Bev Tappan

Category: Riverwoods Poems

Poems from 2001

  • RIVERWOODS POEMS: SQUAMSCOTT BIRCH

    THE SQUAMSCOTT BIRCH

    Barrel chested and brawny armed,

    The aged birch still stands

    Incongruous on the riverbank.

    They have fenced it in

    With posts and a metal chain

    To ward off scrambling kids.

    How many years did it take

    To put out all those limbs,

    One torn off by lightning

    Or by wind: the scar remains.

    It’s younger than the pines

    That sheltered shell diggers,

    But did it watch the big-sailed

    Gundalows barging bricks?

    It could not in its salad days

    Arrow skyward slimly straight

    But branched and branched again

    For what was near at hand.

    Hugely ugly, it calls

    Out to me.  It haunts my

    Memory.  It’s begging to be

    Made into a poem.

  • RECIPROCITY

    As plants breathe out and we breathe in,
    The earth is one gigantic lung:
    Flora supply our oxygen and
    We are the breath of life for them

    Water full of fecal waste
    To flowers is nectar they can use
    And filter all the poisons out:
    They drink it to our health.

    But wait! The air I breathe may
    Have been exhaled by Socrates.
    Pathogens from ancient plagues
    Linger on in kinder form.

    Noxious fumes from China
    Stir up asthma in California
    Inuits sing their melodies
    Into each other’s mouths.

    Here on our spaceship earth
    We share the finite air.

  • RIVERWOODS POEMS: A POEM FOR CARL SAGAN

    A POEM FOR CARL SAGAN

    (and NASA’s Natalie Bataha, who discovered Kepler 10)

    “In order to let go, you have to be there

    In the first place,” Carl said.

    Walking and seeing, perceiving and feeling,

    Attention must be paid:

    Inspecting grains of sand, glimpsing exo-planets,

    Forgetting the self,

    Neurons interconnecting, concocting recipes,

    Not “buying off the shelf.”

    Though we are merely stardust

    And to stardust must return,

    Our flickers of light, in the midst of dark matter,

    May provide some insight.

  • THE PERFECT MOMENT

    Snowfall sometimes frosts the pines

    Bends them low, bowed, supine

    Layers every twig and branch

    Creates a winter wonderland

    Bleaches white the forest floor

    Covers every blemish over.

    The perfection cannot last

    Occurs to us as we drive past.