Tag Archives: Nature

Latine Poets

Cultivo

Cultivo

by Luisa Caycedo-Kimura

once mourning doves   made me think

of graveyards

 

today        they peck     at weed seeds

clean        my land

 

the oldest on record     lived 30 years    and 4 months

from the time          it was tagged

 

until         it was shot

how many mates           did it mourn

 

American toads       breed

at the neighbor’s pond

 

I wring       laundry     to hang     on a clothesline

mostly black

 

when I was eight

a man trapped me    in the stairwell

 

to our New York        apartment

the note from his pocket     loose-leaf cutout

 

blue ink print      said I was       beautiful

a scalpel      in his pocket

 

how many      would die

in a war        without weapons

 

I was born        in the middle

of an Andean hurricane     the first time

 

I saw mamá      her blue eyes

reflected green            from the flame

 

of a candle    the last time   in Florida

her eyes         were shut

 

yesterday       Aaron and I      planned

a garden         for our new         Connecticut home

 

asparagus and blueberries can’t be harvested

for two years

 

seeds must avoid      hickory taproots

cilantro      has to be        direct seeded

 

doesn’t like       to be moved

my older sister bought           her first house

 

after med school

lived there               twenty years

 

before renting it out            I’ve moved

twenty times       from rental to rental

 

clouds dissipate        on our ridge

we buy spades      trowels

 

pruners         window sheers

fog on the trees        lingers

 

coats        the open grass

droplets      vaporize       burn the fog

 

how does one quench         an instinct

to bolt

 

Copyright 2021 Luisa Caycedo-Kimura

From All Were Limones (The Word Works, 2025); originally published in Shennandoah, Spring 2021

Used by permission of the author.
Wallace Stevens

Vacancy in the Park

During Stevens’s years in Hartford (1916-1955) he made sure he always lived near Elizabeth Park. His final home at 118 Westerly Terrace is only a short walk from the park. He walked in the park almost every day.  “Vacancy in the Park” is set in Elizabeth Park on a cold day in March. Stevens notices the footprints of someone who has walked across the freshly fallen snow. To describe the way this makes him feel, he invents three similes (“It is like…”).  How does each simile make you feel? The poem concludes, “The four winds blow through the rustic arbor, / Under its mattresses of vines.”  You can see that rustic arbor covered with vines in the center of the famous Rose Garden in Elizabeth Park.  (This is the first municipal rose garden in the United States and the third largest rose garden in the country today.) Continue reading Vacancy in the Park →

Wallace Stevens

Anecdote of the Jar 

Stevens thought a lot about the importance of imagination in life.  Here the speaker performs one odd, imaginative act—he places a jar on a hilltop.  The man-made jar sticks out from the natural scene surrounding it, commanding our attention and becoming a focal point in the landscape.  The speaker’s gesture is an example of how we create human order in the world.  How does the jar affect the landscape around it?  Does the poem suggest that this is a good or a bad thing?  How?  Continue reading Anecdote of the Jar  →

Eleanor O'Rourke Koenig

from Herb Woman and Other Poems

from Herb Woman and Other Poems
by Eleanor C. Koenig
(New York: Harold Vinal, 1926)

RELEASE

OH, let me run with autumn winds
That pass through reeds and rushes
Let me shriek with evening gales
In ragged currant bushes.
Let me tear through aspen trees,
Roar on naked beaches,
Let me howl through bending oaks
In haunted woodland reaches.
I tell you, this, the grief I hold
Is no considerate sorrow;
This is the King of Pain who must
A fitting garment borrow. Continue reading from Herb Woman and Other Poems →