MaineNaturePoetry

Blizzard

Blizzard Reflection  (December 27, 2010)

Cold, damp air carries the scent of snow that will arrive soon
As dark, heavy storm clouds fill the sky.
A few tiny flakes fly around and around
Carried by a light breeze before hitting the ground.

Anticipation builds as the wind starts to blow
And the treetops rapidly sway to and fro.
Branches creak as the trees bend far over
And the wind reaches a frenzied 35 miles per hour.

Darkness falls and the wind starts to howl.
It becomes an incessant roar
With gusts reaching 50 miles per hour or more.
No sleep tonight!

Huge groups of snowflakes are transformed
Into geometric patterns by the wind as it comes from all directions.
Crazy 8s, spirals, and whorls are whipped up, down, and all around
And then, they get blown out of view in horizontal sheets…Woosh!

The storm door creaks and I hear dull thuds as snow hits the windowpane.
As time goes by the window becomes plastered with snow,
And I am left with only a tiny space through which to spy the world.
A completely white world!

Heavy snow starts to fall, one…two…three inches per hour
And drifts pile up in response to this onslaught.
I hear the rumble of a snowplow racing down the road
And its blade sends snow flying onto the edge of our driveway.

What driveway? Heavy drifts obliterate it.
The snow has been blown into sensuously curved mounds.
All blemishes of the Earth are covered
And a picture perfect landscape greets the eye.

By morning, the storm has blown through and a hush has settled over our world.
The sky has brightened and the trees are sparkling in the light of the rising sun.
It’s time to crank up the snow thrower and start shoveling out.
Then, we can play!

Dad was our hero (poignant memory)

August 20, 2010

Anniversary of Dad’s Death: Here we are again, 7 years after Dad died, and I have found a special photo to share. This photo brings tears to my eyes when I look at how happy my sister and I were as little kids with our hero, Dad. He was a great father who always provided us with wonderful places to live and made sure we appreciated nature in all of our surroundings. Cheers to the memories, Dad!

P.S….Do you see the boulder behind Dad’s head? We called that the “Whale Rock” and thought we were on top of the world every time we climbed it!

Happy Birthday To Mom

Acrostic Poetry - September 12, 2009:

(Unrhymed verse in which the letters of the topic are written vertically letter by letter, each of which is used to construct a phrase or a sentence that describes the topic.)

Barbara Jean:

Because she is my Mom, she is

Absolutely beautiful, as dazzling as a

Rose decked out in all its full-petaled glory.

Barbara Jean is her name, and she is the most

Awesome of mothers…caring, loving, and kind.

Resplendent is her smile and her laughter. She is the

Antithesis of lazy. Mom

Just goes, and goes, and goes…

Energy radiates from her entire being.

And, I love every inch of her. After all, she is my Mom.

No doubt about it!

Yearly Tribute to My Dad (lover of all things natural)

August 20, 2009 - Exerpt from “Under The Sea-Wind”, by Rachel Carson

I found a particularly descriptive and poetic passage in Rachel Carson’s book, Under The Sea-Wind, that I would like to share here. It is partly because of my father that I am so in love with the ocean, and find the deep sea so intriguing. Dad always made sure we had canoes and sailboats with which to explore the waters that lay near each place that we lived. I thank him for nurturing my curiosity of the natural world. Here is what Ms. Carson says about the abyss:

Below them lay the abyss, the primeval bed of the sea, the deepest of all the Atlantic. The abyss is a place where change comes slow, where the passing of the years has no meaning, nor the swift succession of the seasons. The sun has no power in those depths, and so their blackness is a blackness without end, or beginning, or degree. No beating of tropical sun on the surface miles above can lessen the black iciness of those abyssal waters that varies little through summer or winter, through the years that melt into centuries, and the centuries into ages of geologic time. Along the floor of the ocean basins, the currents are a slow creep of frigid water, deliberate and inexorable as the flow of time itself.

Down beneath mile after mile of water-–more than four miles in all-–lay the sea bottom, covered with a soft, deep ooze that had been accumulating there through eons upon eons of time. These greatest depths of the Atlantic are carpeted with red clay, a pumicelike deposit hurled out of the earth from time to time by submarine volcanoes. Mingled with the pumice are spherules of iron and nickel that had their origin on some far-off sun and once rushed millions of miles through interstellar space, to perish in the earth’s atmosphere and find their grave in the deep sea. Far up on the sides of the great bowl of the Atlantic the bottom oozes are thick with the skeletal remains of minute sea creatures of the surface waters-–the shells of starry Foraminifera and the limy remains of algae and corals, the flint-like skeletons of Radiolaria and the frustules of diatoms. But long before such delicate structures reach this deepest bed of the abyss, they are dissolved and made one with the sea. Almost the only organic remains that have not passed into solution before they reach these cold and silent deeps are the ear bones of whales and the teeth of sharks. Here in the red clay, in the darkness and stillness, lies all that remains of ancient races of sharks that lived, perhaps, before there were whales in the sea; before the giant ferns flourished on the earth or ever the coal measures were laid down. All of the living flesh of these sharks was returned to the sea millions of years before, to be used over and over again in the fashioning of other creatures, but here and there a tooth still lies in the red-clay ooze of the deep sea, coated with a deposit of iron from a distant sun.

Cabin Fever (aka… I hate these pink foam panels…)

Acrostic Poetry - February 1, 2009

(Unrhymed verse in which the letters of the topic are written vertically letter by letter, each of which is used to construct a phrase or a sentence that describes the topic.)

Cabin Fever:

Cabin fever in the dead of winter

Absolutely drives me crazy,

Because we have these pink,

Insulating foam panels to keep out the bitter cold.

Never does ice now form on our windows (which is good)

For they are completely blocked, but no sunshine can

Enter, ever…until the panels are taken down…when the outdoor temp. rises.

View the pond I cannot, nor can I see snowfall, and it is dark inside…

Ever dark, although with a Pepto Bismol pink glow when the sun shines.

Rejoice, I will, when the panels come down in March…