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    A Thin Place in Beech Forest

    Beech Forest Poem Provincetown
    June 25, 2022

    With gratitude to Mary Oliver for While I am writing a poem to celebrate summer

    Follow in the
    wake of a fox’s faint
    twitches, her pauses and rolling pink
    shadow. Her sunstretching length, like the roses,
    flows along bog-edge and berm that
    have never been improved but
    rise and roll invisible under twists of brushbramble. Come
    sink among skunk cabbage, thread boulders, to
    root down and rise like a spring bud
    in the beech forest. Then
    trace the blackwater edge to open
    space across the bridge, like
    a poem.

    Chickadeedeedees grasp a little
    seed from your palm then scatter, like afternoon light, soft
    nowhere and everywhere at once. Sighs
    lean into the moss ledge. Stand under
    the logic of leaves, in the
    cool clear river of the meadowlarks’
    whistle, its
    heavenly bodies of breathpraise
    posing as constellations, Orion’s anthem.

    Could you form words sufficient in thanks
    for the fox whose footprance you could never emulate? Its
    gravity holds sway in this arboreal kingdom, where our grounded poet’s alleluia!
    still echos along the edges of the pond, calling to the fox — alleluia!
    And I am caught wondering, wandering, levitating, elevating, oh
    so high up above these woods, and the miracle of its flashing firelord.

    – Kate Wallace Rogers

     

    Kate Wallace Poetry Provincetown

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