its network never goes down, including here
at Big Rock Elementary, where I tell my students
we’re putting on our coats, going outside
in search of images. Past the manicured playground,
past the bleachers, toward and beyond the fence,
Cody running past me, yelling slug eggs!
I point to trees and flowers and birds, say their names:
Red alder. Licorice fern. Douglas fir. Together,
we listen to the Oak-a-REE of a red-winged blackbird,
the raspy call of a red-tail soaring overhead.
Together, we touch the bark of a Hawthorn tree,
admire the fat buds of a big-leaf maple.
I tell each child to choose an artifact,
bring it to their desks. Back inside,
Carmen keeps asking, what’s this called?
It’s blackberry, I say. Smiling, she twirls it. Sniffs.
An ant hitched a ride on Simon’s pinecone.
Tyler wants to know how to tell an eagle
from an osprey. Peyton asks if it’s okay
he chose a dead leaf. The room is alive
with rocks and twigs. The poems they write
are crawling with spiders, wiry like lichen,
swaying with catkins, quiet like clumps of moss.
Nature has no username or password. Its signal
is always strong. Just stand in a field,
let your shoes get wet in knee-deep grass.
This poem first appeared in The Ilanot Review.
—
Martha Silano’s six books include This One We Call Ours, winner of the 2023 Blue Lynx Poetry Prize (Lynx House Press, 2024). She is also the author of Gravity Assist, Reckless Lovely, and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, all from Saturnalia Books. Martha’s poems have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and the anthology Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States, among many others. Learn more about her work at marthasilano.net.
