Bell Rock. Courthouse Rock. Devil’s Bridge.Time has made the land formsand they grow more beautiful with age.Names come from the human world,possession bleeding into perception.What if the land had its own language?No alphabet but steady droneof grasslands, groan of mountains,drought-fire’s scream—a drawn-out cry,hiss of rain, simmer of seedsstirring restless in the soilpure presence and processbreaking into the placemade new by cataclysm.That’s the planet speakingand she cares about the .fissuresin the dry river bed, about the lackof ripe cherries in Washingtonand blue crabs in Maryland,savannah lions down by half.She cares about the sunrise, dandelions,and PCBs. She embraces whateverwe give her—blood, bone, rustbecome her. She invented usto do the work the word “care” implies,invented us to invent words,the thicket of endless possibilitiesso death does not get the last word,so groan and hiss could be accompaniedby our chatter, dirge, thesis, and psalm.
National Forest
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“National Forest” is from Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower by Alison Hawthorne Deming (Red Hen Press 2025).
Used with permission from the publisher.
Alison Hawthorne Deming is the author of five books of nonfiction and six books of poetry. Recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, her most recent books are the poetry collection Blue Flax &Yellow Mustard Flower (Red Hen Press) and the anthology The Gift of Animals: Poems of Love, Loss, & Connection (Storey Press). She grew up in New England, steeped in literary and naturalist traditions. She is currently Regents Professor Emerita at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
In her sixth poetry collection, award-winning writer Alison Hawthorne Deming extends her exploration of the meanings of nature into the tensions of our political and ecological moment. Whether traveling to a biological field station in the Canadian Maritimes, ruins of the Temple at Delphi, community gardens in Havana, the Sonoran Desert’s spring bloom, or eruptions of violence in America, she finds in art healing reciprocities between beauty and devastation. The title refers to crops that grow on farmland in North Dakota where our subterranean nuclear missiles await deployment in their silos. The image epitomizes the tensions that underlie our ordinary days. And yet in these poems she finds “light having an edge over darkness.” Poet and naturalist, celebrant and elegist, Deming’s poems pay homage to “every organism’s joy to thrive,” every poem an act of defiance against human cruelty.
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