Three Poems by Karla Linn Merrifield

With the Dark Touch of Global Warming

You Are Sentencing the Trees of Florida

I want to know exactly which tree.

Fungus-ridden sweet bay?
Beetle-riddled spruce? The ash borers’
hoards of ash-host trees? The Earth’s
warming Ocala wildfire trees? Chain-
sawn Osceola trees? Young, soft Pinus
elliotti pulp-to-be trees? Old-growth Pinus
palustrus trees reduce to clear-cut stumps?

Recite for me every genus & species

of extinction. Torreya taxifolia,
the blighted Apalachicolan yew?
Be explicit about mangrove trees of spiders,
and lysiloma trees of snails swallowed
whole in their forests as the peninsula
falls below rising oceans of salt.
Cypress, cedar, oak, palm, myrtle—
all the green tree people
in these blue latitudes drown,
sentenced to burial at sea.
Your darkness touches bottom.

                           with words from Chris Crittenden

 

 

 

Liver

 

The blood hole

in the white breast

is open to blue sky

& my brown eyes,

as the gull

of the gray back

& whiter breast

wields his yellow bill

to open another hole

in another murre,

another death for life.

 

 

Ta-home

 

Where are we on the map? the young girl asked her father

at rest stops on their family summer hegiras to the ocean.

All the while, the older brother prodded his calssic, nasty,

Are we there yet?

 

The girl cared less about destinations, so much less.  It

was the route that counted, names of towns, distances

between them, river ways & bridges.

 

So she was not surprised years later to be asking the

Tahoma's captain, Where are we on the chart? & Is there

a separate scroll for Grenvill Channel?  How did you

come by such patience to navigate whirlpools & eddies,

to navigate this vessel through the treachery of Queen

Charlotte Sound? More than three thousand miles & as

many years from childhood & boys despised like her

brother?  Why such urgency to get someplace?

 

The calm, deliberate pilot in his wheel house of trust

steers her toward a steady-paced place of further

forgiveness.

 

Moored safely in Horsefly Cove on Green Inlet,

anchored, she lets herself go to his guiding hands at the

helm, knowing exactly where she would be on any

map, every chart, by land, at sea:  She could come home.

 

 

 

A seven-time Pushcart-Prize nominee and National Park artist-in-Residence, Karla Linn Merrifield has had nearly 300 poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies.  She has eight books to her credit, the newest of which are The Ice Decides:  Poems of Antarctica (Finishing Line Press) and Liberty's Vigil, The Occupy Anthology: 99 Poets among the 99%, which she co-edited for FootHills Publishing.  Forthcoming from Salmon Poetry is Athabaskan Fractal and Other Poems of the Far North.  Her Godwit:  Poems of Canada (FootHills) received the 2009 Eiseman Award for Poetry and she recently received the Dr. Sherwin Howard Award for the best poetry published in Weber - The Contemporary West in 2012.  She is assistant editor and poetry book reviewer for The Centrifugal Eye (www.centrifugaleye.com).  Visit her blog, Vagabond Poet, at http://karlalinn.blogspot.com.