About Place Journal - On Freedom - Wild Spaces section header

Heather Swan

Samhain

Gray light and a wild wind that

pushes through the trees the way

the mind pushes against a bad dream

the moment after waking when you rush

to bring yourself back from the tornado

of your own demons pressing toward you

as you scurry along a cliff edge, shouting

your silent shouts, until something wiser

wakes you, the part of your brain

that refuses to stay there, like

this wind that is shaking

whole trees, making them release

what is no longer needed

as we go into this stark season.

There will be phantoms, but you must

not fear them. Be steady, let the wind

take all but what will keep you alive.

For the Field Mouse Stealing Food from My Kitchen

Sweet field mouse, I see you, you ever-more-clever,

wall-storer, floor-joist-walker, sable-backed snack-thief,

peering back with your shining black-bead eyes

at this foolish human. You, with your cartographic snout,

capable of mapping your way to a crumb hidden

behind cupboard doors and steel walls, who capture

a tasty treasure and travel through plaster and dust

past large sleeping mammals whose incisors

are longer than your head, back to your small

and writhing pink children, who are tucked in a nest

of dryer lint in the sleeve of the leaf-packed gutter,

the soft lint, stealthily stolen from the trash bin,

in order to warm their hairless, squinty, no-bigger-

than-my-thumbnail bodies. Oh field mouse, I am not

mad. I am willing to share. In these late Holocene,

dread-packed days, where far too many are suffering,

where I have built a house on what was once your field,

I only pray: May the pest trucks pass you by. May the river

of chemicals slow to a trickle and instead may your

saucer-eared family drink from a clear stream of water pouring

over rock while a nontoxic breeze combs through the trees,

and may we both thrive in the truly wild once again.

All the Sun Long It was Running, It was Lovely

Used to be we cupped the cold water from the spring

bubbling over the slick green stones, lichen listening.

Hours went by like days in our wildness. Fish flitted

while imaginary tambourines rang in our minds. Frogs

slipped past underwater the way swallows swept through

trees overhead. We drank, and the cold cleared space all

the way to our hip bones, opened us to some future we

believed could only be good. We were alive. Before they

warned us, before we grew stiff with grief, before the frogs

and the birds and the butterflies began dying. Before

“The End” was not just something in the storybooks.

Before the word abundant became precious.

Title taken from “Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas

Heather Swan, MFA and PhD, is a poet and nonfiction writer. She is the author of the nonfiction books Where the Grass Still Sings: Stories of Insects and Interconnection and Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field (Penn State Press) the latter of which won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. Her nonfiction has appeared in such journals as The Sun, Emergence, Catapult, Lit Hub, Aeon, and Minding Nature. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Cold Mountain, The Hopper, One Art, Poet Lore, Phoebe, The Raleigh Review, and Terrain. Her book of poems, A Kinship with Ash (Terrapin Books), published in 2020, was a finalist for the ASLE Book Award and long-listed for the Julie Suk Award. A second collection, Dandelion, was published in 2023. She teaches environmental literature and writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

@beegood2bees
https://www.heatherswan.net

Other works by Heather Swan »

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