Rainforest Slash and Burn


Fallen across one another,
the bodies of these trees
tangle in a mass grave.
What is left behind
lies broken on cracked dirt,
thin trunks and branches
bleaching in the unfamiliar sun.

Here and there a few,
too young and spindly
to be of use, still stand,
their sparse leafed crowns
no longer woven into canopy,
no longer holding birds.

Farther up the hill, blackened trunks 
the rancher burned stand guard
like tombstones, while the wind
scatters ashes across soil
so dead that even its insects
have abandoned it.

Pick your way through this boneyard.  
Feel the dead limbs snap
beneath your weight; see how some 
are shaped like animals 
we will never meet.

(From Lizard Light: Poems from the Earth, Sherman Asher Publishing. 1998.)



The Hunt


We have begun to see them
at the periphery of our vision,
scurrying among the shadows 
in corners we would not enter,

although sometimes we turn, 
hoping to name the unknown beasts
whose luminous eyes gleam
as they run by, melting
into the air.

They say that when an Eskimo 
killed a seal, he melted 
a piece of ice in his mouth, 
then covered the dead seal's 
mouth with his own 
and let the water trickle 
from tongue to tongue.

Perhaps the animals who brush 
the edges of our vision, 
raising the fur on our arms 
as they rush through the dark,
are congregating on some shore 
to wait for us, mouths open, 
with wet tongues.

From Lizard Light: Poems from the Earth, Sherman Asher Publishing. 1998.



Relic


We keep the finger-bones of saints
in holy shrines, yellowed joints
laid out on purple velvet.
And the faithful come, 
pressing their foreheads
against the glass case, 
breath after breath fogging
the mirror of their prayers.

So how will we worship the thigh-bone
of a great bear, preserved
for millennia in a dry cave?
Broken at both ends, it is a flute,
three holes punched evenly 
along its brown and hollow length.

Someone helped this bear 
to find an honorable death, 
then fashioned its femur
to sing of rock and ice, 
and of the hot blood 
blessing his cold hands
as he lifted its warm flesh
toward the stars of an ancient sky.
 
If we would call bear home,
we must leave this relic 
in the cave, then sit
for years in its mouth
until the bear's rank breath
courses through our bones.

(From Lizard Light: Poems from the Earth, Sherman Asher Publishing. 1998.)


​
In That Far Haven


In childhood, I often visited a village at twilight— 
a village twinkling in the gloaming sky, floating there
like some far haven of the fae come down to bless us.
 
I was welcome then, invited to a feast set out on silver
plates, and sat at table with the rest—cloaked like them
in strange diaphanous and haloed flesh.
 
Mild-faced wolves, curled like faithful dogs at our feet,
laid their silky heads upon our laps as we slipped them
roasted scraps of a wild beast brought in from the dark
 
uncharted forests far beyond us. Some sacrament was
being acted out in those hallowed rooms, some festive
celebration of the bond between us all—and I, the guest,
 
craved to stay among their kind, to live forever in that
sphere of light and laughter, drinking ambrosia with the
ancient ones who’d come here long ago—ancestors of
 
earth, air, fire, water, who deign to come among us now
and then, crossing the threshold of our mortal coil; who
kindly let me join their festal rites—and taught me well.

From The Resonance Around Us. Mountains and Rivers Press. 2013​

  © 2019 Penny Harter