slowly grew into specialized
cells of one another,
building over millennia
the confederation of organs . . .
Ever since Evolution
conceived a tribe of naked mammals
begotten by the lineage
of Chimpanzee, I think
of all the protoplasm in the diaspora
of Creation, you
are my favorite animal
Grandmother’s Seeds
for Anna Maude, my grandmother
She’s out in her garden,
bending down to touch the soil.
She covers each seed as she
must have tucked me into bed, long
ago. Her old hoe is worn
to a shining crescent, sifting
earth into dark flour.
She never knew the shelves
in her bathroom were lined with
the signs of the zodiac.
I never heard her mention the moon.
She sprinkled poison like
holy water and thanked the Lord
for filling her deep-freeze.
She sits at the lamp
over her morning devotions.
Outside in the dimness
the first seed stirs in the ground.
She folds her glasses, closes
her book on its bookmark and goes out
to turn on the hose.
The Naked Scientist
I am the naked scientist
singing as I set my specimens free
Joyfully I observe the positions of things
and nudge them off their courses,
gauge their direction and budge them
from their places
The green things around me lap my exhalations,
my fresh odors startle the ancient
solution of gases, I let my hand pass experimentally
down the mossy flank of a boulder
purring in the sun
I ache sometimes at sunrise
for the waking of the world to what it knows
Each day I gather data, and grieve
for the grieving of one or two or eleven people
I hadn’t counted before
And I look over my notes at sunset
comforted by this work of the Study of Woe,
calculating my Theory of Revelation
in the face of entropy and decay
I live to know this world as my grandmother
knew her Bible, but best of all
I love the pilgrimage
of the search—
(Shall I tell you my discovery?
It is all alive.
And the snowflakes are not
all one sex.)
Asphalt Nights
Looking back now, I often
regret that night in my delinquent youth
when I impulsively
borrowed a shovel and buried
my memories of childhood down by the creek
under a full moon.
How was I to know the entire floodplain
would be paved for parking
when they built the new mall?
Night after night now I dream I’m a lost child
roaming mile after mile
of fresh black asphalt under the floodlights
between the slumbering cars,
kicking my shadow ahead with every step,
stopping to listen
at every storm drain for the faint
trickle or drip of some other world
to wake up in.
Man Breathing Life into Metal
(Note italics at end)
The saxophonist wets his lips
and caresses his mouthpiece
sucks it in and lets it escape
and then draws it back
into himself so its dark twisting
entrails join with his own
clamps the dormant light of that
gleaming muscle in his
fingertips and forces through its
thin lips from his own
the infinite compression of a breath:
the golden bell sings out
with the panic of inarticulate matter
waking to the agony it is
to be an animal, the joy it is
to move and speak and sing
“Now when I get through playing it,
it going to be just as warm as my body . . .”
Moth
I bit my fingernails too short
waiting for this bus, I stood
too close to the road too long, peering
through the haze of engine fumes—
Everyone around me pretends not to know.
So naturally by now they‘ve all
long since forgotten.
No one on this bus remembers
poetry overhead among the ads: today
hundreds of cockroach silhouettes,
the extermination campaign . . .
A dead moth
on the stairs in the train station knows:
startled black and red and yellow eyes
on shattered wings
stare past me through the concrete overhang,
and suddenly I see
right through the step I’m about to take—
Its furry underbody
leaves a yellow pollen on my fingertips.
Ridiculous
to carry the fallen creature home.
Ridiculous to choose one place
out of all the galaxies
to go.
Distant Singing
Listen:
somewhere off in the distance,
a motor.
It too has a song.
It’s the song of pushing eagerly forward,
heedless of how,
careless of where,
regardless of why,
intoxicated
with the singleminded joy
of burning its little tank of fuel,
never mind
where the fuel came from
or where that little plume of smoke
might go.
Hurtling Through Darkness
Hurtling
between the silver ribbons
uncurling eternally
out through the darkness,
steering by a chain of diamonds
strung through space,
I start again every time
I stray from my lane and they
bump under my tires, the reflecting
eyes of all the animals
who have died for this highway—
Focusing my own wild eyes
into the rainstorm,
the floodlights of billboards,
the pulse of blue lightning
at the power plant,
leaning back in the cushioned engine
of my will
with the road’s vibration
humming in my vitals,
gripping the steering wheel as tight as my life,
I ride the thirsty beast
of my momentum, obedient to the signs,
barely in control,
hurtling through the darkness of the eons
of extinction