You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

by Ada Limon

From where I sit now, I can see the magnolia, the three cypress trees, the hackberry, and the old mulberry tree that drapes its tired branches over everything like it wants to give up but won’t. Watching them makes me feel at once more human and less human. I become aware that I am in a body, yes, but it is a body connected to these trees, and we are breathing together.

How can a poem make a difference? How can a tree make a difference? Perhaps the answer to those questions is that poetry and nature have a way of simply reminding us that we are not alone.

The Kentucky writer bell hooks once wrote, “Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.” Going to the woods, or simply noticing the small defiant ways nature is thriving all around me on a daily basis, helps me feel that communion. And poems, like the poems that I’ve collected here for this anthology, help me feel that sense of communion too.

As I stared at the trail map, I saw the friendly little red arrow that pointed to where I was on the map, its caption: You Are Here. It seemed not only to serve as a locator, but as a reminder that I was living right now, breathing in the woods, that there was life around me, that the natural world was right here and I was a part of it; I was nature too.

I was totally alone and each time my brain wanted to reach toward something awful—I was reminded that I was here.

Because nature is not a place to visit. Nature is who we are.

takes his tea all alone —NATALIE MERCHANT