Muriel Nelson lives near Seattle where she enjoys edible organic landscaping. Her most recent poetry collections are Please Hold and Sightsinger.
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Understory
Illustration by Maddie Fisher
It’s silly to call trees people
saying firs waving limbs are yelling at wind,
and cedars so tall their tops disappear
have heads in the clouds,
or to sympathize with plants below
ripening berries, sending out seeds
on wings while struggling for scraps of light,
and then feeding survivors of fires.
Silly. Better listen. Memorial
services have their ways of bringing up
Poetry: Saving Is a Form of Worship
courtesy of Jill Krementz
'The Hungry Soul in Pursuit of the Full Soul'
On Proverbs 8
My saints won’t be named by a church.
Their sainthood won’t stand as statues. Listen.
Voices
calm as cooking directions
play continually—
If any thing’s resurrectible, it’s memory:
those eyes,
song-haloed, so full of lightness
nothing could stop their flight;
not a Thomas who peers into pupils’ darkness,
not a ravenous soul left grounded.
We are born, yin-yanged, of lightning
with saints and putti the lightest of all.
But love-rumpled faces, quick limbs, and pierced hearts
are unstable, done only in clay.