The first Friday of August means it’s time for another Inkling Challenge. This month it was my turn to pose a prompt for my fabulous critique group partners. I’ve been following Ada Limón’s Poet Laureate project “You Are Here: Poetry in the Parks” on Instagram and decided summer was the perfect season to join Limón’s effort to “deepen our connection to nature through poetry.” 

In the introduction to You Are Here: Poetry In the Natural World, the anthology Limón curated as part of her project, she counsels that “nature is not a place to visit. Nature is who we are.” The epigraph to this stunning collection are these wise words from Robin Wall Kimmerer: “The land is the real teacher.” I kept thinking about these lines as my husband and I took a barnstorming tour of western South Dakota, south central Montana, and northern Wyoming. The vastness of this landscape is truly overwhelming, but it filled me up in so many ways. I was anxious to answer Ada’s question: “What would you write in response to the landscape around you?” and “offer something back to the earth” letting it know that I had noticed my “connection to the planet.”

One caveat: Threaded through our trip was a feeling of profound sadness at the loss of these extraordinary places to the Native peoples who called this area (indeed all of North America) home, and considered many of them sacred, before 1492. I don’t have the knowledge or cultural currency to address these wrongs at this time. I will keep reading and educating myself about this stain on our history.

At Lower Falls

I stand on the edge of the man-made world:
concrete and stone designed to 
Keep. Me. Safe.

Below and beyond rock and river
conspire in their ancient alchemy 
to carve a canyon.

An unrelenting cascade pours over 
the lip of a cliff, chiseling away,
its work never done. 

Columns of water foam and froth, 
roar a single, powerful note,
drowning out the rest of the world.

I am in awe of this showy display,
a peacock among hundreds of 
smaller, less spectacular falls.

Tucked into a forest of lodgepole pines,
Mystic Falls aren’t as high,
hum a softer, soothing tune,

reminding me the world needs both
showy displays of grandeur
and quiet, subtle beauty.

Draft © 2024 by Catherine Flynn

Please be sure to visit my fellow Inklings to read their “You Are Here” poems:

Linda @A Word Edgewise
Mary Lee @Another Year of Reading
Molly @Nix the Comfort Zone
Margaret @Reflections on the Teche
Heidi @my juicy little universe

Then head over to say hi to Laura Purdie Salas and read other Poetry Friday offerings at the Roundup.