Category: woodland (Issue No. VIII)

Seed and Stem

Laurence Levy-Atkinson

All summer long the mango trees shed
The best parts of themselves,
I didn’t even need to scrabble up them
To find it and our mothers screamed from the porch
When we did that anyway.

The ones that fell first were bitter
After you tore the skin off
So we didn’t keep them and threw them away
Seed and stem, into the shade of the farmhouse.
They rotted all summer long

While we climbed and stole the better ones, the newer ones,
Which were sweeter than you could wish for
And sickly when you ate too many.
Which of course we did,
Too young to know any outside limits.

The greener mangoes eventually ripened and fell
But we’d had our fill by then
And they rolled and rotted with the ones before them.
That was after we were gone though,
By a time when we’d eaten all we could

And there was nothing left to climb
Or find. Nothing green anymore.
Or maybe there was and I just wasn’t there
To see it. When you’re plucked seed and stem,
You don’t get a chance to know.

Laurence Levy-Atkinson

Finding Bats in the Spring Wood at Twilight

Barbara A Meier

Inspired by “Finding the Cat in a Spring Night at Midnight” by Pattiann Rogers

It takes a certain hearing, to discern the bat from the bird
in a late afternoon, when the light diminishes Woodrat Mountain.
I hear the swoop of wings beating the soft air
of twilight, humming in the down-sweep
of a dusky afternoon breeze

An aerial battlefield of nectar and mosquito,
with the feeding buzz of the fringed myotis,
and the whir of the dive-bombing male rufous hummingbird.

Bright Venus comes out to play
with the silver fishing hook moon,
Pacific tree frogs bellow their desire in her cold light,
cicadas hammering away at their legs:
a symphony of sound crescendoing
then pianissimo
when they discern my steps into the night.

I lose sight of the magical creatures living in the night.
Pausing the recording of my life in their silence
of fear,
waiting for the confidence to come back;
first, one whir,
a solitary croak,
then joining in an adagio of night wings born at the
edge
of the forest
up to the meadow
sliding gray to brown to black.

Barbara A. Meier