Tag: Ekphrastic Poetry

I should hope to pray like the trees

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“I should hope to pray like the trees” was published in Tiny Seed Literary Journal (March 19, 2019). I took the photo outside Banff, Alberta. Here’s the link to the published poem.

I should hope to pray like the trees

“The trees can’t control their lives. We can’t always control what happens to us. The trees can teach us acceptance. And metamorphosis.”
– Linda Brown, quoted in The Nature Fix.

I should hope to pray
Like the trees, roots running deep,
Limbs singing above.

Blending earth and sky,
Supplicants sway and bow, each
Snowy branch and bough

A sylvan chorus,
A genuflective dance, a
Chance to waltz with God.

Trees outside Banff

Trees outside Banff

Asta Encounters the Divine in Big Laurel Creek

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Originally appeared in The Bark: the Dog Culture Magazine, September 2019. The Bark editors placed in on the inside back cover. They omitted the epigraph by Mary Oliver, which was disappointing. But then again, The Bark has a circulation of over 200,000, so that’s easily the largest audience I’ll ever reach with one of my poems.

Asta Encounters the Divine in Big Laurel Creek

The dog would remind us of the pleasures of the body with its graceful physicality, and the acuity and rapture of the senses, and the beauty of forest and ocean and rain and our own breath.   – Mary Oliver, “Dog Talk”

Sun soaked and sparkling
Asta somehow knows, sipping
Deep the light-filled creek,

Shimmering, shining,
So numinous below. The
Ripples softly speak

Of this bright altar
Of this holy flow, of this
Old dog’s raptured glow.

Asta at Big Laurel Creek

Asta at Big Laurel Creek

Brimful of Grace

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“When preachers in the rural Methodist churches I attended as a boy spoke of grace, I thought of rain.” 
 – Scott Russell Sanders

Grace falls into this
Measured chalice, taunting us
To cipher Heaven.
 
But who could count the
Ageless rains, cleansing countless
Pilgrims, pulsing through
 
The Ganges, the Nile,
The sylvan-clad French Broad: each
Sky-soaked to the brim?

Originally published in Valley Voices: A Literary Review, Vol .18, No. 2, Fall 2018

Brimful of Grace photo

Photo and poem © Gene Hyde

Athabasca River Glacial Melt Global Warming Blues

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This is the first ekphrastic poem I published. ” Athabasca River Glacial Melt Global Warming Blues” was published in The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada (Vol. 16, No. 2 2018). It’s at this link: The Goose

Athabasca River Glacial Melt Global Warming Blues

“For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple”
– Mary Oliver, “Winter Hours”

Afoot by the flow
Of temples, of hallowed snow,
Of the glacial cloak:

Peaks wrapped in white rime
Frozen, riverine, sublime,
A shroud, nigh revoked:

Athabasca blues,
Pilgrims wading in the pews:
Doused, yet still afloat.