There’s a tree I planted at the edge of the yard on my birthday a few years ago: a small Jane magnolia bred for beauty and pleasure, and it has given me both. I’m staring at that tree now as the wind is coming up and the weather is turning from sun-bright to cloud-covered quickly, dramatically. It’s no secret that when I am trying to find myself, trying to ground myself, I stare at trees. I first see them as a green blur of soothing movement, something distant trembling in unison, but then I look at the leaves, remembering the names.
From where I sit now, I can see the magnolia, the three cypress trees, the hackberry, and the old mulberry tree that drapes its tired branches over everything like it wants to give up but won’t. Watching them makes me feel at once more human and less human. I become aware that I am in a body, yes, but it is a body connected to these trees, and we are breathing together.
You might not know this, but poems are like trees in this way. They let us breathe together. In each line break, caesura, and stanza, there’s a place for us to breathe. Not unlike a redwood forest or a line of crepe myrtles in an otherwise cement landscape, poems can be a place to stop and remember that we, too, are living.
A poem can seem so small, so minor, so invisible, especially when up against the daily crises and catastrophes our planet is facing. And that’s not to mention the hardships we each face both publicly and privately. How can a poem make a difference? How can a tree make a difference?
Perhaps the answer to those questions is that poetry and nature have a way of simply reminding us that we are not alone. The Kentucky writer bell hooks once wrote, “Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.”
Going to the woods, or simply noticing the small defiant ways nature is thriving all around me on a daily basis, helps me feel that communion. And poems help me feel that sense of communion, too. As Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote in Braiding Sweetgrass, “All flourishing is mutual.”
A short while ago, I was walking on a trail near where I live in Kentucky, and before I set off for my hike, I studied the map to determine if I wanted to go to the falls or the rocky outcropping that is the river overlook. My brain that day was full of bad news. The climate crisis was presenting itself in furious and disastrous ways all over the globe; the human element was behaving no less ruthlessly. My anxiety was rising, and I could feel my heart beating loudly against the walls of my chest. How do we live? That was the question that kept returning to my mind. How do we live?
As I stared at the trail map, I saw the friendly little red arrow that pointed to where I was on the map, its caption: You Are Here. It seemed to serve not only as a locator but as a reminder that I was living right now, breathing in the woods, that there was life around me, that the natural world was right here and I was a part of it; I was nature, too.
That day, I walked the waterfalls, where water runs clear and cold through the soft hills. I was totally alone, and each time my brain wanted to reach toward something awful, I was reminded that I was here. I repeated, You are here, you are here. And you are, too. We are here, together in this moment, crucial and urgent, yes, but also full of wonder and awe at every turn.
Here are few poems I use to rediscover that wonder in times of sadness, in times of anxiety, when I return again to that question: How do we live?
Lullaby for the Grieving
at the Sipsey River
By Ashley M. Jones
make small steps.
in this wild place
there are signs of life
everywhere.
sharp spaces, too:
the slip of a rain-glazed rock
against my searching feet.
small steps, like prayers—
each one a hope exhaled
into the trees. please,
let me enter. please, let me
leave whole.
there are, too, the tiny sounds
of faraway birds. the safety
in their promise of song.
the puddle forming, finally,
after summer rain.
the golden butterfly
against the cave-dark.
maybe there are angels here, too—
what else can i call the crown of light
atop the leaves?
what else can i call
my footsteps forward,
small, small, sure?
Reasons to Live
By Ruth Awad
Because if you can survive
the violet night, you can survive
the next, and the fig tree will ache
with sweetness for you in sunlight that arrives
first at your window, quietly pawing
even when you can’t stand it,
and you’ll heavy the whining floorboards
of the house you filled with animals
as hurt and lost as you, and the bearded irises will form
fully in their roots, their golden manes
swaying with the want of spring—
live, live, live, live!—
one day you’ll put your hands in the earth
and understand an afterlife isn’t promised,
but the spray of scorpion grass keeps growing,
and the dogs will sing their whole bodies
in praise of you, and the redbuds will lay
down their pink crowns, and the rivers
will set their stones and ribbons
at your door if only
you’ll let the world
soften you with its touching.
Let Loose
By Ada Limón
The soft low voice instructs me to breathe
with gusto and return to the body. The body,
it posits, is safe, it is grounding, it is different
than the skittering mind. The nerves between
my spine and ribs are screeching, gnawing,
playing a sick game of cringe roulette and I’m
losing. A long breath aches, a rib flinches
as if it’s a dog about to be hit, the drench
of claws, not a fever, but a wincing of the skin,
and so let me, I beg of you, let me return
to the cool safety of the mind. I stand in defense
of the mind. My own crass and psychedelic
vivacity. The mind that wanders, that illuminates
this quaking aspen, this sugar pine, this ponderosa,
and imagines lying against the icy grass, imagines
each trembling green blade soothing nerve endings,
every too-alive glial cell coming to heel. The watery
voice again swears the body will bring a sense of ease,
but roughed up, I’m already on the gondola gliding
up the mountain shedding each part of my skinned
self as I go. There, a limb, there, a nervous system,
anything that yowls is let loose, watch each part
of me released to become something entirely
acrobatic and weightless, not flying, but not falling
just entirely in love with the air, oh look at
how gorgeous I am! Falling away from myself, no body
at all, just the mountain, just the breath
of the mountain, no not even the breath
of the mountain, nothing that can be hurt, or taken,
nothing that can be broken into or scarred,
something invisible and just how I imagined.
From You Are Here, edited by Ada Limón (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2024). Copyright © 2024 by Milkweed Editions and the Library of Congress. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions. milkweed.org. This is an adapted excerpt.
Ada Limón is the 24th U.S. poet laureate and the author of The Hurting Kind as well as five other collections of poems. These include The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award. Limón is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and American Poetry Review, among others. Born and raised in California, she now lives in Lexington, Kentucky.
Ashley M. Jones is the poet laureate of Alabama. She is the author of three award-winning poetry collections, including. most recently, Reparations Now! She is the co-editor of What Things Cost: An Anthology for the People. Her work has been featured by CNN, the BBC, Good Morning America, ABC News, and The New York Times. She is the associate director of the University Honors Program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and she teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Converse University.
Ruth Awad is a Lebanese American poet, 2021 National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellow, and the author of Outside the Joy and Set to Music a Wildfire, winner of the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. Alongside Rachel Mennies, she is the co-editor of The Familiar Wild: On Dogs & Poetry. She is the recipient of a 2020 and 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry, Poem-a-Day, AGNI, The Believer, The New Republic, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, The Missouri Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She lives in Columbus, Ohio.
