What Sparks Poetry is a series of original essays that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our new series of Ecopoetry Now, poets engage in an ecopoetic conversation across borders. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay.
The unsympathetic wind, how she has evaded me for years now,
leaving a guileless shell and no way to navigate. Once when I stood
on a plateau of earth just at the moment before the dangerous,
jutting peaks converged upon the sway of grasslands, I almost
found a way back. There, the sky, quite possibly all the elements,
caused the rock and soil and vegetation to congregate. Their prayer
was not new and so faint I could hardly discern. Simple remembrances,
like a tiny, syncopated chorus calling everyone home: across
a thousand eastward miles. And what little wind was left at my back.
I could not move and then the music was gone.
All that was left were the springtime faces of mountains, gazing down,
their last patches of snow, luminous. I dreamed of becoming snow melt,
gliding down the slope of history and into the valley. With the promise,
an assurance, that there is always a way to become bird, tree, water again.
from the book NEW POETS OF NATIVE NATIONS / Graywolf Press
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Cover image of New Poets of Native Nations, in which Today's Poem was published
What Sparks Poetry:
M. L. Smoker on "Heart Butte, Montana"

"It is then next to impossible for me to ignore the echoes that reverberate from beneath and across the earth’s surface. There is both a human and non-human story here. Such places formed by millennia, marked by water and ice, light and dark. Of shifting rock and the new formation of land, plateau, mountain range. Humans were taken in and the land cared for us—we were gifted survival and song by our plant and animal family."
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Color headshot of Deborah Landau against a peach background
Deborah Landau Writes a Real Love Poem

"It felt easier to write poems about longing and desire as a young woman, but as the years have passed, I’ve found that, just as sustaining a relationship isn’t always easy, writing love poems about a long marriage can be a challenge. How do you see the person you’ve lived with for decades as if for the first time? How do you make the 10,000th kiss romantic and new?"

via OPRAH DAILY
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