Poetry Sunday: From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee

I seem to be stuck in a rut with poetry these days, remembering my mother as she worked to preserve the harvest from our fruit trees. It is that time of year, of course, the time when the trees' produce is full-grown and ready to be harvested. She canned the fruits as they were or turned them into jams, jellies, or preserves to be enjoyed in winter. I especially remember those delicious peaches and the blossoms from which they came...

From Blossoms

by Li-Young Lee
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches

we bought from the boy

at the bend in the road where we turned toward   

signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,

from sweet fellowship in the bins,

comes nectar at the roadside, succulent

peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,

comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,

to carry within us an orchard, to eat

not only the skin, but the shade,

not only the sugar, but the days, to hold

the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into   

the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live

as if death were nowhere

in the background; from joy

to joy to joy, from wing to wing,

from blossom to blossom to

impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

This week in birds - #650

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment:

The Nēnē, or Hawaiian Goose, is the American Bird Conservancy's Bird of the Week for this week. The bird, seen here in flight, is one of five species of geese that evolved on Hawaii. It is the only survivor today of those five species and is one of the rarest goose species in the world. It is closely related to the Canada Goose and apparently emigrated to the island more than 500,000 years ago.

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Do you enjoy walking upright? Thank the genes that crafted your ilium.

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This fearsome ancient crocodile relative was a predator of dinosaurs.

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A tree can be home to an entire ecosystem that includes a trillion tiny lives.

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Early humans moved stones long distances in order to use them to make tools as long as 2.6 million years ago.  

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The massive Moai statues of Easter Island could be endangered by seasonal waves as early as 2080.

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Honeybees have faced a drastic decline in their population in recent years, but researchers have developed a "superfood" for them that it is hoped might help them.

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Migratory flamingos age differently from those that do not migrate. Aging comes later for those that migrate. 

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A cow's tooth from a jawbone found buried at Stonehenge offers clues to the origins of its stones.

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It seems strange things are happening to the rabbits of Colorado. Some of them have 'horns.'

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A 102-year-old man just became the oldest person to climb to the summit of Japan's Mt. Fuji. Gives us all something to aspire to, doesn't it?

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The waterways connected to the Great Lakes are yielding up ancient canoes that are as old as the Great Pyramids of Egypt.

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The armored ankylosaur was certainly one of the stranger of the dinosaurs that once walked our planet, but it seems that it may have been even weirder than previously thought. 

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And speaking of strange things, meet Neptune, a bright blue oyster caught by a fisherman off the coast of Massachusetts earlier this summer. Neptune did not become anyone's dinner and now lives at Northeastern University's Marine Science Center at Nahant, Massachusetts. 

Poetry Sunday: Blackberry-Picking by Seamus Heaney

My father was a farmer and my mother was a farm wife, and being a farm wife in those days meant preserving things. Like blackberries. But before they could be preserved, they had to be picked. I remember so many hot summer days when she would drag my unwilling corpus out to the blackberry briar patch to be pricked and scratched as we picked those luscious berries. Unlike Seamus Heaney's experience, our berries never went to rot. My mother soon turned them into jellies, jams, preserves - they were delicious and were a comfort to us through the long, cold winters, a reminder that summer would come again. 

Blackberry-Picking

by Seamus Heaney 

Late August, given heavy rain and sun

For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.

At first, just one, a glossy purple clot

Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.

You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet

Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it

Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for

Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger

Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots

Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.

Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills

We trekked and picked until the cans were full,

Until the tinkling bottom had been covered

With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned

Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered

With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.

But when the bath was filled we found a fur,

A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.

The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush

The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.

I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair

That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.

Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

This week in birds - #649

 A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment:

The American Bird Conservancy's Bird of the Week is another Hawaiian species, the ʻAlawī, a small, inconspicuous honeycreeper. There are four disjunct populations of the bird on the big island, Hawaii. Each of the populations is nonmigratory and show strong site fidelity throughout the year.

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Light pollution at night is a big problem for birds during migration and there is a movement afoot to "take back the night" and change that. 

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Streaked Shearwaters spend much of their time in the air and a lot of that time they are pooping! This behavior was accidentally discovered through video coverage that was meant to investigate something else altogether.

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A partial dire wolf skull (a species that went extinct around the end of the last ice age) that is set to be auctioned is expected to bring as much as $30,000. 

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Our current president is strongly anti-environment and is planning to dismantle the country's efforts to fight climate change. (Honestly, the stupidity, it burns!) 

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I've never understood some people's antipathy to gulls. I've always found them interesting and engaging creatures.

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This is the Blue Dasher, a beautiful dragonfly that actually thrives on pollution.

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The recent floods in Travis County, Texas washed away sand and revealed dinosaur tracks from 115 million years ago.

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The Eastern Massasauga Rattlesnakes in Michigan are becoming more isolated because of habitat fragmentation and that is leading to inbreeding.

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Stone tools from more than a million years ago discovered on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi reveal clues about some of our earliest human relatives.

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It seems that dolphins and whales actually interact with each other more than previously thought.

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And speaking of whales, did you know their ancestors walked on land?

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Here's how to attract goldfinches to your yard.

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And here's how one woman learned her appreciation of Nature.

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Nature seems to REALLY like its crabs. Why else would it keep evolving new ones?

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Fossilized hominin teeth that have been discovered suggest there may have been as many as four different lineages living in East Africa between 2.5 million and 3 million years ago.

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Ancient flip-flops? Maybe.

Poetry Sunday: The Unknown Bird by Edward Thomas

Have you ever been haunted by the song of a bird that you didn't recognize? Edward Thomas could relate. 

The Unknown Bird

by Edward Thomas

Three lovely notes he whistled, too soft to be heard
If others sang; but others never sang

In the great beech-wood all that May and June.

No one saw him: I alone could hear him

Though many listened. Was it but four years

Ago? or five? He never came again.

 

Oftenest when I heard him I was alone,

Nor could I ever make another hear.

La-la-la! he called, seeming far-off—

As if a cock crowed past the edge of the world,

As if the bird or I were in a dream.

Yet that he travelled through the trees and sometimes

Neared me, was plain, though somehow distant still

He sounded. All the proof is—I told men

What I had heard.

 

                                   I never knew a voice,

Man, beast, or bird, better than this. I told

The naturalists; but neither had they heard

Anything like the notes that did so haunt me,

I had them clear by heart and have them still.

Four years, or five, have made no difference. Then

As now that La-la-la! was bodiless sweet:

Sad more than joyful it was, if I must say

That it was one or other, but if sad

'Twas sad only with joy too, too far off

For me to taste it. But I cannot tell

If truly never anything but fair

The days were when he sang, as now they seem.

This surely I know, that I who listened then,

Happy sometimes, sometimes suffering

A heavy body and a heavy heart,

Now straightway, if I think of it, become

Light as that bird wandering beyond my shore.