Category: Poetry

Yellow sweetgum leaves
scattered across white concrete steps
are stars at my feet,
leading me off paved paths
into the forest at Bowman’s Hill.
Hemlock needles drop
like reluctant rain,
rustling leaves where they fall.

Pidcock Creek roars below,
rushing over rocks
insistent, drowning out
titmouse cheeps and sapsucker calls.
A dark hollow in a beech trunk
left by a lost limb
is home for a screech owl.
What else hides in that darkness?

Above, in the canopy
sunlight turns lingering leaves
into blinking jewels
of ruby, topaz, and amber
longing to drop down
into that sure decay,
feeding the ground that fed them
to bloom again
in some other way.

–Stevie O. Daniels

Lady’s slippers cover the bank
along this descending path;
they rise from low, puckered tongues.
Pink balloons with white veins stretching
from edges where petals fold and touch
in the valley of each inflated belly.
Wings of lime-green wood ferns
flutter from their perches, each frond a fan
of pointed spears among moss and lichen-faced rocks.
Curled silvery sheets of birch bark
strewn along the path
leave pink fleshy patches on the trunks.
I unfurl a scroll and study
horizontal rows of dark tiny dashes,
dahs in an SOS message,
tiny stitches in a quilt.
Dits arise from hemlock needles striking leaves below.
Waves lave the lakeshore
like a lover’s whisper in my ear.
I hear a loon call, then see her fly
across my path and over Cutler Lodge.
Later, a kitten cries by my window.
I want to urge her closer.
Sweet scent rises from twinberry blossoms
woven in the moss and lichen.
Wide gray spoon leaves of pussytoes
cluster in patches beneath birches and oaks.
Lichens are splattered on rocks and branches,
as if rained onto the forest floor.
My feet sink in this cushioned path where
rock edges are hidden by hairy moss sporophytes.
Rasping gnaws of beetles in fawn-colored
stumps, are drowned by vibrations of tabla and sitar
that resound from the hall,
sink into wood, escape through windows
reaching the place where we remember our lives
as loons, lichens, stones.

–Stevie O. Daniels